Silicon Valley Girl (Hardcover Version)

Silicon Valley Girl (Hardcover Version)
Author: Maya Morrow
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2017-06-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1480942448

Silicon Valley Girl (Hardcover Version) by Maya Morrow Inspired by the life and works of poet Sylvia Plath, including Plath’s published journals, Maya Morrow presents her own coming-of-age journey in this collection of raw and uncensored diaries spanning a decade and a half. The story begins Christmas 1984 and ends in 1999, when the author, twenty-six, rediscovers the handwritten diaries for the first time. “These diaries are compelling enough on their own,” Morrow writes. “However, what makes this coming-of-age story different from many others is that it gives the reader a glimpse of not just an average, American middle class girl’s life – it highlights the fact that my life was that, and I’m Afro American. When The Cosby Show came on, I saw my family on television, and didn’t understand why the media said the show was an unrealistic depiction of African American life. It was realistic; it was my life!” Set against a backdrop of cultural touchstones any Gen-Xer would recognize, Silicon Valley Girl: My Adolescent Life and Times, and an Ode to Generation X offers a deeply personal look at the emotional life of a teenager of color trying to make sense of race, class, and sexuality at the dawn of Post-Cold War America. (2017, Hardcover, 242 pages)

Valley Girls

Valley Girls
Author: Mark S. Luckie
Publisher: Windsor Hills
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780578778563

**Now available for Pre-Order** Rising star Kelsey Pace has landed the role of a lifetime as communications manager for Elemynt, one of the world's most popular social media apps. Not only is it the job she's always dreamed of, but the workplace is a corporate fantasyland where free gourmet meals are available at the swipe of a badge and complimentary spa services are one building away. What starts off for Kelsey as a series of positive public relations campaigns evolves into a whirlwind of defending the company against global scandals, scrutinizing media exposés, and raging battles between employees that spill into public view. The tangle of secrets she is tasked with hiding reveals to her the increasingly challenging personal and moral sacrifices she'll have to make to keep the company on top.

Secrets of Silicon Valley

Secrets of Silicon Valley
Author: Deborah Perry Piscione
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2013-04-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 113732421X

While the global economy languishes, one place just keeps growing despite failing banks, uncertain markets, and high unemployment: Silicon Valley. In the last two years, more than 100 incubators have popped up there, and the number of angel investors has skyrocketed. Today, 40 percent of all venture capital investments in the United States come from Silicon Valley firms, compared to 10 percent from New York. In Secrets of Silicon Valley, entrepreneur and media commentator Deborah Perry Piscione takes us inside this vibrant ecosystem where meritocracy rules the day. She explores Silicon Valley's exceptionally risk-tolerant culture, and why it thrives despite the many laws that make California one of the worst states in the union for business. Drawing on interviews with investors, entrepreneurs, and community leaders, as well as a host of case studies from Google to Paypal, Piscione argues that Silicon Valley's unique culture is the best hope for the future of American prosperity and the global business community and offers lessons from the Valley to inspire reform in other communities and industries, from Washington, DC to Wall Street.

Bad Blood

Bad Blood
Author: John Carreyrou
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2018-05-21
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1524731668

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The gripping story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos—one of the biggest corporate frauds in history—a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley, rigorously reported by the prize-winning journalist. With a new Afterword covering her trial and sentencing, bringing the story to a close. “Chilling ... Reads like a thriller ... Carreyrou tells [the Theranos story] virtually to perfection.” —The New York Times Book Review In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the next Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with its breakthrough device, which performed the whole range of laboratory tests from a single drop of blood. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.5 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work. Erroneous results put patients in danger, leading to misdiagnoses and unnecessary treatments. All the while, Holmes and her partner, Sunny Balwani, worked to silence anyone who voiced misgivings—from journalists to their own employees.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley
Author: Cary McClelland
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2018-10-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0393608808

A Stanford University Three Books Selection for 2019 “Essential.… A conflicted and complex portrait of a city starving for solutions.” —Brandon Yu, San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco is changing at warp speed. Famously home to artists and activists, and known as the birthplace of the Beats, the Black Panthers, and the LGBTQ movement, the Bay Area has been reshaped by Silicon Valley. The richer the region gets, the more unequal and less diverse it becomes, and cracks in the city’s facade—rapid gentrification, an epidemic of evictions, rising crime, atrophied public institutions—are growing wider. Inspired by Studs Terkel’s classic works of oral history, Cary McClelland spent years interviewing people at the epicenter of recent change, from venture capitalists and coders to politicians and protesters, capturing San Francisco as never before.

The Code

The Code
Author: Margaret O'Mara
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2020-07-07
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0399562206

One of New York Magazine's best books on Silicon Valley! The true, behind-the-scenes history of the people who built Silicon Valley and shaped Big Tech in America Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government--and always had been--and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was. Now, after almost five years of pioneering research, O'Mara has produced the definitive history of Silicon Valley for our time, the story of mavericks and visionaries, but also of powerful institutions creating the framework for innovation, from the Pentagon to Stanford University. It is also a story of a community that started off remarkably homogeneous and tight-knit and stayed that way, and whose belief in its own mythology has deepened into a collective hubris that has led to astonishing triumphs as well as devastating second-order effects. Deploying a wonderfully rich and diverse cast of protagonists, from the justly famous to the unjustly obscure, across four generations of explosive growth in the Valley, from the forties to the present, O'Mara has wrestled one of the most fateful developments in modern American history into magnificent narrative form. She is on the ground with all of the key tech companies, chronicling the evolution in their offerings through each successive era, and she has a profound fingertip feel for the politics of the sector and its relation to the larger cultural narrative about tech as it has evolved over the years. Perhaps most impressive, O'Mara has penetrated the inner kingdom of tech venture capital firms, the insular and still remarkably old-boy world that became the cockpit of American capitalism and the crucible for bringing technological innovation to market, or not. The transformation of big tech into the engine room of the American economy and the nexus of so many of our hopes and dreams--and, increasingly, our nightmares--can be understood, in Margaret O'Mara's masterful hands, as the story of one California valley. As her majestic history makes clear, its fate is the fate of us all.

Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream

Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream
Author: Glenna Matthews
Publisher:
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2003
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

What accounts for the growing income inequalities in Silicon Valley, despite huge technological and economic strides? Why have the once-powerful labor unions declined in their influence? This book examines these questions from a fresh perspective: that provided by the history of women in Silicon Valley in the twentieth century.

Brotopia

Brotopia
Author: Emily Chang
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2019-03-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0525540172

Instant National Bestseller A PBS NewsHour-New York Times Book Club Pick "Excellent." —San Francisco Chronicle Silicon Valley is a modern utopia where anyone can change the world. Unless you're a woman. It's time to break up the boys' club. Incisive, powerful, and a fierce rallying cry, Emily Chang shows us how to fix Silicon Valley’s toxic culture--to bring down Brotopia, once and for all. Silicon Valley is not a fantasyland of unicorns, virtual reality rainbows, and 3D-printed lollipops for women in tech. Instead, it’s a "Brotopia," where men hold the cards and make the rules. While millions of dollars may seem to grow on trees in this land of innovation, tech’s aggressive, misogynistic, work-at-all costs culture has shut women out of the greatest wealth creation in the history of the world. Brotopia reveals how Silicon Valley got so sexist despite its utopian ideals, why bro culture endures even as its companies claim the moral high ground, and how women are speaking out and fighting back. Drawing on her deep network of Silicon Valley insiders, Chang opens the boardroom doors of male-dominated venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, the subject of Ellen Pao's high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit, and Sequoia, where a partner once famously said they "won't lower their standards" just to hire women. Exposing the flawed logic in common excuses for why tech has long suffered the “pipeline” problem and invests in the delusion of meritocracy, Brotopia also shows how bias coded into AI, internet troll culture, and the reliance on pattern recognition harms not just women in tech but us all, and at unprecedented scale.

Sophia of Silicon Valley

Sophia of Silicon Valley
Author: Anna Yen
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2018-04-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062673033

Sharp, dramatic, and full of insider dish, SOPHIA OF SILICON VALLEY is one woman’s story of a career storming the corridors of geek power and living in the shadow of its outrageous cast of maestros. During the heady years of the tech boom, incorrigibly frank Sophia Young lucks into a job that puts her directly in the path of Scott Kraft, the eccentric CEO of Treehouse, a studio whose animated films are transforming movies forever. Overnight, Sophia becomes an unlikely nerd whisperer. Whether her success is due to dumb luck, savage assertiveness, insightful finesse (learned by dealing with her irrational Chinese immigrant mother), or a combination of all three, in her rarified position she finds she can truly shine. As Scott Kraft’s right-hand woman, whip-smart Sophia is in the eye of the storm, sometimes floundering, sometimes nearly losing relationships and her health, but ultimately learning what it means to take charge of her own future the way the men around her do. But when engineer/inventor Andre Stark hires her to run his company’s investor relations, Sophia discovers that the big paycheck and high-status career she’s created for herself may not be worth living in the toxic environment of a boys-club gone bad.

Troublemakers

Troublemakers
Author: Leslie Berlin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2017-11-07
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 145165152X

Acclaimed historian Leslie Berlin’s “deeply researched and dramatic narrative of Silicon Valley’s early years…is a meticulously told…compelling history” (The New York Times) of the men and women who chased innovation, and ended up changing the world. Troublemakers is the gripping tale of seven exceptional men and women, pioneers of Silicon Valley in the 1970s and early 1980s. Together, they worked across generations, industries, and companies to bring technology from Pentagon offices and university laboratories to the rest of us. In doing so, they changed the world. “In this vigorous account…a sturdy, skillfully constructed work” (Kirkus Reviews), historian Leslie Berlin introduces the people and stories behind the birth of the Internet and the microprocessor, as well as Apple, Atari, Genentech, Xerox PARC, ROLM, ASK, and the iconic venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In the space of only seven years, five major industries—personal computing, video games, biotechnology, modern venture capital, and advanced semiconductor logic—were born. “There is much to learn from Berlin’s account, particularly that Silicon Valley has long provided the backdrop where technology, elite education, institutional capital, and entrepreneurship collide with incredible force” (The Christian Science Monitor). Featured among well-known Silicon Valley innovators are Mike Markkula, the underappreciated chairman of Apple who owned one-third of the company; Bob Taylor, who masterminded the personal computer; software entrepreneur Sandra Kurtzig, the first woman to take a technology company public; Bob Swanson, the cofounder of Genentech; Al Alcorn, the Atari engineer behind the first successful video game; Fawn Alvarez, who rose from the factory line to the executive suite; and Niels Reimers, the Stanford administrator who changed how university innovations reach the public. Together, these troublemakers rewrote the rules and invented the future.