Kara Swisher Dishes in Her Memoir, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story
Silicon Valley tech businesses change our world
Does anyone understand the man-boys of the legendary Silicon Valley that seethed with creativity and weirdness starting in the late 1960s and continues to this day?
So many stories swirled around those gifted inventors, their incredible inventions, and their wildly expensive IPOs. All seemed unfathomable, so most of us accepted that this isolated culture defied understanding.
One who didn’t was Kara Swisher, who was seriously intrigued.
Beginning in the late 1980s, this (woman!) journalist worked hard to know and explain them to us. Today, she has earned an outsize reputation for her storytelling on the page, at events, and on her podcasts. She had to write her memoir to explain herself because this is who she is, and thinking and writing and speaking about the business of technology is what she does. She has a lot to say.
Who are her likely readers beyond those self-involved in the high-tech world and its venture capitalists funding them? (Swisher notes that she omitted an index, so her subjects must read her book to find what she writes about them.)
Interested outsiders likely include historians, journalists, and teachers, and I am not one of them.
But the moment I read about her book, I knew I had to read it, even though I have never been part of that unique tech ecosystem nor its soaring stock gains. I use many devices, and I have known talented people enthralled by the gifted technologists who created them, who were, to quote Swisher, “supremely odd but compelling people.” And I have friends who have wisely invested in their companies.
So many tech inventions were breakthroughs in new ways of working and showed enormous promise for increased productivity. They were intriguing, and their inventors routinely oversold them. It was challenging to uncover what was the truth. Sound familiar? What about AI?
Swisher caught the gathering momentum as tech took off even bigger after the invention of the World Wide Web in 1990. In 1997, she moved West to experience that unique ecosystem firsthand.
She believes the inventors were not precisely lying to her, but “these entrepreneurs were more often lying to themselves.”
She concluded,
self-congratulation and self-deception are now a part of the Valley’s ethos, right up there with fearless risk-taking, maniacal effort and programming genius.
Swisher briefly keeps us abreast of her personal life, including her stroke in 2011 at age 49 and her more recent entrepreneurial adventures.
But her memoir relates her experiences with the biggies of tech: Jobs at Apple, Gates at Microsoft, Andreessen at Netscape, Bezos at Amazon, Zuckerberg of Facebook, Elon Musk, Sheryl Sandberg, AOL, and Yahoo. Plus, many more. (See my list at the end of “top tier players” and a shorter list of “women” she mentions.)
Swisher has solid opinions and divulges them in her Burn Book.
For decades, she has tried new devices and software and thought about their unintended consequences as well as their merits. She tells us that she likes TikTok but uses it only on burner devices.
She notes how few women have held key positions in the ecosystem and how diverse voices still need to be included. She tells us who is most disappointing (Elon Musk) and most dangerous (naïve Zuck).
She is not shy about using unflattering nicknames, for example, referring to Rupert Murdoch as Uncle Satan.
Swisher’s career path moved from the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal and finally to her own enterprises. She considers herself “an optimistic pessimist” who expects the worst but hopes for the best.
She advises,
Life is a series of next things, and you’d do well to be ready for that.
Some of Tech’s Top Tier Players she mentions
Sam Altman (OpenAI), Marc Andreessen (Netscape), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sergey Brin (Google), Sue Decker (Yahoo), Andy Gems (Yahoo), Tony Hsieh (Zappos), George Lucas, Marissa Mayer (Google, Yahoo), Elon Musk, Craig Newmark (Craig’s List), Larry Page (Google), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), MacKenzie Scott (Amazon), Eric Schmidt (Google), Anne Wojcicki (Google), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook).
Some Women she mentions
Susan Fowler, Laurene Powell Jobs, Kim Kardashian, Marissa Mayer, Ellen Pao, Sheryl Sandberg, MacKenzie Scott, and Anne Wojcicki.
