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Wolfe, Alexandra

September 11, 2017 by admin

WORK TITLE: Valley of the Gods
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CITY: New York
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http://www.vogue.com/article/alexandra-wolfe-valley-of-the-gods-interview

Posted in 408 | Comments Off on Wolfe, Alexandra

PERSONAL

Daughter of Tom Wolfe.

EDUCATION:

Attended Duke University.

ADDRESS

Home - New York, NY.

CAREER

Wall Street Journal, New York, NY, staff reporter; freelance writer.

WRITINGS

Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2016

Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Wall Street Journal, New York Observer, Condé Nast Portfolio, Bloomberg Businessweek, Travel + Leisure, Departures, Vanity Fair, and Town & Country.

SIDELIGHTS

Alexandra Wolfe is a journalist who writes about the computer industry and Silicon Valley. She is a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal who writes the weekly column “Weekend Confidential.” Previously, she was a staff reporter for several other publications, including the New York Observer and Condé Nast Portfolio, and has published freelance articles in Bloomberg Businessweek, Travel + Leisure, and Departures. She holds a degree from Duke University and lives in New York City.

In 2016, Wolfe published Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story, a chronicle of the rise of three entrepreneurs as they strive to become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. Nerds rule the tech world of baggy jeans and t-shirts, rather than suits and ties, in this look at how the denizens of Silicon Valley live, work, date, and invent. Wolfe centers her journey on Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and creator of Founders Fund, a fellowship offering young adults $100,000 in venture capital to drop out of or delay college, focus on hard science and technology, and devise a million-dollar business idea that could change the world. Wolfe focuses on three individuals who graduated from Thiel’s “20 Under 20” 2011 program. The three are John Burnham, who wants to mine asteroids; Laura Deming, who studies extending human life; and Paul Gu, who envisions a new way for loaning money. “Wolfe incorporates useful information about these young people and their lifestyles that can be adopted generally,” according to Littleton Maxwell in Library Journal.

Wolfe tracks the three entrepreneurs as they learn whether they’ve won an award, their living in communal spaces, their social lives, and struggles in business with technology, funding, and coworkers. For example, libertarian and far-right blogger Burnham arrives in Silicon Valley as an “Asperger’s chic” wunderkind with confidence, but by the end of Wolfe’s account has discovered a spiritual void, leaves the tech world, enrolls in college, and reads Shakespeare and Greek literature. A writer in Kirkus Reviews described Wolfe’s book, saying: “Nothing surprising but of some interest to business readers and entrepreneurs looking for ways to ‘disrupt’ education.” Wolfe also adds information on the history of Silicon Valley and Stanford University. “Readers seeking an inside view of this high-tech mecca will certainly find it,” observed Sarah McCraw Crow in BookPage. Crow also noted, however, that the historical information takes away from the struggles of the three young entrepreneurs.

Slate website contributor Jonathan L. Fischer had another take on Wolfe’s book, saying: “Wolfe never hesitates to conjure up a sense of place to heighten the absurdities of her book’s setting, but the occasional polyamory compound aside, those places, at least in her telling, turn out to be kind of boring. The rest of the country has CrossFit gyms and jerks on Segways, too.” Adding a similar comment, Nick Bilton said in New York Times: “It isn’t so much that I didn’t like [the book] as much as I didn’t like the people in [it]. They, frankly, come across as self-centered lunatics who are intent on making a dent in the universe, without an ounce of self-awareness for the repercussions of how those actions could harm others….I was left wondering how many more dents our universe can take.”

On the other hand, “With a detached and playful tone, fly-on-the-wall Wolfe catalogs the unique habits, dress, nutrition, and mating habits” of her subjects, according to Booklist contributor Annie Bostrom, who added that the dizzying array of people, places, and tech may dismay readers, but are appropriate for the larger-than-life “god” strewn Silicon Valley. Noting that Wolfe briefly addresses complex issues like gender discrimination in Silicon Valley, a writer in Publishers Weekly called Wolfe’s approach “a lighthearted, at times funny, view of Silicon Valley filled with chatty prose and throwaway comments.”

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

Booklist, December 15, 2016, Annie Bostrom, review of Valley of the Gods, p. 6.
BookPage, January 2017, Sarah McCraw Crow, review of Valley of the Gods, p. 24.
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2016, review of Valley of the Gods.
Library Journal, January 1, 2017, Littleton Maxwell, review of Valley of the Gods, p. 108.
Publishers Weekly, December 12, 2016, review of Valley of the Gods, p. 140.

ONLINE

New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (February 14, 2017), Nick Bilton, review of Valley of the Gods.
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (February 9, 2017), Jonathan L. Fischer, review of Valley of the Gods.
Vogue, https://www.vogue.com/ (January 11, 2017), Julia Felsenthal, author interview.

Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2016

1. Valley of the gods : a Silicon Valley story LCCN 2017287405 Type of material Book Personal name Wolfe, Alexandra, author. Main title Valley of the gods : a Silicon Valley story / Alexandra Wolfe. Edition First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. Published/Produced New York : Simon & Schuster, 2017. ©2017 Description x, 261 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 1476778949 (hardcover) 9781476778945 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER Not available Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

Simon and Schuster - http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Valley-of-the-Gods/Alexandra-Wolfe/9781476778945
ALEXANDRA WOLFE
Alexandra Wolfe is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal and writes the weekly column “Weekend Confidential.” After graduating from Duke University, she worked as a staff reporter for the New York Observer, The Wall Street Journal, and then Condé Nast Portfolio. As a freelancer, she wrote regular columns for Bloomberg Businessweek, features for Travel + Leisure and Departures, and has written cover stories for Vanity Fair and Town & Country. The Valley of the Gods is her first book. She lives in New York City.
Vogue - https://www.vogue.com/article/alexandra-wolfe-valley-of-the-gods-interview
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CULTURE > BOOKS
Alexandra Wolfe Takes a Deep Dive Into Silicon Valley for Valley of the Gods
Julia Felsenthal's picture
JANUARY 11, 2017 12:45 PM
by JULIA FELSENTHAL

