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If you like tech, here’s some more inspiratio­n

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THE EVERYTHING STORE

by Brad Stone Not every dot-com company boomed and busted. Jeff Bezos' Amazon.com, which launched in 1994 as an online bookstore, ground on through the 1990s, diversifyi­ng, growing and gradually creating a fair chunk of what we now understand as internet commerce. It's now the world's largest internet company by revenue and America's biggest retailer full stop. Its founder now also owns the Washington Post. And as Brad Stone makes clear, what happened wasn't always pretty. In one widely quoted passage, Stone describes what was internally known as the “Gazelle Project”, so named after Bezos' suggestion to his managers that Amazon should approach small book publishers "the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle". It's a story about brilliance and brutality. And yes, of course you can get it on Kindle.

HOW THE INTERNET HAPPENED: FROM NETSCAPE TO THE IPHONE

by Brian McCullough

Brian McCullough's book, published late last year amid a resurgence of interest in the foundation­s of the internet we know today — one driven in part by his own Internet History Podcast — traces a long historical arc from the key decisions made in the creation of the pre-internet internet to, well, where we are today. He has the advantage of having been not only a long-time watcher but a dot-com player. In 1999, still in college, he founded ResumeWrit­ers.com — and, somewhat remarkably given the way of these things, still owns and runs the company. The core of his story, the point where everything pivots, is those few years in the 90s where an academic research network got swamped in money and became something else altogether.

THE NEW NEW THING

by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis' most recent work, The Fifth Risk, is one of the most talked-about political books of the past two years — but he's been in the game much longer than that. Published in 1999, The New New Thing is ostensibly a book about Silicon Valley but really one about one man: Netscape and Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark, who helped create the model of the Valley entreprene­ur — sometimes appearing to run on pure anger as he did so.

BROTOPIA: BREAKING UP THE BOYS' CLUB OF SILICON VALLEY

by Emily Chang

Emily Chang's 2018 book looks at the birth and growth of Silicon Valley culture through a particular lens: what it meant for women trying to make their way in the new tech culture.

And what it meant was often very bad. How exactly did computing — a field where in the 60s and 70s women were integrally involved — become a kind of maledomina­ted terrordome? Strikingly, tech is a field that has actually gone backwards in terms of gender equity in the past three decades. When the 1990s dawned, more than a third of Americans working in computing were women. Now, it's down to a quarter. Chang dives deep into Google, whose early success was in part driven by a trio of women — Susan Wojcicki, Marissa Mayer and the remarkable Sheryl Sandberg (now COO of Facebook) — and whose founders, she says, “cared very much about hiring more female engineers”. And yet, for all that women did for Google, the normative pressures of the Valley have gradually made it not all that different from the others.

Russell Brown

 ?? Photo / 123RF ??
Photo / 123RF
 ?? Photo / Bloomberg ?? Sheryl Sandberg.
Photo / Bloomberg Sheryl Sandberg.
 ?? Photo / AP ?? Jeff Bezos.
Photo / AP Jeff Bezos.

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