Valley of Genius
Valley of Genius

Author: Adam Fisher

Publisher: Hachette+ORM

Published: 2014-11-04

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 1455559016

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"This is the most important book on Silicon Valley I've read in two decades. It will take us all back to our roots in the counterculture, and will remind us of the true nature of the innovation process, before we tried to tame it with slogans and buzzwords." -- Po Bronson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nudist on the Late Shift and Nurtureshock A candid, colorful, and comprehensive oral history that reveals the secrets of Silicon Valley -- from the origins of Apple and Atari to the present day clashes of Google and Facebook, and all the start-ups and disruptions that happened along the way. Rarely has one economy asserted itself as swiftly--and as aggressively--as the entity we now know as Silicon Valley. Built with a seemingly permanent culture of reinvention, Silicon Valley does not fight change; it embraces it, and now powers the American economy and global innovation. So how did this omnipotent and ever-morphing place come to be? It was not by planning. It was, like many an empire before it, part luck, part timing, and part ambition. And part pure, unbridled genius... Drawing on over two hundred in-depth interviews, Valley of Genius takes readers from the dawn of the personal computer and the internet, through the heyday of the web, up to the very moment when our current technological reality was invented. It interweaves accounts of invention and betrayal, overnight success and underground exploits, to tell the story of Silicon Valley like it has never been told before. Read it to discover the stories that Valley insiders tell each other: the tall tales that are all, improbably, true.

The Geography of Genius
The Geography of Genius

Author: Eric Weiner

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-01-05

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1451691688

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Tag along on this New York Times bestselling “witty, entertaining romp” (The New York Times Book Review) as Eric Weiner travels the world, from Athens to Silicon Valley—and back through history, too—to show how creative genius flourishes in specific places at specific times. In this “intellectual odyssey, traveler’s diary, and comic novel all rolled into one” (Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness), acclaimed travel writer Weiner sets out to examine the connection between our surroundings and our most innovative ideas. A “superb travel guide: funny, knowledgeable, and self-deprecating” (The Washington Post), he explores the history of places like Vienna of 1900, Renaissance Florence, ancient Athens, Song Dynasty Hangzhou, and Silicon Valley to show how certain urban settings are conducive to ingenuity. With his trademark insightful humor, this “big-hearted humanist” (The Wall Street Journal) walks the same paths as the geniuses who flourished in these settings to see if the spirit of what inspired figures like Socrates, Michelangelo, and Leonardo remains. In these places, Weiner asks, “What was in the air, and can we bottle it?” “Fun and thought provoking” (The Miami Herald), The Geography of Genius reevaluates the importance of culture in nurturing creativity and “offers a practical map for how we can all become a bit more inventive” (Adam Grant, author of Originals).

Average Joe
Average Joe

Author: Shawn Livermore

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-09-29

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 1119618878

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The book covers numerous tech entrepreneurial founders and software developers, and the exciting brands or products that they created. It goes deep on a handful of them, narrowly divulging exactly how a few software developers and startup founders created breakthrough tech products like Gmail, Dropbox, Ring, Snapchat, Bitcoin, Groupon, and more. It highlights and unpacks the general hero-worship that the media and our own minds practice about tech founders and tech entrepreneurs. This idealization of tech success can create a paradox, preventing average tech professionals from their own successful journeys. This book provides hard evidence that anyone in tech can create, and anyone on the peripheral of tech can break through to the center where innovation, creativity, and opportunity meet. The anecdotes, stories, evidence, facts, arguments, logic, principles, and techniques provided in this book have helped individuals and businesses engage in slow creation cycles, improve the morale of their development teams, and increased their delivery potential of their technology solutions overall. Average Joe covers: Genius - The systematic deconstruction and debunking of the commonly held assumptions in the tech industry around supreme intelligence, and how that intelligence has been worshipped and sought after, despite the facts. Slow Creation - How to force-manufacture creative ideation. How conscious and subconscious cycles of patterns, details, and secrets can lead to breakthrough innovations, and how those P.D.S. cycles, and systematic mental grappling, can be conjured and repeated on a regular basis. Little-C Creativity - The conscious and miniature moments of epiphany that leak into our active P.D.S. cycles of Slow Creation. Flow - Why it's great, but also - why it's completely unreliable and unnecessary. How to perpetually innovate without relying on a flow state. Team Installation - How teams and companies can engage their employees in Slow Creation to unlock dormant ideas, stir up creative endeavors, and jumpstart fragile ideas into working products. User Manipulation - How tech products are super-charged with tricks, secret techniques, and neural transmitters like Dopamine, Oxytocin, and Cortisol; how those products leverage cognitive mechanisms and psychological techniques to force user adoption and user behaviors. Contrarianism - How oppositional and backward-thinking leaders create brand-new categories and the products which dominate those categories. Showmanship - How tech players have presented their ideas to the world, conjured up magic, manufactured mystique, and presented compelling stories that have captured their audiences. Sustainable Mystique Triad – A simple model for capturing audiences consistently without relying on hype and hustle.