Photo: Mark Seliger
“I was writing this book and I was like, ‘I’ve finally come up with something new!’ ” the journalist Alexandra Wolfe, giggling, remembered by phone. “Then my dad was like: ‘I wrote the first story on Silicon Valley.’ ”
Wolfe was referring to her just-published first book, Valley of the Gods,a sharply observed, often quite funny anthropological deep dive into the strange inner workings of the Bay Area tech world. And her dad, if you haven’t already guessed, is Tom Wolfe, the nattily attired octogenarian novelist and New Journalism pioneer who gave us such sharply funny classics as The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and also, apparently, a 1983 magazine profile of Robert Noyce, an inventor of the microchip and cofounder of Intel, who earned the nickname, “Mayor of Silicon Valley”).
“I was like, ‘Yes, naturally, you’ve scooped me again,’ ” the younger Wolfe playfully grumbled. Jokes aside, she owes a debt to her father—or at least to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his beloved 1968 nonfiction account of counterculture guru Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters as they traveled through America, tripping on psychedelics, in a janky old-school bus.
Valley of the Gods is nominally about a very different kind of guru, one who presides over a very different kind of counterculture. At the heart of the book is tech investor Peter Thiel, the libertarian Trump supporter who made billions on PayPal and Facebook and who has used his wealth to bankroll Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, a yet-to-be-realized man-made island nation with the Seasteading Institute, and a fellowship program that, since 2011, has annually granted a group of 20 or so kids (age 22 and under) $100,000 a piece to leave school and spend two years launching their first companies.
That last endeavor was a way, writes Wolfe, to “call attention to what Thiel considered the waste of time and money spent on a college education” and to rail “against the political correctness he thought universities propagated.” In other words: why seclude yourself in an echo-chamber of liberal groupthink when you might put that time toward inventing the next PayPal or Facebook? College” can be good for learning about what’s been done before,” says the Thiel Fellowship website, “but it can also discourage you from doing something new.”
And that’s the bit that interested Wolfe. The author (who calls Thiel a friend, saying she values his curiosity and his singular way of thinking) caught wind of the fellowship program when it was still in the planning stages. At that point, Thiel had in mind the idea that he would design the program’s kickoff as an homage to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and he wanted Wolfe, and maybe her father, to come along.
“One of his earliest ideas was to pick up these Thiel Fellows on a bus that was sort of a spoof of the Merry Pranksters,” Wolfe told me, “the total opposite of the beat-up school bus. They were going to get a really high-tech, expensive bus, trick it out inside, and take all these kids away from the PC University system, bring them out west so they could think differently.”
That plan, to Wolfe’s relief, soon evaporated. (“I’m not a big sleep-on-a-bus-for-a-month person,” she confessed.) Instead, the author followed the first class of Thiel Fellows (who arrived in Silicon Valley by more conventional means) over the course of the grand experiment in fledgling entrepreneurship.
The individual experiences of the fellowship program varied—charting one’s own course, it turns out, is as difficult in Palo Alto and Mountain View as it is in the hallowed halls of academia. The kid who wants to mine asteroids ends up halfheartedly developing a personal server platform, then fleeing back east to study philosophy and religion. The girl who intends to bankroll research into human longevity winds up traveling the tech conference speaker circuit. Another boy drifts from idea to idea, trying to find a problem to fix, hoping to reverse engineer a company.
But if none of the grantees Wolfe followed have yet proved to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Peter Thiel, their crash course in Silicon Valley life helps shine a spotlight on some of that world’s weirdest corners. Through the fellows, we meet techies obsessed with immortality who tattoo their cryogenic freezing instructions onto their skin; polyamorists with extremely restricted diets; and a startup CEO who, in a more elemental version of the Thiel Fellowship, bribes his interns not to return to college with the promise of unlimited meat.
“It ended up being so much like how I pictured the ’60s were from reading my dad’s books,” Wolfe admitted. “These co-living communities. These kingpins who everybody rallies around. All the Burning Man stuff. There’s so much overlap.”
So basically, even in the innovation-obsessed Silicon Valley, there’s no such thing as a truly new idea. Wolfe and I chatted more about college educations, the culture of entrepreneurship, and the brave newish world the author dropped in on while writing Valley of the Gods.

