Kara Swisher - Sine Institute Fellow 2024

Title
Burn Book: A Tech Love Story From 25 Years of Covering Silicon Valley

Seminar Series
For the last quarter century, journalist Kara Swisher has covered the business of the Internet. This semester she will share with us that history and her experiences being at the epicenter of the largest boom in wealth and innovation of the modern age. She will also cover where we are today and how she views the current landscape, including the future of technology, its benefits and the challenges and how we navigate the rapid pace of change taking place.

Dates & Times (EST)

February 1 | 1PM- Welcome Fellows and Introduction to the Cohort of 2023
February 8 | 12PM- The Tech Moment
March 8 | 12PM- Burn Book: A discussion with Kara Swisher about her newly released book on the tech industry
April 16 | 12PM- On With Kara Swisher
April 23 | 2PM- Career Conversations with the Fellows

About Kara Swisher

Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) is host of On with Kara Swisher, co-host of the Pivot podcast, and editor-at-large at New York Magazine. She is the former host of the Sway and Recode Decode podcasts and the cofounder of the technology website, Recode.

Considered the top reporter in the tech game, Swisher has been reporting on the industry since the early 1990s. She was there when Amazon was looking for its first headquarters in Seattle, when Google was in its garage and when Netflix was just a small startup. Once called “Silicon Valley's most feared but revered journalist” by New York Magazine, Swisher has established herself as the oracle of the tech world with unrivaled access to the industry's most significant leaders.

Swisher was previously a contributing New York Times opinion writer and host of the podcast, Sway. She co-founded the technology website Recode and, before that, co-produced and co-hosted The Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital” conference series (now called the Code Conference) with Walt Mossberg starting in 2003. It was, and still is, the country’s premier conference on tech and media, with interviewees such as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Tesla Technoking Elon Musk, Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, and many other leading players. She and Mossberg were also the co-executive editors of a tech and media website, AllThingsD.com, founded in 2007. Swisher worked in The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau.

For many years, she wrote the column “BoomTown,” which appeared on the front page of the Marketplace section and online at WSJ.com. Previously, Swisher covered breaking news about the web’s major players and internet policy issues, and she also wrote feature articles on technology for the paper. Earlier in her career, she worked as a reporter at the Washington Post and as an editor at the City Paper of Washington, D.C. She received her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and her graduate degree at Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Swisher is also the author of aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the the Web, published by Times Business Books in 1998. The sequel, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future, was published in 2003 by Crown Business.

Swisher has been a contributor to NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC. She’s also appeared on programs including ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS’s 60 Minutes Overtime, HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and many more. She is currently a contributor to CNN.

Kara Swisher Host, On With Kara Swisher, and co-host, Pivot for New York Magazine; contributor, CNN.

Kara Swisher
Host, On With Kara Swisher, and co-host, Pivot for New York Magazine; contributor, CNN.