Bill has seen it all and shares most of it. The Bleeding Edge is a memoir of early and middle tech that most of us forget about. However, understanding that era and seeing it first-hand through one of the people who were at the center of the action is crucial to understanding how today's tech innovations may play out and how to spot potential winners and losers. It's a good reminder of the foundations that led to the Microsoft/Apple era as well as our current AI landscape.

I worked in tech for several years and I wish I had read this very inspiring book. I learned a lot from it.

This was a very interesting book to read. Reading about his journey through numerous tech companies was engaging and fun. I like how he highlights many of the tactics used at those times and how they would conflict in our current society. I enjoyed learning how many of our current great companies came to be. I do wish he went more into detail about how he was recruited and the process but I’m happy he took us through his impressive career history. Definitely a must read for anyone wanting to understand the inner workings of the tech industry and also for those with an appreciation for innovation development.

Thanks to NetGalley and the Publisher for the arc.

Bill Raduchel was in on the tech revolution from the outset. His latest book, The Bleeding Edge, is a summary of the management lessons he learned as he hopped from high tech firm to high tech firm, probably a dozen of them, often not staying even a couple of years. It is filled with names like McNealy and Jobs and Ballmer. Some were his own students as a graduate teaching assistant at Harvard, or people he did favors for, or who got their first job through his calls. He was even right there when Sun nearly bought a floundering Apple in 1995, for example. In other words, he was the ultimate insider.

In the sixties, Raduchel found himself as a student at Harvard, also writing the first code they used in numerous applications. He was the lead inventor on several patents for digital streaming. He soon equaled and surpassed his professors in knowledge and importance in the world of high tech. The book gives the impression he easily drifted from startup to startup until things changed, and he moved on again, always upward. His reputation preceded him and so he was given more and more responsibility with every move. He always failed upwards. At times, it seems like a fairytale.

He was the one who put Netscape’s browser code into open source with Mozilla. He was at the center of the bizarre union of AOL and Time Warner, having been an executive at both firms. All kinds of processes run on his code at Harvard. And he was there when the Opera browser, despite a brilliant strategy, tore itself to pieces thanks to no two minds thinking alike.

Even at Harvard, Raduchel encountered the stodgy. The chairman of the Economics department blew him off, saying the department “had looked into the intellectual value of software and concluded there was none.” At Xerox, it took 26 interviews to hire him – even though the VP of Strategy wanted him there (My own experience is an annoying six. It makes the applicant wonder if this is all a very big mistake). Nonetheless, right from the beginning, he was briefing CEOs and watching them in action. So he learned all kinds of lessons without living through making the mistakes himself, and that is really what the book is about.

He learned that diverse teams solved problems demonstrably better than simply white male teams, something he says has now been proven repeatedly in studies. He saw that companies do not lend money other companies; people lend money to other people. Relationships proved themselves to him over and over. One year he had to fly to Japan for a celebration with the company’s partner there. He flew in a half hour before the event, drank the first toast, left four minutes later, and flew home to the USA. But his being there gained him all kinds of points in Japan.


One year Larry Ellison of Oracle told Scott McNealy of Sun to fire Raduchel because he found one of Raduchel’s projects “so stupid.” The next year Ellison invited Raduchel to give a keynote speech at Oracle. You must roll with punches and not burn bridges.

At Sun, he found the corporate culture was slim: “We minimized the number of rules. If we were not going to fire someone for breaking a rule, we did not have it.”

At the same time, “Plans are valuable because they make you do planning.” And despite the fact they “almost always are wrong,” they do prepare management to pivot.

He learned that “Anyone in a staff role is always in a position where doing what is right may cost you your job.” (This happened to me three times. There is no way around it if you think yourself ethical.)

He was also taken advantage of, moved from division to division and office to office with zero consideration for his private life. At one point, he had to fly from California to the east coast for a weekly Monday morning meeting, back to the west coast for a regular Tuesday meeting, and return to the east coast on Wednesdays. He says he racked up 12 million air miles in 40 years.

Raduchel was a keen observer and could get to the bottom of problems and puzzles. When he was running Admissions at Harvard, he found the secrets of getting admitted. For one thing, SAT scores seem to make little or no difference in predicting grades once the verbal scores crosses about 550. And while there were quotas and policies in place, ultimately it came down to the admissions staff:
“Members of the admission staff fall into four categories: (1) those who understand the game but who are charged with maintaining the charade; (2) those who understand the game but have no power—they do the only rational thing and don’t worry about their candidates; (3) those who really think they do something important and who try hard to do the right thing in an absolute sense; and (4) those who just don’t understand. A candidate’s chances for admission can vary tremendously with the group to which his or her staff representative belongs.”

Truly valuable information for anyone starting out.

Raduchel is a generous writer. Everyone he has worked for or with seems to be a borderline genius in something or other. He worked with the best sales people and marketers, the best strategists, the best humanists, the best managers, and a wide variety of corporate cultures that weren’t so much stifling as fascinating to him. Somehow, he fit into most of them.

The companies he worked at had cultures just as divergent. At Time Warner, they never had regular meetings. At others there were constant meetings. Some favored creativity and innovation. Others insisted on navigating and surviving the bureaucracy over launching quickly. Raduchel doesn’t criticize any of them. He observes and appreciates them. Again, a good intro for anyone starting out.

He has one annoying little tick that I don’t understand. He keeps saying the internet didn’t come along until the mid-nineties. In chapter after chapter he has cause to say – And remember, this was 15 years before the internet. Or this was still a decade before the internet – in the mid-eighties. It is true the world wide web only came into being in the early 90s, and graphical interfaces on laptops in the mid-nineties with Windows 95. But I designed my first two sites right on the internet in 1981 on an Apple II Plus. Both were graphical, too. And the internet itself had been around since the late sixties. Lots of us were reaping the advantages of the new thing called e-mail in the early eighties. We had accounts at MCI or Compuserve or Bell. It is wrong to say repeatedly there was no internet throughout the seventies and eighties, into the mid-nineties.

My one real criticism of this gossipy tale is Raduchel’s assumption the reader knows high tech as well as he does. He is big on dropping names of ancient computer models (and showing photos of them and SPARC chips, but not the people he dealt with), chips and processes. Only those steeped in high tech, having come up the hard way, will be comfortable with all these names and acronyms.

For me, it was a trip down memory lane when I learned the chips and the boards, processor speeds, protocols and the first stumbling apps. Raduchel tosses them off as if everyone knows them inside out. Including why one survived as long as it did, while a different one failed. He knew it just from watching management. So The Bleeding Edge might be a very different read for someone interested in a biography or a management primer. For me it was grand.

David Wineberg