Courtesy of Simon & Schuster
In 2004 you wrote this scathing piece for the Observer, where you were then a reporter, about the American culture of positive reinforcement, which, you said, had led us to become a coddled people who can never admit our own weaknesses. You got a contract to turn that piece into a book that never materialized. In Silicon Valley, failure is almost a virtue. It’s a badge of honor to start a company and have it not get off the ground. Did this project in anyway evolve out of that one?
Yeah, it actually completely grew out of that one. I had trouble writing that because I kind of feel like a poster child for being coddled. It was like, “Oh, my parents were too good to me?” It’s so bad.
That idea of failure being a virtue: People say it so much out there that it’s a cliché at this point. It’s also not true. Failing is awful. When the “American Coddle” idea failed as a book, that wasn’t a virtue. That was bad. It’s not fun to fail.
Yes, it does result in something better. You move on. It makes you stronger. But it would be better not to have [failed]. The whole trend of being an entrepreneur is all these people moving out there and glorifying this idea of living out of your car, eating ramen, having no money. I think they find it’s not so glorious.
There’s something to be said for actually learning the ropes, and not rushing into something, not doing something just because you think it’s going to be some promised land of entrepreneurial ebullience.
I think the culture of coddling does that, too. That story back in 2004 was the same idea of this feeling that you should expect to leapfrog into success. And anybody who doesn’t cut corners is wasting time. I just found through trying to cut corners, that that’s wasting time more than anything.
So was selling a book at such a precocious age your version of trying to cut corners?
Yeah. I felt like I didn’t have the right. It was great as an article, that story, but I felt like I should have known more about psychiatry. I was 24; I’m not going to write a book on parenting. Criticizing parents at age 24 felt pretty obnoxious to me.
Your book mentions Jacob Weisberg’s 2010 Slate piece excoriating the Thiel Fellowship idea. He wrote: “Thiel’s program is premised on the idea that America suffers from a deficiency of entrepreneurship. In fact, we may be on the verge of the opposite, a world in which too many weak ideas find funding and every kid dreams of being the next Mark Zuckerberg.” Would you agree? Has entrepreneurship culture gotten out of control?
Yeah, I guess. I think the positive part of entrepreneurship culture is the idea that to be an entrepreneur means you want to do something that you wouldn’t normally do if you were going to join a profession, or a company. The positive image you have around the word is that it’s going to be an innovation, a new idea. So I think when people start doing it in lockstep, it loses the positive part. It becomes only the trend. You can’t really strike out on your own if you’re doing the Facebook for pets. If you lose the originality, then why be an entrepreneur? In that sense, I definitely agree with him.
But the idea of the fellowship, the idea of just dropping out, the idea of being encouraged to try that, I do think is worthwhile. If you ask the Thiel Foundation, the whole point was to get people to stop and pause and think: “Do I have to do this thing that everybody else is doing? Maybe there is this thing that I’m really good at.”
I think that idea is valuable, too. As everybody rushes to frantically apply to college, and then frantically to try to get a job in an acceptable firm, magazine, auction house, instead of following like lemmings, stopping and saying, “Maybe I can scrape by and do something I really want to for a little while, and that’s okay?” Or, “Maybe I can think of something new?”
Did writing this book actually make you question your own decision to go to college? Yes. But not because I had a brilliant idea. Because I don’t think I learned very much there. I sort of felt adrift in college. I had a great time, but I didn’t really feel like the scholar I thought I should be. I don’t know if not going to college would have helped that. Maybe I would have started at the Observer at 18 or something. I wouldn’t have loved to start a company, but I maybe would have done something else.
If I were to go back and do it all over again at that time, I would still go to college, I’m sure. But at this time, maybe I wouldn’t. I think now, maybe this is overly biased, just because I’ve been focusing on it for so long, but I think the Thiel fellowship really did change the mentality around that. You can now not go to college with less of a stigma. Whereas if I hadn’t gone to college in 1998, when I graduated from high school, that would have been unacceptable.
As people who live in New York, on the East Coast, we’re used to the idea that we export our culture west, that we’re at the center of where things are happening. But increasingly, it feels the opposite: The west is sending culture east. Are we about to inherit all of Silicon Valley’s weirdest ideas one by one? I totally agree with you, I was laughing so hard, a friend of mine was saying there was some Wall Street banker trying to underwrite some big tech IPO, and he showed up in a hoodie. It was somebody who wore a suit all the time, at like age 75, in a hoodie trying to get them to feel one with him, which is beyond preposterous. There was a company out there that had Tie Tuesdays. They had a day of the week where they would make fun of, or ironically gesture toward, this old-fashioned thing called a tie. The whole culture seems to be coming east, I guess in large part because banking isn’t that cool anymore. The recession probably did a number on that one.
What was the most fascinating or mystifying bit of Silicon Valley culture that you encountered? I guess the artificial intelligence stuff made me think the most. That was the part I couldn’t really get my head around. I guess that’s what I struggled with the most with Silicon Valley, this idea of being able to code everything. There’s something I like so much about poetry and art and theater, things that aren’t machinelike. I like them for not being machinelike.
There was one [thing], I think I put it in the book, but you had multiple-choice answers of how far you wanted to upload yourself. You could upload your brain, or your body, all these weird ways you can turn yourself into a machine. It just seemed so dark to me.
A lot of people find it really exciting. But I hope that doesn’t happen. It seemed like a lot of people were banking on it actually happening. So there’s probably some nice way to spin it in your mind, but I struggled to find it. Which is why I ended up really sympathizing with [Thiel Fellow] John Burnham. He wanted to go out there and had huge dreams of mining asteroids, becoming superhuman in a way. And he ended up coming back to the East Coast and becoming really interested in religion. Space, in a way, was this elevation of a human, whereas turning yourself into a chip didn’t feel like an elevation at all.
This interview has been condensed and edited.

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10/2/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Wolfe, Alexandra. Valley of the Gods: A Silicon
Valley Story
Littleton Maxwell
Library Journal.
142.1 (Jan. 1, 2017): p108.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Wolfe, Alexandra. Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story. S. & S. Jan. 2017. 272p. ISBN 9781476778945. $27;
ebk. ISBN 9781476778969. BUS
Wolfe (staff reporter, the Wall Street Journal) was intrigued by the number of young people who are attracted to Silicon
Valley each year to start businesses, calling it a badge of honor to have unsuccessfully tried a new venture. She decided
to follow several of ' these individuals in their quests and here attempts to document their trials and tribulations in
working through the process of starting a business. Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and partner of the Founders Fund,
set up a program to get students to drop out of college, concentrate on computer coding, and come up with a business
idea that, with the assistance of his organization, could prosper. Wolfe follows three members of Thiel's "20 Under 20"
fellowship program who have been given $100,000 each to come up with new innovations. The cooperative ventures
they participate in portray an interesting subculture. Thiel's ideas are credited with inspiring this book, but the cultural
aspects go beyond him. VERDICT Wolfe incorporates useful information about these young people and their lifestyles
that can be adopted generally.--Littleton Maxwell, Robins Sch. of Business, Univ. of Richmond
Maxwell, Littleton
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Maxwell, Littleton. "Wolfe, Alexandra. Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2017, p.
108. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562397&it=r&asid=20c7be7bb74b7a54fb6ab90a7170a61f.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476562397

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Valley of the Gods
Sarah McCraw Crow
BookPage.
(Jan. 2017): p24.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
VALLEY OF THE GODS
By Alexandra
Wolfe
Simon & Schuster
$27, 272 pages
ISBN 9781476778945
eBook available
BUSINESS
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Imagine that you're 19 years old and you've been offered $100,000 to drop out of college and build the tech start-up of
your dreams. For the 20 students who win a Thiel Fellowship each year, with funding and mentoring provided by
PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, this is reality. In Valley of the Gods, Wall Street Journal reporter
Alexandra Wolfe (daughter of writer Tom Wolfe) profiles several members of the 2011 class of Thiel fellows, among
them John Burnham, who aims to mine asteroids for platinum and gold; Laura Deming, who's focused on extending
human longevity; and Paul Gu, who wants to create a new method for loaning money.
Wolfe follows this first class of Thiel fellows from the time when they're still finalists, waiting to learn if they've won
an award and undecided as to whether to put off college. She highlights their living spaces (like the communal house
depicted in The Social Network, where Mark Zuckerberg and friends lived and worked before Facebook was the
world's highest-valued company), their social lives and their work struggles. Launching a successful tech startup is
incredibly difficult, even with a good idea, an unusual level of intelligence and monetary support, and Wolfe conveys
the young entrepreneurs' ups and downs well.
These stories are interspersed with a more general profile of Silicon Valley, its history, its connection to Stanford
University and its oddities, like Cougar Night at the Rosewood Hotel, where "older" women hit on young techies.
These asides make for fascinating reading, but they take us away from the Thiel Fellows and their struggles, so we care
less about them than we otherwise might have. Still, readers seeking an inside view of this high-tech mecca will
certainly find it in Valley of the Gods.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Crow, Sarah McCraw. "Valley of the Gods." BookPage, Jan. 2017, p. 24. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225447&it=r&asid=b9d962dc8a40c0bbc228f5b49cd4030a.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475225447

