The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley

One of the earliest and sharpest histories of Silicon Valley, written in 1985 while the region was still becoming what it would become. Malone was a journalist who knew the founders personally — Hewlett, Packard, Noyce, Moore, Jobs — and he wrote with the immediacy of someone documenting a living culture rather than mythologising a completed one. The result is a portrait of the Valley before the narrative calcified: messy, personal, full of feuds, failures, and luck. The Stripe Press reissue rescued a book that had been out of print for decades and that later historians drew from without always crediting. For product directors, the value is in seeing that the ecosystem they operate in was not inevitable but was constructed by specific people making specific bets under specific conditions. It is a corrective to the ahistorical presentism that dominates technology culture.