Special Characters: My Adventures with Tech's Titans and Misfits
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“CNN’s former senior tech correspondent shares her front-row seat on the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and other new-media empires—and the geeks turned entrepreneurs who founded them.”—People An unflinching, era-defining story of self-discovery and breaking barriers by award-winning investigative reporter Laurie Segall. In 2008, 23-year-old Laurie Segall was a newly minted assistant at CNN and was living in an East Village walk-up apartment. As Wall Street was crashing down, Segall began discovering a group of scrappy misfits who were rising from the ashes of the recession to change the world: the tech entrepreneurs. A misfit herself, Segall gained entrance to New York’s burgeoning tech scene, with its limitless cash flow and parties populated by geeks-turned-billionaires. Back at the news desk, she rose through the ranks at CNN, while these entrepreneurs went from minnows to sharks, building companies that would become our democracy and our social fabric: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Tinder. Over the course of a decade, Laurie Segall became one of the first reporters to give airtime to many of these founders—from Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) to Jack Dorsey (Twitter) to Kevin Systrom (Instagram) to Travis Kalanick (Uber)—while tracking their evolution and society’s cultural shift in the CNN startup beat she created. By the end of her tenure at CNN, she had become its on-air senior technology correspondent and had witnessed the rise of second-wave tech, from the boom to the “complicated years” to the backlash, as her misfits emerged as some of the world’s most influential leaders. A coming-of-age narrative chronicling an era transformed, Special Characters is, at its core, a young woman’s origin story—in love, in career, and in life—and an account of the humans behind the companies that have shaped our modern society. Filled with emotional heft and razor-sharp observations, Segall’s empowering memoir is a richly rendered backstage pass to the tech bubble that reimagined the ethos of our social, political, and cultural experience. “Fans of Brotopia or anyone who wants a backstage pass to Zuckerberg and some of the biggest co.’s of our time, you’ll devour this.” — The Skimm What is it really like to witness the birth of the platforms that run our lives, and the misfits who built them? An Insider Account of the Tech Boom: Follow Laurie Segall from a walk-up apartment to the front lines of the CNN startup beat she created, gaining unprecedented access to the founders of Facebook, Twitter, and Uber. A Woman in a Man’s World: Discover the challenges and triumphs of a young female reporter carving out a career in the male-dominated spaces of broadcast news and Silicon Valley. The Titans of Tech, Up Close: Go behind the soundbites with Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Travis Kalanick, witnessing their evolution from scrappy outsiders to some of the most powerful people on the planet. From Boom to Backlash: Track the cultural shift as the promise of a connected world gives way to the complicated realities of data, privacy, and the power of social media.About this book
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