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Wolfe, Alexandra: VALLEY OF THE GODS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Wolfe, Alexandra VALLEY OF THE GODS Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 1, 17 ISBN: 978-1-4767-
7894-5
An account of the rising generation of Silicon Valleyites, who want it all--and then some.Peter Thiel has made
headlines recently for being the only noted tech leader to support the Donald Trump candidacy. He takes center stage in
Wall Street Journal reporter Wolfe's look at a contrarian experiment of his: take the best and the brightest young
people--the nerdier the better--have them unlearn any squishy, soft humanities stuff they may have learned in school,
keep them out of college, and train them in think tanks and labs to take their places among the "tribe of overage boys"
that constitutes the region's and world's tech elite. Leading the class of "Asperger's chic" wunderkinder in this tale is
Jonathan Burnham, who arrives at Thiel's academy with the matter-of-fact assurance that one day soon he is going to
mine asteroids. Guided by a right-wing tech blogger code-named Mencius Moldbug--Wolfe likes this factoid enough to
repeat it a couple of times--Burnham makes for the perfect Ayn Rand-ian libertarian in the Hobbesian world of the
startup. Others in his class are biotech- or business services-inclined, but all promise to become a new kind of
entrepreneur for a happy future world. Thiel, a Stanford graduate, insists ironically here that college isn't for everyone
but "made sense for some people--such as for him," and in the end his promised shake-up of the whole college-tocareer
model amounts to a kind of yearlong summer camp for the geekily gifted. Wolfe departs from the standard
business/human interest narrative template only to the extent that Burnham does, for by the end of the account, he has
found a gaping spiritual void in his life that he fills by enrolling in college and reading Shakespeare and Greek
literature as a "needed retreat from the madness he'd just experienced out west."Nothing surprising but of some interest
to business readers and entrepreneurs looking for ways to "disrupt" education.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Wolfe, Alexandra: VALLEY OF THE GODS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865827&it=r&asid=a4b6354c5ae429c36cae35ccab67f849.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469865827

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Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
113.8 (Dec. 15, 2016): p6.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story.
By Alexandra Wolfe.
Jan. 2017. 272p. Simon & Schuster, $27 (9781476778945). 330.9794.
Inspired by her friendship with Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and investor in Facebook, Wall Street Journal staff
reporter Wolfe was intrigued by the tech mogul's Silicon Valley world. In 2011, Thiel's launch of his 20 Under 20
fellowship, which granted $100,000 each to young people willing to drop out of college and move to the valley in
order to follow brilliant technological pursuits, proved the perfect lens for her to begin her research. Wolfe follows
several of the first young fellows and along the way explores the particulars of the valley itself, where youth and highprofile
failure can be badges of honor, and the concentrations of wealth and intelligence are staggering. With a
detached and playful tone, fly-on-the-wall Wolfe catalogs the unique habits, dress, nutrition, and mating habits of the
startup class. The dizzying array of proper nouns, all real people and companies, can cause a scattered focus and lack
of real connection to Wolfe's subjects, which might not be out of place in this reporter's anthropological view of the
larger-than-life, tech-fertile, "god"-strewn valley.--Annie Bostrom
YA: Tech-savvy teens curious about Silicon Valley and alternatives to college might want to check this out. AB.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2016, p. 6+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476563398&it=r&asid=dcf6f2f9337fa5481adfa182ca1873c1.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476563398

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10/2/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506973101188 5/5
Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story
Publishers Weekly.
263.51 (Dec. 12, 2016): p140.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story
Alexandra Wolfe. Simon & Schuster, $27
(257p) ISBN 978-1-4767-7894-5
Wall Street Journal reporter Wolfe's debut zeroes in on a subculture of Silicon Valley's youngest entrepreneurs,
recipients of the Thiel Fellowship, a two-year program funded by Paypal founder Peter Thiel who doles out 100,000
grants to people under the age of 20 so they can "drop out of school and head to Silicon Valley." The book loosely
follows the first class of fellows through the experiences of Jonathan Burnham, a teen with a dream of mining heavy
metals from asteroids, who was awarded the fellowship in 2011. Through Burnham's story, readers are introduced to
world of dorm-like housing, home to an assortment of oddballs who subsist on weird diets and seek ways to never die.
Wolfe provides a lighthearted, at times funny, view of Silicon Valley filled with chatty prose and throwaway comments
about investors who are more interested in taking women on dates then backing their technologies. Wolfe rarely
addresses the underbelly of this California playscape, touching only briefly on issues such as gender discrimination.
(Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p. 140. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225106&it=r&asid=89b5415edbd7d6521bd94f5cbfc84f45.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475225106

Maxwell, Littleton. "Wolfe, Alexandra. Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 108. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562397&it=r. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017. Crow, Sarah McCraw. "Valley of the Gods." BookPage, Jan. 2017, p. 24. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225447&it=r. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017. "Wolfe, Alexandra: VALLEY OF THE GODS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865827&it=r. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017. Bostrom, Annie. "Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2016, p. 6+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476563398&it=r. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017. "Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p. 140. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225106&it=r. Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.

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READING BETWEEN THE LINES.FEB. 9 2017 10:48 AM

Visionary Puppies
A new book unpacks Peter Thiel’s gambit to pay teens to skip college and incubate big ideas. If only it also unpacked Thiel himself.

By Jonathan L. Fischer
Adi Embers
Adi Embers

There is no greater subject of fascination in Silicon Valley right now than Peter Thiel, seminal Facebook investor, PayPal Mafia don, Palantir founder, billionaire venture capitalist, oceanic city-state enthusiast, sworn enemy of political correctness, scourge of Gawker Media, recent New Zealander, prospective vampiric consumer of young people’s blood, and President Trump’s chief envoy to the CEOs of the tech industry. Or you might describe him as Alexandra Wolfe does in Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story: He is the tech sector’s “first philosopher,” who possesses “the big ideas, contrarian outlook and a willingness to back crazy concepts,” and who is, as Wolfe acknowledges in her author’s note, a friend. That chumminess might have been the germ of a revealing, insider-y unpacking of Silicon Valley and the utopians, dystopians, geniuses, and strivers who populate it—a This Town of the Left Coast geek elite. Instead it largely provides her access to Thiel’s first formal class of acolytes, a group of young men and women who in 2011 Thiel paid to skip college and attempt to incubate ambitious, world-shaking ideas, like asteroid mining. Whether Thiel’s radical libertarian outlook and declinist view of American innovation mark him as emblematic of Silicon Valley or as an eccentric, these ideas have never been worthier of interrogation. And yet, though Thiel hovers above Wolfe’s narrative like an Oz-like godhead, he is barely a presence in it, except when he’s the recipient of its adulation.

