Gary Rivlin tells the story of Ron Conway, the man who has placed more bets on Internet start-ups than anyone eise in Silicon Valley. Conway is a reader-friendly way into the realm of angel financing, where independently wealthy investors link up with companies just as they are being born. The Godfather of Silicon Valley takes you into this fascinating world on the edges of the financial universe, where the pace is frantic, the story lines are rich, and every moment is perilous.

The Plot to Get Bill Gates
An Irreverent Investigation of the World's Richest Man ... and the People Who Hate Him
(paperback:Three Rivers Press, 2000)
(hardcover: Random House, 1999)

Over the last ten years, Bill Gates has evolved from a mere software mogul to a full-blown global cultural icon, as universally known and scrutinized by the media as Madonna, Michael Jordan, or Princess Diana. Meanwhile, legions of people - from Silicon Valley to Washington, DC - have become utterly obsessed with Gates and his $80 billion fortune, plotting strategies to end Microsoft's dominance over the technology universe, and suffering from what high-tech pundit Esther Dyson has dubbed "Bill Envy." As Dyson told author Gary Rivlin, "Just about every guy in this business suffers from it. Bill is like the Rorschach blot of the industry. What people think of him tells you more about them than it does about him."

Rivlin, an award-winning journalist, spent three years interviewing, researching and writing THE PLOT TO GET BILL GATES, which chronicles the software wars as an entertaining and often funny hybrid of Moby Dick and Roger & Me. He offers fresh insights into some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the tech business, each of whom learned that, like the Great White Whale, Bill Gates only becomes angrier, hungrier, and more dangerous every time you try to attack him. And like Captain Ahab, these normally smart executives discovered that blind obsession and hatred for your enemy can cloud your better judgment and perhaps even sink your ship. 
Rivlin draws fascinating portraits of such moguls as Larry Ellison of Oracle, Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems, Ray Noorda of Novell, Marc Andreessen and Jim Barksdale of Netscape, and Philippe Kahn of Borland - as well as other Gates-detractors such as attorney Gary Reback, consumer activist Ralph Nader, and venture capitalist John Doerr. As a loosely knit cabal, they really did (and some still do) see themselves as a Rebel Alliance fighting a noble war against Darth Vader and his Evil Empire. They despise Gates for his ruthlessness, his underhanded and possibly illegal tactics, and his insistence that he's really just a regular Joe who loves making great software and doesn't care much about money. Of course, as Rivlin stresses, most of Gates's enemies aren't exactly boy scouts, and would have been just as cold-blooded and devious for the chance to have his level of wealth and power.

Among the eye-opening scenes in the book:

• How Gates showed his true colors early on, arm-twisting his childhood friend and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen into accepting a 64-36 split (eventually changed to 60-40) in their ownership of the company-even though Allen had been equally instrumental in getting it off the ground.

• How Scott McNealy's zealotry led him to pressure Sun's customers not to use Microsoft software, and to treat any employee who left the company as a traitor to the cause. His jealousy also got so extreme that he'd call reporters to whine whenever Gates received positive press coverage, while he and Sun were supposedly being ignored.

• How Larry Ellison was so blinded by Bill Envy - and so jealous of all the media attention paid to the launch of Windows 95 - that he promised to ship within the year a "network computer" that would supposedly render the PC obsolete, even though those charged with building it knew it couldn't be done.

• How Ellison couldn't accept the fact that Gates was building a bigger house than his, so he made plans for one that would cost $ 1 0 million MORE than the Gates mansion.

• How Philippe Kahn, the object of a "Delete Philippe" campaign inside Microsoft, hated Gates so passionately that when a Hare Krishna solicited him at the Seattle airport, he gave the guy $1 00 and Gates's address, and told him to go there for much more.

• How Ray Noorda championed the anti-Gates cause with messianic zeal - and in the process all but destroyed what was then the third largest software company in computerdom.

• How people in Silicon Valley would rejoice over any Gates misstep, no matter how minor - such as the time he bombed as a guest on "Late Night with David Letterman" because he had never watched the show before.

• How the Microsoft PR machine has worked overtime to promote his image, to the extent of introducing a brand new persona (which Rivlin calls "Gates 3. 1 ") to counter the bad press caused by the Federal antitrust trial.

Rivlin quotes a woman who had worked at both Oracle and Sun as saying: "I feel like all of us, we're just pawns in this fight. Some very wealthy little boys are fighting each other, and the rest of us are just their minions." THE PLOT TO GET BELL GATES ultimately vindicates neither Gates nor his ego-driven enemies, but rather the hard-working programmers and engineers and other 'minions' who make the whole game possible.

Drive-By
(Henry Holt & Co., 1995)

The story of a group of teenagers whose dispute over a bicycle ended in murder presents the experiences of their families, investigators, and defenders, in an examination of the human element of random violence.

Fire on the Prairie
Chicago's Harold Washington and the Politics of Race
(Henry Holt & Co., 1992)