Fearless Genius - 9781476752693

An award-winning documentary photographer delivers a stunning visual history of the Silicon Valley technology boom, in which he was witness to key moments in the careers of Steve Jobs and more than seventy other leading innovators as they created today’s digital world.

In the spring of 1985, a technological revolution was underway in Silicon Valley, and documentary photographer Doug Menuez was there in search of a story—something big. At the same time, Steve Jobs was being forced out of his beloved Apple and starting over with a new company, NeXT Computer. His goal was to build a supercomputer with the power to transform education. Menuez had found his story.

Menuez hoped to photograph Jobs as he built this new computer from conception to product launch, thereby capturing the spirit and substance of innovation through the world’s top technology guru. In an amazing act of trust, Jobs granted Menuez unprecedented access to him and his team, and what Menuez thought would last only three years soon stretched into fifteen. Once Silicon Valley heard Jobs had granted him complete access, they all did. Over the years, Menuez photographed behind the scenes with John Warnock at Adobe, John Sculley at Apple, Bill Gates at Microsoft, John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, Bill Joy at Sun Microsystems, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove at Intel, Mark Andreessen at Netscape, and more than seventy other leading companies and innovators.

By 2000, an era was ending, the Valley had crashed, and Steve Jobs was rising up, riding a blazing rocket back to glory. The growth of transformational technology during this singular era had led to the creation of more jobs and wealth than any time in human history. And Menuez was there, witness to a global revolution.

In Fearless Genius, Menuez brings his experiences to print, showing, in 100 stunning photographs of scenes only he had access to, the human face of innovation and what it takes to transform the power of ideas into reality.