From Optimism to Reckoning: Reflections on Silicon Valley with Steven Levy 7 | 43

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Reckoning with Silicon Valley’s Promise—and Its Reality

Take an honest look at the optimism that shaped Silicon Valley’s early culture and how those ideals unravelled. Kim & Steven candidly share their unique perspective of how it feels to recognize the gap between what they believed and what actually happened as two people who had a front row seat.

Radical Candor Podcast Resources

Radical Candor Podcast Transcript

Kim Scott: Hello everybody and welcome to the Radical Candor Podcast. I'm Kim Scott.

Jason: And I'm Jason Rosoff. And today we're joined by Steven Levy. Steven has been covering Silicon Valley since the days when tech leaders saw themselves as rebels, challenging authority ... as WIRED’s editor at large, he's chronicled the evolution from Idealistic Home Brew Computer Club to today's billionaire, CEO at Mar-a-Lago moment.

Kim Scott: Steven, welcome to Radical Candor.

Steven Levy: Great seeing you.

Kim Scott: Great to see you. What folks may not know about Steven is that he was one of the early champions of my writing career. I had written a novel about what it was like to work at Google and Steven read it and wrote a nice article about that unpublished novel.

Steven Levy: Sure, yeah. The headline in the article was, I thought I knew Silicon Valley. I was wrong. And the thing that first drew me to writing about technology was the exciting, irreverent transformational nature of it. I started my journalistic career covering the rock music world... I had never touched a computer before then. But talking to those people, it blew my mind.

...
Steven Levy: Well, I guess what happens to anyone if they're worth a hundred billion dollars? ... I don’t think everyone works for Google is a criminal or a bad person, but,

Kim Scott: No. In fact, I still love Google.

Steven Levy: Well, you're helping people go through situations like this. You're doing something, you know, I mean, you're still.

Kim Scott: too little, too late, but.

Steven Levy: you know, we do what we can. Right. you're not still working for Google, no, I'm not. In fact, I don't even have any stock.

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