Early True Believers: The Untold Story of Silicon Alley [Audible Original]

Early True Believers: The Untold Story of Silicon Alley is a 1990s saga of ambition and innovation set in Manhattan’s Silicon Alley, a swath of downtown that served as New York City’s nerve center of tech entrepreneurship. The series features the stories of a forgotten cohort of early internet visionaries, avxhm.se, countercultural social networks, the digital gold rush, and the lavish events that came with it, including one held in an underground Tribeca bunker that abruptly ended in a police raid—a harbinger of the upheaval to come. After 9/11 and the dot-com crash, nearly all of Silicon Alley’s businesses, many based on a utopian ideology of inclusion and creativity, were lost to history.

This is a groundbreaking oral history of Silicon Alley, the flamboyant and art-driven counterpoint to Silicon Valley’s engineering culture. From the pioneering efforts of figures like Stacy Horn, Jason Calcanis, and Josh Harris to the speculative frenzy that led to the tech bubble’s burst, Early True Believers takes listeners through a world where creativity and capital collide, providing a useful lens to understand the internet today.