At Google co-founder Sergey Brin's and 23andMe co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki's baby shower in 2008, everyone in attendance either wore an adult-sized dress or an “oversized comical They were required to wear large diapers with “pins” on them. Guests were required to wear either a baby bonnet or a pacifier as an accessory.
According to Swisher's new memoir, only two guests refused to dress up: prominent technology reporter Carla Swisher and future California governor Gavin Newsom. Burn Book: A technology love storyThis article details her 35-year career as a technology reporter.
Swisher and Newsom decided a toast was in order to celebrate their shared disagreement. They stared at an ice sculpture of a woman trying to fill a cup from a White Russian's chest. They then clicked their glasses and laughed “at the ridiculousness of these people.” And in a small scene in which an avid tech reporter and an ambitious politician sip Kahlua at a tech billionaire's baby shower, Swisher gives us a classic look behind the curtain at Silicon Valley's elite. He will show you.
But exactly where Swisher stands against that curtain is unclear.
It may be unclear to the reader whether she is working behind the scenes, sitting in the audience, or perhaps even being part of the main attraction herself. Indeed, at many of the conferences she founded and hosted over the years, including All Things D and Code Conference, she was on stage, although she was rarely the main character. She began her career as a humble and unknown tech reporter, ridiculed by many of her colleagues or barely aware of her existence. She has few prerequisites for fame or fame.
When Swisher was there washington post In the late '90s, she remembers telling the paper's owner, Don Graham, that the Internet flood was coming. “Then it better not be wet,” Graham joked.
Swisher's height has grown over the years, and so have the countless tech executives she has interviewed, including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. Ta. Eventually, she evolved from a child reporter relegated to the “internet beat” to a media figure and sometimes a confidant of a tech company executive.
what burn the book Like microprocessors, eccentric founders, and VC pitch decks, Swisher is proving to be part of the tech firmament. Like it or not, Kara Swisher is technology.
“I was clearly infected with some of the entrepreneurial spirit of the people I had been interviewing, and I became increasingly grumpy about interviews. [Wall Street Journal]I was beginning to think of it as a velvet coffin,” Swisher wrote of his decision to leave the church. wall street journal to start her own business with her mentor Walt Mossberg. (Swisher dedicated the book to him.) “The idea of being trapped in a box was a metaphor that resonated with me. I completely realized another characteristic of Silicon Valley: the need to move on. I was absorbing it.”
Her work informs a lot about how the public thinks about technology. She wields unusual influence for a journalist over the industry's great leaders, using her natural talent and distaste for incompetent authority figures to undermine an industry that is boring and averse to change: journalism. She shook it in her own way.
“I don't like what you did to this place.”
The start of her career in journalism was met by editors who were predictably arrogant and seemed to have a pathological aversion to innovation, where email was convenient and publishing articles on the Internet was a worthwhile endeavor. The best, and perhaps the most prescient, was spent trying to convince people not to do anything. The technology that computer geeks would eat their lunch on. Thirty years later, email is still practical and news organizations are “still trying to figure out digital.” The parka-wearing dweebs turned out to be corporate killers, decked out in sustainably made Dutch basics. (Some people now personally own those publications).
“For far too long, there has been a vindictiveness in the media that could be replicated.” [tech] And you think it was easy, but it really isn't,” Swisher says.
From the beginning of his career, Swisher was energized by the understanding that technology only moves in one direction: forward. Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, Swisher understood that no matter how much (literally) ink-stained journalists complained, he couldn't stop all content from becoming digital. According to ing). burn the book. Instead, Swisher accepted it.
“I love technology,” Swisher says. But she is “not foolish to danger.”
In fact, her belief in the “endless possibilities” of technology led her to cover the industry as a Starbeat reporter. Then, through her own imitation of her entrepreneurial spirit, she became its spokesperson through a series of conferences, and was subsequently established as the Eminence Gris, imparting both judgment and wisdom to the masses.
“The expression I use is 'I don't like what they've done with this place,'” she says. “I have high expectations for technology.”
