Gary Rivlin tells the story of Ron Conway, the man who has placed more bets on Internet start-ups than anyone eise in Silicon Valley. Conway is a reader-friendly way into the realm of angel financing, where independently wealthy investors link up with companies just as they are being born. The Godfather of Silicon Valley takes you into this fascinating world on the edges of the financial universe, where the pace is frantic, the story lines are rich, and every moment is perilous.
I'll confess that in high school I was the type more likely to read the Cliff Notes than the assigned work. I was going to be an engineer; who cared about books? But for a requirement in college I took a literature course and I've been grateful ever since. I joke that I'm a self-taught reader, having pretty much started at age 19.
Politics and social issues propelled me into journalism. I felt like I had something to say so I started to write. In college I always enjoyed reading a great alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader. I began contributing to the Reader and eventually earned a staff job there writing about Chicago politics. That led to my first book, Fire on the Prairie, in which I tell the story of race politics at work in every big city by telling the tale of Chicago during the 1980s, a particularly brutal racial time in that city's history.
Youth violence was the subject of my second book, Drive-By. In that work, I introduce readers to the range of characters and issues at work in a single drive-by shooting that left a 13-year-old dead and put three teenagers in prison for murder. With my third book, The Plot to Get Bill Gates, I returned to my early tech roots.
I left the book world for about a decade. I started writing for a range of magazines, from Wired to the New York Times Magazine to GQ. At the start of 2004, I took a staff position with The New York Times. As terrific experience as that was, I'm very happy to be returning to books and talking about my latest work, BROKE, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. - How the Working Poor Became Big Business.