Jonathan L. Fischer
JONATHAN L. FISCHER
Jonathan L. Fischer is a Slate senior editor.

The author is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the daughter of Tom Wolfe, the New Journalism pioneer and author—a lineage that might not be fair to note except that Wolfe fille invites the comparison with at least two references to Ken Kesey (the subject of her father’s beloved The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) and a chapter titled “Asperger’s Chic,” a plain nod to her father’s liberal-ribbing essay “Radical Chic.” Her prologue certainly kicks off the book with a bit of Wolfean verve, hop-scotching through the haunts of Silicon Valley’s casually attired oligarchs and the investors and engineers riding their vapors. There’s the deck lounge overlooking the “Olympic-size pool skirted in fuchsias” at the Rosewood Sand Hill hotel in Menlo Park, and Prius-driving, Blue Bottle–guzzling entrepreneurs in Palo Alto, and the “Left Coast Ladies Who Lunch,” who “do so over Clif Bars while walking the Dish, the popular hiking trail on Stanford property.”

170209_SBR_ValleyOfTheGods
Eventually Valley of the Gods reveals itself in part as a tour through Silicon Valley’s cultural mores, from its group houses and startup accelerators and dating scene (insofar as it has one) to its highest-flying obsessions, like human immortality and advanced A.I. Wolfe describes the region, evocatively, as a place founded by “visionary puppies who realized that the Internet would become the world’s first great new industry in a half century—created, developed, operated, and more important, owned by children.” But the energy begins to lag quickly, as when Wolfe, visiting the shared home of several Thiel Fellows, pauses to offer a deadening description of the contents of their fridge: “It was fully stocked with sausages, vegetables, pasta, fruit, and loaves of bread from Whole Foods.” Pasta! Wolfe never hesitates to conjure up a sense of place to heighten the absurdities of her book’s setting, but the occasional polyamory compound aside, those places, at least in her telling, turn out to be kind of boring. The rest of the country has CrossFit gyms and jerks on Segways, too.

The Thiel Fellows who populate Wolfe’s book spend much of it being, well, miserable.
Less boring are Wolfe’s main subjects, the Thiel Fellows, most of them the kind of young, brilliant oddballs that the culture founded by those original visionary puppies continues to cherish. John Burnham, the one with the asteroid-mining idea, is awkward in the classroom but an autodidact who thrills at the notion of taking Thiel’s $100,000 to forgo traditional schooling; he ends up “pivoting” repeatedly as each of his Next Big Thing ideas fails to take off, and he eventually does go to college. In taking the fellowship, Burnham and his peers attempted to realize a particular utopian dream of Silicon Valley heavyweights: that they could “stop out” of the old, orthodox system; that they might embody the new tech industry’s meritocratic ideals; and that, in the industry’s parlance, they might change the world. (Mark Zuckerberg did it, after all.) But as Burnham realizes, to the people standing between a visionary and investment capital, changing the world actually means being profitable. “It’s just a really interesting phenomenon that if you’re running the company that does nothing, you can feel like king of the world,” he tells Wolfe.

It’s true that Thiel’s interests include things much loftier than earning a mint, like life extension. But Wolfe doesn’t seem interested in mounting a critique of Silicon Valley writ large that is anywhere near as perceptive as Burnham’s, and she certainly doesn’t pursue the uglier directions that Thiel’s view of the universe has taken him. His bullying, surreptitious campaign against Gawker Media, which he swore to litigate out of existence by any suit necessary after one of its sites wrote that he was gay, rates a brief, just-the-facts treatment. The narrative ends before the 2016 campaign, during which Thiel was Silicon Valley’s only prominent backer of Trump. While the Thiel Fellowship continues, and being accepted to it is tougher than getting into Harvard, it is now more like a gap year, requiring just one year out of school. And though many of those initial Thiel Fellows remain strivers in Silicon Valley—1 in 10 went back to college, by the way—the ones that populate Wolfe’s book seem to spend much of it being, well, lost and miserable.

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To Wolfe, that outcome is no indictment of the project itself. “In the end,” she writes, “the Thiel fellowship was a microcosm of the millennial generation. It said, ‘If you’re so good, let’s take the best and brightest among you and see if you can prove it’—and maybe the fact that they didn’t start billion-dollar companies didn’t matter.” Even if the fellows didn’t get out of the experiment what Thiel intended, she writes, the experience was still worth the doing as a growth experience for them and especially for its core tenet, “the idea of breaking away from what an institution enforced and had to be.” And yet even Peter Thiel, she concedes, “couldn’t necessarily create” success stories like his own, even as his own triumphs have convinced him that only he possesses the right vision for a better future. But figures like Thiel, both outliers and central cogs of Silicon Valley’s dream machine, aren’t ominous for the moonshots they take and the ambitions they describe. They’re ominous because they keep trying to inflict their harebrained ideas on the rest of us.

---

Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story by Alexandra Wolfe. Simon & Schuster.

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No American ever rose further faster than Ulysses S. Grant. Grant washed out of the Army after a promising start—West Point, Mexican-American War heroics—and by 1859, he could be found wandering the streets of St. Louis in ragged clothes, broke, begging for work. When the Civil War broke out in spring 1861, Grant was a notoriously indifferent junior clerk at his father’s leather goods store in Galena, Illinois.

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Pet Projects of the New Billionaires
By NICK BILTONFEB. 14, 2017
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Peter Thiel, venture capitalist. Credit Andrew White for The New York Times
VALLEY OF THE GODS
A Silicon Valley Story
By Alexandra Wolfe
261 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.

THE KINGDOM OF HAPPINESS
Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia
By Aimee Groth
318 pp. Touchstone. $27.

As I sat down for lunch at a restaurant in Los Angeles, I placed a copy of “Valley of the Gods,” by Alexandra Wolfe, on the table, and a waitress walking by stopped to peer at the cover. “Oh, that looks like an interesting book,” she said. “What’s it about?”

“It’s about Silicon Valley,” I began. “It follows this young kid, John Burnham, who gets paid $100,000 by this weird billionaire guy, Peter Thiel, whom you’ve probably heard of; he’s a big Trump supporter and spoke at the Republican National Convention?” — a blank stare from the waitress. “Anyway, Thiel pays him (and a bunch of other kids) to forgo college so Burnham can mine asteroids, but he doesn’t actually end up mining the asteroids and. . . .”

