Palo Alto

By Malcolm Harris,

Book cover of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

Book description

The true, unvarnished history of the town at the heart of Silicon Valley.

Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Palo Alto as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This is the story of how and where the tech bro mindset was born. I was at first intimidated by the size of this thing and the breadth of its subtitle. But Harris manages to explain how the ethos of Palo Alto was forged long ago in a system of horse breeding that has carried through to the way startups are funded, evaluated, and shed today.

What I liked about it most were the stories of the people who developed this strange part of the country and how all of them contributed to what is now unquestioned: the Silicon Valley…

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