Gary Rivlin has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Becoming a Venture Capitalist.
Becoming a Venture Capitalist
Summary
A listener-friendly guide to the inner workings and behind-the-scenes action of Silicon Valley and venture capitalism. Investigative reporter Gary Rivlin gives an armchair tour of the world of venture capitalism, while providing vivid case studies illustrating how to get started in the field. He shows how once-small companies such as Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon used venture capitalism to transform into the icons they are today, and the VCs that made a fortune in the process. Listeners will learn what series funding is, the difference between an angel and super angel investor, and how to go about identifying ideas worthy of funding. Becoming a Venture Capitalist is not only an exclusive look into the world of legendary venture firms - as well as stories of their most interesting characters, including Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Mark Zuckerberg - but a wonderful guide on how to break into a seemingly impenetrable world.
©2019 Gary Rivlin (P)2019 Simon & Schuster
Fire on the Prairie
Summary
Chicago - the city whose name is synonymous with urban politics; the city of sharply divided ethnic and racial enclaves; the city whose police force shocked America during the 1968 Democratic convention and then the next year killed Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. As Martin Luther King, Jr., said when he traveled to Chicago in 1965 to turn his attention to the great urban centers of the north, "If we crack Chicago, then we crack the world." Black empowerment "would take off like a prairie fire across the land." In 1983 Chicago elected Harold Washington as the city's first black mayor. This is the story of Washington's improbable victory over Jane Byrne, heir to the late Richard J. Daley's political empire, and over Daley's eldest son. It's the story of a coalition outside the party's mainstream coming to power and ruling in the country's most political of cities. In Fire on the Prairie, Gary Rivlin reveals the personalities and philosophies of those who were at the center of events, from black separatists such as Lu Palmer to community organizers such as Jesse Jackson, and from white liberals who held Washington at arm's length to Chicago originals like Ed Vrdolyak, the opposition's leader. At the center of the drama was Harold Washington, an enigmatic yet engaging figure who fashioned an uneasy but potent multiracial coalition that ruled for five years. The conflicts and compromises of all are described in vivid detail and the resulting history is a thorough account of an election and an administration that captured the nation's attention. Like Mississippi in the 1960s or Boston in the 1970s, Chicago in the 1980s was the stage for a drama that revealed the dimensions of America's racial politics and offered insights and inspiration for future generations.
©1992 Gary Rivlin (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Becoming an Ethical Hacker
Summary
An acclaimed investigative journalist explores ethical hacking and presents a listener-friendly, informative guide to everything there is to know about entering the field of cybersecurity. It’s impossible to ignore the critical role cybersecurity plays within our society, politics, and the global order. In Becoming an Ethical Hacker, investigative reporter Gary Rivlin offers an easy-to-digest primer on what white-hat hacking is, how it began, and where it’s going, while providing vivid case studies illustrating how to become one of these “white hats” who specializes in ensuring the security of an organization’s information systems. He shows how companies pay these specialists to break into their protected systems and networks to test and assess their security. Listeners will learn how these white hats use their skills to improve security by exposing vulnerabilities before malicious hackers can detect and exploit them. Weaving practical how-to advice with inspiring case studies, Rivlin provides concrete, practical steps anyone can take to pursue a career in the growing field of cybersecurity.
©2019 Gary Rivlin (P)2019 Simon & Schuster
The Godfather of Silicon Valley
Summary
Gary Rivlin tells the story of Ron Conway, the man who has placed more bets on Internet start-ups than anyone else in Silicon Valley. Conway is a listener-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.
©2001 Gary Rivlin (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Katrina
Summary
Ten years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Southeast Louisiana, journalist Gary Rivlin traces the storm's immediate damage, the city of New Orleans' efforts to rebuild itself, and the storm's lasting effects not just on the city's geography and infrastructure but on the psychic, racial, and social fabric of one of this nation's great cities. Much of New Orleans still sat underwater the first time Gary Rivlin glimpsed the city after Hurricane Katrina. Then a staff reporter for The New York Times, he was heading into the city to survey the damage. The interstate was eerily empty. Soldiers in uniform and armed with assault rifles stopped him. Water reached the eaves of houses for as far as the eye could see. Four out of every five houses - 80 percent of the city's housing stock - had been flooded. Around that same proportion of schools and businesses were wrecked. The weight of all that water on the streets cracked gas and water and sewer pipes all around town, and the deluge had drowned almost every power substation and rendered unusable most of the city's water and sewer system. People living in flooded areas of the city could not be expected to pay their property taxes for the foreseeable future. Nor would all those boarded-up businesses - 21,000 of the city's 22,000 businesses were still shuttered six months after the storm - be contributing their shares of sales taxes and other fees to the city's coffers. Six weeks after the storm, the city laid off half its workforce - precisely when so many people were turning to its government for help. Meanwhile, cynics both in and out of the Beltway were questioning the use of taxpayer dollars to rebuild a city that sat mostly below sea level. How could the city possibly come back? This book traces the stories of New Orleanians of all stripes - politicians and business owners, teachers and bus drivers, poor and wealthy, black and white - as they confront the aftermath of one of the great tragedies of our age and reconstruct, change, and, in some cases abandon, a city that's the soul of this nation.
©2015 Gary Rivlin (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Broke, USA
Summary
For most people, the Great Crash of 2008 has meant troubling times. Not so for those in the flourishing poverty industry, for whom the economic woes spell an opportunity to expand and grow. These mercenary entrepreneurs have taken advantage of an era of deregulation to devise high-priced products to sell to the credit-hungry working poor, including the instant tax refund and the payday loan. In the process they've created an industry larger than the casino business and have proved that pawnbrokers and check cashers, if they dream big enough, can grow very rich off those with thin wallets. Broke, USA is Gary Rivlin's riveting report from the economic fringes. From the annual meeting of the national check cashers association in Las Vegas to a tour of the foreclosure-riddled neighborhoods of Dayton, Ohio, here is a subprime Fast Food Nation featuring an unforgettable cast of characters and memorable scenes. Rivlin profiles players like a former small-town Tennessee debt collector whose business offering cash advances to the working poor has earned him a net worth in the hundreds of millions, and legendary Wall Street dealmaker Sandy Weill, who rode a subprime loan business into control of the nation's largest bank. Rivlin parallels their stories with the tale of those committed souls fighting back against the major corporations, chain franchises, and newly hatched enterprises that fleece the country's hardworking waitresses, warehouse workers, and mall clerks. Timely, shocking, and powerful, Broke, USA offers a much-needed look at why our country is in a financial mess and gives a voice to the millions of ordinary Americans left devastated in the wake of the economic collapse.
©2010 Gary Rivlin (P)2010 HarperCollins Publishers