NO PLAN B: The Adventures of a Carbon Unit in Silicon Valley, or How I Made a Million Dollars in Hi-Tech Startups Basically by Just Showing Up

by D. Scott Apel

NO PLAN The Adventures of a Carbon Unit in Silicon Valley, or How I Made a Million Dollars in Hi-Tech Startups Basically by Just Showing Up (Don’t Try This at Home) Ever wonder what it was like to participate in the Silicon Valley hi-tech revolution? To work at a startup struggling for survival? To be deeply embedded in a major company like Apple? This worklife memoir gets you in on the ground floor...and like its author, you’ll never rise any higher. NO PLAN B is not a history of Silicon Valley. It is not the story of a struggling startup that went on to rule the world. It is the far more common story of a few startups that tried but tanked, as witnessed by a cubicle dweller who went down with those ships, often without a life preserver. NO PLAN B is not a Silicon Valley overview. It is an underview. It is a memo sent from the trenches—notes from the break room, not the boardroom. No Plan B is not a business book; it’s a work book. There are more than enough books about Silicon Valley that concentrate on The Big the epic struggles of a startup to survive, and the outrageous and outsized egos of their larger-than-life founders. But for every successful startup there are a hundred that go belly-up, and for every Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg there are 10,000 nameless, faceless workers who toil in obscurity to make the vision of these visionaries a success...if only just to hold on to their jobs. Nobody tells their stories. NO PLAN B is one...

661 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 13, 2020

Reviews

[Anandh Sundar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very few people explicitly acknowledge their genetic lottery or the role of luck, but this book does it and hence deserves a 4* for this alone.