I had never heard of Kara Swisher before I read this book, but from the bottom of my heart I tell her, thank you. I am 85 years old, and I have been a fan of technology since before it was called that. The year that The World Wide Web, was conceived, 1962, I was in the jungles of Viet Nam, far away from technology living with an indigenous people. In 1995 my wife and I bought our first computer. We do art and craft shows and design our own marketing and POP materials. That winter just before Christmas, we were doing a Christmas show in a mall in San Antonio, TX. An older gentleman approached me and called me aside and said Sir, there is something happening that is the new face of business, it is called the World Wide Web, and I think your business would work really well on it. Go find out about it. So we did, and my wife went and took a crash course in HTML and in April of 1996 our website went live along with the less than a million live at the time, probably less than a quarter of a million actually. Orders started pouring in, and they still are 28 years later. I didn't know who all these people were that were responsible for all this magic, but it didn't matter, it worked, and it changed my life and my wife's life, and started us on a path we could not have previously imagined. Listening to Kara tell her story about her journey and about all those men boys that shaped the digital age, was very stimulating and interesting, I loved it and the way it was presented. So read her book, it is a treasure, and I thank you Kara Swisher, great job.

I have admired the author’s writing throughout the past 25 years and thought this book was great until three quarters of the way through it. In the beginning and majority of the book Swisher dishes the dirt on technology billionaires with a great writing style. After awhile it gets bogged down with too much negativity on Silicon Valley’s leadership. Plus, and I know that the book is part autobiographical, she spends too much time on her personal life. I would have liked her to elaborate more on the “good guys “ in tech such as Mark Cuban to name one. The other thing that left me flat was not going out on a limb enough on where the industry is going. I was disappointed at the end of it.

I am a huge fan of Kara Swisher. I listen to both of her podcasts and wanted to read more in depth information about the tech executives in Silicon Valley and elsewhere she often discusses. Kara does a great job of relaying her experiences and history with the reader. Her straightforward approach is appreciated and respected by this reader. If you are interested in learning about some background information on the tech titans, this is where you should start!

I am a handful+ years Kara’s senior and was introduced to the tech world writing Assembler, Basic, Fortran, and COBOL code in the mid 1970s at a time when my TI Calculator cost more than PCs does today. While I and started my professional career punching card decks to feed mainframes, I pivoted into emerging tech trends in the late 1970s with the emergence of the Apple II and VisiCalc. I led the PC and email revolution at my company in the 1980s using ARPANET along with introducing Local Area Networks, SQL databases, and client/server computing later that decade. One of my numerous periodical subscriptions was the Wall Street Journal. I looked forward to reading Walt’s insights and referenced them frequently in my own writings at that time. Several years later I was also introduced to Kara through her perceptive journalism in the Journal. While my own professional focus was on B2B technology, I have also been an early adopter of consumer tech since the early 1990s from PCs and Pilots, mobile phones, Blackberries, and GPS devices along with an early adopter of LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and many other social media platforms in the 2000s. I have been an avid follower of smart journalists like Walt, Kara, and scores of others since the early 1980s. While I resided on the east coast of the US, Kara and Walt provided me with a front-row seat of all the new tech innovations emerging from the Silicon Valley and the entire west coast from Seattle to San Diego. I continued to follow Kara into the teens with the launch of Recode Decode podcast and listened to many of her interviews with tech pioneers. Quite fortunate for me, I caught Kara’s interview with Scott Galloway in May 2019 and became instantly addicted to the chemistry between this intriguing pair. I subsequently followed Kara and Scott to “Pivot”, “Sway”, “On with Kara Swisher”, and of course all things Scott Galloway including “No Mercy / No Malice”, “The Prof G Pod”, Section Memberships, and soon to be five of his books. Listening to their podcasts have become an important element in my daily life and am proud to confess that I have not missed a single one. I thoroughly enjoyed this stroll down memory lane with Kara citing her interactions with dozens of my heroes (and antiheros) over the past three decades. While I’ve previously read and listened to many of these stories over the period, I very much looked forward to consuming several more chapters each day. Technology has also been a “Love Story” for me throughout my professional life and I have also had the pleasure to publish multiple books on this topic. I would highly recommend “Burn Book” for all tech enthusiasts and anyone interested in the history and future of how tech has had such an incredible impact on each of our lives. Lastly, I’ve heard Kara briefly mention her father’s unexpected passing dozens of times in her podcasts over the years. Reading her passages in this book made me reflect about the impact of losing my brother, mother, and father unexpectedly in my 20s and how it impacted and transformed me to make each day count for the past four decades. Kara and Scott have not only informed how I think about business, tech, and politics, but how I live my life each and every day.

I enjoyed the lively writing and sharp commentary on leading people in tech. I disliked the self-absorbed style that unnecessarily seeks to show how influential and clever the author is.

Saw Kara at a recent security software event. She was the closing keynote speaker and we needed the break after a couple days of corporate and technical superlatives. Book is great and I haven’t been so challenged from a vocabulary standpoint in a long while. We’re about the same age and I’ve met a lot a tech people too serving as an industry analyst.