Quirky

by Melissa A Schilling

  A Bell Labs team that included John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain worked on developing pure germanium “crystal” diodes for use in the radar systems. It was this work on diodes that would give rise to transistors, invented in 1947 (Bardeen, Shockley, and Brattain were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for the development of the transistor). In 1956 Shockley moved from New Jersey (where Bell Labs was located) to Mountain View, California, to help his ailing mother. There he founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Although Shockley was undeniably brilliant, he also had psychological problems, was a proponent of eugenics, and was—to put it mildly—difficult to work with.30 It is perhaps not surprising, then, that only a year later eight of Shockley’s top researchers left to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Over the next two decades, dozens of companies would be spawned by the intellectual talent at Fairchild Semiconductor, giving rise to Silicon Valley.

  Let’s take a moment to review that sequence of events: Churchill, fearing the fall of Britain to the Nazis, sends vastly superior radar technology to the United States. Bell Labs gets the contract to work on the radar and ends up also developing transistors. Shockley takes the transistor technology to Mountain View because his mother is ill, but because of his psychological problems, his research team leaves to found Fairchild. Fairchild subsequently spawns dozens of companies that give rise to Silicon Valley. It’s an iconic example of “path dependence,” a situation where the outcome is exquisitely sensitive to the sequence of events that led up to it. What if Churchill had not sent the British magnetron to the United States or if the Tizard mission had been thwarted? What if the contract to work on the magnetron had not been given to Bell Laboratories? What if Shockley had not moved to Mountain View to care for his ailing mother? Any change to this sequence of events could have led to an entirely different future where Silicon Valley did not emerge. What would the United States look like today if Silicon Valley never came to be? What companies and technologies would not exist? What companies and technologies might have arisen instead? Would we know who Steve Jobs was?

  We can review a similar path for most of the innovators studied here: Thomas Edison was offered a job in a telegraph station because he had saved the stationmaster’s child from an oncoming train. If he had not saved that child, he would not have been offered that job, and his career would have taken a completely different direction. Edison had a nearly insatiable appetite for chemical experiments, so it is probable that he would still have become a scientist or inventor, but perhaps not in electricity. Edison (and Tesla) lived during a period that was ripe for electrical invention. Work by Hans Christian Ørsted, André-Marie Ampère, and James Clerk Maxwell on electromagnetism, the development of the electric motor by Michael Faraday, and work on electric circuits by Georg Ohm had laid the necessary scientific groundwork upon which others such as Edison, Tesla, Bell, Kelvin, and Westinghouse would build.31 Because the timing was right, we didn’t just see a steady trickle of invention in electrical devices; we saw a huge surge in electrical inventions that would drive the second industrial revolution and radically transform our society’s way of life.32 If Tesla or Edison had come of age in a different time or chosen a path in something other than electricity, they may have still been inventors—possibly even famous inventors—but they would not be known for the things they are known for today. It is even possible that their names would have been lost to posterity.

  The role of “right time, right place” is immensely important but is not enough to account for a serial breakthrough innovator. Thousands of people were working on electricity and electrical devices in the late 1800s, but only a very few of them continued to develop breakthrough innovations repeatedly throughout their lives with a similar impact on the world as that of Edison or Tesla. Similarly, although thousands of people have made individual important breakthroughs in computing, none became as synonymous with repeatedly creating life-transforming products as Jobs did. Röntgen and Becquerel identified radioactive rays ahead of Curie but did not pursue them with the intensity and persistence that enabled her to become one of the most famous scientists of all time. Although the opportunities of an era are important for almost every breakthrough innovation, they are not sufficient to account for a serial breakthrough innovator. This type of innovator also has a nature and a drive that help her capitalize on such opportunities in a way that others do not.

  7

  “It’s not about the money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.…”

  Access to Resources

  The previous chapter showed that timing matters—sometimes, technological, political, or cultural shocks foster a burst of innovative activity, such as how the invention of the transistor led to major improvements in computers. Timing isn’t the only source of situational advantage that affects innovation, however. Another major source of “right time, right place” benefits is an innovator’s access to resources.

  When business and economics researchers study why a nation or region innovates—or fails to—they often focus on access to capital and education. That makes sense; surely, having money and spending it well on innovative ventures and training have proven to be important. Also, a strong capital market—a well-developed market of investors and lenders, along with strong financial reporting standards, financial analysts, and good contract law—is important for innovation and efficiency. It also goes without saying that education enhances the opportunities of people and helps advance an economy. But how much do financial resources and education matter for the emergence of a breakthrough innovator?

