Riding The Wave

January 2007, an office in an old building in Berlin-Mitte. Two men stare at flickering monitors; the sushi is cold, the beer warm. In San Francisco, Steve Jobs holds up a device destined to change the world. That night, the two men already know it.

Jörg Kampers has witnessed four decades of technology history up close. As a schoolboy, he programmed calculators using magnetic cards; as a student, he soldered together his own hard drive. At Commodore, he experienced the home computer boom from the inside, followed by the networking of offices, the dot-com bubble, the mobile internet, the cloud, and the Internet of Things. And then, past the age of 60, he encountered the biggest wave of them all: artificial intelligence.

*The Wave Rider* recounts these decades as no textbook ever could: from the inside, from the engine room. It tells of record-breaking quarters and bankruptcies, a fraudulent executive, sleepless nights, and the realization that the greatest obstacles to progress rarely lie in the technology itself, but almost always in the people.

A book for anyone who lived through this era. And for anyone who wants to know what is currently rolling our way.