David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

things that they were so good at?
Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan
and Julia were serious basketball
players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly,
Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali,
had never played the game before. They
weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot.
They weren’t particularly adept at
dribbling. They were not the sort who
played pickup games at the playground
every evening. Ranadivé lives in Menlo
Park, in the heart of California’s Silicon
Valley. His team was made up of, as
Ranadivé put it, “little blond girls.”
These were the daughters of nerds and
computer programmers. They worked on
science projects and read long and
complicated books and dreamed about