Kara Swisher Keynote Speaker

Kara Swisher is the host of On with Kara Swisher and co-host of the Pivot podcast. She’s editor-at-large at New York Magazine and a CNN contributor. Swisher is the co-founder of the technology website, Recode, and tech conference, Code, which is the country’s premier conference on tech and media.

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.

In 2024, Swisher will publish Burn Book: A Tech Love Story — part memoir, part history, and ultimately a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead. Burn Book includes soaring tales of innovation and brilliant entrepreneurs, as well as Silicon Valley’s much more complex history of striving, success, and failure. The book details how the commercial internet came into being and how, for all it has given the world, it now sits at the center of global power, creating a clear and present danger to humanity. Yet despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech’s potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At its heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.

She is also the author of aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web, published by Times Business Books in July 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 the fall of 2003 by Crown Business Books.

Swisher was named to The Hollywood Reporter’s list of “Podcast Power Players” in 2022 and 2023, and to the 2023 Out 100. She also received the “Pioneer Icon” award at the 2023 iHeart Podcast Awards. Additionally, Pivot was named one of the “Best Podcasts of 2022” by the New York Times and “Best Thought Leadership Podcast” at the 2022 Adweek Audio Awards.

She was previously a contributing New York Times opinion writer and former host of the podcasts, Sway and Recode Decode. 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, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, and many other leading players.

Swisher worked in the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau and as a reporter at the Washington Post. She was also a contributor to NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC. Swisher played herself  on HBO’s Silicon Valley and Fox’s The Simpsons, and is a regular guest on national broadcast programs. She also hosted HBO’s Succession podcast, which was named Adweek’s 2023 “Podcast of the Year.” 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, Swisher 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.

For availability and speaker fees, please contact Kara Swisher’s speaking agent at Chartwell here,