Valley of the Gods

December 12, 2016
Wall Street Journal reporter Wolfe’s debut zeroes in on a subculture of Silicon Valley’s youngest entrepreneurs, recipients of the Thiel Fellowship, a two-year program funded by Paypal founder Peter Thiel who doles out 100,000 grants to people under the age of 20 so they can “drop out of school and head to Silicon Valley.” The book loosely follows the first class of fellows through the experiences of Jonathan Burnham, a teen with a dream of mining heavy metals from asteroids, who was awarded the fellowship in 2011. Through Burnham’s story, readers are introduced to world of dorm-like housing, home to an assortment of oddballs who subsist on weird diets and seek ways to never die. Wolfe provides a lighthearted, at times funny, view of Silicon Valley filled with chatty prose and throwaway comments about investors who are more interested in taking women on dates then backing their technologies. Wolfe rarely addresses the underbelly of this California playscape, touching only briefly on issues such as gender discrimination.

November 15, 2016
An account of the rising generation of Silicon Valleyites, who want it all--and then some.Peter Thiel has made headlines recently for being the only noted tech leader to support the Donald Trump candidacy. He takes center stage in Wall Street Journal reporter Wolfe's look at a contrarian experiment of his: take the best and the brightest young people--the nerdier the better--have them unlearn any squishy, soft humanities stuff they may have learned in school, keep them out of college, and train them in think tanks and labs to take their places among the "tribe of overage boys" that constitutes the region's and world's tech elite. Leading the class of "Asperger's chic" wunderkinder in this tale is Jonathan Burnham, who arrives at Thiel's academy with the matter-of-fact assurance that one day soon he is going to mine asteroids. Guided by a right-wing tech blogger code-named Mencius Moldbug--Wolfe likes this factoid enough to repeat it a couple of times--Burnham makes for the perfect Ayn Rand-ian libertarian in the Hobbesian world of the startup. Others in his class are biotech- or business services-inclined, but all promise to become a new kind of entrepreneur for a happy future world. Thiel, a Stanford graduate, insists ironically here that college isn't for everyone but "made sense for some people--such as for him," and in the end his promised shake-up of the whole college-to-career model amounts to a kind of yearlong summer camp for the geekily gifted. Wolfe departs from the standard business/human interest narrative template only to the extent that Burnham does, for by the end of the account, he has found a gaping spiritual void in his life that he fills by enrolling in college and reading Shakespeare and Greek literature as a "needed retreat from the madness he'd just experienced out west."Nothing surprising but of some interest to business readers and entrepreneurs looking for ways to "disrupt" education.

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January 1, 2017

Wolfe (staff reporter, the Wall Street Journal) was intrigued by the number of young people who are attracted to Silicon Valley each year to start businesses, calling it a badge of honor to have unsuccessfully tried a new venture. She decided to follow several of these individuals in their quests and here attempts to document their trials and tribulations in working through the process of starting a business. Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and partner of the Founders Fund, set up a program to get students to drop out of college, concentrate on computer coding, and come up with a business idea that, with the assistance of his organization, could prosper. Wolfe follows three members of Thiel's "20 Under 20" fellowship program who have been given $100,000 each to come up with new innovations. The cooperative ventures they participate in portray an interesting subculture. Thiel's ideas are credited with inspiring this book, but the cultural aspects go beyond him. VERDICT Wolfe incorporates useful information about these young people and their lifestyles that can be adopted generally.--Littleton Maxwell, Robins Sch. of Business, Univ. of Richmond

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