Understanding Silicon Valley

Download or read book Understanding Silicon Valley written by Martin Kenney and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores the factors that have made Silicon Valley such a fertile breeding ground for new technologies and new firms. It looks at how its pioneering achievements begana̧nd the forces that have propelled its unprecedented growth.

Download or read book Secrets of Silicon Valley written by Deborah Perry Piscione and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Silicon Valley Edge written by Chong-Moon Lee and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at Silicon Valley's business environment, and what features have made it a fertile ground for start-up companies who develop radical and disruptive technologies.

Download or read book The Code written by Margaret O'Mara and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Abolish Silicon Valley written by Wendy Liu and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Former insider turned critic Wendy Liu busts the myths of the tech industry, and offers a galvanising argument for why and how we must reclaim technology's potential for the public good. Former insider turned critic Wendy Liu busts the myths of the tech industry, and offers a galvanising argument for why and how we must reclaim technology's potential for the public good. "Lucid, probing and urgent. Wendy Liu manages to be both optimistic about the emancipatory potential of tech and scathing about the industry that has harnessed it for bleak and self-serving ends." -- Naomi Klein, author of On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal "An inspiring memoir manifesto...Technologists all over the world are realizing that no amount of code can substitute for political engagement. Liu's memoir is a road map for that journey of realization." -- Cory Doctorow, author of Radicalized and Little Brother Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What's not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it's hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon workers or Uber drivers. It's becoming clear that the tech industry's promised "innovation" is neither sustainable nor always desirable. Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality of Silicon Valley, and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo. Going beyond the idiosyncrasies of the individual founders and companies that characterise the industry today, Wendy Liu delves into the structural factors of the economy that gave rise to Silicon Valley as we know it. Ultimately, she proposes a more radical way of developing technology, where innovation is conducted for the benefit of society at large, and not just to enrich a select few.

Download or read book Cultures@SiliconValley written by J.A. English-Lueck and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the initial publication of Cultures@SiliconValley fourteen years ago, much has changed in Silicon Valley. The corporate landscape of the Valley has shifted, with tech giants like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter vying for space with a halo of applications that connect people for work, play, romance, and education. Contingent labor has been catalyzed by ubiquitous access to the Internet on smartphones, enabling ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft and space-sharing apps like Airbnb. Entrepreneurs compete for people's attention and screen time. Alongside these changes, daily life for all but the highest echelon has been altered by new perceptions of scarcity, risk, and shortage. Established workers and those new to the workforce try to adjust. The second edition of Cultures@SiliconValley brings the story of technological saturation and global cultural diversity in this renowned hub of digital innovation up to the present. In this fully updated edition, J. A. English-Lueck provides readers with a host of new ethnographic stories, documenting the latest expansions of Silicon Valley to San Francisco and beyond. The book explores how changes in technology, especially as mobile phones make the Internet accessible everywhere, impact work, family, and community life. The inhabitants of Silicon Valley illustrate in microcosm the social and cultural identity of the future.

Download or read book Troublemakers written by Leslie Berlin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.