Category: tech startups

bookstech startups

Genius Makers by Cade Metz

This book is about the renaissance of artificial intelligence (via neural networks) in the early 2000s. The bones of the technology were developed at Cornell University in the 1950s but due to a combination of skepticism in the field and lack of computing power, the idea of the neural network lay mostly dormant for the next 30 years. The man at the centre of the book is British-Canadian professor Geoffrey Hinton, who has spent most of his academic career at the University of Toronto and had conceded that he enjoys the epithet “The Godfather of AI”. The book opens with…

bookstech startups

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell

Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 10 years in jail; Adam Neumann got a billion-dollar payday and has returned from the ashes to found a cryptocurrency startup. Both founders are liars; Holmes’ lies were dangerous, but of the two founders Neumann may have been more brazen. Theranos was a sham, but Bad Blood by Carreyrou describes it as a busy place where top-class scientists signed ironclad NDAs and strove to make Holmes’ lies come true in a toxic and stressful work environment. Neumann is 2000’s “hustle culture” personified: he is a hustler incarnate. The incredible thing about WeWork is that Neumann…

tech startups

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

What annoyed me is that Theranos has been singled out as a bad apple, an exceptional case. It is not. The “fake it ’til you make it” ethos is a poisonous Silicon Valley mantra, and I’ve heard repeated with glee all over Southern Ontario. Tech founders boast of their guts and guile at faking demos to scam investors (quietly developing a functional product only when the money is safely in the bank). Elizabeth Holmes has been pilloried – rightly – but the notion that Theranos was exceptionally brash or dishonest is probably untrue. Also: Theranos investors were credulous fools. Unlike…

bookstech startups

Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore by Arnold Thackray

Moore is famous for the law that bears his name: namely, that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a microchip doubles every 2 years. The “law” originated from Moore’s insatiable love of data, his tendency to take copious notes, his reflective, analytical thinking and his affinity for graphs. Moore made this prediction in 1975 and although it is now generally held to have expired, it held true for 30 years, a testament to Moore’s vision for the field. He predicted “portable communications devices” – phones and so forth. Moore himself seems to have been a staid bit…