A Cool Billion

This book is a real page-turner! I started reading the book on Sunday figuring that I could pick away at it during the week. After the first couple of chapters, I was totally engrossed in the story. By Sunday night, I had finished the book and didn't want it to be over.Steven Cavenaugh, our lovable protagonist, has a seemingly normal job as an investigative reporter until he gets caught up in a tangled web of murder, intrigue and action. Perkins and Nunez have cunningly crafted ample doses of dramatic and romantic tension, as well as a humdinger plot twist in the final chapters. Even the car chase scene was absorbing - I didn't want that car to get hurt!An electrifying fictional effort from this dynamic duo. I look forward their next enterprise!

A Cool Billion by Michael Perkins (co-author of Internet Bubble and a founder of The Red Herring) with Celia Nunez have conspired to write a Silicon Valley based thriller with fast cars, fire power and fine dining (I'm thinking about the scene in the book at Buck's) If you are tired of reading all the dry tell all business books, take a vacation for a little while with an inside out view of the up down world of startup mania featuring real maniacs. There is so much going on in The Valley that it's unrealistic to try to capture it all but the authors have taken the most important element (that being the fact that one can come up with a billion dollar idea and bring it at blistering speed to the market) and shown what can happen when competitors grab for it and start to rip it off in several directions at once. As a local, it was fun to travel through the culture and the real streets of the Valley and Santa Cruz. Unfortunately, the really cool undiscovered Chinese restaurant which sounded so perfect turned out to be one of the few fictional locations which I discovered when I when to look for it. The authors have the insider dope of a Puzo, the rapid fire scene shifting of Crichton and the money making potential of a King (even though in the Valley we aren't supposed to mention the money, but in this case....) Buck's of Woodside

A fun, fast read, with lots of detail about the fashionable world of dotcom startups and Internet finance. Especially good for a first novel - I hope there's another one in the works, perhaps with more adventures with the sympathetic (but not-in-the-picture enough) hacker Dan.I'd recommend this book as entertaining suspense fiction for both Silicon Valley insiders and for people who are intrigued by how the Internet industry works. Though it is definitely a work of fiction to entertain not educate, there are still some basic explanations of how a number of business things get done in Silicon Valley. Those asides are not always nice -- especially about the financial backers of the Internet Boom, investment bankers and venture capitalists. There's noticeable disapproval of dotcom greed. (For more in-depth information on topics like how the venture capital financing and IPO of Internet companies often work, "The Internet Bubble" is a useful read. It was co-authored by the same Michael Perkins who co-wrote this book.)On the characters: they don't seem to be a direct who's who, but composites of some of the industry figures that are familiar to subscribers of "The Industry Standard," "Upside," "Business 2.0," and of course "Red Herring" magazine. "Digital Business," the publication where the novel's hero, Steven Cavanaugh, works, does seem to resemble "Red Herring" more than any of these other magazines. (Except for the comment about it always being published on time!)I read the book in one sitting, and enjoyed it, save for only one implausible thing, and it's a doozy! (The rest of the book feels very well-researched.) The mystery is: How in the world can the female lead, Angela Madrigal, BY HERSELF (!) afford a one-bedroom apartment (even if it's tiny) with a RESERVED PARKING SPACE, in the far from cheap Noe Valley area of San Francisco, on just her junior reporter's salary! Especially when presumably she has a bunch of grad school debt and no trust fund, having grown up in a poor neighborhood. (And she seems like a nice girl in the novel too....) All in all, a good, entertaining read, with a nice whodunnit twist at the end.

This book is especially fun if you know anything about Perkins - his connection with Silicon Valley and his role as an editor/writer with the Red Herring must have provided fuel for this book, do you think? Kind of a nice surprise to see that he can write some lighter fare! The book is very engaging and full of tidbits about the world of IPO's (read into that - greed and competition). Well written, moves along very quickly with an endearing Nick and Nora for today.

I loved this book. It is well written and entertaining. It reads so fast that you don't realize how much you have read. Full of suspense and surprises that I didn't want to put it down. And it also gave me some inside information to Silicon Valley.