Fearless Genius
Fearless Genius

Author: Doug Menuez

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1476752737

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An award-winning documentary photographer delivers a stunning visual history of the Silicon Valley technology boom, in which he was witness to key moments in the careers of Steve Jobs and more than seventy other leading innovators as they created today’s digital world. An eye-opening chronicle of the Silicon Valley technology boom, capturing key moments in the careers of Steve Jobs and more than seventy other leading innovators as they created today’s digital world In the spring of 1985, a technological revolution was under way in Silicon Valley, and documentary photographer Doug Menuez was there in search of a story—something big. At the same time, Steve Jobs was being forced out of his beloved Apple and starting over with a new company, NeXT Computer. His goal was to build a supercomputer with the power to transform education. Menuez had found his story: he proposed to photograph Jobs and his extraordinary team as they built this new computer, from conception to product launch. In an amazing act of trust, Jobs granted Menuez unlimited access to the company, and, for the next three years, Menuez was able to get on film the spirit and substance of innovation through the day-to-day actions of the world’s top technology guru. From there, the project expanded to include the most trailblazing companies in Silicon Valley, all of which granted Menuez the same complete access that Jobs had. Menuez photographed behind the scenes with John Warnock at Adobe, John Sculley at Apple, Bill Gates at Microsoft, John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, Bill Joy at Sun Microsystems, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove at Intel, Marc Andreessen at Netscape, and more than seventy other leading companies and innovators. It would be fifteen years before Menuez stopped taking pictures, just as the dotcom bubble burst. An extraordinary era was coming to its close. With his singular behind-the-scenes access to these notoriously insular companies, Menuez was present for moments of heartbreaking failure and unexpected success, moments that made history, and moments that revealed the everyday lives of the individuals who made it happen. This period of rapid, radical change would affect almost every aspect of our culture and our lives in ways both large and small and would also create more jobs and wealth than any other time in human history. And Doug Menuez was there, a witness to a revolution. In more than a hundred photographs and accompanying commentary, Fearless Genius captures the human face of innovation and shows what it takes to transform powerful ideas into reality.

1000 Portraits of Genius
1000 Portraits of Genius

Author: Victoria Charles

Publisher: Parkstone International

Published: 2014-11-24

Total Pages: 1224

ISBN-13: 1783109459

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According to the defined canons of art technique, a portrait should be, above all, a faithful representation of its model. However, this gallery of 1000 portraits illustrates how the genre has been transformed throughout history, and has proven itself to be much more complex than a simple imitation of reality. Beyond exhibiting the skill of the artist, the portrait must surpass the task of imitation, as just and precise as it may be, to translate both the intention of the artist as well as that of its patron, without betraying eitherÊs wishes. Therefore, these silent witnesses, carefully selected in these pages, reveal more than faces of historic figures or anonymous subjects: they reveal a psychology more than an identity, illustrate an allegory, serve as political and religious propaganda, and embody the customs of their epochs. With its impressive number of masterpieces, biographies, and commentaries on works, this book presents and analyses different portraits, consequently exposing to the reader, and to any art lover, a reflection of the evolution of society, and above all the upheavals of a genre that, over 300 centuries of painting, has shaped the history of art.

What Tech Calls Thinking
What Tech Calls Thinking

Author: Adrian Daub

Publisher: FSG Originals

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 95

ISBN-13: 0374721238

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A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "In Daub’s hands the founding concepts of Silicon Valley don’t make money; they fall apart." --The New York Times Book Review From FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual origins Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley’s world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of “disruption,” Daub locates the Valley’s supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley's ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

History of Silicon Valley
History of Silicon Valley

Author: Mary Wadden

Publisher:

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 9781467572453

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Vintage photos populate this artful and timely book as it traces the evolution of Santa Clara Valley from the days of the Gold Rush through modern day. Filled with over 400 high resolution images, this book captures the spirit of Silicon Valley. More than just a place, Silicon Valley is a state of mind and this book serves as a tribute. If you have ever wondered why the microchip, personal computer and Internet were all born in Santa Clara Valley, this is a must read. --Amazon.com

Genius of Place
Genius of Place

Author: Justin Martin

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Published: 2011-05-31

Total Pages: 494

ISBN-13: 0306818817

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This definitive, first full-scale biography of Olmsted--famed designer of New York's Central Park--reveals him also as a brilliant political and social reformer.

Troublemakers
Troublemakers

Author: Leslie Berlin

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-11-07

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 145165152X

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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.

Obsessives, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius
Obsessives, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius

Author: Malcolm Gladwell

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2009-10-20

Total Pages: 99

ISBN-13: 0316086142

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!--StartFragment--What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard-but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century? In the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has written three books that have radically changed how we understand our world and ourselves: The Tipping Point; Blink; and Outliers. Now, in What the Dog Saw, he brings together, for the first time, the best of his writing from TheNew Yorker over the same period. Here is the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill, and the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz. Gladwell sits with Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen, as he sells rotisserie ovens, and divines the secrets of Cesar Millan, the "dog whisperer" who can calm savage animals with the touch of his hand. He explores intelligence tests and ethnic profiling and "hindsight bias" and why it was that everyone in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate. "Good writing," Gladwell says in his preface, "does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head." What the Dog Saw is yet another example of the buoyant spirit and unflagging curiosity that have made Malcolm Gladwell our most brilliant investigator of the hidden extraordinary. !--EndFragment--