Silicon Valley Stories

Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings and INSEAD professor Erin Meyer lay out the operating system behind the company: hire and pay for top talent, demand constant candor, then strip away controls such as vacation and expense approvals. A first-hand guide to how culture, not process, let Netflix move from mailing DVDs to streaming to producing its own shows.

The Wall Street Journal reporter who exposed Theranos tells how Elizabeth Holmes raised more than $700 million and reached a valuation of about $9 billion for blood-testing technology that did not work. A detailed case study of how a famous board, star investors and retail partners failed at basic due diligence, and how employees and one newspaper finally stopped it.

Bloomberg reporter Sarah Frier tells how Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger built Instagram, sold it to Facebook for $1 billion when it had 13 employees, and then lost a long struggle with Mark Zuckerberg over its independence. Winner of the 2020 FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year, and arguably the best case study of a big tech acquisition.

Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Ashlee Vance's 2015 biography follows Elon Musk from a bruising South African childhood through Zip2, PayPal and the 2008 crisis that nearly sank SpaceX and Tesla at once. It is the best account of how Musk raised money, took risk and drove engineers in the years before he became the world's richest man.

Brad Stone's sequel to The Everything Store covers Amazon's decade from 2010 to the pandemic: Alexa, the Fire phone, AWS, the third-party marketplace, the last-mile delivery network, advertising, Whole Foods, HQ2 and the antitrust backlash. For investors it is the most detailed reported account of how Bezos built the company's operating leverage.

Two Wall Street Journal reporters who covered the company tell the full story of Adam Neumann's office-subletting company. It reached a $47 billion private valuation on SoftBank's money and lost most of it when its 2019 IPO filing went public. The book is a case study in what happens when cheap capital, founder control and a tech-company story meet real estate economics.

The New York Times reporter who broke many of Uber's worst stories tells how Travis Kalanick built the company by ignoring regulators and rules, and how the same culture got him forced out by his own investors in 2017. A close study of founder control, growth at any cost and what venture capital tolerates while the valuation keeps rising.

The authorized biography of Apple's co-founder, built from more than 40 interviews with Jobs and over 100 with family, colleagues and rivals. Walter Isaacson shows how one difficult, obsessive founder was pushed out of his own company, rebuilt himself through NeXT and Pixar, and returned to turn a near-bankrupt Apple into the most valuable business of its era.

Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull, writing with journalist Amy Wallace, explains how the studio went from a money-losing hardware company backed by Steve Jobs to the maker of Toy Story and Finding Nemo, and what management habits kept its films good. A practical book on candor, failure and protecting new ideas inside a growing company.

A Fortune technology editor with rare cooperation from Mark Zuckerberg tells Facebook's story from a Harvard dorm room to roughly 500 million users in 2010. It is the best early account of how the company grew, how it was financed, why Zuckerberg turned down buyers and how it learned to make money, though written by an admirer before the company went public.

The former Financial Times editor writes the first Western biography of SoftBank's Masayoshi Son, the risk-loving dealmaker behind early bets on Yahoo and Alibaba, the iPhone in Japan, and both Uber and WeWork. It is a study of how one founder's appetite for leverage and conviction made and lost several fortunes across three tech cycles.

A longtime Morgan Stanley banker who became SoftBank's chief dealmaker and a top adviser to Masayoshi Son recounts the tech-bubble deals, the boardroom rivalries and a covert smear campaign that drove him out. It gives an insider's view of how mega-deals get done and argues that more money does not buy more control.

A reported account of the messiest leveraged buyout in recent memory: Elon Musk's $44 billion purchase of Twitter, his attempt to walk away, the lawsuit that forced him to close, and the fallout. Deal people will see what happens when a buyer with heavy bank debt, no clear business plan and motives that have little to do with returns takes over an advertising-funded company.

Winner of the 2025 FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year. Stephen Witt tells how Nvidia went from a Denny's booth and a near-fatal first chip to the most valuable company on earth. Built on rare access to Jensen Huang and his circle, it shows investors why a stock that went nowhere for more than a decade became the main bet on artificial intelligence.

Bloomberg Businessweek's Max Chafkin wrote the first major biography of Peter Thiel: PayPal co-founder, Facebook's first outside investor, Palantir co-founder, Founders Fund partner, and funder of the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker and of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. It is a critical account of how venture money and a contrarian worldview turned into political power.

Two New York Times reporters reconstruct Facebook's years between the 2016 and 2020 elections: Russian interference, Cambridge Analytica, misinformation and the January 6 Capitol riot. They show how Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg's push for growth and advertising revenue kept winning out over safety. It is a close study of governance and key-person risk at one of the world's most valuable companies.

A history of venture capital from Arthur Rock and Fairchild Semiconductor to Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Accel, SoftBank and the unicorn era, built on interviews with the investors themselves. It explains the logic of the business: most bets fail, a few return the fund many times over, and that skewed math shapes how VCs pick, back and fight with founders.