The story of Caterina Fake is worthy of a novel. We’re pleased to introduce Fake as this month’s special guest to discuss the February California Book Club selection, The Every, with author Dave Eggers and host John Freeman.
In the early ’90s, before the first dot-com bubble, Fake was an English major at Smith College and Vassar College who had been seriously planning to get her PhD in Renaissance literature. After getting waylaid in San Francisco en route to Nepal at the height of the dot-com boom, she decided to try out web design. You’re likely to recognize the names of the ingenious projects she wound up leading and facilitating. They used technology that excited her because her travels and studies in the humanities had led her to believe in facilitating human-to-human connection, marketplaces that operated in rebellion against the sterility of big-box stores.
She cofounded the photo-sharing website Flickr. Later, she became an early investor in Kickstarter, and in a male-dominated industry full of people with computer science backgrounds, she also invested in Etsy after visiting souks in Syria, becoming its director and board chair. She also made investments in Blue Bottle Coffee, Cloudera, Hipcamp, Lovevery, and many other startups.
Today, Fake is a general investor and partner at Yes VC, which focuses on startups at the vanguard of cultural or social movements. She is the host of the fascinating Ingenious with Caterina Fake podcast, which looks at courage, ingenuity, and bigheartedness—the most recent guest, in October, was Maria Ressa, the journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner—and she has hosted the tech podcast Should This Exist? She has appeared in Time magazine’s Time 100, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Best Leaders in 2005, Forbes’s 2005 E-Gang, Fast Company’s Fast 50, Red Herring’s 20 Entrepreneurs Under 35, Business Insider’s Seed 25, and the Founders Forum Angels Hall of Fame. She serves on the boards of McSweeney’s and the Sundance Institute and previously served on the board of the nonprofit Creative Commons. Looking at her work, you can see a preference for lateral and associative thinking that is common to entrepreneurs and other creative people.
Fake presents us with an optimistic, collaborative, and community-oriented vision of Silicon Valley, a vision that deserves as much attention as the hypermasculinist one that has dominated old-school media’s attention these last years. Her exceptional, passion-driven innovations demonstrate the Bay Area’s continued potential as a home for transformative and beautiful and antiauthoritarian projects, including San Francisco–based projects like the ones that Eggers is behind, such as the stunningly designed books and magazines of McSweeney’s and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness, which gives voice to unheard people fighting against injustice.
Fake, who considers herself a “possibilist,” continues to read widely and writes poetry. Against modern life’s many stimulations and entertainments, and the “security exploits of the brain that the internet has managed to insinuate into our lives,” Fake has remarked on how important it is to protect your inner life and hold off on an excess of web-related opportunities. In a podcast interview with Tim Ferriss, she said, “Poetry, writing, dreaming, paying attention to those kinds of things, and the cultivation of an inner life is something that you have to deliberately do, that you have to protect in your life and make time for.”
We can’t wait to hear Fake, Eggers, and Freeman talk about The Every—join us!•
Join us on February 15 at 5 p.m. Pacific, when Eggers will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and special guest Fake to discuss The Every. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
HOW TO CREATE VALHALLA
CBC host John Freeman writes about California’s utopian projects and Eggers’s novels The Circle and The Every. —Alta
THE FUTURE OF CALIFORNIA
Read a Q&A with activist and former venture capitalist Roger McNamee about the historical context for changes to Silicon Valley and its future. —Alta
CULTURAL MEDIATOR
Author Peter Richardson reviews Don Armstrong’s The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason: Dispatches from the Front, a biography of a legendary music journalist who maintained a “rapport with musicians [that] had little to do with celebrity.” Richardson calls the book “judicious and balanced.” —Alta
ROCK MYSTERY
Pasadena-based author Christine Sneed interviews Sarah Tomlinson, a ghostwriter and former music journalist, about her debut whodunit, The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers. —Zyzzyva
MARRIAGE WITH A SIDE OF BITTERS
Critic Alexandra Jacobs reviews Philip Gefter’s Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, calling diary excerpts by the screenwriter Ernest Lehman the “most delicious parts.” —New York Times
PORTRAIT OF NURSES IN VIETNAM
Warner Bros. preemptively acquired rights to bestselling Pacific Northwest author Kristin Hannah’s novel The Women. —Deadline
Alta’s California Book Club email newsletter is published weekly. Sign up for free and you also will receive four custom-designed bookplates.
Anita Felicelli, Alta Journal’s California Book Club editor, is the author of the novel Chimerica and Love Songs for a Lost Continent, a short story collection.
