This Post Has 11 Comments

1. Wise, funny, and insightful
   I came across Kara Swisher exactly one week ago on an Adam Grant podcast. I was immediately struck by how gutsy, honest and deeply moral this lady is. This is someone who takes no prisoners and marches firmly to the beat of their own drum.This book is no exception and exposes much of the deep truths of the tech industry we’ve probably been vaguely aware of, but lacked specific insight into. ‘Why isn’t the tech industry regulated?’ and ‘How did it get to this?’ are questions that occur after reading. There’s deep insights into the forces and personalities that made Silicon Valley and a humanity in the telling that never loses sight of the moral imperative. The excerpts about Steve Jobs possibly made me like him a little more (favourite, cliched trope of iconoclasm though he is).I really enjoyed this book and look forward to devouring anything more by this lady, including her excellent podcasts ‘Pivot’ and ‘On’.

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2. Nostalgic romp through the dot.com era
   I didn’t know anything about Kara Swisher before reading this book but I thoroughly enjoyed it as a nostalgic romp through the rise of the dot.coms and the outsized personalities behind them. I really didn’t learn much new, aside from Swisher’s witty and entertaining takes on the people, the parties, the interviews, conversations, and all the e-mails. She is talented and intelligent and quickly established herself as a leader in the male-dominated world of tech journalism. She holds back no punches when it comes to some of the tech and news titans of the day. She takes an introspective look at her own career path relative to what went on during the dot.com boom. Despite her decision to stick to ethical principles, I have to wonder if she misses the excitement of the day and regrets passing on any of those job offers she mentioned having received.

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3. Very smart and no nonsense writing.
   I bought this book for my husband and he totally enjoyed it. The author is straight forward and tells it like it is. We would recommend this book.

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4. Technology is here to stay, best we know everything about it
   I had never heard of Kara Swisher before I read this book, but from the bottom of my heart I tell her, thank you. I am 85 years old, and I have been a fan of technology since before it was called that. The year that The World Wide Web, was conceived, 1962, I was in the jungles of Viet Nam, far away from technology living with an indigenous people. In 1995 my wife and I bought our first computer. We do art and craft shows and design our own marketing and POP materials. That winter just before Christmas, we were doing a Christmas show in a mall in San Antonio, TX. An older gentleman approached me and called me aside and said Sir, there is something happening that is the new face of business, it is called the World Wide Web, and I think your business would work really well on it. Go find out about it. So we did, and my wife went and took a crash course in HTML and in April of 1996 our website went live along with the less than a million live at the time, probably less than a quarter of a million actually. Orders started pouring in, and they still are 28 years later. I didn’t know who all these people were that were responsible for all this magic, but it didn’t matter, it worked, and it changed my life and my wife’s life, and started us on a path we could not have previously imagined. Listening to Kara tell her story about her journey and about all those men boys that shaped the digital age, was very stimulating and interesting, I loved it and the way it was presented. So read her book, it is a treasure, and I thank you Kara Swisher, great job.

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5. Lost Steam Three Quarters Through
   I have admired the author’s writing throughout the past 25 years and thought this book was great until three quarters of the way through it. In the beginning and majority of the book Swisher dishes the dirt on technology billionaires with a great writing style. After awhile it gets bogged down with too much negativity on Silicon Valley’s leadership. Plus, and I know that the book is part autobiographical, she spends too much time on her personal life. I would have liked her to elaborate more on the “good guys “ in tech such as Mark Cuban to name one. The other thing that left me flat was not going out on a limb enough on where the industry is going. I was disappointed at the end of it.

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6. Honest and refreshing
   Saw Kara at a recent security software event. She was the closing keynote speaker and we needed the break after a couple days of corporate and technical superlatives. Book is great and I haven’t been so challenged from a vocabulary standpoint in a long while. We’re about the same age and I’ve met a lot a tech people too serving as an industry analyst.

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7. Mordaz, cáustico, muy ameno, me ha gustado

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8. I’m only into the second chapter so far, but yeah, it’s great. Witty, intelligent, searing, etc, etc. The bit about John McLaughlin and the toast buttering in Chapter Two is worth the price of admission all by itself.Later note: It really needs a glossary. I’m half way through the book, and I finally figured out that VC stands for venture capital and not Viet Cong. (well, I knew it wasn’t the latter, but that was all that came into my head).And another later note: On p.219, the year 2021 is given instead of 2019. Given that this section is all about the Jan 6th insurrection, it’s weird that an editor wouldn’t have caught this prior to publication.And yet another later note: The book REALLY needs an index. A couple of times just in the last few weeks I ran across names (Marc Andreesen and Nicole Shanahan) in either other publications or the news, and thought it would be nice to cross-reference Swisher’s thoughts with others.

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9. “Burn Book” by Kara Swisher is energetic, opinionated, and places people and some big personalities at the heart of the tech story. But by the time I finished the book, what I really felt it to be was a critical but loving eulogy for the pre-AI internet era. New opportunities and dangers await.

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10. Kara’s reflections on a life in tech is truly astonishing. Her Burn Book is such an eloquent read fuelling so much nostalgia that I found it difficult to put down- even waking at 3AM to read the next chapter! (How I miss Steve’s rants and insights)For those of us in tech, some of us a front row seat, and even those of us not, Burn Book provides such a wonderfully detailed trip down memory lane, telling the stories often left untold. What this book does is remind us all that despite fame, fortune, brains and bruised egos, we are all fallible, we all have struggles, and yet we can all change the world in our own unique way.Thank you Kara, for changing it in yours.

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11. A great chronicle of recent history mixed with a loving affection for the mixed up geniuses who created our modern world.The flaws , greed and successes are described in a personal love letter to all things techie.

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