Perhaps it's that unabashed love for the subject matter she covers that has raised some eyebrows about her viability as a neutral arbiter of the tech industry. Swisher has developed a reputation as a consummate insider within the industry. Much of her status as an insider has come from her pursuit of excellent reporting. She reported on countless scoops during her decades-long career. A bright young Google executive named Sheryl Sandberg was to join Facebook. Disney is considering acquiring Twitter. Uber has reportedly hired Dara Khosrowshahi as its next CEO. (The last one also broke the news to Khosrowshahi himself).
Growing up with tech billionaires
throughout burn the book Here are some examples of her close personal experiences with some of the most prominent figures in the technology industry. But she makes it clear that the people she covers are not her friends.
Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page once spent the night at his girlfriend's mother's apartment in New York because the hotel elevator was out of order. (Think of Mr. Swisher's wife, then a Google employee, who had to spend the night with her boss, boss, boss, and her mother-in-law.) According to Swisher, at a party in 1999, Swisher had a conversation with an enthusiastically curious Jeff Bezos about same-sex parenthood. burn the book. The exchange was later leaked to Page Six, where it was speculated that Bezos may be the father of Swisher's child.
Swisher makes no apologies for how close he became to his interviewees, attributing it to being in the right place at the right time as his career grew parallel to theirs. I haven't done that.
“We were lucky to arrive before they became famous,” Swisher says of the tech executives he interviewed. “I was there when Google was in the garage. No one was there. wall street journal [where Swisher worked] Except for me, I was really paying attention to these people. ”
The rest depended on Chop's report. “I also spent a lot of time building relationships,” she says. “If you're Jeff Bezos' first trading partner, you have better access.”
It's also something Swisher admits may ruffle some feathers. burn the book And in many of her other media appearances, she says she likes some of the executives she interviews. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, and former AOL CEO Steve Case are just a few of the executives Swishers classifies as menche. It's taboo for journalists to say they “like” their interviewees, making Swisher's confession a small act of courage rather than a major cowardice.
Even now, as he watches founders who started out in garages hand over the reins of their companies to a new generation of leaders, Swisher believes the nature of Silicon Valley means that their positions at the top of their industries are never secure. I understand that it means something far away. In fact, she expects the emergence of her AI to create new companies and leaders.
“I wish some company we've never met would clean all our watches,” Swisher says. “That's my hope. I love to see new startups with new ideas make everyone's watches cleaner. That's my favorite part of technology.”
But if part of a journalist's job is to spend time with sources “in their natural habitat,” as she likes to say, other parts of Swisher's career mirror those of tech luminaries. However, they do not necessarily have to be journalists. Eventually, her network of sources became so extensive that tech industry moguls started calling her for advice.throughout burn the book She said she regularly provided advice to various executives. Rupert Murdoch was calling her to gather inside information about the technology companies she covered. Mr. Swisher once advised Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to end its partnership with fledgling search engine company Google.
Nevertheless, at some point Swisher began to feel that he was “too familiar” with Silicon Valley. In 2020, Swisher left camp for Washington, D.C., for a change of pace. It wasn't a bad thing that doing so made it easier to “build relationships with government officials” who decided on a flurry of new technology regulations that were gaining support among elected officials. .
There's a lot of debate about her style and level of access, but there's one thing that's beyond reproach. That's the work. Swisher's distinguished career and her monumental accomplishments justify her scrutiny rather than her upbringing. In this respect, she too is similar to technology companies and their products.
in burn the book She provides a classic explanation of why the technology industry and its powerful companies are able to have such a far-reaching impact on the daily lives of those who use their products. “Who makes the product and what properties it has have a huge impact on what happens to the product, especially if it becomes damaged,” Swisher writes.
Swisher's point is correct, but it is appropriate to apply the same considerations to her, a journalist whose reporting more than anyone else has shaped how the public views these high-tech products. Will. Work is great. But how did that happen? Have there been any unintended consequences?
There was nothing that even the most stubborn reporters couldn't understand.
