Josh Riedel Brings Alternative Reality to Silicon Valley in 'Please Report Your Bug Here'

In his debut novel, Please Report Your Bug Here: A Novel, Josh Riedel takes us into the tech startup world of Silicon Valley where we meet 24-year old Ethan Block, a recent college grad who lives in San Francisco and has a job working with a new dating app called DateDate. “In the book, really Ethan’s working for a dating app startup and it’s a pretty normal dating app, except for the fact that there’s a lot of parts about the app that require a lot of friction from the user… so it’s not really the type of app that venture capitalists might be that excited about in our real world because it’s not that easy to use, but it’s a version of a dating app… but what happens is that Ethan finds a bug in the app that transports him to other worlds.” Riedel, who was the first employee at Instagram, wrote the opening pages of the book in 2017 using his own experiences after leaving the tech industry a few years prior. “So the main character, Ethan’s, bike ride to work is pretty much exactly the bike ride that I took, from my neighborhood, my apartment in San Francisco, down to SoMa, where all the startups were then. This was in 2010 San Francisco. So yeah, there are definitely parts of the book that are autobiographical, a lot of the, just what it’s like to work at these intense startups really early on. Just the intensity of work, the hours that you put in, the constant flow of Red Bull… a lot of those details are definitely what it was like.”

Although he worked in technology, Riedel always wanted to be a writer, starting from a young age. In college, he decided to attend his first fiction workshops and began completing short stories and from that point on, he wrote anytime and anywhere he had the chance. At the time, a lot of his writing had magical/realist elements, but as he moved into the tech world, he became surrounded by people who were trying to invent the future and constantly asking “what is this” questions. “That time I spent working after college really influenced my fiction and made it more speculative, more sci-fi in that there is invented technology… so like, having a dating app in my novel is a way for me to experiment with inventing my own app but also finding a really straightforward way to say like, ‘Hey, how can we bring two people together in real life?”