After On
The definitive novel of today’s Silicon Valley, After On flash captures our culture and technological movement with up-to-the-instant savvy. Matters of privacy and government intrusion, post-Tinder romance, nihilistic terrorism, artificial consciousness, synthetic biology and much more are tackled with authority and brash playfulness by New York Times best selling author Rob Reid.
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Year Zero
Low-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it’s a prank, not an alien encounter, when a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous nun show up at his office. But Frampton and Carly are highly advanced (if bumbling) extraterrestrials. The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly hooked on American pop songs ever since “Year Zero” (1977 to us), resulting in the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang and bankrupting the whole universe. Nick has just been tapped to clean up this mess before things get ugly. Thankfully, this unlikely galaxy-hopping hero does know a thing or two about copyright law. Now, with Carly and Frampton as his guides, Nick has forty-eight hours to save humanity—while hoping to wow the hot girl who lives down the hall from him.
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Architects of the Web
No industry truly needs lots of MBAs. But most need at least a few. And in 1995, the nascent World Wide Web had scarcely a dozen. Those of us with the dumb luck to have landed there were able to write our own tickets as our industry expanded by a factor of thousands. Some became venture capitalist. Others, entrepreneurs. I leveraged my situation into a hitch writing a long, challenging book with dim commercial prospects (Pro Tip: Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be writers).
My ideal reader was someone like me 18 months earlier – a nontechnical business type with no knowledge of the Web, but an urge to understand how it would restructure the way we lived our lives and did business. I was as fervent an evangelist, believer and witness as most preachers are for their faith. The Web was an obscure domain that none of my friends outside of tech had even heard of. Perhaps ten of my 800 business school classmates were issued email addresses after graduating, and I wanted to bring them the gospel of all that would soon engulf them like a Bengali typhoon (in a good way, of course). I hoped to paint a highly accessible picture of how radically things – almost all things – were about to change, and why.
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Year One
Title notwithstanding, there is no tie between this and my novel Year Zero. This was my first book, which I wrote in my mid-20’s while a student at (you guessed it) Harvard Business School. I went to HBS with the goal of one day becoming . . . a novelist. Yes, really! Risk aversion drives people to do the darnedest things, and going to HBS instead of writing my first novel was rather cowardly. But that long ago decision was the right one. I met many lifelong friends at b-school for one thing. For another, that two-year side trip did launch my writing career – which set me up to become a novelist many years later, when I was actually ready for it.
Like hundreds of my classmates, I visited the office that connects students with HBS graduates for career advice soon after arriving. Then (like absolutely none of my classmates) I asked about novelists in the alumni ranks. Which earned me the strangest look. But the staff came back with the astounding news that there was one. And she lived just a few miles away!
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