How We Got Here is about what happens when technology and the markets “go to bed together.” Author Andy Kessler takes us back a few years to the time when almost any dot-com idea could get funded and everyone was poring over handbooks about HTML, PERL, Linux, and Unix. It was the age of techno babble—and if you didn’t understand eyeballs and unique visitors, you were one of many who were trying to catch up in order to cash in on the Internet.
Part One harks back even further, to the Industrial Revolution, from the creation of the first steam engine through railroad transportation. Part Two picks up the market perspective—the volatility that any revolution brings—and briefly points out the influence of markets on the gold rush, the South Sea Bubble of the early eighteenth century, when ordinary people began to invest their savings and often lost big, and the dot-com boom and bust.
Part Three answers the question “What does this have to do with technology and the markets?” Kessler briefly discusses the earliest forms of electronic communication (Alexander Graham Bell, anyone?) before addressing the main point of his book: Technology and markets make a great couple, but you never know how long they will stay together. As the author writes, “You never know which technologies or companies are really going to work. More often than not, you get weeds, weeds, weeds.”
Kessler’s strength in this book is his wit combined with lengthy investment experience. In the end, his ultimate goal is to provide perspective for the future. As he sees it, “Technology and Wall Street can lie down together, but neither will get much sleep.”
Kessler also wrote Running Money: Hedge Fund Honchos, Monster Markets and My Hunt for the Big Score, and is a former Wall Street analyst and hedge fund manager. He occasionally writes for Wired magazine.
- Sara Grant