Special Characters: My Adventures with Tech's Titans and Misfits

CNN's former senior tech correspondent shares her front-row seat on the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and other new-media empires--and the geeks turned entrepreneurs who founded them.--PeopleAn unflinching, era-defining story of self-discovery and breaking barriers by award-winning investigative reporter Laurie Segall. In 2008, 23-year-old Laurie Segall was a newly minted assistant at CNN and was living in an East Village walk-up apartment. As Wall Street was crashing down, Segall began discovering a group of scrappy misfits who were rising from the ashes of the recession to change the world: the tech entrepreneurs.A misfit herself, Segall gained entrance to New York's burgeoning tech scene, with its limitless cash flow and parties populated by geeks-turned-billionaires. Back at the news desk, she rose through the ranks at CNN, while these entrepreneurs went from minnows to sharks, building companies that would become our democracy and our social fabric: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Uber