The house’s owners have built a vast basement that amounts to an underground village. Illustration by Michael Kirkham Witanhurst, London’s largest private house, was built between 1913 and 1920 on an eleven-acre plot in Highgate, a wealthy hilltop neighborhood north of the city center. First owned…

After about an hour of weaving up and down the winding, mountainous, two-lane highway that is route 58 , eastbound from San Luis Obispo, I honestly started to wonder where 9 million solar panels — one of the world’s largest operating solar panel farms that was built in this region — could be hiding.…

BOTH financiers and economists still get the blame for the 2007-2009 financial crisis: the first group for causing it and the second for not predicting it. As it turns out, the two issues are connected. The economists failed to understand the importance of finance and financiers put too much faith…

I turned 30 last week and a friend asked me if I'd figured out any life advice in the past decade worth passing on. I'm somewhat hesitant to publish this because I think these lists usually seem hollow, but here is a cleaned up version of my answer: 1) Never put your family, friends, or significant…

Om Malik: I’ve been reading about you, and I have been fascinated by your progress and more importantly how you have conducted your business. Where did you find the inspiration to follow this path? Brunello Cucinelli: From the teary eyes of my father. When we were living in the countryside, the…

Axel Dumas, the 44-year-old chief executive of Hermès and a sixth-generation member of the family who founded the house in 1837, wants to have lunch in the private dining room of the company’s Paris headquarters and shop at 24 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. And so I arrive, via the shop’s main…

Astro Teller says that at Google[x], failure is indeed an option. So is changing the world. Google has long declared itself an unconventional company. But its division that takes on long-term, risky projects, Google[x], makes the rest of the company look pretty staid. Now led by Astro Teller (born…

Finally the SMS arrived: “Tomorrow morning 5am, flight number AZ610 from Rome to NewYork.” An SMS hitting my BlackBerry on Sunday evenings used to decide my destination and client for the coming week. I was working for one of the top three global strategy consulting firms. A life packed in a…

At the height of the financial crisis in October 2008, HSBC executives were worried that queues were forming outside their UK branches. Unlike Northern Rock, which had suffered a run on deposits the previous year, this international banking giant was not running out of money. It had run out of…

She smiled. “Like school… but sex… sex school.” By Jason Smith As I reached my hand between her thighs, she pushed me away the way you would a dog who’s not allowed on the couch. “No today, Jay-zone,” she said, matter-of-factly, looking slightly annoyed. “La prossima settimana… Mercoledi.” My…

Pave Talent Tabitha Wood recently posted a question on our Community Forum asking members, What’s the biggest career risk you’ve taken? Looking back, do you feel it was worth taking? Why or why not? Maneesh Goyal, founder of both MKG and Live in the Grey , expanded on his initial response, which is…

Imagine it’s January of 1884 in Atlanta, Georgia. Glotz, an affluent fellow citizen, has invited you to participate in a peculiar competition: You and twenty others are invited to present a plan to start a business that will turn a $2 million investment into a business worth $2 trillion by the year…

Magicians, Mafiosos, a Missing Painting, and the Heist of a Lifetime Venice was built to confuse. The floating Italian city has few straight lines: Each cobblestoned footpath veers and twists, the buildings lean, and small bridges vault sideways. For tourists, it’s like entering a labyrinth. Locals…

This Essay Took Four Years to Write Our house in Old San Juan Four years ago I temporarily moved to Puerto Rico. I went to PR to seek the New American Dream, a dream that had swept through American business culture, launched a billion dollar self-help industry, alienated my generation, and killed…

Get it on Amazon → The Big Short, by Michael Lewis The Big Short, by Michael Lewis, is an amazing book about the banking crisis of 2008. Having watched the events unfold over the course of about a year, and not really understanding everything involved, the tragedy of situation wasn’t quite as…

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The federal investigation echoed tactics used for the Mob: get low-level workers to inform on those farther up the hierarchy. Illustration by Concepción Studios. Clockwise from Top: Louis Lanzano / Bloomberg via Getty; Shannon Stapleton / Reuters / Corbis; Louis Lanzano/Bloomberg via Getty; Brendan…

It was six minutes after the opening bell on Feb. 4, and dozens of big-name stocks were still untraded in Tokyo. Telecommunications giant SoftBank Corp. was among those that hadn’t budged. The offer price fell 5 percent, then more, and still there were no takers. Then an order was filled: 300,000…

Hedge funds have generated enough wealth to make J. Pierpont Morgan’s fortune seem a pittance. They may also be the best vehicles for the financial system to manage risk. Here’s what you should know about them. (Originally published on Dan Wang’s blog .) J. Pierpont Morgan died in 1913 with a…

August 22, 2013 at 11:28pm Home Expected read time: 8-12 minutes This was by far one of the most inspiring episodes of Princeton Startup TV . Sometimes you have high profile entrepreneurs or professors as your guests, and you, as an interviewer , get nervous, look up at the authority too much and do…