  The answer is surprising and is more nuanced than the question. Each innovator studied here benefited from living and working in a well-functioning economy replete with capital resources and educated people, but the innovators themselves typically had scant financial resources of their own and far less formal education than you might expect. Most, in fact, had almost no financial resources when they began their careers. Benjamin Franklin famously arrived in New York with enough money for two rolls of bread, and his formal education was close to nonexistent. Thomas Edison, likewise with almost no formal education, bootstrapped his way up from a position as a newspaper sales boy to owning his own research laboratory. Elon Musk also began his career with almost nothing, having moved to Canada as a teenager with very little money and working odd jobs during his school years to keep himself afloat. Access to financial resources is not a necessary condition for being a breakthrough innovator. In fact, it is possible that not having significant financial resources provides benefits by giving the innovator little to lose and ensuring a strong work ethos. As Musk tersely put it in a 2013 interview, “If I couldn’t make money I could run out of food and die.” On the other hand, nearly every innovator’s story illustrates the important role of access to other kinds of resources, especially technological and intellectual resources. Steve Jobs provides an apt example.

  Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955, to two University of Wisconsin graduate students. His father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, an emigrant from Syria, was a teaching assistant pursuing his doctorate in political science. His mother, Joanne Schieble, was studying speech pathology. When the twenty-three-year-old students realized they had conceived a child, they at first planned to marry. However, their plans were thwarted by Joanne’s conservative father, who threatened to disown her if she married Jandali, a Muslim. Joanne thus traveled to San Francisco to have her child in secrecy and then gave him up for adoption. The family Joanne first chose was Catholic, well-educated, and affluent. However, at the last minute they decided to adopt a girl instead. The baby was then placed with Paul and Clara Jobs, who named him Steven Paul Jobs.

  Joanne was dissatisfied with the Jobs family and took them to court to challenge the adoption. Although she ultimately agreed to drop the case under the condition that Paul and Clara Jobs commit to sending Steve to college, the court case had created an unsettling start for the new fami
ly. Chrisann Brennan, Jobs’s first girlfriend, later recounted that one day when she and Steve were teenagers and had only recently begun dating, Clara suddenly confessed to her that “I was too frightened to love him for the first six months of his life.… I was scared they were going to take him away from me. Even after we won the case, Steve was so difficult a child that by the time he was two I felt we had made a mistake. I wanted to return him.”1 By many accounts, the knowledge that his birth parents had given him up weighed heavily on Jobs, a source of pain and bitterness he would wrestle with throughout his life.

  The Jobs family lived in a modest home in the San Francisco suburb of Mountain View, right in the center of the area that would become known as Silicon Valley. Paul was an engine mechanic who had dropped out of high school and served in the Coast Guard during World War II. He was an industrious man who was constantly working. In his spare time, he would buy old cars and fix them up for resale. Paul had a well-stocked workshop in his garage with hundreds of impeccably organized tools, each with its proper place outlined on a pegboard in black marker. Steve’s room was similarly meticulous in its organization; every item had been carefully assessed for its value, usefulness, and the space it took up—much like the set of priorities with which he would later design computers.2 Clara was a good-natured woman whose parents had emigrated to the United States after fleeing the Turks in Armenia. She worked as a bookkeeper.

  From early on it became clear that Steve was very smart. He was also very rebellious and was prone to getting in trouble at school, where he was frequently bored. When he was in the fourth grade, Steve scored at the tenth-grade level on intelligence tests, so his elementary school suggested having him skip two grades to keep him adequately stimulated. His parents wisely had him skip only one and moved to a new neighborhood in Los Altos, also in Silicon Valley, so Steve could attend a better school.

  After work or on weekends, Paul would show Steve the cars he was working on, and the two would often go together to junkyards to look for needed parts, a skill that Steve would later use when he hunted through technology flea markets. His father also taught him to appreciate careful design—including the insides and backs of products that a user would not normally see—because these were important aspects of quality craftsmanship. This was also a lesson Steve would use later in life; the circuit boards of Apple computers had to look orderly, and even the inside of the computer cases had to be polished to perfection. Although Paul could be hard on Steve, and according to Chrisann Brennan would constantly berate him with criticism and disapproval, Steve responded with “sad smiles and painstaking patience.”3 He knew his adopted parents were devoted to him, and he loved them deeply.

  Heathkits, from which one could build radios and television receivers, were an obsession for Jobs during his teenage years. The kits gave him confidence about his ability to understand electronics and build electronic products. As Jobs explained, “Heathkits came with all the boards and parts color-coded but the manual also explained the theory of how it operated.… It made you realize you could build and understand anything. Once you built a couple of radios, you’d see a TV in the catalogue and say ‘I can build that as well,’ even if you didn’t. I was very lucky, because when I was a kid both my dad and the Heathkits made me believe I could build anything.”4

