Siliconned

How the Tech Industry Solves Fake Problems, Hoards Idle Workers, and Makes Doomed Bets with Other People's Money

By: Emmanuel Maggiori

Narrated by: Ariel Paredes

Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

A start-up wastes a billion dollars making videos nobody wants to watch. A city rushes to build landing pads for flightless air taxi prototypes. Tech giants hire thousands of techies for fake projects to stop them working for rivals.

The tech industry has a tendency to go crazy. In Siliconned, industry insider Emmanuel Maggiori decodes tech’s hysteria and explains why we all pay the price for it.

You’ll discover:

- How tech investment became a blind hunt for pipe dreams, unicorns, and explosive growth;

- How shady incentives reward tech investors for burning cash;

- How governments and central banks pour fuel on the fire;

- How tech companies squander talent, and how well-intentioned fads like Agile and Lean help cover it up.

From low interest rates to gigantic bubbles, Siliconned turns the tech industry upside down and suggests how to fix it.

©2024 Emmanuel Maggiori (P)2024 Emmanuel Maggiori

It's too good to be true until ... nah, still is

How do startup tech companies appear overnight, generate world-wide buzz, raise millions of dollars, lose millions in ongoing costs, then fold without ever delivering a product all the while making founders and investors rich? This book contains a crash course in the inner workings of the financial institutions and business mentalities that have become all too commonplace in the tech sector. Topics are introduced gradually with real-world examples so you don't feel thrown into deep water, but steadily build upon previous chapters to explore and expose the dirty secrets being used to essentially manufacture free money, or outright take it from public trusts. A fascinating and timely discussion by Emmanuel Maggiori and narrated clearly by Ariel Paredes, there's barely a factoid or lesson that isn't immediately relevant and thought-provoking. [disclosure: I received this title for free and listened at 1.75x]

Great Summary of the State of Big Tech and Startups

Great narrator. Easily digestible book, with good examples that tie together good conclusions. As a software engineer, and someone who's been involved with angel investors I the past I thought the book did a good job of walking through the problems with tech industry and vcs.

Excellently written and extremely informative.

Received Audiobook for Free

This really is a great book and I learned quite a bit despite always thinking of myself as being knowledgeable about such things.

Some of the stories about mistakes companies made with what usually amounts to “our” money are both scary and entertaining. I use “our” money loosely as the author describes how whether through your retirement plan investing, your state/local government investing, or you directly investing through mutual funds or stock purchases, we wind up paying for a lot of these mistakes.