Randall Stross

Randall Stross is a historian who writes mostly about present-day technology, business, and society. His most recent book is an exception and is centered on higher education, the liberal arts, and Stanford University in particular: A Practical Education. It looks at the contention between the liberal arts and engineering at Stanford, from the university's founding to the present. 

It also narrates the job-seeking experiences of ten recent Stanford grads who chose a major in the humanities. In 2012, he published The Launch Pad, an account of the sixty-four startups that went through Y Combinator in the summer of 2011. It was the third book he had written about Silicon Valley startups. The first was published in 1993: Steve Jobs & the NeXT Big Thing, a story of a startup that struggled and struggled. 

From the misery of those dark years, Jobs learned much that would serve him well when he returned to Apple. The other earlier book on startups was eBoys (2000), a fly-on-the-wall account of the workings of then-young Benchmark Capital. Work on it happened to coincide with the dot-com boom in the Valley and the boom's end.

He paid a visit to an earlier era of American startups when I worked on a biography of the original serial entrepreneur, Thomas Edison: The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World, which was published in 2007.

Some of the largest technology companies have served as my book subjects. In 1995, he wrote The Microsoft Way, and in 2008, Planet Google.