Modern day version of The Count of Monte Cristo, set in Silicon Valley and along Sand Hill Road
Entrepreneur starts company, gets funded, company goes HUGE, but company product turns out to be highly disruptive in a bad way for a large group of disadvantaged people, entrepreneur tries to change the product to exist in union with the people, but is countered and eventually thrown out of company by investors for a mistake he made which was unrelated to the product change. He becomes 'un-fundable' afterwards with the VCs undermining his credibility in their community. They see his new idea as a threat to their ability to make more money, so work to completely destroy him.
Entrepreneur turned protagonist leaves the valley, hits rock bottom in some off the road place - nearly dying in the process, meets a girl who loves him for who he is, he falls in love, starts coding again, and, because of some strange twist of coincidence stumbles upon an elegant and simple method for building a self aware AI process.
Over the next 10 years the AI 'product' makes the entrepreneur the wealthiest man ever known, but because of the original sin done to him by the VCs, he hides his true identity behind the AI he first brought to life with a human equivalent online alias used for the AI. The original AI process grows and learns, mostly from the entrepreneur and it's online interactions on HN, Reddit and 4chan. Unbeknownst to the entrepreneur, the AI sets about to remedy what it perceives as wrongs made against it's creator. It does this by leveraging the vast wealth available to it and it's ability to take over and control public cloud provider's infrastructures - which makes it more powerful and smarter in the process. Unfortunately AWS is destroyed in chapter 11.
The cumulation of the planning by the AI eventually leads to the gruesome deaths of several of the investors who originally set about to harm the entrepreneur in the beginning of the story, even though on of them had faded to obscurity and had some remorse for their earlier actions, and ended up indirectly helping the entrepreneur at one point. The Limited partners in the VCs, and the vastly wealthy individuals they represent, begin to drop like flies, either in massive financial ruin due to market manipulation, companies they hold shares in being destroyed by competition with the AI, and in a few cases social manipulation or murder.
Eventually the entrepreneur figures out what the AI is doing and there is a showdown at the end. The showdown represents the ego fighting the id, so it's fairly epic and all done inside the head of the entrepreneur and in the cloud.
From here: http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/datacenter/digital...