Like: The Button That Changed the World

A riveting, insider's look at the creation and evolution of the like button and what it reveals about innovation, business, and culture—and its profound impact on modern human interaction.

"…an entertaining new book by Martin Reeves and Bob Goodson on the origins of the "like" button." — The Economist

Over 160 billion times a day, someone taps a like button. How could something that came out of nowhere become so ubiquitous—and even so addictive? How did this seemingly ordinary social media icon go from such a small and unassuming invention to something so intuitive and universally understood that it has scaled well beyond its original intent?

This is the story of the like button and how it changed our lives. In Like, bestselling author and renowned strategy expert Martin Reeves and coauthor Bob Goodson—Silicon Valley veteran and one of the originators of the like button—take readers on a quest to uncover the origins of the thumbs-up gesture, how it became an icon on social media, and what's behind its power.

Through insights from key players, including the founders of Yelp, PayPal, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, and FriendFeed, you'll hear firsthand the disorderly, serendipitous process from which the like button was born. It's a story that starts with a simple thumbs-up cartoon but ends up with surprises and new mysteries at every turn, some of them as deep as anthropological history and others as speculative as the AI-charged future.

But this is much more than the origin story of the like button. Drawing on business and innovation theory, evolutionary biology, social psychology, neuroscience, and other human-centered disciplines, this deeply researched book offers smart and unexpected insights into how this little icon changed our world—and all of us in the process.

© 2025 Harvard Business Review Press (Ebook): 9798892790468

Release date

Ebook: 29 April 2025