by Steven Levy
Levy had unprecedented access to Google's founders, engineers, and executives over two years to chronicle the company's algorithms, culture, and strategic battles. Levy argues that Google's engineering-led culture and willingness to automate judgement represented a fundamentally new way of building a company.
In this collection, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives references 3 other books and is cited by 10 other books.
It draws on The Innovator's Dilemma, Steve Jobs and Hackers and Painters.
It’s picked up by Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World and Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley and 7 others.
Scroll down to read the exact passages where other authors reference this book and what they say about it.
In the Plex is the go-to reference for understanding Google's internal culture, ad-auction mechanics, and engineering-driven decision-making, cited by nearly every major book about Silicon Valley's power. Antonio Garcia Martinez uses it as the comparative account of Google's ad system against which he reconstructs Facebook's competing machinery in Chaos Monkeys, while Jonathan Taplin cites it when indicting the search-advertising business model in Move Fast and Break Things.
David Sanger draws on Levy's reporting of the Google-China confrontation in The Perfect Weapon, and Jaron Lanier references the book repeatedly when arguing that Google's advertising economics represent the paradigmatic exploitative business model. Readers praise Levy's unprecedented access and his ability to make technical subjects legible, finding it an indispensable companion to Stone's The Everything Store for anyone trying to understand how Big Tech actually works.
The books Levy references and why each one mattered to the argument.
Levy uses Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma framework to explain Google's self-disruption discipline and its response to mobile threats
Levy contrasts Google's engineering-driven culture with the design-driven Apple culture Isaacson documented in Steve Jobs
Levy draws on the hacker-founder archetype Paul Graham articulated in Hackers and Painters to characterize Page and Brin's engineering mindset
The exact passages where other authors bring up “In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives” and what they take from it.
Bilton draws on Levy's In the Plex for the comparative Silicon Valley context and the Google-era culture that shaped how Twitter's founders thought about scale
Stone draws on Levy's In the Plex for the Google-era growth playbook that Uber and Airbnb internalized as Silicon Valley orthodoxy
Levy's In the Plex is the comparative account of Google's ad auction mechanics against which Garcia Martinez reconstructs Facebook's competing ad-targeting system
Cited in
Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valleyby Antonio Garcia Martinez
Isaac draws on Levy's In the Plex for the comparative Google culture that Kalanick admired and tried to adapt for Uber's engineering organisation
Levy's In the Plex is cited for the Google gender-dynamics material, including the Damore memo's precursors in the company's founding culture
Levy's In the Plex is cited for the Google-China confrontation and Operation Aurora, which Sanger treats as a watershed for corporate-state cyber conflict
How ideas flow through the citation network. Ancestors are books this title builds on; descendants are books that build on it.
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Books from completely different categories that share citation overlap with this one. These are the reads you would not find by browsing a single shelf.
Books with the highest citation overlap within the same categories.
The Everything Store
Brad Stone
8 shared citations
Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson
7 shared citations
The Innovators
Walter Isaacson
5 shared citations
The Master Switch
Tim Wu
4 shared citations
Nudge
Richard Thaler
2 shared citations
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
Ashlee Vance
2 shared citationsThis book and its direct connections. Hover a node to see its title, click to visit.
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