  The Steve Jobs we know as a serial breakthrough innovator may have emerged from just about anywhere, but his chances were enormously enhanced because of the San Francisco area’s unique endowment of technological and intellectual resources. By the 1960s, Silicon Valley had already emerged as one of the largest and most important information technology clusters in the world. Its genesis had begun in the early 1900s, when the area became a site of significant US naval research and technology. Firms such as Federal Telegraph Corporation were creating wireless communication systems, and Lockheed was founded there to develop aerospace applications. In 1933 an air base in Sunnyvale became the Naval Air Station Moffett Field, which would later house the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Silicon Valley was thus an early fertile garden for advanced electronic technologies. In the 1940s and 1950s, Frederick Terman (then Stanford’s dean of engineering) began encouraging Stanford students and faculty to start up entrepreneurial ventures. He also leased land around the campus to high-technology companies in order to fund the university’s growth. Soon Stanford had become the hub of a thriving technology center that included Hewlett Packard, Varian Associates, Intel, and, as noted in the previous chapter, Shockley Semiconductor and Fairchild Semiconductor. Nearly every household in Jobs’s neighborhood was connected in one way or another to electronics and engineering. When many technology-based companies are in this type of proximity, clustering advantages emerge. As decades of research in economic geography have shown, employment opportunities multiply in technology clusters, and the region grows a large pool of highly skilled labor. Furthermore, employees from different companies will be neighbors and belong to the same clubs; their children will go to the same schools. Soon a web of personal relationships knits the organizations together and ensures that knowledge rapidly diffuses among them.5 In the words of the famous economist Alfred Marshall, who wrote about such clusters, “[T]he mysteries of the trade become no mysteries; but are as if it were in the air.”6 Breathing such heady air undoubtedly made any teenager growing up in this environment more likely to enter the information technology industry, but it was a particularly rich resource for a smart and enterprising kid like Jobs.

  Having a father and a wide array of people in his neighborhood with expertise in electronics had an importance influence on Jobs’s future, as did seeing what was going on in nearby organizations and companies. He described this early influence during an interview in 1990:

  I saw my first computer when I was twelve. And it was at NASA. We had a local NASA center nearby. And it was a terminal, which was connected to a big computer somewhere and I got a timesharing account on it. And I was fascinated by this thing. And I saw my second computer a few years later which was really the first desktop computer ever made. It was made by Hewlett Packard. It was called the 9100-A. And it ran a language called BASIC. And it was very large. It had a very small cathode ray tube on it for display. And I got a chance to play with one of those maybe in 1968 or ’69. And spent every spare moment I had trying to write programs for it. I was so fascinated by this. And so I was probably fairly lucky.7

  One engineer in the neighborhood was Francis Wozniak, a brilliant rocket scientist at Lockheed who taught engineering principles to his son Steve, known to his friends as “Woz.” As Woz recounted, “He would explain what a resistor was by going all the way back to atoms and electrons. He explained how resistors worked when I was in second grade, not by equations but by having me picture it.”8 Woz was both extremely intelligent and extremely nerdy—he was much more comfortable with circuit boards and transistors than with people. When he and Steve Jobs met, however, they became immediate friends. Their shared passions included pranks, electronics, and music. As Woz noted, “We had so much in common. Typically, it was really hard for me to explain to people what kind of design stuff I worked on, but Steve got it right away. And I liked him. He was kind of skinny and wiry and full of energy.”9 It was a serendipitous meeting for both: while their commonalities brought them together, their differences made them a synergistic match. Jobs was the spiritual dreamer with vision and ambition; Woz was the gifted technical genius who could execute Jobs’s ideas. Jobs had a domineering and mercurial nature that made him difficult to get along with, but Woz’s unassuming and gentle disposition made him exceptionally tolerant of Jobs’s difficult personality and sometimes hurtful behaviors. Soon the two young men were spending much of their time hunting down Bob Dylan bootlegs and coming up with complicated pranks together. One such prank, which ultimately became their first money-making venture, was creating the “blue boxes” that enabled them to fool the AT&T phone system into making long-distance calls for free, as discussed earlie
r.

  When Steve Jobs graduated from high school in 1972, his parents honored their commitment to his birth mother, Joanne, by agreeing to send him to the college of his choice. Steve chose the very expensive and artistic Reed College, in Oregon. There, like many American college campuses, students were transitioning from the activism of the 1960s into the pursuit of enlightenment and personal expression of the 1970s. Jobs became increasingly involved in meditation, Zen Buddhism, and psychedelic drugs, and these things, in turn, would cause him to increasingly value intuition and a minimalist aesthetic. Minimalist design and an emphasis on intuitive interfaces would become the signature features of the products he would later design.

  Jobs didn’t like conforming to the curriculum requirements of Reed, and he also felt guilty about the financial burden it was imposing on his parents. He therefore made the rather remarkable decision to drop out of Reed but continue to audit the courses he found interesting. As Jobs later described, “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.”10 The dean of students at Reed, Jack Dudman, agreed because “He had a very inquiring mind that was enormously attractive.… He refused to accept automatically received truths, and he wanted to examine everything himself.”11 He rented a garage apartment for $20 per month and supported himself by returning soda bottles for the five-cent deposits. He would walk seven miles across town every Sunday evening to get dinner at the Hare Krishna temple. He enjoyed his Bohemian lifestyle and had little need for material goods. However, by February 1974, after eighteen months of hanging around Reed, he knew it was time to move on.