Best 5 books about Silicon Valley
1) The Big Score: The Billion-Dollar Story of Silicon Valley
The Big Score is a book by Michael S. Malone that explores the history of the tech industry and its origins in Silicon Valley. Malone, who was one of the first reporters on the tech industry beat at the San Jose Mercury News, takes readers on a journey through the decades of technological innovation that laid the foundation for the meteoric rise of Silicon Valley in the 1970s.
Starting with the birth of Hewlett-Packard in the 1930s, Malone highlights the feverish efforts of young technologists and entrepreneurs to build something that would change the world and score them a big payday. He provides incisive profiles of tech's early luminaries, including Nobelist William Shockley and Apple's Steve Jobs, when they were struggling entrepreneurs working 18-hour days in their garages.
The Big Score also delves into the darker side of the Valley, where espionage, drugs, hellish working conditions, and shocking betrayals shaped the paths for winners and losers in a booming industry. Malone uses exclusive, unvarnished interviews to punctuate this history and provide readers with a unique perspective on the industry.
The Big Score is a decades-long story of individual sacrifice, ingenuity, and big money at its core. It recounts the history of today's most dynamic sector through its upstart beginnings, giving readers a comprehensive look at how the tech industry became what it is today.
2)Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
The book "Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup" by John Carreyrou chronicles the rise and fall of Theranos, a startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes that promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a device that could perform a whole range of laboratory tests from a single drop of blood. The book details how Holmes, who was widely seen as the next Steve Jobs, raised millions of dollars in funding from investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, valuing the company at more than $9 billion and putting her own net worth at an estimated $4.5 billion.
However, the technology behind Theranos' device did not work as promised, leading to erroneous results that put patients in danger and led to misdiagnoses and unnecessary treatments. Despite warnings from employees and journalists, Holmes and her partner, Sunny Balwani, worked to silence anyone who voiced misgivings about the company's technology.
"Bad Blood," tells the story of how Carreyrou, a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, uncovered the truth about Theranos and exposed the lies and deceit that permeated the company. The book offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of Silicon Valley's "fake it till you make it" culture and the consequences of prioritizing hype and glamour over substance and integrity.
3) Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass
Mary L Gray, Siddharth Suri
In their book "Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass," anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri explore the growing phenomenon of "ghost work": high-tech piecework that is done by a vast, invisible human labor force, hidden beneath the surface of the web. Companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber rely on this invisible labor force to perform tasks such as flagging X-rated content, proofreading, and designing engine parts, among many others.
Gray and Suri reveal that an estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this "ghost economy," and that number is growing. These workers usually earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, have no health benefits, and can be fired at any time for any reason. There are no labor laws to govern this kind of work, and these latter-day assembly lines draw in a surprisingly diverse range of workers, including harried young mothers, professionals forced into early retirement, recent graduates who can't get a foothold on the traditional employment ladder, and minorities shut out of the jobs they want.
"Ghost Work" offers a critical look at this new kind of work, arguing that it creates an opportunity for exploitation and a new global underclass. However, the authors also suggest ways that ghost workers, employers, and society at large can work together to ensure that this new kind of work creates opportunity rather than misery for those who do it.
4) The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
Margaret O'Mara's book is a comprehensive history of Silicon Valley, covering four generations of explosive growth from the 1940s to the present day. O'Mara reveals how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley has been with the federal government and how it started off homogeneous and tight-knit but has since evolved into a collective hubris that has led to astonishing triumphs as well as devastating second-order effects. She covers the evolution of tech companies through successive eras and has a profound understanding of the politics of the sector and its relation to the larger cultural narrative about tech. O'Mara also penetrates the inner kingdom of tech venture capital firms, the cockpit of American capitalism, and the crucible for bringing technological innovation to market. The book highlights the transformation of big tech into the engine room of the American economy, and its fate is the fate of us all.
5) The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
By: Jimmy Soni
"The Founders" by Jimmy Soni is a book about the early days of PayPal, a scrappy online payments start-up created by a group of individuals who would go on to become some of the most powerful and influential people in the technology industry. The book explores how these founders faced intense competition, internal strife, widespread online fraud, and the dot-com bust of the 2000s before ultimately building one of the world's foremost companies. Soni draws from hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of internal material to reveal the stories of the individuals who were central to PayPal's success but were often left out of the spotlight. Described as "an intensely magnetic chronicle" and "engrossing," the book illustrates how this rare assemblage of talent came to work together and how their collaboration changed the world forever, planting the seeds for many of the concepts that shape modern life today.
* TO PURCHASE CLICK THE BOOK TITLE
Comments
Post a Comment