When technology journalist Kara Swisher first met Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, she thought he was nothing more than a “savage.”
Swisher, then a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, had traveled to Seattle in the mid-1990s to tour one of Amazon's first warehouses. Mr. Bezos was “running around like a crazed mongoose” trying to get high-profile press coverage for his fledgling company, said Mr. Swisher, who published the book on Tuesday titled “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.” He recalls this in his new book.
Bezos was a numbers guy who was more sophisticated and outperformed many high-profile startup founders at the time, Swisher wrote. While Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were foolish to litter their offices with scooters, Bezos was serious. While Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was a “seemingly difficult man,” Bezos “repressed his raw personality in public.”
“Yet I believed from the beginning that Jeff Bezos would bite my face off to get ahead,” Swisher wrote.
After nearly 30 years of covering the technology industry as a journalist, columnist, and podcast host, Swisher's memoir aims to tell the story of what it was like to cover some of the industry's biggest companies. Masu. Back in the day, when they weren't sure if their company was going to take off. And the media industry wasn't ready to realize how much the internet would change.
The book is primarily a history of Swisher's career, interspersed with anecdotes about some of the most influential figures in technology. In an interview with the Seattle Times before coming to Seattle to talk about his book, Swisher said Burn Book is a memoir, not a business book aimed at breaking news. .
“There's no need to break news. I didn't want to break news,” she said.
Back in the 1990s, when Ms. Swisher asked Washington Post editors if she could spend more time reporting on the Internet, the editors asked if she was sure she wasn't interested in politics. Ta. Later, when she decided to move to San Francisco to continue her reporting for the Wall Street Journal, her colleagues chided her, saying she wouldn't have much news to cover.
At the time, most people viewed the Internet the same way they view cryptocurrencies today, Swisher joked over the phone. “Early on, people thought it was a bit of a pyramid scheme,” she says. (She later emphasized that she actually hasn't been paying much attention to cryptocurrencies lately.)
Swisher recalls in her book that she quickly fell in love with the Internet and the digitalization it brought. The first time she tried out the World Wide Web at Duke University in North Carolina, she downloaded the entire “Calvin and Hobbes” collection. Although networks were disrupted, she felt this was just the beginning of the digital revolution.
She said by phone that she never doubted that the Internet would change the world, joking that ignoring it was like thinking electricity has no effect.
But in her book, she praises founders like Mr. Bezos and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs who envisioned ways to harness the power of the internet, and how their ideas actually changed the world. Most founders have switched to disdain for their mentality. Little consideration is given to other (possibly) unintended consequences that may result.
She called Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg “one of the most careless and dangerous people in the history of technology.” She poked fun at Google's founders, including an anecdote about an unusual baby shower she attended for one of the company's founders. She said Gates worked hard to “smooth the edges” as he gained wealth and power. The entire industry was filled with “casual hypocrisy,” she wrote.
“For years, I have watched idealistic young founders aiming to change the world with miraculous digital innovations become sloppy, careless internet moguls through ungodly financial windfalls. , I have watched with increasing alarm,” Swisher wrote. “Even when presented with data that showed they were causing harm, they ignored the impact of their inventions on the larger world.”
When it comes to Bezos, Swisher doesn't hesitate to call him a narcissist, writing that he “embodies muscular ambition.” But she also singled him out among today's many technology visionaries as someone who might rival Jobs' accomplishments.
“More than a decade after his death, Jobs' status as a unicorn remains,” Swisher wrote. “I think Bezos is probably the closest to reinventing commerce, recognizing the importance of cloud, and revolutionizing logistics.”
Mr. Swisher said by phone that he would not have been surprised if Mr. Bezos handed over control to Andy Jassy in 2021. Because we knew startup founders would get bored. He said Mr. Jassy had done a good job in his new role, but had difficulty following Mr. Bezos' ambitions.
She equated Jassy and current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was appointed in 2014, to “janitors.”
“It's hard to take that 'up and right' thing forever,” Swisher said, referring to the companies' explosive growth and inevitable slowdown trajectories.
Swisher said he hasn't covered Microsoft and Gates as closely as other founders. The company fell further under the helm of Walt Mossberg, another technology journalist known for his Wall Street Journal column. In the early 2000s, Swisher and Mossberg launched All Things Digital, a conference series that set up live interviews with some of the biggest names in the technology world.
Swisher recalled in his book that Gates and Jobs appeared together on stage at All Things Digital, but interviews were rare as Jobs threw jabs at competitors and sometimes friends. are doing. On stage, Jobs told Mossberg that Apple “received cards from a lot of people saying iTunes was his favorite app for Windows.” It's like giving a glass of ice water to someone in hell. ”
Swisher said that after Gates was identified with Satan backstage, he “sneaked backstage” while tending to his wounds.
In 2014, Swisher and Mossberg launched a new interview series and website, Recode. In his book, Swisher admitted that he was “influenced in part by the entrepreneurial spirit” of his interview subjects when he decided to strike out on his own.
Recode was later acquired by Vox, which shut down the brand last year. Swisher also works as a New York Times columnist and her CNN contributor, and hosts two podcasts, “On with Kara Swisher” and “Pivot.” She said in an interview with the Seattle Times that she would never have an employer again, preferring to be independent on her own.
Mr. Swisher had no advice to offer reporters currently covering the tech giants or predictions about what would happen next with the Internet. She knows one thing for sure, she said. That means tech founders will continue to get richer and more powerful.
