The book is pretty personal, more than most books like this. I'm a character in the book. I show up in chapter three, which is about the dot-com bubble of the late 90s. I was the editor of a magazine called The Industry Standard, which was the Bible of the dot-com boom. As journalists, we covered the dot-com boom, and obviously that was super interesting, and I had a front-row seat for all that stuff. But in addition, we as a company were kind of a bubble company. We were a startup, and we had $15 million in revenue in our first year, then $40 million in the second year, then $140 million in the third year. And then in the fourth year, we went bankrupt. It was a classic. So I used The Industry Standard and myself as the main characters in that piece of the story.

I show up again a little later on, because I was editor of something called The Bay Citizen, a nonprofit news site that was started in 2010 by a guy named Warren Hellman, who was a rich guy and a very important civic figure. He was kind of the leader of the business community in the city. He died a premature death while The Bay Citizen died with him, essentially.

Most recently, I was editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Standard, which is another new online thing. This one is for-profit, but owned by a rich guy — started by Mike Moritz, one of the preeminent venture capitalists around. So I show up a little bit there too. The book is a work of history that tracks my own history covering the business, and so it's certainly very, very personal in that way.

When I was thinking about writing a book, I had a lot of experiences I think are relevant, but I was trying to figure out what kind of book I should write. My agent was categorical about not writing a memoir–nobody wants to read a journalism memoir. But the editors and the agent were on board with the idea of myself being a kind of character in the book. A friend of mine crystallized it: you should just write a book about the city in the tech era. That crystallized a set of ideas that had been swimming around.

Ongoing thread. More from Jonathan Weber to follow.