Andrew, thank you so much for coming on the Tech Mem Ride Home.

Awesome, thank you for having me.

Yeah, I I've been seeing your tweets all week where you were

super excited that you're refreshing your

browser in the Amazon author portal and things like that.

Believe me, I know how that feels.

So first of all, you know, congratulations on the book and, you know know it must feel great.

It does feel great after three years of research

and interviews and writing and more writing

and even more writing and locking myself in a closet to record the audio book.

It feels good to finally be have it out there this week.

So can I start with the dumbest possible question, which is, you know, where the idea for the book came from and why you wanted to do it, but that'll lead us right into the thesis of the book,

which I think is really important to get to.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, so I've spent nearly 15 years in Silicon Valley, and one of the things that really jumped out at me as

soon as I moved I grew up in Seattle and I moved to Silicon Valley in 2007 is just how special and how interesting the companies are that

get built in the Bay Area.

And they are among the most successful, most impactful products in the world. These are products like Airbnb and

Instagram and Dropbox and Slack and all these amazing products that I explore in the book and and the question is what is the secret?

What is the propelling force that unifies all of those things and is there one and so what I argue and what I got

excited about putting together is that at the core of all of these products, what unifies them is that these are new products that are meant to connect people in different ways.

Sometimes it's because of work and collaboration, sometimes it's because somebody's trying to buy something, the other person's trying to sell something, sometimes it's because somebody's trying to buy something the other person's trying to sell something sometimes it's for social media

You're someone one one side is creating the other side is consuming and and so all of these products have that special quality they connect people.

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