Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

by Adam Fisher

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Fisher assembles an oral history of Silicon Valley from over 200 first-person interviews, stitching together the stories of Atari, Apple, Xerox PARC, Netscape, Google, PayPal, Facebook, and Twitter in the protagonists' own unedited words. The book argues that the Valley's culture - counterculture roots, hacker ethos, and chaotic collaboration - is inseparable from its technical output, and that the innovators themselves disagree wildly about what actually happened.

Published:: 2018
Pages:: 512

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In the Conversation

In this collection, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) references 5 other books.

It draws on The Innovators, Steve Jobs and Hackers and Painters.

Scroll down to read the exact passages where other authors reference this book and what they say about it.

What This Book Draws On

The books Fisher references and why each one mattered to the argument.

Complements Isaacson's The Innovators as an oral-history counterpart to Isaacson's narrative history, covering the same Atari/Apple/PARC/Netscape territory from the participants' own mouths

References

The Innovators

by Walter Isaacson

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Cross-references Isaacson's Steve Jobs with alternative, sometimes conflicting accounts of Jobs from Wozniak, Bushnell, and early Apple employees interviewed directly by Fisher

References

Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson

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Features Paul Graham and the Hackers and Painters milieu, using YC-era founders to trace the continuity between PARC-era hackers and modern startup culture

References

Hackers and Painters

by Paul Graham

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Parallels Stone's The Everything Store by providing first-person Amazon and eBay competitor accounts from the same late-90s ecosystem

References

The Everything Store

by Brad Stone

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Covers the same 1997 Jobs-returns-to-Apple pivot that Schlender and Tetzeli reconstruct in Becoming Steve Jobs, but through the voices of NeXT, Pixar, and Apple insiders who witnessed it