Venture Labor: How Ambition, Technology And Opportunity Trumped The Career Ladder In 1990s New York

They called it "Silicon Alley," a clumsy play on words meant to evoke an East Coast urban version of the California place where microchips made fortunes grow and digital devices work. It was a marketing play really, designed to lure public funding and convince established business to locate in New York. But the term was always flawed. For one, few of the small-time entrepreneurs and dreamers who created the tiny and fragile Internet scene in mid-1990s New York ever touched silicon or worked on a...