“Oh, I thought it was a nonfiction book,” the waitress interrupted with a perplexed and awkward look on her face.

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“Oh,” I replied. “Believe it or not, it is.”

She scampered away, unsure she wanted to hear more. At times while reading the book, I wish I could have done the same thing.

Over the last couple of decades there has been a lot of ink spilled about Silicon Valley, which ironically has helped disembowel most ink-spilling businesses. Lewis, Stone, Swisher, Bronson, Losse, Isaacson and yours truly have all tried to take hoi polloi on a written tour of that peculiar area south of San Francisco, whisking them around like Midwesterners in a celebrity-tour van in Beverly Hills.

Now, we have two more to add to the collection: the aforementioned book by Wolfe, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and “The Kingdom of Happiness,” by Aimee Groth, a contributor to Quartz — both of which are about tech culture.

Photo

Tony Hsieh, chief executive of Zappos. Credit Brad Swonetz for The New York Times
Wolfe’s writing doesn’t differ much from those who came before her in this regard. She’s informative and has spoken with lots and lots of people up and down the peninsula. But unlike (most) others who come to the Valley with heaps of skepticism, Wolfe instead treats that plot of earth as if it’s mystical and magical, worthy of a place in history and something akin to the Greek odes to Aphrodite and Dionysus. But gods the nerds are not.

The book begins with the protagonist, Burnham (or antagonist, depending whose side you’re on), who isn’t old enough to drink yet but is debating dropping out of college to follow the Pied Piper of libertarian and contrarian thinking, Peter Thiel, to Silicon Valley. As Wolfe chronicles, Thiel, who has a degree from Stanford University and largely credits where he is today (a billionaire) to his time at that school, started the Thiel Fellowship, in 2011, which awards $100,000 to 20 people under 20 years old to say no to M.I.T., Stanford or, in Burnham’s case, the University of Massachusetts, to pursue an Ayn Randian dream of disrupting archetypal norms.

It won’t be giving away the ending by pointing out that it doesn’t end well for Burnham.

Wolfe’s writing can oscillate between graciously beautiful and being almost too explicative. (I didn’t need to know the name of everyone she met along her journey, but I feel as if I did.) But when her storytelling works, it works well. In one paragraph, she seems to channel Steve Irwin as he slinks up on a feral critter in the woods, talking about these strange men and women who live in the Valley and what drives them. (Changing the world, Wolfe assures us.) In another paragraph, it feels as if she’s trying to channel Robin Leach while he strolls through a gold-encrusted living room, as she talks about the insane amount of money in Silicon Valley. (Wait, I thought they were just trying to change the world?)

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Where I found myself getting frustrated was with Wolfe’s decision to omit facts that don’t fit that particular part of the story. For example, when we first meet Thiel, he is lauded as a genius who made billions on companies like Spotify and Lyft and started his own hedge fund, Clarium Capital. Yes. This is all true. But Wolfe fails to note that Clarium faltered badly with misplaced bets during the Great Recession, or that his support for Donald Trump has made him largely persona non grata in Silicon Valley.

While Wolfe is a fly on the wall in her book, writing as if she is documenting history, Groth places herself smack in the center of her book and, while there, is often blissfully inebriated.

“The Kingdom of Happiness” doesn’t take place in Silicon Valley per se, but it is definitively about tech culture. Groth follows Tony Hsieh, the creator of Zappos, as he pours $350 million of his personal wealth into downtown Las Vegas with the goal of reinventing the area as a blissful business utopia. I won’t be giving away the story by pointing out that it doesn’t end well for Hsieh, either.

Where Groth succeeds is by bringing you along on her journey to understand the world she’s documenting. Where she fails is that she brings you along on every single painful, tedious moment of that journey.

One evening while partying with Hsieh she gets blackout drunk on vodka and ends up being dropped off at a hospital (rather than home) by an altruistic cabdriver who is concerned she has alcohol poisoning. Groth rides bikes around Burning Man with Hsieh, sits across from him on a private plane to Los Angeles, hangs out in his tony Airstream trailer, where he lives, in Las Vegas, goes to Zappos meetings, pool parties, more meetings, and over the course of the book, drinks enough fernet (nicknamed “Kool-Aid” in downtown Vegas) with Hsieh and the Zapponians (the term given to Zappos employees) to make me want to sign all of them up for a few weeks in rehab.

When she’s sober, Groth documents Hsieh’s attempt to integrate “holacracy” into his organizations, a term that rids a company of hierarchy and titles, and instead creates an all-for-one do-what-you-want mentality. (No, I’m not kidding.) It gave me a panic attack just thinking of working in a place like that.

Both books feature Burning Man, which Groth eloquently (and aptly) describes as akin to a “circus on the moon.” As both authors note, the tens of thousands of people — many of whom hail from Silicon Valley — who traipse off to Black Rock City, Nev., once a year to dress like “Mad Max” characters, take a ton of MDMA, and dance late into the morning to playa tech rave music, are all so moved by the experience that they want to recreate it in real life. There are times that you wonder why both authors didn’t pick up the phone and call the parents of some of the people in their books. “Um, Mr. and Mrs. Brown, your son is living in a gluten-free polygamous coding commune and wants to drill into the center of the Earth, you might want to pick him up now.”

It isn’t so much that I didn’t like both of these books as much as I didn’t like the people in them. They, frankly, come across as self-centered lunatics who are intent on making a dent in the universe, without an ounce of self-awareness for the repercussions of how those actions could harm others. While the books do have some skepticism, more often than not, they read as though the authors consider their subjects to be gods, not mere mortals who just happened to be good on computers.

For me, I was left wondering how many more dents our universe can take.

Nick Bilton is the author of “Hatching Twitter.”

