She is the founding executive director of the Steve Jobs Archive and chair of the advisory group for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. She is the editor of Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words and author of two books: The Man Behind the Microchip, a biography of chip inventor and Intel co-founder Robert Noyce; and Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age.
She has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and served on the advisory committee to the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Leslie has been a “Prototype” columnist for The New York Times and has commented on Silicon Valley for the Wall Street Journal, NPR, PBS, the BBC, The Atlantic and Wired, among other outlets.
Former Google chairman Eric Schmidt called publication of Troublemakers, her book exploring how Silicon Valley during the 1970s set the stage for our modern high-tech world, “a landmark event.” The Washington Post said that The Man Behind the Microchip, her definitive biography of microchip co-inventor and Intel co-founder Robert Noyce, “should be required reading for today’s entrepreneurs and executives.”
She received her PhD in History from Stanford and her BA in American Studies from Yale. She has two college-age children and lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, whom she has known since they were both twelve years old.
Q&A: “Troublemakers” Helped Build Silicon Valley’s Tech Industry–Now What?