Upstarts, by Brad Stone, loc 337-353 describes Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky’s preoccupation with Silicon Valley as a dissatisfied recent graduate of design school:
At the time he was obsessively following the story of the fantastically successful founders of the video-sharing site YouTube; he was spending hours on the site as well as watching Steve Jobs’s keynote presentations and the television film Pirates of Silicon Valley. This was a universe where new things really did change reality. “I got kind of obsessed,” he says. “I was living vicariously, escaping to a world where someone could build something and actually change something. I was not doing that. I was sitting in a dark office making stuff for closets and landfills.”
Interestingly, Chesky also describes being inspired by a biography of Walt Disney. This highlights how there have always been mechanisms through which people find inspiration in the lives of others. However does the mediation of Silicon Valley lend it a particular power, in so far as there are more cultural products in circulation which depict lives lived there?
Mark Carrigan 