A version of this review appears in print on February 19, 2017, on Page BR18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Denting the Universe. Today's Paper|Subscribe

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‘Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story,’ by Alexandra Wolfe
By Kevin Canfield Published 12:29 pm, Thursday, January 26, 2017

"Valley of the Gods" Photo: Simon & Schuster
Photo: Simon & Schuster
IMAGE 1 OF 2 "Valley of the Gods"

The young men and women in Alexandra Wolfe’s new book wear “dorm-chic jeans” and gather at “geek chic” hangouts, where their social awkwardness is embraced as “Asperger’s Chic.”
As you might have guessed from her one-note observations, Wolfe’s subject is the world of technology and Internet commerce. “Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story” is couched as a behind-the-curtain look at various tech subcultures, but it’s mainly a collection of worn-out stereotypes and meaningless generalizations.
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Wolfe’s prose is casual and insidery. “It was so Silicon Valley,” the Wall Street Journal reporter writes of a business plan for an online money-lending site. Yet her knowing depiction of the valley relies on the kind of cliches that have informed dozens of previous books and magazine articles. These pages are rife with “boy CEOs,” “beta” males and “engineering geeks (who) barely knew how to make friends or navigate a cocktail party.”
Wolfe focuses on Thiel Fellowship recipients, budding entrepreneurs who’ve skipped or postponed college in exchange for grants from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. While this approach provides her with some compelling people to interview, it also places Wolfe in the camp of Thiel fans.
Thiel is “charismatic” and “youthful,” she says, a “friend” who “inspired this book: He piqued my curiosity about Silicon Valley and about people who have the courage to think differently and then execute on their ideas. Peter introduced me to people more impressive and fascinating than I thought possible.”

For a journalist who hails from a family of writers — Tom Wolfe is her father — this is an interesting time to align oneself with Thiel. In 2016, several years after the Gawker Media website Valleywag outed him in a blog post, Thiel funded wrestler Hulk Hogan’s invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against the company. The court action resulted in Gawker’s bankruptcy.
Elsewhere in the book, Wolfe isn’t shy about mocking entire professions for their supposed social backwardness, but when it comes to a powerful mogul like Thiel, she equivocates. Thiel’s backing of the Gawker lawsuit, she writes, inspired “a wave of fear that a billionaire with bad press could eradicate an entire media institution. ... Still others considered Thiel a hero, standing up against a company that many in the media didn’t even count as legitimate.”
Valleywag’s actions were disgraceful, but this is a chilling moment for those who value the First Amendment, and the Gawker case is a classic slippery slope: What’s to stop Thiel, or another aggrieved mogul, from laying waste to other media outlets? Thiel supported Donald Trump, who has promised to rewrite libel laws and punish the press. In this climate, it’s hard to understand why an experienced reporter like Wolfe would give Thiel the kid-gloves treatment.

“Valley of the Gods” is set during what Wolfe calls “the second tech boom, from around 2010 to 2015.” She profiles Thiel Fellowship recipients like James Proud, who developed a sleep-tracking device that landed him on “Charlie Rose,” and Laura Deming, who began studying gerontology as a preteen.
It would be silly to yoke her subjects together under a single, sweeping generalization. But Wolfe doesn’t mind trying: “Millennials didn’t like institutions; they liked start-ups, and they liked freedom, and they liked leaving behind the East Coast.”
The casual way in which Wolfe tosses around a borderline offensive term like “Asperger’s Chic” is even more troublesome. “When faced with choosing two engineers with the same skill set,” she writes, “employers would often take the one with the stutter over the smooth talker, any day.” She offers no documentation to back this up.
Wolfe does write some memorable scenes about what she says is the valley’s burgeoning sexual adventurousness. In one chapter, we meet a small group of middle-aged tech industry types — mostly men — who spend a lot of time evangelizing about open marriages and polyamorous affairs.
In 2014, “in an empty, steamy warehouse deep in the Mission District,” Wolfe writes, “tables were set up in an X (for the chromosome, of course), although out of fifty attendees, only three of them had two X chromosomes. While death and longevity were the focus of the evening, the dinner was only foreplay before the after party, where traditional sexual roles would be rejected.”
Colorful set pieces aside, Wolfe isn’t terribly interested in knotty details.
Discussing an entrepreneur who claimed to have come up with an algorithm capable of “judg(ing) a person’s character,” Wolfe makes the following comparison: “They had predicted crime, after all, with systems such as CompStat in New York, a computer statistics management tool introduced into the NYPD in the mid-1990s.”
This is a major oversimplification. In recent years, a series of critics and whistle-blowers have demonstrated that CompStat’s data is fallible and easily distorted by calculating law-enforcement officials.
In another chapter, this one about efforts to slow the aging process, she says that Ted Williams, the late baseball star, “elected to have” his head preserved at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona. Actually, Williams’ will called for his cremation, but two of his adult children, their case aided by contesting documents, opted for the Alcor route. An ugly court fight ensued.
Mostly, Wolfe seems bent on reinforcing stereotypes that have existed for generations. Surveying a group of “engineering royalty,” she finds them “divided into two camps: the nerd clan and the frat clan. The nerd clan embraced their intrinsic nerdiness, nerding out with thick-rimmed glasses and loose T-shirts emblazoned with obscure coding references covering an either skinny or portly physique. The frat clan were the nerds who worked out.”
With its well-chronicled diversity problems and its enormous self-regard, Silicon Valley is always ripe for a takedown. But in “Valley of the Gods,” Wolfe does little more than string together a set of geek-centric cliches.
Kevin Canfield has written for Bookforum, Film Comment and other publications. Email: books@sfchronicle.com
Valley of the Gods
A Silicon Valley Story
By Alexandra Wolfe
(Simon & Schuster; 259 pages; $27)
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VALLEY OF THE GODS
By Alexandra Wolfe

Simon & Schuster
$27.00
ISBN 9781476778945
Published 01/10/2017

Nonfiction / Business & Finance / Business

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January 2017

VALLEY OF THE GODS
The wild world of tech
BookPage review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Imagine that you’re 19 years old and you’ve been offered $100,000 to drop out of college and build the tech start-up of your dreams. For the 20 students who win a Thiel Fellowship each year, with funding and mentoring provided by PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, this is reality. In Valley of the Gods, Wall Street Journal reporter Alexandra Wolfe (daughter of writer Tom Wolfe) profiles several members of the 2011 class of Thiel fellows, among them John Burnham, who aims to mine asteroids for platinum and gold; Laura Deming, who’s focused on extending human longevity; and Paul Gu, who wants to create a new method for loaning money.

Wolfe follows this first class of Thiel fellows from the time when they’re still finalists, waiting to learn if they’ve won an award and undecided as to whether to put off college. She highlights their living spaces (like the communal house depicted in The Social Network, where Mark Zuckerberg and friends lived and worked before Facebook was the world’s highest-valued company), their social lives and their work struggles. Launching a successful tech start-up is incredibly difficult, even with a good idea, an unusual level of intelligence and monetary support, and Wolfe conveys the young entrepreneurs’ ups and downs well.

