George Gilder

The Silicon Eye

Technology insider George Gilder delivers a “compelling” (Wired) look under the hood at a genius-fueled startup. Cameras can now be found in PDAs, phones, and anything else that will fit an imaging chip and a lens. Battling for a share of this two-billion-dollar market is a company called Foveon with an innovative—some say superior—chip. George Gilder tracks Foveon’s founders, IT genius Carver Mead and Federico Faggin, inventor of the CPU, as they struggle with the unpredictable mix of genius, drive, and luck that can rocket a startup into the Fortune 500.

“Proof that the spell of the Valley, after decades of booms and busts, is alive and well.”—David Kushner, Washington Post

“Like Foveon’s founders, Mr. Gilder wants to understand vision, albeit of a different kind: the vision of innovators. . . . The unpredictable disorder of markets is, in Microsoft parlance, not a bug but a feature. That’s a lesson that Mr. Gilder’s book drives home.”—Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Wall Street Journal