Nudist on the Late Shift
The True Story Of The Greatest Legal Creation Of Wealth In The History Of The World, And The People Making It Happen. Masses Of Entrepreneurs And Tech Wizards, Immigrants And Investors, Dreamers And Visionaries Are Heading West To Seek Their Fortune. Their Mecca Is Silicon Valley - Where One Person Can Achieve So Much With Just Initiative, Talent And A Good Idea. It Is A Mad, Fertile Time In Superachiever Land. Meet David Filo, Co-Founder Of Yahoo And Worth Over $500 Million, Who Still Sleeps Under His Desk One Night A Week. Meet The 26-Year-Old Who Is Already On His Fifth Start-Up Venture. Meet The Man With The Biggest Brain In The World. Meet The Nudist Who Works The Late Shift.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
8mentions
8people
2009–2023years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- >What other similar books would you recommend?
Similar era at least: Po Bronson - The Nudist on the Late Shift ... and other tales of Silicon Valley (1999)
- > I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms.
I’m happy with the destruction of Twitter. I think it’s a net negative for the world and we’ll be better off without it. This might be the only tech I’ve ever felt like this about (including atomic bombs). I think it amplifies and even creates hate and division.
It will be funny if ten years from now we find out it was a gawker-style takedown with the intent to purposely destroy something in a lasting and permanent way as described in Ryan Holiday’s book about Thiel’s purposeful execution of strategy to destroy gawker, https://www.grahammann.net/book-notes/conspiracy-ryan-holida...
PS- are there any other business/tech “case study” type books out there. I also liked Clifford Stoll’s Cuckoo’s Egg, John Brooks’ Business Adventures, Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, Po Bronson’s Nudist on the Late Shift, and David Kaplan’s Silicon Boys. Looking for more of what I suspect is more common than I can find.
- We interviewed the inventor of PowerPoint for our blog, and he gave a fascinating inside story of how he almost sold to Apple before eventually sealing a deal with Microsoft:
https://blog.zamzar.com/2016/06/10/deal-of-the-century-how-m...
We also recently interviewed the creator of Microsoft Word who talked about working with Bill Gates in the 1980s:
https://blog.zamzar.com/2020/03/20/an-interview-with-richard...
For books I’d massively recommend:
- The Cuckoo’s Egg, a first-person account of the hunt for a computer hacker who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory[1]
- Founders at Work, for early Silicon Valley startup stories[2]
- The Nudist on the Late Shift by Po Bronson, for similarly wacky late ‘90s/early 2000’s startup stories[3]
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98233.Founders_at_Work
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/119751.The_Nudist_on_the...
- There's "The Nudist on the Late Shift" by Po Bronson, which is an expansion on his various Wired writing from the Dotcom era. It's pretty good.
https://www.amazon.com/Nudist-Shift-Other-Silicon-Valley/dp/...
You can read the first (and best) chapter here: https://www.wired.com/1999/07/pilgrims/
- The Nudist On The Late Shift is a great one.
The Nat Geo TV series "Valley Of The Boom" was on earlier this year, that was entertaining.
- Founders at Work was a good one. Some that I really liked (not all biographical per se, some more non-fiction, and many non-SV related):
------------Tech------------
"The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison" (Oracle, Ellison, the birth of the DB)
"The New New Thing" (about Jim Clark, netscape, SGI, what became webmd)
"In the plex" (Google)
"The Nudist on the Late Shift" (kind of like founders at work, a bit light but hey)
"Hackers" (by Stephen Levy, again, kind of light, but entertaining)
"The Hacker Crackdown" (by Bruce Sterling, entertaining)
------------General Business------------
"Losing My Virginity" (Richard Branson)
"King of Capital" (Steve Schwarzman, guy that started Blackrock)
"Art of the Deal" (Trump)
"The Age of Turbulence" (Alan Greenspan)
"Barbarians at the Gate" (RJR Nabisco takeover in 80s)
"Liar's Poker" (the mortgage bond)
"Den of Thieves" (Milken, Boesky, the junk bond)
"Conspiracy of Fools" (Enron)
------------Historical------------
"Carnegie" (by Peter Krass)
"Dark Genius of Wall Street" (Jay Gould + most of the robber barons)
"Titan: The life of John D. Rockefeller" (Rockefeller)
"The House of Morgan" (JP Morgan, etc.)
"Disraeli: A Brief Life" (Benjamin Disraeli)
"Hitler: Hubris", "Hitler: Nemesis", "The Hitler Myth" (all by Ian Kershaw, all really good, covers a lot of territory)
"Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945" (not biography but REALLY good)
------------Cool Story------------
"Life" (Keith Richards, still in the middle of it but so far so good)
"Blow" (the book that turned into the movie, they left a lot out of the movie)
"Catch me if you can" (book that turned into the movie, again, they left a ton out of the movie, the book is autobiographical)
That's a pretty good list of some of the ones I've enjoyed over the years, hope someone finds some of them enjoyable.