PORT JEFFERSON, N.Y. — By 10 a.m. the heat was closing in on the North Shore of Long Island. But 300 miles down the seaboard, at an obscure investment company near Washington, the forecast pointed to something else: profit. As the temperatures climbed toward the 90s here and air-conditioners turned…

On a Friday morning in April, I strapped on a headset, leaned into a microphone, and experienced what had been described to me as a type of time travel to the future of higher education. I was on the ninth floor of a building in downtown San Francisco, in a neighborhood whose streets are heavily…

You can read a version of this story in Spanish here. Pueden leer una versión de esta historia en español aquí. José Urbina López Primary School sits next to a dump just across the US border in Mexico. The school serves residents of Matamoros, a dusty, sunbaked city of 489,000 that is a flash point…

Like kale salads and Robin Thicke, coconut water seems to have jumped from invisible to unavoidable without a pause in the realm of the vaguely familiar. The stuff is everywhere — not just in supermarkets and convenience stores, but also on ads on buses (“Crack life open”) and bar signs (“Detox…

I just met Greg Brockman a few minutes ago, but I’m already showing him my credit card number. Brockman is the chief technology officer at Stripe, the billion-dollar online payments startup backed by some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, and he wants to show how easy it is to use the…

Illustration by Francesco Francavilla One afternoon in October 2009, a former banking executive named Aaron Siegel waited impatiently in the master bedroom of a house in Buffalo that served as his office. As he stared at the room’s old fireplace and then out the window to the quiet street beyond, he…

Last week, I read a biography that left an impression on me. No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet by Molly Knight Raskin documents the 31-year life of Danny Lewin, the Founder of Akamai Technologies . What Danny accomplished between the…

Remember you will die. Maybe even today. Don’t forget that. Don’t forget to be thankful for your health. For the ability to walk. For the time you get to spend with the person you love. For your siblings. For whatever it is that you have today. It’s not yours, it can be stolen away at any moment. So…

Leonardo Notarbartolo strolls into the prison visiting room trailing a guard as if the guy were his personal assistant. The other convicts in this eastern Belgian prison turn to look. Notarbartolo nods and smiles faintly, the laugh lines crinkling around his blue eyes. Though he's an inmate and…

Many people have remarked that Bitcoin resembles the internet in the early 90s: we haven’t yet built the Googles that will make it accessible or the Facebooks and Netflixes that will make it broadly useful. So it’s an open question: what might a Bitcoin that’s useful for the mainstream look like?…

California Coast; Adam London This is the time for small paychecks and big memories. This is the time for travel. We are about as attached to one location as we are to our favorite Chinese take-out place. We know what we like about it, and we take comfort in the familiarity, but that’s about it. -…

Stuart Cheshire, May 1996. (Revised periodically) Years ago David Cheriton at Stanford taught me something thatseemed very obvious at the time -- that if you have a network linkwith low bandwidth then it's an easy matter of putting several inparallel to make a combined link with higher bandwidth,…

Wall Street Oasis Investment Banking & Finance Community Reports Investment Banking Investment Banking Salary Report Investment Bank Company Reviews Investment Banking University Stats Investment Banking Diversity Stats Private Equity Private Equity Salary Report Private Equity Fund Reviews Private…

A unique perspective on what it takes to succeed in life. Yeah that’s right; you heard me… I’m talking to you… I’m calling you out. I’m looking you in the eyes, (ok well, not really since you are probably reading this article, but figuratively, I am burning a cyclops type hole in your face right…

Illustration by Mike Nudelman One day in July 2001, Larry Page decided to fire Google's project managers. All of them. It was just five years since Page, then a 22-year-old graduate student at Stanford, was struck in the middle of the night with a vision. In it, he somehow managed to download the…

Richard Barnes It was an unseasonably warm December, and somewhere nearby a rising tide in the San Francisco Bay was lifting all kite-surfers, but Nick Edwards and Chris Monberg were crouched at opposite rented desks in a shared coworking space near the Caltrain station in SoMa wondering if, by the…

Illustration by Grant Snider Every month, some young bureaucrat in the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange (known, slightly menacingly, as SAFE) reaches out to a trader in London and buys or sells billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. Treasury bonds. You’ve heard the overblown fears that…

A new book by author Michael Lewis describes how trading algorithms that detect and exploit tiny, fleeting profit opportunities, called high-frequency traders, have transformed the stock market. And not by ripping off middle class investors. But that doesn't mean there are no problems. Read on to…

August 9, 2012 The Best Advice My Dad Ever Gave Me (for Demo Day) TL;DR1: I believe you can raise a $200M hedge fun, why not a seed round? TL;DR2: You have the rest of your life to be a “fat and happy” finance guy on the fringes of the financial industry (or run any lifestyle business, like our…

Before the collapse of the U.S. financial system in 2008, Brad Katsuyama could tell himself that he bore no responsibility for that system. He worked for the Royal Bank of Canada, for a start. RBC might have been the fifth-biggest bank in North America, by some measures, but it was on nobody’s…