Susan Wojcicki

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Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Wired wrote: Megan Molteni and Adam Rogers, “The Actual Science of James Damore’s Google Memo,” Wired, August 15, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-damores-google-memo/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the company shared publicly: Susan Wojcicki, “Read YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s Response to the Controversial Google Anti-Diversity Memo,” Fortune, August 9, 2017, https://fortune.com/2017/08/09/google-diversity-memo-wojcicki/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In a subsequent interview: Eric Johnson, “YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki Explains Why the ‘Google Memo’ Author Had to Be Fired,” Recode, October 16, 2017, https://www.vox.com/2017/10/16/16479486/youtube-susan-wojcicki-james-damore-google-memo-diversity-gender-kara-swisher-podcast. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 27: Elsagate told a fellow YouTuber: Stanley “Dirt Monkey” Genadek, “Interview with Geek to Freak Greg Chism,” YouTube video, May 23, 2015, 37:06, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT another magazine named her: Elizabeth Murphy, “Inside 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki’s $99 DNA Revolution,” Fast Company, October 14, 2013, https://www.fastcompany.com/3018598/for-99-this-ceo-can-tell-you-what-might-kill-you-inside-23andme-founder-anne-wojcickis-dna-r. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a San Jose newspaper: Mike Swift, “Susan Wojcicki: The Most Important Googler You’ve Never Heard Of,” The Mercury News, February 3, 2011, https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/02/03/susan-wojcicki-the-most-important-googler-youve-never-heard-of/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT dubbed her: Patricia Sellers, “The New Valley Girls,” Fortune, October 13, 2008, https://fortune.com/2008/10/13/the-new-valley-girls-2/.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT conference speaker recounted: Alan Burdick, “Looking for Life on a Flat Earth,” The New Yorker, May 30, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/looking-for-life-on-a-flat-earth. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT described the scene thusly: Harry McCracken, “Susan Wojcicki Has Transformed YouTube—But She Isn’t Done Yet,” Fast Company, June 18, 2017, https://www.fastcompany.com/40427026/susan-wojcickis-youtube-isnt-tv-but-its-tvs-biggest-rival. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT her service’s blemishes: Although Wojcicki told the magazine she had no plans to change the ad commission terms with creators. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT ten-page memorandum: Kate Conger, “Exclusive: Here’s the Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google,” Gizmodo, August 5, 2017, https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

“whole, you know, age of computer”: Jeremy Diamond, “Trump, the Computer and Email Skeptic-in-Chief,” CNN, Dec. 30, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/29/politics/donald-trump-computers-internet-email/index.html. CHAPTER 3: GOOGLE: WHEN GOOD INTENTIONS AREN’T ENOUGH “I wish I could say”: Susan Wojcicki, “Studio 1.0: Susan Wojcicki Opens Up About Being a Working Mother in the Tech Industry,” interview by author, Bloomberg, Nov. 14, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-14/studio-1-0-susan-wojcicki-opens-up-about-being-a-working-mother-in-the-tech-industry. And it’s worth examining: Erik Larson, “Google Sued for Allegedly Paying Women Less Than Male Peers,” Bloomberg, Sept. 14, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-14/google-sued-by-women-workers-claiming-gender-discrimination.

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“We know when we work with dudes”: Cate Huston, “We Know Who He Is,” Medium, Aug. 6, 2017, https://medium.com/@catehstn/we-know-who-he-is-596fdd93d7c2. “I’ve had my abilities”: Susan Wojcicki, “Read YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s Response to the Controversial Google Anti-diversity Memo,” Fortune, Aug. 9, 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/08/09/google-diversity-memo-wojcicki. Forbes recently ranked her: “The World’s Most Powerful Women In 2016,” Forbes, Jun. 6, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alixmcnamara/2016/06/06/the-worlds-most-powerful-women-in-2016/#54f8fb971c83. “the cold weather”: Susan Wojcicki (@SusanWojcicki), “Super cold weather @Davos2016 is it’s easy to store breast milk.

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And it’s worth examining: Erik Larson, “Google Sued for Allegedly Paying Women Less Than Male Peers,” Bloomberg, Sept. 14, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-14/google-sued-by-women-workers-claiming-gender-discrimination. Google had no marketing budget: Adam Levy, “Susan Wojcicki: From Google Doodles to YouTube CEO,” Motley Fool, July 5, 2015, https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/07/05/susan-wojcicki-from-google-doodles-to-youtube-ceo.aspx. “You do the content”: Steven Levy, In the Plex (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 84. In this particular column: Rachel Hutton, “Meeting Our Campus Celebrities,” Stanford Daily, Nov. 9, 1998, https://stanforddailyarchive.com/cgi-bin/stanford?

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

Schachter, February 15, 2008. 88 the effort at Sandberg was now working on: author interview with Sheryl Sandberg, October 11, 2007. 88 What Google was quietly exploring ... monitorthe results online: author interviews with Salar Kamangar, March 27, 2008; Marissa Mayer, March 25, 2008; Susan Wojcicki, April 16, 2008; Hal Varian, March 27, 2008; and Sheryl Sandberg, September 18, 2008. 90 Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi : author interview with Sergey Brin, September 18, 2008; Brin interview, Haaretz.com, June 2, 2008. 90 “AdWords is brilliant”: author interview with Nathan Myhrvold, March 28, 2008. 91 The effort was led and architected by Susan Wojcicki: author interview with Susan Wojcicki, April 16, 2008. 91 “basically turned the Web into a giant Google billboard”: Danny Sullivan, quoted by Jefferson Graham, “The House That Helped Build Google,” USA Today, July 5, 2007. 9I “He and an engineer” ...

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Schachter, February 15, 2008. 88 the effort at Sandberg was now working on: author interview with Sheryl Sandberg, October 11, 2007. 88 What Google was quietly exploring ... monitorthe results online: author interviews with Salar Kamangar, March 27, 2008; Marissa Mayer, March 25, 2008; Susan Wojcicki, April 16, 2008; Hal Varian, March 27, 2008; and Sheryl Sandberg, September 18, 2008. 90 Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi : author interview with Sergey Brin, September 18, 2008; Brin interview, Haaretz.com, June 2, 2008. 90 “AdWords is brilliant”: author interview with Nathan Myhrvold, March 28, 2008. 91 The effort was led and architected by Susan Wojcicki: author interview with Susan Wojcicki, April 16, 2008. 91 “basically turned the Web into a giant Google billboard”: Danny Sullivan, quoted by Jefferson Graham, “The House That Helped Build Google,” USA Today, July 5, 2007. 9I “He and an engineer” ... “You see why I work with these people”: author interview with Eric Schmidt, September 12, 2007. 91 a marketing budget of two hundred thousand dollars: author interview with Susan Wojcicki, April 16, 2008. 92 “probably was an accident”: Larry Page lecture at Stanford University May 1, 2002. 92 “It changed the way content providers think”: author interview with Susan Wojcicki, April 16, 2008. 92 $7 million: Google’s Form S-1 filed with the SEC, August 18, 2004. 92 “Now we could fund”: author interview with Urs Hölzle, September 10, 2007. CHAPTER 5 Innocence or Arrogance?

