Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Mem Ride Home, I'm Brian McCullough.

I've said it before. Stephen Levy is the Dean of Tech Writers, all the way back in 1984, his classic book

Hackers, defined a tech space that wasn't even fully aware of itself yet.

Stephen has written book length histories and examinations of Apple and Google and now with his new book

Facebook the inside story he finally tells the full Facebook story for the first time

Not the movie version the real story of how

Facebook became Facebook from the earliest days at Harvard through the rise to

two and a half billion users. It is, as I tell him, the best tech book I've read in recent years.

If you want to fully understand Facebook

or just how a modern startup works

or how a modern tech behemoth functions

and thinks of itself in the world, I cannot recommend this book more highly.

Link to buy the book in the show notes.

So I know that this is sort of writer inside baseball a bit

to start out this way, but you got a lot of cooperation from

Facebook people like from Zuckerberg and Sandburg personally and lots of ex

Facebook employees. I'm just curious, overall the company, you had a good relationship with the company,

they knew what you were doing and there was no sort of like, what you can't talk about this, you can't talk

to that person or anything like that?

No, I was allowed to ask anything.

People could refuse to answer a question a couple times they said, want I want to get into that.

But generally, they gave me their side of the story.

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