It was difficult to find an open seat in the room at this year’s Alumni Authors Salon, where George Kikvadze WG01, founder of Cryptic8 VC, and David Seltzer WG76, co-founder of Mercator Advisors LLC, shared their approaches to drafting and publishing a book and exploring one’s personal life through writing.
Tapping into more than 45 years of experience raising capital for transportation agencies and other governmental issuers and three years with the U.S. Department of Transportation, Seltzer crafted a feast for the eyes with his elegant collection of metro stations in Transit Tourism: The Iconic Art and Design of 22 Subway Systems Around the World. Along with visiting about 60 stations himself — from Buenos Aires to Beijing — Seltzer drew on a deeply rooted interest in urban rail.
“Many of you might have had a gurgling brook or rustling willows outside your bedroom window that would lull you to sleep,” said Seltzer, who grew up outside of Philadelphia along the Reading Railroad. “For me, it was the Lansdale local trundling by.”
Seltzer’s coffee-table-style book aims to reveal the character of cities through their subways or metros — such as the iconic London Underground shield logo and the arched white tiled entrances in Paris — and evaluate them on convenience, ease of use, design, and the elusive X factor of “personality.” Stations then receive a ranking of one to four tokens. Philadelphia’s SEPTA didn’t do too well, he joked.
Kikvadze’s source material for And Then You Win: A Start-Up’s Untold Story of Grit, Grind, and Glory was likewise deeply personal. As panel moderator and Wharton Magazine editor in chief Richard Rys pointed out, the material was in fact Kikvadze’s own life. Although Rys introduced him as a “Bitcoin O.G.” to cheers from fellow alumni in the audience, Kikvadze — vice chairman and an early backer of Bitfury Group — emphasized that the book was more about the treacherous journey of building a company from scratch than cryptocurrency itself.
“This may be a story about Bitcoin, but it’s really a story about human relations, overcoming adversity, and the journey.” Kikvadze said. “I learned myself that who you have in the journey matters more than anything else. And if you want to go fast, you go by yourself, but if you want to go far, you go together with the team.”
Alumni react to the panel discussion.
When it came to finding a publisher, Seltzer and Kikvadze took slightly different paths. With the visual element so crucial to his book’s mission, Seltzer thought it wise to invest in a book designer at his own expense. In addition, his publisher improved his Amazon clicks immensely: Schiffer Publishing found that a previous self-published version of Seltzer’s book, titled Notes from the Underground, was getting buried under results of a classic Fyodor Dostoevsky novel of a similar name.
Kikvadze was more instinctive than deliberate when choosing a publisher. After he met intellectual property guru Kary Oberbrunner at a book event, the two solidified a deal with Oberbrunner’s Igniting Souls/Ethos Collective publishing firm over Docusign, on the spot.
This same intuitiveness guided Kikvadze’s writing. Inspired by Angela Duckworth, Wharton OID professor and Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor, he liked to get into “the flow of things,” even if it wasn’t perfect. “The idea is, you want to tell your story,” said Kikvadze. “The story has to be authentic, and then the rest is sort of where it just flows and it goes.” Although AI helped him get started, he still had to “chisel” and tweak things here and there: “You have to write an authentic story, and then you need to grind.”
This message resonated with the audience of alumni, as Rys asked for a show of hands from both aspiring and published authors. The book authors in attendance, whose literary works ranged from a crime thriller about a detective from Kolkata to the memoir of a kidney transplant recipient, asked questions and imparted their wisdom to fellow alumni. Due Quach WG06, who scored a deal with a Penguin Random House imprint for her book Calm Clarity, reminded the audience that in choosing which authors to work with, publishers are making a business decision. “If they can’t predict your sales, they will not invest the time,” she said.
Like many alumni, Seltzer and Kikvadze had a book idea brewing in their lives long before sitting down to write. Seltzer consulted a home library he had accumulated over the years of 500 or so books on subways and metros. (His favorites, by the way, are in Naples, Brussels, and São Paulo, he told one curious audience member.)
As for Kikvadze, he again relied on his gut to guide him. “You cannot push a book out of yourself,” he said. “You will know when the time is there. So listen to your inner voice, and things will happen. And when it’s there, you just go for it.”
