Seth Goldstein's thinking on the attention economy is so elevated that few understand it. In New York, where the marketing guru made his career, that didn't matter so much, because Madison Avenue advertising people would at least nod, knowingly. Goldstein has moved to Mill Valley with his wife, Tina Sharkey, whose new job as chairman of Babycenter brought her to Silicon Valley. The Bay Area is a less forgiving environment for obscurantist writing. After a recent encounter in Menlo Park with a bemused local VC, Goldstein writes, with breathtaking presumptuousness, he felt like Bertolt Brecht, the radical German playwright, author of Mother Courage, who had a famously miserable exile writing screenplays too sophisticated for Hollywood.

Contact information for this author is not available.