Valley of the Gods
A Silicon Valley Story
(Sprache: Englisch)
Reporter Alexandra Wolfe tells a biting but loving story of Silicon Valley and the men and women whose hubris and ambition are changing the world.
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Reporter Alexandra Wolfe tells a biting but loving story of Silicon Valley and the men and women whose hubris and ambition are changing the world.
Klappentext zu „Valley of the Gods “
Each year, young people from around the world go to Silicon Valley to hatch an idea, start a company, strike it rich, and become powerful and famous. In The Valley of the Gods, Wolfe follows three of these upstarts who have "stopped out" of college and real life to live and work in Silicon Valley in the hopes of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.Meet the billionaires who attend parties where people devour peanut butter-and-jelly sushi rolls, and date and seduce in a romantic culture in which thick glasses, baggy jeans, and a t-shirt is the costume of any sex symbol (and where a jacket and tie symbolize mediocrity). Through Wolfe's eyes, we discover how they live and how they have created a business world and an economic order that has made us all devotees of them.
A blistering, brilliant, and hysterical examination of this new ruling class, The Valley of the Gods presents tomorrow's strange new normal where the only outward signs of tech success are laptops and ideas.
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Valley of the Gods 1
Asperger's Chic
John Burnham wanted to mine asteroids. He had always been a little bit different. Instead of reading school textbooks or his summer reading list, he read Plato, Aristotle, and a modern-day "neoreactionary" thinker who goes by the pen name Mencius Moldbug. A self-declared libertarian and "self-directed learner," motivated to study on his own, Burnham felt like he didn't need teachers to tell him what to do. He was a terribly behaved student.
By the spring semester of his senior year of high school in 2011, John had been rejected or wait-listed from all ten colleges he applied to except the University of Massachusetts, just over ten miles away from where he lived in Newton, Massachusetts. He didn't really care, though, since the idea of enduring another four years of dull lectures and drearier tests was less than appealing. It was a distraction from what he had always wanted to do, which was to go into space-and reap trillions of dollars from the valuable minerals that existed in asteroids.
Burnham wasn't delusional. He knew what he was talking about. While most of his classmates read Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The Great Gatsby, he was researching nickel, cobalt, and platinum on S-type (silacaceous) asteroids. With bright blue eyes, blond hair, and a seemingly permanent smirk, he was popular with girls and distracted himself with brief high school flirtations, but John still had plenty of time for his loftier interests. As he procrastinated doing the homework assignments he found pointless, he scoured the Web, stumbling across bloggers whose ideas were at least more interesting than those of his current teachers.
His favorite was called Unqualified Reservations, written by the reactionary blogger Mencius Moldbug, whose real name is Curtis Yarvin. An engineer living in Silicon Valley, Yarvin described himself in his blog's "About Me" section with the words "stubbornness and disrespect." Burnham was
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hooked.
One night, when John was up reading Patri Friedman's blog, he came upon a new posting announcing a call for applications to a fellowship called 20 Under 20. Sponsored by the Thiel Foundation, it offered twenty students under twenty years old $100,000 to drop out of school, forgo college for the duration of the fellowship, and start their own companies. Drop out of school? Burnham didn't have to be convinced. He wasn't sure what his mother and father, a Congregationalist minister and a financial investor, respectively, would think of the idea, but he was curious to find out more.
The Thiel Foundation turned out to be the charitable arm of an empire belonging to Peter Thiel, founder and chairman of the Founders Fund, a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm that had invested in companies such as Spotify, the music streaming subscription service, and the ride-sharing service Lyft. Burnham clicked from article to article: from the Forbes magazine piece that described Thiel's chef and butler to the Fortune article calling him one of best investors in the country.
In 2011 Thiel was a youthful forty-three. He had just announced the fellowship in fall 2010 at a conference called TechCrunch Disrupt. The conference was sponsored by TechCrunch, a website dedicated to news and gossip about the valley, and also served as a tech company directory, listing founders, investors, and financing rounds. At first, Thiel's announcement was a way to call attention to what he considered the waste of time and money spent on a college education. He also railed against the political correctness he thought universities propagated. By selecting
One night, when John was up reading Patri Friedman's blog, he came upon a new posting announcing a call for applications to a fellowship called 20 Under 20. Sponsored by the Thiel Foundation, it offered twenty students under twenty years old $100,000 to drop out of school, forgo college for the duration of the fellowship, and start their own companies. Drop out of school? Burnham didn't have to be convinced. He wasn't sure what his mother and father, a Congregationalist minister and a financial investor, respectively, would think of the idea, but he was curious to find out more.
The Thiel Foundation turned out to be the charitable arm of an empire belonging to Peter Thiel, founder and chairman of the Founders Fund, a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm that had invested in companies such as Spotify, the music streaming subscription service, and the ride-sharing service Lyft. Burnham clicked from article to article: from the Forbes magazine piece that described Thiel's chef and butler to the Fortune article calling him one of best investors in the country.
In 2011 Thiel was a youthful forty-three. He had just announced the fellowship in fall 2010 at a conference called TechCrunch Disrupt. The conference was sponsored by TechCrunch, a website dedicated to news and gossip about the valley, and also served as a tech company directory, listing founders, investors, and financing rounds. At first, Thiel's announcement was a way to call attention to what he considered the waste of time and money spent on a college education. He also railed against the political correctness he thought universities propagated. By selecting
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Autoren-Porträt von Alexandra Wolfe
Alexandra Wolfe is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal and writes the weekly column "Weekend Confidential." After graduating from Duke University, she worked as a staff reporter for the New York Observer, The Wall Street Journal, and then Condé Nast Portfolio. As a freelancer, she wrote regular columns for Bloomberg Businessweek, features for Travel + Leisure and Departures, and has written cover stories for Vanity Fair and Town & Country. The Valley of the Gods is her first book. She lives in New York City.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Alexandra Wolfe
- 2017, 272 Seiten, Maße: 14,1 x 21,3 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Simon & Schuster US
- ISBN-10: 1501147056
- ISBN-13: 9781501147050
- Erscheinungsdatum: 03.01.2017
Sprache:
Englisch
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