Perhaps more than anywhere else, Silicon Valley in the latter part of the 20th century has come to represent the essence of the American dream. Its economy has resembled the various rushes and booms of the 1800s. The Valley is a unique place in a unique time, where just about anyone with a good idea, an aptitude for hard work, and a boatload of luck has a chance to make it big--really big. In
The Nudist on the Late Shift, Po Bronson intends to capture the spirit of the Valley, leading us through a series of vignettes that takes us from a "near brush with sudden wealth" to a $400 million buyout; from life on the edge with a group of Java programmers to the plight of a futurist writer with the looming deadline for a 9,000-word article. For Bronson, the appeal of the Valley is this:
Every generation that came before us had to make a choice in life between pursuing a steady career and pursuing wild adventures. In Silicon Valley, that trade-off has been recircuited. By injecting mind-boggling risk into the once stodgy domain of gray-suited business, young people no longer have to choose. It's a two-for-one deal: the career path has become an adventure into the unknown.
Like Tracy Kidder's
Soul of a New Machine, what makes Bronson's book work is a talent for narrative. He presents compelling stories about those who make it--for example, Ben Chiu (Killerapp.com, C/NET) and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail)--as well as those whom we'll never hear of again: the database salesman working on the "hockey stick" at the close of the quarter and the "kiss-ass entrepreneur" who's taken up COBOL programming to make ends meet.
The Nudist on the Late Shift is for anyone who has wondered what life on the modern frontier is like--and for those who are already there, the reflection might be revealing.
--Harry C. Edwards
Having satirized Silicon Valley in his novel The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, Bronson now turns a much rosier eye on the pulsing heart of the information age. As Bronson examines the pursuit of high-tech entrepreneurial glory, his method recalls the way Robert Altman's Nashville gave moviegoers a sense of the chase for country music stardomAexcept there's very little pathos here and a lot of blue sky. Though he dutifully presents the long odds facing the would-be founders of the next Yahoo!, Bronson thrills to the culture of the Valley because he believes it fuses the often contradictory desires for security and adventure. "By injecting mind-boggling amounts of risk into the once stodgy domain of gray-suited business, young people no longer have to choose. It's a two-for-one deal: the career path has become the adventure into the unknown." Bronson clearly likes the wild-eyed optimists and masters of uncertainty he profiles. There's Sabeer Bhatia, the Indian-born founder of Hotmail, who established a company and, against the advice of more experienced heads, rejected several buyout offers from Bill Gates until Microsoft paid $400 million for Hotmail. There's the exec who let Bronson be a fly on the wall during the ulcer-inducing process of steering a company through an IPO. And there are the talented programmers, many of whom, though not yet 30, have Ancient Mariner-like tales of rejecting stock optionsAand thus forfeiting millionsAin companies that were bought or went public. Bronson is tuned in to the quirks of both personality and culture. His prose, often funny, maintains impressive velocity and is well suited to the manic life of the Valley and its colorful menagerie of characters. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
For novelist Bronson, Silicon Valley "is about the opportunity to become a mover and a shaker, not about being one." In his first work of nonfiction, he turns his satirist's eye on Silicon Valley (also the subject of his second novel The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, 1997). Inspired by the urban legend of the nudist programmer, a folktale that turned out to be true, Bronson profiles in witty, vivid detail the people who make the Valley the exciting place it is: young newcomers who come for the adventure and the risk; entrepreneurs like Ben Chiu of Killerapp.com and Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail who strike it rich, brilliant but socially inept programmers ("eccentricity is de riguer") who thrill to see their software "go live on the Big Green X" yet will drop everything to go squirrel hunting in Tennessee. As Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker (1989) captured Wall Street and the spirit of the greedy 1980s, so Bronson's new book reflects the Valley and the digital revolution it spawned in the 1990s. For all libraries.
-AWilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
The growing subspecialty of business books that deals with the brainiac talents and picaresque entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley is upgraded to version 2.0 with this knowledgeable communiqu from cyberspace. Just as Hollywood is said to have done, Silicon Valley lures mature talent and young folk bright or attractive enough to cast hundreds of sitcoms. Novelist and Wired contributor Bronson (Bombardiers, 1995; The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, 1997) presents the wildcatters of the valley, from the seller of used cubicles to the multimillionaire who bedded down each night under his desk, from the devious headhunters to the young CEOs of software firms with killer apps. In a series of profiles, he probes their minds and hearts. We witness the closing days of an IPO (more dramatic than the preceding scutwork). Here, among the processors, terminals, modems, and servers are the individual progrananers, salespeople, venture capitalists, visionaries who build financial empires on vapor, and the new generation of studly geniuses who truly want to change the way the world operates. It just takes being first with one big idea. Here are the superachievers who risk all for exponential dollars. And here's the nude guy, who is no urban legend. It's all quite bizarre, of course, especially the money, which is ``puppylike, untrained,'' i.e., it doesnt behave commonsensically. . . . People give money out here just to be part of the excitement of the deal. The stories are told with vitality and more than a touch of gonzo. Though basic familiarity with the terminology might be nice, after reading this entertainment, you'll think you understand the slang, the jargon, the gibberish, and the buzzwords of the valley. While Internet stocks are ballooning, so are books about the players. Here's a strong entry in the genre, savvy and clever. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
Advance praise for The Nudist on the Late Shift
"Most books, in baseball parlance, are singles or maybe doubles. Many books instruct but don't entertain; others entertain but teach nothing. Po Bronson has written a book about a dream valley that kept me glued to my seat--laughing, sighing, shaking my head--while also leaving me with a deeper sense of the human energy and hubris that fuels America's new entrepreneurial capital, Silicon Valley. A home run." --Ken Auletta
"Nobody is better at writing about digital technology than Po Bronson. His stories get at the truth and reality of this new world." --Clay Felker
"Po Bronson is a genuine voice of a new generation, the bard of Silicon Valley." --Lewis Lapham
From the Inside Flap
dist on the Late Shift</b> is the true story of a new generation at the proving point of their lives, written by the most exciting and authentic literary voice to emerge from Silicon Valley, Po Bronson.<br> <br>This is a defining portrait of young people in the whirl of an information revolution and an international gold rush. Masses of entrepreneurs and tech wizards, immigrants and investors, dreamers and visionaries, are heading west to seek their fortune and a new destiny. In Bronson, they have found their troubadour.<br> <br>Already hailed by <i>The Village Voice Literary Supplement</i> as "the most complete and empathetic portrait of the Valley so far," <b>The Nudist on the Late Shift</b> establishes Bronson as the first author to capture the spirit of this new mecca. Recently chosen by the VLS as one of 1999's "Writers on the Verge," Bronson has spent t
About the Author
Po Bronson is a feature writer for Wired and has written about high-tech culture for The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes ASAP. His first novel, Bombardiers (1995), was translated into ten languages, became an inter-national bestseller, and was described by Business Week as "perhaps the most entertaining depiction of greed on Wall Street ever to see print." His second novel, The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest (1997), was called "a smart, sassy fantasy" by The New York Times. The Boston Herald added, "Ken Kesey would be proud."
When asked in December 1998 which young authors he was reading, Tom Wolfe responded, "Two of the writers I look to with tremendous interest are Richard Price and Po Bronson. Those are the two writers I am watching very closely, because they are so talented."
Bronson grew up in Seattle, graduated from Stanford University in 1986, and lives in San Francisco. For more information on the author and his Silicon Valley Bleeding Edge Book Tour, visit www.pobronson.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
If the most torturous fate
was a mind, caged,
who would understand?
If you always found life's elixir
in striving rather than getting,
who would understand?
If you gambled rather than nest-egged
and hit jackpot once of seven,
who would understand?
BY CAR, BY PLANE, THEY COME. They just show up. They've given up their lives elsewhere to come here. They come for the tremendous opportunity, believing that in no other place in the world right now can one person accomplish so much with talent, initiative, and a good idea. It's a region where who you know and how much money you have have never been less relevant to success. They come because it does not matter that they are young or left college without a degree or have dark skin or speak with an accent. They come even if it is illegal to do so. They come because they feel that they will regret it the rest of their lives if they do not at least give it a try. They come to be a part of history, to build the technology that will reshape how people will live and work five or ten years from now. They come for the excitement, just to be a part of it. They come because they are competitive by instinct and can't stand to see others succeed more than they. They come to make enough money so they will never have to think about money again.
They are the new breed, Venture Trippers, who get off on the dizzying adventure of bloodwork. It is a mad, fertile time. Working has become nothing less than a sport here in Superachieverland: people are motivated by the thrill of the competition and the danger of losing, and every year the rules evolve to make it all happen more quickly, on higher margins, reaching ever more amazing sums.
They come from places wallowing in an X-Y-axis attitudinal coordinate, a slow-mo way of thinking about one's life that offers a plodding story line they can't manage to suspend their disbelief of. They try to live that story, but they keep popping out, keep finding themselves saying, "What the hell am I doing with my life?"
They come because what they see ahead of them, if they stay where they are, is a working life that seems fundamentally and unavoidably boring. Nothing seems worse than the fate of boringness. They feel they are being offered a neo-Faustian trade-off by society: all of life's sprawling dimensions will be funneled through the narrow pipe of the career path.
And rather than choosing not to work hard, the Venture Trippers are taking the opposite approach from the Slackers. They're saying, If I'm going to have to make that trade-off, then hell, why the fuck not? I'm young, let's raise the stakes. Let's up the bet. Let's make it exciting. Let's put it all on black. Let 'em roll.
And they come.
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