Interesting and informative. If you want to know and curious about behind-the-scenes look at Silicon Valley, read this book. A quick read and fun book.
I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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This was a very fascinating read for me and I was glued till the end (even though it sometimes felt like there were too many stories at a time).

Alexandra writes about Silicon Valley and what makes it tick. She first takes the reader through the Thiel fellowship, Singularity University and YCombinator program, amongst others. The embodiment of people who just don't want to make money...the fundamentally want to change the world.

She gives the reader more than a sneak peek into the lives and seemingly strange ways of the individuals who move to Silicon Valley. They things they do differently, the way the think and ultimately how in a twisted way, they make the world a better place.

Rating: 3/5

Favourite Quote: "Silicon Valley has always favored the young, since they are more likely to stay abreast of the newest computer science programs, but now, having to hire a lot of people for expanding companies, tech giants were seeking the self-taught.

It turned out that many tech CEOs preferred someone who had learned autodidactically rather than from a professor at an Ivy League school.

The first issue was that technology was improving faster than educators could teach it."

I'm very interested in the Silicon Valley and it's populace. This book was very interesting for the first 2 chapters. Then the story got disjointed and very boring. I had to give up half way through the book.

I have to say that I was disappointed in this confused book for many reasons.

First, and most importantly, the author doesn't bother to tell us what the book is about in any clear way until her conclusion. You might think that it's about the Theil fellows. If so why does she abandon their story for all or most of chapters at a time? You might think is a rather one-sided view of a libertine, amoral, workaholic and self-centered society that is the world of Silicon Valley. But then why does she switch settings to other places and ignore the perfectly normal majority of people living and working there? If it's about the Theil programs disrupting the college trajectory, why does she suddenly have a chapter about great and valuable programs at Stanford?

It's confusing, off-putting, and a bit passive-aggressive. It makes for a book that plugs into the counter-culture myth of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, presenting a one-sided and only partially true picture. It is about as realistic a picture of Palo Alto as the hot-tub-and peacock-feathers documentary by CBS in the late 70's was of Marin.

A less important problem is that the author throws around words without ever really defining them. She'll talk about the "libertarian" tendencies of a polyamorous community, without ever saying that what this is is libertine living, not libertarian., even though there political philosophy may be that. Often she sounds as if her descriptions of companies and living situations came straight out of an elevator speech.

She also seems to have little historical knowledge to beef up her text. It's as if, mostly, the Internet world spring fully-formed and ready to explode in the late 1990's. To someone who has participated or watched the growth of technology since the 1970's, this is infuriating. And her bias towards the young doesn't stop there. She paints portraits often of under-30 entrepreneurs. But when a mentor is older, as is the case with many people she cites, age and past experience are left out.

Yes, ultimately she does question the value of the portrait she has painted in the entire rest of the book. Yes, she does bring up critiques of this life, this technology, and this philosophy. But not only are her conclusions not surprising to the moderately attentive observer, they come as too little, too late.