Unicorn: a silicon valley love story

by Steven Hahn

It’s 1999 during the first dot-com boom. America is awash in new companies powered by young founders riding the Hokusai-rendered wave that was the dawn of the World Wide Web. Valuations are as fat as the revenues thin. But the Early True Believers believe. This is Silicon Valley.

Back east, Sloane Richmond, a corporate lawyer, quits New York for the Valley to follow her old flame Tae Kim, now the visionary founder of a start-up revolutionizing NLP (natural language processing).

Driven to see “if the future has a future” she ascends to become the general counsel of the hottest tech company in America, only to find herself on a collision course with Silicon Valley’s thorniest secrets and the very nature of language itself.

Will Sloane solve the ever-threatening crises that could doom the future of Interstitial.com? Will she unpack the mystery of her ex, Tae Kim? Will she finally manifest her Silicon Valley dreams? And for the Valley, is this the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

64 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 23, 2022

About the author

Steven Hahn is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor in American History at the University of Pennsylvania.