These stories are interspersed with a more general profile of Silicon Valley, its history, its connection to Stanford University and its oddities, like Cougar Night at the Rosewood Hotel, where “older” women hit on young techies. These asides make for fascinating reading, but they take us away from the Thiel Fellows and their struggles, so we care less about them than we otherwise might have. Still, readers seeking an inside view of this high-tech mecca will certainly find it in Valley of the Gods.

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

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Book review: Valley Of The Gods— A Silicon Valley Story
In Valley Of The Gods—A Silicon Valley Story, author Alexandra Wolfe describes a year in the life of the first batch of Thiel fellows
Sonya Dutta Choudhury

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Valley Of The Gods— A Silicon Valley Story: By Alexandra Wolfe, Simon and Schuster, 261 pages, Rs599.
Valley Of The Gods— A Silicon Valley Story: By Alexandra Wolfe, Simon and Schuster, 261 pages, Rs599.
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In 2010, billionaire investor Peter Thiel announced that he would award fellowships of $100,000 (around Rs65 lakh now) “to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom”. Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and a graduate from the US’ Stanford University, invited applications from high-school students for what he originally called his “20 under 20” programme.

In Valley Of The Gods—A Silicon Valley Story, author Alexandra Wolfe, journalist with The Wall Street Journal and daughter of novelist Tom Wolfe, describes a year in the life of the first batch of Thiel fellows. Wolfe focuses on two in particular—John Burnham, “with bright blue eyes, blond hair, and a seemingly permanent smirk, who wants to mine asteroids”, and Laura Deming, “a striking seventeen-year-old half-Asian wunderkind, (who) looked like a school girl gone bad” and wanted to create her own private equity firm to fund anti-ageing breakthroughs.

“The first year’s fellows ended up being part of my window into Silicon Valley’s elite and underbelly,” says Wolfe early on in the book, which is crammed with details of the fads and fashions of Silicon Valley personalities, like the investors, the entrepreneurs, their wives and girlfriends.

On the Silicon Valley women, Wolfe is expansive. She writes: “Instead of socialites, Silicon Valley has technolites. Far from chairing the charity ball, the modus operandi of the upwardly mobile female is to match her hobby with online payments system PayPal, sell jewellery or embroidered dog beds or pastel beds online, launch a website, and then anoint herself CEO”.

Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen (wife of investor Marc Andreessen), philanthrophy professor and head of a charitable foundation, is one such colourful character. Others include Ellen Pao, once partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, and Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg.

She describes trending female fashions—“the less cutesy, feminine, and frilly you could be as a Silicon Valley woman, the better. Of course, all women like to feel attractive, which you are allowed to do, as long as it is mostly through toning, rather than an expensive dress. Skirts are ok as long as they have pockets, similar to jeans, or somehow resemble construction-type attire, showing one’s toughness.”

Burnham and Deming, the two main protagonists in the book, end up rather lost in this landscape. Burnham abandons his asteroid mining project and half-heartedly develops a personal server platform before fleeing back to East Coast colleges to study philosophy, religion and math. Deming persists with her longevity project but ends up spending more time on the techconference speaker circuit than in working on significant breakthroughs. Reading their stories, the Thiel fellowship feels like a failed experiment. Wolfe writes well but the story drifts. The fellows meander through chapters like “Aspergers Chic” and “Hippy Dippy Coding Communes”, as does the book itself, in a hotchpotch of directionless detail.

Valley Of The Gods is not an inspiring account of an entrepreneurial life story like Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, founder of online shoe and clothing retailer Zappos, or an expose biography of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in The Everything Store. Nor is it like the Silicon Valley TV series, which works brilliantly in its caricatures of Silicon Valley eccentricities. It falls instead into no-man’s land, with some interesting glimpses into the high life of the Silicon Valley.

First Published: Sun, Apr 30 2017. 03 29 PM IST
TOPICS: VALLEY OF THE GODS VALLEY OF THE GODS— A SILICON VALLEY STORY ALEXANDRA WOLFE TOM WOLFE BOOK REVIEW
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FEBRUARY 22, 2017 ROBERTMCGRATH 5 COMMENTS
Valley of the Gods by Alexandra Wolfe

Alexandra Wolfe’s new book joins the growing collection of “silicon valley stories”, including Chaos Monkeys, Hatching Twitter, Dogfight, and Year Without Pants. Wolfe documents the supercharged environment of Silicon Valley, a place where the kids are definitely in charge, and someone gave them billions of dollars to play with.

Throughout the book, Wolfe covers the progress of several of the youngsters who won Thiel Foundation Fellowships, following them through their year.

Wolfe’s coverage of the Thiel kids is extremely interesting, not at all matching up the romantic vision of this program.

Wolfe also gives us first hand fly-on-the-wall insight into a variety of goings on in SV, hanging out in group residences, attending to parties, workshops, and various peculiar and indescribable hybrid events. She also interviewed many notables and not-so-notables of the Valley, and offers more observations than I really need about food and fashion.

[Read the full review]

Alexandra Wolfe, Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2017.
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Valley of the Gods, by Alexandra Wolfe

April 3, 2017 Dan Gelernter

Not long ago I visited a friend who’d moved to Silicon Valley to work in the startup industry. He had undergone a baffling change: The formerly sports-jacketed East Coaster had become a gluten-free, paleo-dieting, T-shirt-wearing Burning Man.

Burning Man, for the uninitiated, is an annual week-long gathering in the Nevada desert attended by thousands—around 70,000, at last count. There are no hard and fast rules, but among the 10 guiding principles are “radical inclusion,” “radical self-expression,” and, of course, “gifting.” That last principle means you should always do your best to give something to everyone you meet, even if the only thing you have on hand is an interpretive dance performed from your bicycle. This admirably nonmaterialistic lifestyle obviously presupposes that you don’t have a family at home waiting for your next paycheck.

To a cynical New Yorker—or possibly to anyone beyond San Francisco’s cultural blast-radius—Burning Man appears to be a gaggle of grownups imitating their children in a giant box of dirt.

Attendees can reject civilization (Western, Eastern, whatever) as a whole and try to build something new and better from scratch. Religion is important, but only in the form of yoga and other self-exploratory immediacy-driven experiences. And youth is emphasized, above all and forever. If we’re too old to be kids, we can at least act like them. And while Alexandra Wolfe does not put it in so many words, we could call it a new paganism.

Read the rest of this review here, on the Weekly Standard.

DAN GELERNTER

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