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In September, Shriram was asked to join Page and Brin as one of three Google directors, a seat he continues to hold on a board that now consists of ten members. For $1,700 a month, the just-formed company sublet new office space: the two-car Menlo Park garage and two downstairs spare rooms of an 1,800-square-foot house in Menlo Park. The owners were friends: Susan Wojcicki, an engineer at Intel, and her husband Dennis Troper, a product manager at a tech company. The newly constituted Google had found its way to them because Sergey had dated Susan’s roommate at Stanford Business School. The house was not located in the upscale sections of Menlo Park, near the Sand Hill Road offices made famous by the venture capitalists whose offices are there, or in nearby Atherton, where many of these venture capitalists live and in 2008 an acre of land could sell for $3 million.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

After the Bechtolsheim meeting, Shriram invited them to his house to meet his boss Jeff Bezos, who was enthralled with their passion and “healthy stubbornness,” as they explained why they would never put display ads on their home page. Bezos joined Bechtolsheim, Cheriton, and Shriram as investors, making for a total of a million dollars of angel money. On September 4, 1998, Page and Brin filed for incorporation and finally moved off campus. Sergey’s girlfriend at the time was friendly with a manager at Intel named Susan Wojcicki, who had just purchased a house on Santa Margarita Street in Menlo Park with her husband for $615,000. To help meet the mortgage, the couple charged Google $1,700 a month to rent the garage and several rooms in the house. At that point they’d taken on their first employee, fellow Stanford student Craig Silverstein.

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On the first day of the deal, early arrivals at headquarters discovered that there weren’t enough servers to run searches on both Google and the Netscape home page. So Google turned off its own home page—stranding its loyal home page users—until it could get more servers. “It showed we were a real business, doing the right thing and following through on our commitments,” says one early Google employee, Susan Wojcicki. (After sharing her home with Google, she had joined the company.) Google’s first stab at selling advertising began in July 1999. When Jeff Dean arrived from DEC—a couple of months before he toiled in the war room to fix the indexing problem—Brin and Page told him that they needed an ad system.

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“It didn’t make much money,” admits Dean. Google was not yet drawing enough traffic to amass significant numbers of buyers, and Amazon’s affiliate fees—5 percent of the sale—weren’t all that high to begin with. “I think we made enough to buy the beer for TGIF [Google’s Friday-afternoon employee meeting] for a couple of weeks.” Susan Wojcicki later admitted the real problem: “No one clicked on the ads.” But she felt that the experiment was a great success. “It was incredible that we were going to build an ad system at all. What, we didn’t have enough to do with search? Now we’re asking our engineers, ‘Can you develop subsecond delivery times in every language in the world for every specific keyword?’

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, intentional community, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, web application, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

And what if we could invent a laptop around that operating system—a Chromebook—to tap directly into all of those applications living in the cloud? But those would be stretch goals for another day. 14 Stretch: The YouTube Story Susan Wojcicki CEO Cristos Goodrow Vice President of Engineering Google is so teeming with stretch goals that it would feel incomplete to chronicle only one of them. And so here is a second, the story of YouTube and how it grew—exponentially—with the “stretch” OKR superpower. Susan Wojcicki, according to Time magazine, is “ the most powerful woman on the internet.” She’s played a central role at Google from the start, even before becoming employee No. 16 and the company’s first marketing manager.

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Version_2 For Ann, Mary, and Esther and the wonder of their unconditional love CONTENTS PRAISE FOR MEASURE WHAT MATTERS TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT DEDICATION FOREWORD Larry Page, Alphabet CEO and Google Cofounder PART ONE: OKRs in Action 1 Google, Meet OKRs How OKRs came to Google, and the superpowers they convey. 2 The Father of OKRs Andy Grove creates and inculcates a new way of structured goal setting. 3 Operation Crush: An Intel Story How OKRs won the microprocessor wars. 4 Superpower #1: Focus and Commit to Priorities OKRs help us choose what matters most. 5 Focus: The Remind Story Brett Kopf used OKRs to overcome attention deficit disorder. 6 Commit: The Nuna Story Jini Kim’s personal commitment to transform health care. 7 Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork Public, transparent OKRs spark and strengthen collaboration. 8 Align: The MyFitnessPal Story Alignment via OKRs is more challenging—and rewarding—than Mike Lee anticipated. 9 Connect: The Intuit Story Atticus Tysen uses OKR transparency to fortify a software pioneer’s open culture. 10 Superpower #3: Track for Accountability OKRs help us monitor progress and course-correct. 11 Track: The Gates Foundation Story A $20 billion start-up wields OKRs to fight devastating diseases. 12 Superpower #4: Stretch for Amazing OKRs empower us to achieve the seemingly impossible. 13 Stretch: The Google Chrome Story CEO Sundar Pichai uses OKRs to build the world’s leading web browser. 14 Stretch: The YouTube Story CEO Susan Wojcicki and an audacious billion-hour goal. PART TWO: The New World of Work 15 Continuous Performance Management: OKRs and CFRs How conversations, feedback, and recognition help to achieve excellence. 16 Ditching Annual Performance Reviews: The Adobe Story Adobe affirms core values with conversations and feedback. 17 Baking Better Every Day: The Zume Pizza Story A robotics pioneer leverages OKRs for teamwork and leadership—and to create the perfect pizza. 18 Culture OKRs catalyze culture; CFRs nourish it. 19 Culture Change: The Lumeris Story Overcoming OKR resistance with a culture makeover. 20 Culture Change: Bono’s ONE Campaign Story The world’s greatest rock star deploys OKRs to save lives in Africa. 21 The Goals to Come DEDICATION RESOURCE 1: Google’s OKR Playbook RESOURCE 2: A Typical OKR Cycle RESOURCE 3: All Talk: Performance Conversations RESOURCE 4: In Sum RESOURCE 5: For Further Reading ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES INDEX FOREWORD Larry Page Alphabet CEO and Google Cofounder I wish I had had this book nineteen years ago, when we founded Google.

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It is a collaborative goal-setting protocol for companies, teams, and individuals. Now, OKRs are not a silver bullet. They cannot substitute for sound judgment, strong leadership, or a creative workplace culture. But if those fundamentals are in place, OKRs can guide you to the mountaintop. Larry and Sergey—with Marissa Mayer, Susan Wojcicki, Salar Kamangar, and thirty or so others, pretty much the whole company at the time—gathered to hear me out. They stood around the ping-pong table (which doubled as their boardroom table), or sprawled in beanbag chairs, dormitory style. My first PowerPoint slide defined OKRs: “A management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization.”

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

And let’s not get into his complicated romantic life, the servicing of which required a fuckpad on Manhattan island. Susan Wojcicki was the sister of Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Sergey Brin, and she was the Senior Vice President of Advertising. She was like Demeter, the goddess of the harvest and the growing earth. It was Susan Wojcicki who let Sergey Brin and Larry Page start Google in her garage, and it was Susan Wojcicki who really ran the show, overseeing the advertising which was the source of all the money. Susan Wojcicki had wanted to be an artist and Susan Wojcicki was even more mysterious than Eric Schmidt. No one knew much about her, which reminded Christine of the Eleusinian Mysteries, shrouded in darkness.

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

They chose the variant spelling for two reasons: the googol.com web domain was taken, and Larry thought they wouldn't be able to trademark a number. Larry was a very shrewd businessman—but we'll get to that. Within a year, Larry and Sergey had taken leave from Stanford and set up in the Menlo Park garage of Susan Wojcicki, the college roommate of Sergey's girlfriend. Google's traffic began climbing and the company began hiring. They incorporated in September 1998, and when they outgrew Susan's garage in early 1999, they moved to an office at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto. Six months later, having talked two venture capital firms out of $25 million, they moved into an industrial park at 2400 Bayshore Parkway in Mountain View.

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Nothing here suggested rivers of currency dammed and waiting to burst forth in a torrential IPO. It was just a conference room in a generic office building on a lazy late-autumn afternoon. As I sat idly patting a three-foot ball, a number of folks on the business side of the company straggled in and introduced themselves. Susan Wojcicki, who owned the garage that had been Google's first headquarters, had left Intel to join her tenants' company as a marketing manager. Cindy McCaffrey had come over from Apple to be director of public relations. Together they walked me through a general introduction to Google with the sort of positive energy that bubbled over everywhere in those days.

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Industrious, objective, unflappable, and willing to stretch her day across multiple time zones, Karen took all the words I threw together and arranged them in pretty columns on our website. She had more influence on the overall look of Google than anyone who worked on it after Larry and Sergey's original "non-design" design. Other than Susan Wojcicki, who had put her MBA to work at Intel, our group was new to marketing. Google hired Stanford grads in bulk and set them loose in the halls. If they didn't secure a role elsewhere, they rolled downhill to our department, where the assumption seemed to be that no special skills were required. "The founders were okay with a loose shag bag of marketing folks who were at the ready to execute on their whims," Cindy told me, "but a real marketing department with a VP, proper organization, funding, and a strategy was not a priority."

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book scanning, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive load, company town, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, helicopter parent, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Kevin Roose, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, nudge unit, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, random walk, Richard Thaler, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Turing machine, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

It wasn’t his job to care about building design and foot traffic patterns, but in doing so he became the spiritual founder of one of the most innovative organizations in history.iv Turning back to Google, Larry and Sergey deliberately left space for others to act as founders. People with vision were given the opportunity to create their own Google. For years, the troika of Susan Wojcicki, Salar Kamangar, and Marissa Mayer were referred to as the “mini-founders,” critical early Googlers who would go on to build and lead our advertising, YouTube, and search efforts, in partnership with brilliant computer scientists such as Sridhar Ramaswamy, Eric Veach, Amit Singhal, and Udi Manber.

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The founders realized it was important to hire by committee, often interviewing candidates together while sitting around the ping-pong table, which doubled as our only conference table. They intuited that no individual interviewer will get it right every time, an instinct that would later be formalized in our “wisdom of the crowds” study in 2007, which we’ll discuss shortly. Even Susan Wojcicki, who knew Larry and Sergey well and owned the garage they were renting as Google’s first office, had to interview for her original job as our first marketing leader. Importantly, they also had the instinct to hew to an objective standard, ideally enforced by having a single, final, central reviewer who is charged with upholding that standard.

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And as we’d hoped, the combination of our stringent hiring bar and exhaustive focus on recruiting meant we were successfully hiring remarkable people. Among the first hundred hires were people who would go on to be CEOs (of Yahoo and AOL), venture capitalists, philanthropists, and, of course, continue on as Googlers and lead some of Google’s most important initiatives. Susan Wojcicki, for example, led our advertising product efforts before moving over to lead YouTube. In fact, sixteen years later, about one-third of the original hundred hires are still at Google.xix It’s rare among start-ups for early hires to persist this long, and even rarer for them to be able to continue growing personally and professionally as the company scales from tens of people to tens of thousands.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

“I didn’t know what I would be working on, because they just hire people, and then they put them on a project,” said Chaslot, who speaks in a breathy, energetic mumble. He would be working, he found out, on a video platform that Google had acquired at the urging of an advertising executive named Susan Wojcicki. In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the creators and co-founders of Google, had set up the company’s first servers in her garage. When their search engine caught on, Wojcicki (pronounced woe-jiski) left her job at Intel to work for them. She oversaw advertising products and a streaming service, Google Videos, which was getting outperformed three to one by a bare-bones startup called YouTube.

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In the coming months, digital watchdogs, journalists, congressional committees, and the outgoing president would all accuse social media platforms of accelerating misinformation and partisan rage that paved the way for Trump’s victory. The companies, after a period of contrition for narrower sins like hosting Russian propagandists and fake news, largely deflected. But in the hours after the election, the first to suspect Silicon Valley’s culpability were many of its own rank and file. At YouTube, when CEO Susan Wojcicki convened her shell-shocked staff, much of their discussion centered on concerns that YouTube’s most-watched election-related videos were from far-right misinformation shops like Breitbart and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Similar misgivings were expressed by Facebook employees. “The results of the 2016 Election show that Facebook has failed in its mission,” one Facebooker posted on the company’s internal message board.

…

It was implicit admission of exactly the sort that the companies had avoided for so long: that their products could be dangerous, that societies would be safer with aspects of those products switched off, and that it was easily within their power to do so. Then came the QAnon crackdowns. Partial bans earlier in the year, removing select accounts or groups, had proven ineffective. Finally, Facebook and Instagram imposed total bans on the movement in October, with Twitter gradually culling Q-linked accounts. YouTube’s CEO, Susan Wojcicki, said only that YouTube would remove videos that accused people of involvement in Q-related conspiracies in order to harass or threaten them. The narrow rule tweak was YouTube’s only significant policy change leading up to the election. But as with Boogaloo and so many other dark currents, it was too late.

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

It’s not known how much they spent on the suit, but Google reported spending $100 million in just the first three years.17 While all this was going on, YouTube had continued to grow rapidly, with Google’s deep pockets saving it from having to worry too much about the sustainability of its business model. As cofounder Chad Hurley explains, this helped its meteoric rise: “We could have spent more time on how we’re going to monetize the system, but we continued to focus on more growth, more users, better experience.”18 As recently as 2016 the company was still running at a deficit, with CEO Susan Wojcicki saying it was “still in investment mode” and had “no timetable” for becoming profitable.19 Google’s ownership helped YouTube in other ways too. By 2009 some estimates suggested YouTube was spending $350 million a year serving videos to users. But Levy reports Google “privately tell[ing] journalists that those guesses were based on what others had to pay to move such massive numbers of bits.

…

That will force smaller players from the market and block new ones from entering, leaving creators with even fewer, even more powerful, buyers for their work. Rather than braking YouTube’s anticompetitive flywheel, this intervention promises to speed it up. Google knows this, which is why it backflipped from its original opposition to the EU proposal. In an opinion published in the Financial Times, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki sang the praises of Content ID as “the best solution” for managing global rights and called for the EU to develop similar technology-based solutions.49 The cultural industries should have figured out by now that, if it’s good for Google, it’s probably not good for them. Google’s play is obvious: to be the only one that can afford to participate in the market for user-uploaded video content.

…

Erick Schonfeld, “Google Spent $100 Million Defending Against Viacom’s $1 Billion Lawsuit,” TechCrunch, July 16, 2020, https://techcrunch.com/2010/07/15/google-viacom-100-million-lawsuit. 18. Levy, In the Plex, 255. 19. Leena Rao, “YouTube CEO Says There’s ‘No Timetable’ For Profitability,” Fortune, Oct. 19, 2016, https://fortune.com/2016/10/18/youtube-profits-ceo-susan-wojcicki. 20. Levy, In the Plex, 265. 21. Victoriano Darias, “Content ID as a Solution to Address the Value Gap,” Journal of the Music and Entertainment Industry Educators Association 18, no. 1 (2018): 105, 128. 22. Christophe Muller, “YouTube: ‘No Other Platform Gives as Much Money Back to Creators,’” Guardian, Apr. 28, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/apr/28/youtube-no-other-platform-gives-as-much-money-back-to-creators;Paul Resnikoff, “YouTube: 99.5% of All Infringing Music Videos Resolved by Content ID,” Digital Music News, Aug. 9, 2016, https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/08/08/copyright-problems-resolved-content-id. 23.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

Elizabeth Dwoskin, Nitasha Tiku, and Heather Kelly, “Facebook to start policing anti-Black hate speech more aggressively than anti-White comments, documents show,” WashingtonPost.com, December 3, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/03/facebook-hate-speech/. 45. Emine Saner, “YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki: ‘Where’s the line of free speech—are you removing voices that should be heard?,’” TheGuardian.com, August 10, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/10/youtube-susan-wojcicki-ceo-where-line-removing-voices-heard. 46. https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/hate_speech/. 47. Tony Romm and Elizabeth Dwoskin, “Trump banned from Facebook indefinitely, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says,” WashingtonPost.com, January 7, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/07/trump-twitter-ban/. 48.

…

“We know that hate speech targeted toward underrepresented groups can be the most harmful,” explained Facebook spokeswoman Sally Aldous, “which is why we have focused our technology on finding the hate speech that users and experts tell us is the most serious.”44 All hate speech is bad, except for the hate speech the experts say is nondamaging. The so-called community standards put forward by the tech companies follow the same pattern: originally designed to protect more speech, they have been gradually ratcheted tighter and tighter in order to allow broader discretion to companies to ban dissenting material. As Susan Wojcicki, the head of YouTube, explained in June 2019, “We keep tightening and tightening the policies.”45 The ratchet only works one way. These policies are often vague and contradictory. Facebook’s “hate speech” policy, for example, bans any “direct attack” against people on the “basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease.”

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

But what had caught the attention of Accel partners Mitch Kapor and Jim Breyer were the well-placed endorsements of Google search by its early adopters, the engineers and software developers. “This thing Google is better than anything else,” Kapor and Breyer were told. “This is all we’re using.” Google was growing fast—getting more than ten thousand searches a day. Brin and Page had moved the start-up from their Stanford dorm room to a garage rented to them by Susan Wojcicki, then to a small office above a bike shop here on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Theresia kept an eye on the time, aware that partners’ meetings often went late. Accel occupied floors two through four of the building at 428 University Avenue, about three miles from the VCs of Sand Hill Road.

…

She was a mother and she had breast cancer. THERESIA After appearing on the cover of Fortune, Theresia became a fixture in top-ten-women-in-tech lists of the most powerful women, the most influential women, the most successful women, the women to watch. She was featured in Time alongside Susan Wojcicki at Google, Meg Whitman at Hewlett-Packard, Virginia Rometty of IBM, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo!, Safra Catz at Oracle, and Sheryl Sandberg. Theresia was one of only two women on the Forbes Midas list of top one hundred venture capitalists, where she was lauded for “bringing in more than a billion dollars in capital gains through her savvy investments.”

…

That night, as music played and drinks flowed, the women took turns posing in the photo booth, donning costumes and holding signs like I LIKE BIG BUCKS, I’M WITH HER, and NAUGHTY OR NICE. Theresia’s daughter, Sarah, a freshman in high school, had expressed interest in attending the party. Theresia was half convinced that the draw for Sarah was not her mom but her mom’s friends, such as Emily White, the COO of Snapchat, and Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube. But Theresia noted a deeper change in her daughter. When Sarah was in elementary school, she had asked her mom why she wasn’t a room parent or a field trip chaperone. Theresia was the mother who would buy baked goods and put them in a homemade container to pass them off as her own.

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, cloud computing, El Camino Real, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PalmPilot, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple

But we learned by observing his community activities. Invest in creating real, emotional bonds between people. Those are what endure and what make teams truly strong. * * * ALWAYS BUILD COMMUNITIES BUILD COMMUNITIES INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF WORK. A PLACE IS MUCH STRONGER WHEN PEOPLE ARE CONNECTED. * * * HELP PEOPLE Susan Wojcicki was an early employee at Google and spoke with Bill frequently over the years. A few years back, Susan, who was by then the head of YouTube, wanted to attend an important tech and media conference. Despite YouTube’s status as one of the biggest video destinations for consumers around the world and an important player in the media and entertainment world, Susan could not secure an invitation.

…

Bollinger Todd Bradley Sergey Brin Shona Brown Eve Burton Al Butts Derek Butts Bruce Chizen Jared Cohen Scott Cook Dick Costolo Eddy Cue John Doerr John Donahoe Mickey Drexler David Drummond Donna Dubinsky Joe Ducar Brad Ehikian Alan Eustace Bruno Fortozo Pat Gallagher Dean Gilbert Alan Gleicher Al Gore Diane Greene Bill Gurley John Hennessy Ben Horowitz Bradley Horowitz Mark Human Chad Hurley Jim Husson Bob Iger Eric Johnson Andrea Jung Salar Kamangar Vinod Khosla Dave Kinser Omid Kordestani Scotty Kramer Adam Lashinsky Ronnie Lott Marissa Mayer Marc Mazur Mike McCue Mary Meeker Shishir Mehrotra Emil Michael Michael Moe Larry Page Sundar Pichai Patrick Pichette Peter Pilling Ruth Porat Jeff Reynolds Jesse Rogers Dan Rosensweig Wayne Rosing Jim Rudgers Sheryl Sandberg Philip Schiller Philipp Schindler Chadé Severin Danny Shader Ram Shriram Brad Smith Esta Stecher Dr. Ron Sugar Stacy Sullivan Nirav Tolia Rachel Whetstone Susan Wojcicki Like any important project, this was a team effort, and ours has been fantastic. Lauren LeBeouf kept us organized and managed all of those interviews, but more important, proved to be an astute and sensitive editor. She made this book much better. Marina Krakovsky helped us connect Bill’s principles with academic research, showing that he was truly ahead of his time in the business management world.

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

According to the February 2021 report: Ibid. “because bullying and harassment”: “Facebook’s Response to Australian Government Consultation on a New Online Safety Act,” Facebook Newsroom, February 19, 2020, https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Facebook-response-to-consultation-new-Online-Safety-Act.pdf. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki: Susan Wojcicki, “Expanding Our Work Against Abuse of Our Platform,” YouTube Official Blog, December 5, 2017, https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/expanding-our-work-against-abuse-of-our/. “the team responsible”: Zuckerberg, “A Blueprint for Content Governance and Enforcement.” “distressing videos and photographs”: Sandra E.

…

This is a point that Facebook readily concedes, stating “because bullying and harassment are highly personal by nature, in many instances, we need a person to report this behavior to us before we can identify or remove it.” Though AI will continue to improve in the future, it’s really only the first line of defense. The number of human content moderators needed to tackle the volume of information on these platforms is enormous. In 2017, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that the company would hire 10,000 content moderators in the coming year. The following year, Mark Zuckerberg wrote that “the team responsible for enforcing these [community standards] policies is made up of around 30,000 people. . . . they review more than two million pieces of content every day.”

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

So from the very beginning the mission for Google was not to use AI to make their search better, but to use search to make an AI. Heather Cairns: To rule the Earth!? Here we are. There are seven people inside of someone’s house, working out of bedrooms, and that’s what they were saying then. Ray Sidney: The first Google digs was half of Susan Wojcicki’s house, including a garage. Heather Cairns: We were allowed to use Susan’s washer and dryer that was in the garage. But we were working out of bedrooms; we weren’t in the garage. That’s the folklore, because every start-up is supposed to be in a garage. David Cheriton: I’m tempted to say it was like a frat house, although I’m not sure I’ve ever been to a frat house.

…

It was an idea that we had talked about for a long time, but there was this belief that somehow it wouldn’t work. But it seemed like an interesting problem, so one evening I implemented this content-targeting system, just as sort of a side project, not because I was supposed to. And it turned out to work. Susan Wojcicki: It was a really novel idea at the time to serve ads that were targeted dynamically. People were saying, “This is a sports site, so we’ll serve a sports ad.” And we were saying, “No. We can actually look at the page in real time and figure out what this page is about.” Paul Buchheit: What I wrote was just a throwaway prototype, but it got people thinking because it proved that it was possible, and that it wasn’t too hard because I was able to do it in less than a day.

…

When the boom turned to bust, Williams stayed and eventually started a series of companies, the most notable being Twitter. Terry Winograd is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. He was the thesis advisor to Larry Page, and he guided the very earliest incarnation of what we now know as Google. Susan Wojcicki rented out a few spare bedrooms in her Menlo Park home to Google when they were just starting, and she quickly got sucked into the company. She is now the CEO of the company’s YouTube subsidiary—the second most popular site in the world, after Google. Gary Wolf was one of the first—and best—writers for Wired magazine and soon was tapped to clean up the mess that was HotWired, the print magazine’s online spin-off.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg

affirmative action, business process, Cass Sunstein, constrained optimization, experimental economics, fear of failure, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, old-boy network, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social graph, Susan Wojcicki, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

Google was hard charging and hypercompetitive, but it also supported combining work and parenthood—an attitude that clearly started at the top. Larry and Sergey came to my baby shower and each gave me a certificate that entitled me to one hour of babysitting. (I never used the certificates, and if I could find them, I bet I could auction them off for charity, like lunch with Warren Buffett.) Susan Wojcicki, who blazed a trail by having four children while being one of Google’s earliest and most valuable employees, brought her children to the office when her babysitter was sick. Both my boss, Omid, and David Fischer, the most senior leader on my team, were steadfast supporters and did not allow others to take over parts of my job.

…

I watched as the promise my generation had for female leadership dwindled. By the time I had been at Google for a few years, I realized that the problem wasn’t going away. So even though the thought still scared me, I decided it was time to stop putting my head down and to start speaking out. Fortunately, I had company. In 2005, my colleagues Susan Wojcicki and Marissa Mayer and I all noticed that the speakers who visited the Google campus were fascinating, notable, and almost always male. In response, we founded Women@Google and kicked off the new series with luminaries Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, who were launching the Women’s Media Center.

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin

4chan, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, end-to-end encryption, epigenetics, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, information security, Kevin Roose, lockdown, mass immigration, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Overton Window, phenotype, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The author, Joseph Bernstein, also focused on Soph’s extraordinary propensity to respond to any limitations on her content with threats of violence. In response to concerns over pedophilic commentary on Soph’s content, YouTube had removed the comments sections on her videos. In response, Soph uploaded a twelve-minute rant directly threatening the life of Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s CEO. “Susan, I’ve known your address since last summer,” she said, staring directly into the camera. “I’ve got a Luger and a mitochondrial disease. I don’t care if I live. Why should I care if you live, or your children? I just called an Uber. You’ve got about seven minutes to draft up a will. . . .

…

But an increasingly strained and undermanned press corps in the United States hardly suffices to patrol the nigh-endless digital deeps of the contemporary internet landscape. In a speech to the Anti-Defamation League in November 2019, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen pointed out the inherent risks of the so-called “Silicon Six”—“Zuckerberg at Facebook; Sundar Pichai at Google; at Google’s parent company Alphabet, Larry Page and Sergey Brin; Brin’s ex-sister-in-law, Susan Wojcicki at YouTube; and Jack Dorsey at Twitter”—being totally responsible for, and unconstrained in, making such momentous decisions as whether Holocaust denial and antiblack hate speech have a role in public discourse. Silicon Valley has long operated on a libertarian, reckless, “move fast and break things” ethos that is far more conservative about reining in hate speech than allowing it to reverberate in the public consciousness unchecked.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

Survivors and the relatives of victims of numerous shootings were reportedly subjected to online abuse and threats, often tied to popular conspiracy theory ideas featured prominently on YouTube. Parents of people killed in high-profile shootings tried to report abusive videos about their deceased children and repeatedly called on Google to hire more moderators and to better enforce its policies.57 In response to this increasing negative press and public sentiment, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced in December 2017 that Google was going to hire thousands of new “moderators,” expanding its total workforce to more than 10,000 people responsible for reviewing content that could violate its policies.58 In addition, YouTube announced it would continue to develop advanced machine learning technology to automatically flag problematic content for removal.

…

Contrary to Trump Tweet, Yes,” New York Times, August 16, 2017. 54.Ibid. 55.Daniel Keyes, “How e-Tailers Can Steal Amazon’s Customers at the Last Moment,” Business Insider Intelligence, June 1, 2018 (accessed June 22, 2018). 56.Emma Woollacott, “YouTube Hires More Moderators as Content Creators Complain They’re Being Unfairly Targeted,” Forbes, December 5, 2017. 57.Sam Levin, “Google to Hire Thousands of Moderators After Outcry Over YouTube Abuse Videos,” Guardian, December 5, 2017. 58.Susan Wojcicki, “Expanding Our Work Against Abuse of Our Platform,” YouTube Official Blog, December 4, 2017, https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/12/expanding-our-work-against-abuse-of-our.html (accessed October 30, 2018). 59.Ibid. 60.Alex Hern, “YouTube to Manually Review Popular Videos Before Placing Ads,” Guardian, January 17, 2018. 61.Amar Toor, “EU Close to Making Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter Block Hate Speech Videos,” Verge, May 24, 2017. 62.Catherine Supp, “Commission Backs Away from Regulating Online Platforms over Hate Speech,” Euractiv, January 19, 2018. 63.European Commission, “Results of Commission’s Last Round of Monitoring of the Code of Conduct Against Online Hate Speech,” January 2018, http://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/just/item-detail.cfm?

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

But more often than not, if you can show progress along the way, smart investors will come on some pretty crazy rides.” Google’s Eight Innovation Principles While Kelly Johnson had fourteen rules, Google has eight innovation principles that govern their strategy, famously summarized in a 2011 article by Google senior vice president of advertising Susan Wojcicki.17 Throughout this book, we’ll see them highlighted in different ways and exhibited by different people. Without doubt, these rules are core to your success as an exponential entrepreneur. My suggestion is that you write them on your wall, use them as a filter for your next start-up idea, but above all, don’t ignore them.

…

Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010). 14 Christopher Mims, “When 110% won’t do: Google engineers insist 20% time is not dead—it’s just turned into 120% time” qz.com, August 16, 2013. 15 James Marshall Reilly, “The Zappos Story: How Failure can Fuel Business Success,” Monster.com, http://hiring.monster.com/hr/hr-best-practices/workforce-management/hr-management-skills/business-success.aspx. 16 All Astro Teller quotes come from a series of AIs conducted between 2013 and 2014. 17 Susan Wojcicki, “The Eight Pillars of Innovation,” thinkwithgoogle.com, July 2011, http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/8-pillars-of-innovation.html. 18 For a much deeper look at flow and its impact on performance see Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance (New York: New Harvest, 2014). 19 AI with John Hagel conducted 2014. 20 Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal, “Five Surprising Ways Richard Branson Harnessed Flow to Build A Multi-Billion Dollar Empire,” Forbes, March 25, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2014/03/25/five-surprising-ways-richard-branson-harnessed-flow-to-build-a-multi-billion-dollar-empire/. 21 Steven Kotler, “The Rise of Superman: 17 Flow Triggers,” Slideshare.net, March 2014, http://www.slideshare.net/StevenKotler/17-flow-triggers. 22 AI with Ned Hallowell conducted 2013. 23 Kevin Rathunde, “Montessori Education and Optimal Experience: A Framework for New Research,” The NAMTA Journal (Winter 2001): 11–43. 24 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 48–70. 25 For a great breakdown of group flow and the social triggers see Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (New York: Basic Books), 2008. 26 AI with Ismail, 2013.

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

They are among the most iconic entrepreneurs behind the disruptive companies that have shaped our cultural landscape. Among the pantheon of modern scale leaders sharing their stories with us: Bill Gates, Mark Cuban, Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, Apple’s Angela Ahrendts, Google’s Eric Schmidt, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki, Spotify’s Daniel Ek, Canva’s Melanie Perkins, Xapo’s Wences Casares, Spanx’s Sara Blakely, the Black List’s Franklin Leonard, ClassPass’s Payal Kadakia, Duolingo’s Luis von Ahn, Minted’s Mariam Naficy, Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer, Walker & Company’s Tristan Walker, designer Tory Burch, investor and philanthropist Robert F.

…

And that’s a legacy of that early decision.” The $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube is a perfect example. “We made the decision to purchase YouTube in about ten days. Incredibly historic decision but we were ready. People were focused. We wanted to get it done,” Eric recalls. And Susan Wojcicki also recalls the speed. Susan is YouTube’s current CEO, but at the time of the acquisition, she was a longtime Googler, then working on a new program called Google Video, a direct competitor to YouTube. “YouTube launched a few months after us, and they very quickly grew and were very soon bigger than us,” Susan recalls.

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Computer technology has been mainstreamed, and women have joined the high-tech gold rush. Tech mammoths like Facebook, IBM, Yahoo!, Hewlett-Packard, and Google all employ women in leading roles. But despite the power of women like Sheryl Sandberg, Ginni Rometty, Marissa Meyer, Meg Whitman, and Susan Wojcicki, the gender balance in Silicon Valley and the larger corporate world remains highly skewed, and most leadership positions are held by men. At tech companies only 2 to 4 percent of engineers are women; at Fortune 500 firms, 4 percent of CEOs are women. Boardrooms are a bastion of maleness, and many companies, like Twitter, have no women on their board.

Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age by Michael Wolff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Carl Icahn, commoditize, creative destruction, digital divide, disintermediation, Golden age of television, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Joseph Schumpeter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, telemarketer, the medium is the message, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Maker Studios, a native producer of YouTube videos and promoter of YouTube talent, was sold to Disney for more than $500 million. YouTube, suddenly excited that YouTube might finally be catching up with the market, launched a major campaign—much of it in old media—to promote, in television fashion, its own stars. Google sent in one of its key executives, Susan Wojcicki, who had masterminded much of Google’s search advertising strategy. Wojcicki said the YouTube strategy was to be more like television. In essence, it was a bifurcated strategy. The original YouTube would be relegated to a nether YouTube, a low-end and low-margin outlet, like certain low-performing areas of the cable dial.

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

From ‘Business model evolving, circulation revenue rising’, Newspaper Association of America, 18 April 2014 <http://www.naa.org/Trends-and-Numbers/Newspaper-Revenue/Newspaper-Media-Industry-Revenue-Profile-2013.aspx> (accessed 8 March 2015). 191 ‘Digital News Report 2014’, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism <http://www.digitalnewsreport.org> (accessed 7 March 2015). 192 Facebook Newsroom, <http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/> (accessed 8 March 2015). 193 <https://twitter.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 194 <https://www.youtube.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 195 ‘Digital News Report 2014’, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism <http://www.digitalnewsreport.org> (accessed 7 March 2015). 196 Nic Newman, ‘Journalism, Media, and Technology Predictions 2013’, accessed online <https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-whYpjV6DzWUER1VjgySzB1OG8/edit> (8 March 2015). 197 David Carr, ‘Facebook Offers Life Raft, but Publishers Are Wary’, New York Times, 26 Oct. 2014 <http://www.nytimes.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 198 Lauren Goode, ‘Susan Wojcicki Wants to Sell You Youtube Video Subscriptions (Video)’, re/code, 27 Oct. 2014 <http://recode.net> (accessed 8 March 2015). 199 1.39bn total monthly users, 1.19bn mobile monthly users. From <http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/> (accessed 27 March 2015). 200 Nic Newman, ‘Mainstream media and the distribution of news in the age of social discovery’, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Sept. 2011 <https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk> (accessed 8 March 2015). 201 John Reynolds, ‘Three-fifth’s of Twitter’s UK users follow a newspaper or journalist’, Guardian, 4 Mar. 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/> (accessed 8 March 2015). 202 ‘ABCs: National daily newspaper circulation September 2014’, Guardian, 10 Oct. 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/> and <https://twitter.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 203 David Carr, ‘Facebook Offers Life Raft, but Publishers Are Wary’, New York Times, 26 Oct. 2014 <http://www.nytimes.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 204 Lizzie Widdicombe, ‘From Mars’, New Yorker, 23 Sept. 2013. 205 Scott E.

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Nicholas Morris and David Vines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 129–53. Goldin, Claudia, and Lawrence Katz, The Race between Education and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). Goldman, Harvey, ‘Good Work, from Homer to the Present’, Daedalus, 134: 3 (Summer 2005), 36–41. Goode, Lauren, ‘Susan Wojcicki Wants to Sell You Youtube Video Subscriptions (Video)’, re/code, 27 October 2014 <http://recode.net> (accessed 8 March 2015). Goode, William, ‘Encroachment, Charlatanism and the Emerging Profession: Psychology, Sociology, and Medicine’, American Sociological Review, 25: 6 (1960), 902–65. Goodstein, Laurie, ‘Some Mormons Search the Web and Find Doubt’, New York Times, 30 July 2013 <http://www.nytimes.com> (accessed 27 March 2015).

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

And it is the increasingly disruptive and unsettling transitional phase we are in now. The great transformation “Revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense…that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately” Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Seventeen years after Sergey Brin and Larry Page first launched Google in their friend Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California, HBO released the second season of Silicon Valley, its fictional comedy parodying the thriving industry that had grown out of those early garage start-ups. In the third episode, Gareth Belson – CEO of a company that has more than a few parallels with the one that Brin and Page had created – rather grandiosely likened Silicon Valley to Europe in the Renaissance.

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Especially not straight white men. Not only are minorities some of the most famous and successful players in Hollywood, they are also among the most powerful people in our country’s leading industries. Take, for instance, openly gay CEO of Apple Tim Cook (net worth $500 million); female CEO of YouTube Susan Wojcicki (net worth $500 million); and CEO of General Motors Mary Barra (net worth $60 million). This is part of why Jay-Z (a black man, in case you’d forgotten) is now hip-hop’s first billionaire and why Rihanna (a black immigrant from Barbados) was recently named the world’s richest female musician with a wealth of $600 million.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Wojcicki not only teaches the children of the tech aristocracy but is also the matriarch of one of Silicon Valley’s most remarkable tech families. She is the mother of three adult daughters: Susan, Anne, and Janet. In 1998, when Larry Page and Sergei Brin founded Google as Stanford graduate students, Susan rented them space in her garage. Today Susan Wojcicki is the CEO of YouTube and among the most powerful entertainment moguls in the world. Her sister Janet is a professor of epidemiology at UC San Francisco. Anne, the youngest Wojcicki, is the cofounder and CEO of the gene mapping start-up 23andMe and was married to Google cofounder Sergei Brin.

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

In California, they launched revolutions from garages: Jobs and Woz building personal computers next to a rack of pocket wrenches in a garage in Los Altos, Bill Hewitt and Dave Packard making oscillators behind barn-like doors in a garage in Palo Alto, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin inventing Google as Stanford grad students in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park. But in Brooklyn, there weren’t many garages; there were basements. And in the part of Brooklyn where Charlie grew up, those basements were crowded, dark, dingy, and usually smelled a little bit like brisket. From above, the urban neighborhood of narrow streets spanning Avenue I to Avenue V, Nostrand to West Sixth Street, might have looked like any other section of the borough, but in reality, Charlie’s home sat right in the center of the seventy-five-thousand-member-strong Syrian Orthodox Jewish community—an ethnic, religious, and cultural island unto itself.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Cisco networking guru Dave Cheriton had all blessed the Google project with substantial investments. Stanford itself earned 1.8 million shares in exchange for Google’s access to Page’s patents held by the university. (Stanford had cashed in those shares for $336 million by 2005). Google moved out of Stanford in 1999 into the Menlo Park garage of Susan Wojcicki, an Intel manager soon to be CEO of YouTube and a sister of Anne, the founder of the genomic startup 23andMe. Brin’s marriage to Anne in 2007 symbolized the procreative embrace of Silicon Valley, Sand Hill Road, and Palo Alto. (They divorced in 2015.) By 2017, Google’s own computer scientists had authored more of the world’s most-cited papers in the subject than had Stanford’s own faculty.1 Google’s founders always conceived of their projects in prophetic terms.

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

One room contained Sergey, Larry, and two other engineers. The garage itself was packed with servers. Desks were the simplest possible design: a door placed horizontally across a pair of sawhorses. Nothing could be cruder or easier to put together and take apart, or easier to hack about. One day the house’s owner, Susan Wojcicki, was expecting delivery of a refrigerator. She returned home to find that the Googlers had commandeered it, moved it to their part of the house, and filled it with drinks and snacks. This was the typical “anything goes” scavenger mentality of early Google. Wojcicki didn’t seem to mind—she later joined the company and ended up running YouTube.24 In any case, by the spring of 1999, Google had moved again, to an office over a bicycle shop.

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

And at the end of the day, we subscribe to all the platforms and love all of the children equally. . . . If you adopt that view, it’s all the same. The siloes are broken down.” The New Front brought bombast as well as competition. At YouTube’s well-attended New Front presentation at the Javits Center, CEO Susan Wojcicki declared fallaciously that YouTube “reached” more 18- to 49-year-old mobile viewers “during prime time than the top ten shows combined.” But as noted earlier, “reach” does not equal viewing. Nielsen reports that the average audience per minute on television accounts for 95 percent of video watching, with smartphone video accounting for only 1 percent (and PCs 4 percent).

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

During widespread state-imposed lockdowns during the pandemic, YouTube (owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet) banned videos that were critical of COVID-19-related policies, including content posted by medical professionals arguing that lockdowns were excessive or unnecessary. Its stated justification? To remove “medically unsubstantiated” content in favor of facts from “authoritative” sources. According to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”2 In early 2021, YouTube did the same thing by censoring the Senate testimony of a doctor who made the medical case for ivermectin, a little-known tropical medicine, to treat severe COVID-19 patients, with no explanation other than to say it violated its misinformation policy.

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

The scientific paper describing how Google chose its results wasn’t formally published until the end of December 1998; a paper describing how ‘PageRank’, the system used to determine what order the search results should be delivered in – with the ‘most relevant’ (as determined by the rest of the web) first – wasn’t deposited with Stanford University’s online publishing service until 1999.15 The duo incorporated Google as a company on 4 September 1998, while they were renting space in the garage of Susan Wojcicki. They did that using a cheque written in August for $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, made out to ‘Google Inc’. (Page and Brin left it in a drawer in Stanford while they tried to get some more funding and figure out the mechanics of setting up the company that would be able to accept it.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Meanwhile, bots inflate platforms’ engagement numbers, the holy grail for digital marketers. In 2012, YouTube “set a company-wide objective to reach one billion hours of viewing a day, and rewrote its recommendation engine to maximize for that goal.”67 “The billion hours of daily watch time gave our tech people a North Star,” said its CEO, Susan Wojcicki. Unfortunately for YouTube users, that single-minded fixation on metrics also empowered bad actors to manipulate recommendations and drive traffic to dangerous misinformation, as discussed above. To help identify and deter such manipulation, both social networks and search engines should crack down on manipulative bots.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

We also benefited from conversations with many current and former Googlers: CJ Adams, Larry Alder, Nikesh Arora, Jieun Baek, Brendan Ballou, Andy Berndt, Eric Brewer, Shona Brown, Scott Carpenter, Christine Chen, DJ Collins, Yasmin Dolatabadi, Marc Ellenbogen, Eric Gross, Jill Hazelbaker, Shane Huntley, Minnie Ingersoll, Amy Lambert, Ann Lavin, Erez Levin, Damian Menscher, Misty Muscatel, David Pressoto, Scott Rubin, Nigel Snoad, Alfred Spector, Matthew Stepka, Astro Teller, Sebastian Thrun, Lorraine Twohill, Rachel Whetstone, Mike Wiacek, Susan Wojcicki and Emily Wodd. There are a number of people at Google who helped orchestrate many of the logistics and trips that helped make this book possible: Jennifer Barths, Kimberly Birdsall, Gavin Bishop, Kimberly Cooper, Daniela Crocco, Dominique Cunningham, Danielle “Mr. D” Feher, Ann Hiatt, Dan Keyserling, Marty Lev, Pam Shore, Manuel Temez and Brian Thompson.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

At around 6:00, I walked into the storied Googleplex, the sprawling campus of low-slung glass-and-brick buildings that make up the company’s main headquarters. Google was the quintessential Silicon Valley start-up. Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin had incorporated the company in 1998, after working out of the garage of Susan Wojcicki (now YouTube’s CEO). By the time I joined, nearly two decades later, Google had grown into one of the most iconic companies on the planet. There were more than 60,000 Googlers working around the world, on everything from perfecting search engines to testing self-driving cars.1 Those products and services brought in an astonishing $90 billion in annual revenue.2 Within a year Google would briefly dethrone Apple as the most valuable brand in the world.3 Google had become the kind of company every scrappy start-up sought to unseat.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

It would make them rich beyond belief and transform Google from a mere search engine into a sprawling global platform designed to capture as much information as possible about the people who came into contact with it. The Brain Tap In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin moved into the garage of a house owned by Susan Wojcicki, the sister of Brin’s future wife, Anne Wojcicki. They had an initial $100,000 check from Andy Bechtolsheim, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems, a powerful computer company that itself had come out of an ARPA-funded 1970s computer research program at Stanford University.36 The initial small investment was followed by a $25 million tranche from two powerful venture capital outfits, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.37 Brin and Page couldn’t be happier.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

Deliberative processes make change deliberate, as it should be for limitations imposed on free speech. A National Commission on Technology and Democracy In researching this book, I watched hours of congressional testimony by tech executives like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai, and Susan Wojcicki. I watched testimony on privacy, antitrust, election manipulation, data protection, algorithmic bias, and the role of social media in vaccine hesitancy, free speech, political bias, filter bubbles, and fake news. I got one overwhelming feeling from watching congressmen and -women question tech executives: we need more experts leading the way.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Facebook is by far the largest of the “monsters.” The year Noah died, the social network Zuckerberg founded in 2004 in his Harvard dorm room became the first platform to surpass one billion active users. By the end of 2021, that number was close to three billion. It enraged Lenny that Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, and YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki shaped what people read, bought, and got angry about. How their platforms fostered personal attacks by refusing to remove vicious content in the name of “free speech,” then threw up their hands when what any half-savvy user could predict would happen, did. “That kind of influence on human lives has to be government-regulated.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

When Page and Brin realized that it was time to put aside plans for dissertations and leave the Stanford nest, they found a garage—a two-car garage, which came with a hot tub and a couple of spare rooms inside the house—that they could rent for $1,700 a month at the Menlo Park house of a Stanford friend, Susan Wojcicki, who soon joined Google. In September 1998, one month after they met with Bechtolsheim, Page and Brin incorporated their company, opened a bank account, and cashed his check. On the wall of the garage they put up a whiteboard emblazoned “Google Worldwide Headquarters.” In addition to making all of the World Wide Web’s information accessible, Google represented a climactic leap in the relationship between humans and machines—the “man-computer symbiosis” that Licklider had envisioned four decades earlier.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

and the other search portals were choking with garish ads. Here came Google’s cool expanse of white, a visual oasis to the user. Its search algorithm, honed over four years of academic testing, was a leap forward in the state of the art. With seed money in hand, Brin and Page moved operations out of the dorm and into their friend Susan Wojcicki’s nearby garage by the start of 1999. (Wojcicki was another child of academics; the professors’ kids were taking over the world.) They snagged Ram Shriram, a former Netscaper now at Amazon, as an advisor; Shriram persuaded his boss Jeff Bezos to make a personal investment too. Wilson Sonsini became Google’s counsel.