"I Love The Petting Zoo Guy": The Curious Characters Sarah Lacy Met While Writing Her New Book [TCTV]

For the past few days, it seems the whole world has been reviewing Sarah Lacy’s new book, Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos .

Fortune’s Dan Primack described it as “an outstanding piece of journalism”, Jon Swartz at USA Today called it “a fascinating new gem of a book,” Vivek Wadhwa in Business Week describes how it “vividly illustrates how the American Dream has become America’s most significant cultural export”  and even Michael Arrington – possibly the world’s most persistent Silicon Valley flag-waiver – jumped in, saying “Sarah’s book opened my eyes… to the untenable constraints that people around the world have to work with.” My own – thoroughly biased review can be found here.

But, yeah yeah, blah blah – I get it – it’s a brilliant piece of business journalism. For me, though, the best thing about the book is its cast of characters. The Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky entrepreneurs. The Chinese driving school guy who has his own petting zoo, the Israeli movie mogul, the Brazilian slum-kid-turned-genius-entrepreneur and – of course – Jean de Dieu Kagabo. So while everyone else continues to rave about the important business lessons and geopolitical implications of Sarah’s book, I bullied her into the TCTV studio to chat about some of her favourite people she met while writing it.

The individual parts – one for each country – are below, or you can watch the full thing here.

Rwanda:

China:

Brazil:



Indonesia:

Conclusion: