Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

by Adam Fisher

  Biz Stone: San Francisco is the cool place to be.

  Ev Williams: My theory is that as these tech companies have become more culture makers, then they gravitate toward the City, because that is who makes culture—people who live in cities. And now it’s maturing to a degree where you can be in tech and be a pure businessperson and there’s lots of them. And lots of lawyers, and now there’s lots of artists and those people are part of tech, too. And they live in cities and they live in San Francisco.

  Louis Rossetto: The nineties marks this transition where all the original technical breakthroughs started to bite in society at large. There is a switch happening. The blog gave way to the tweet and to Facebook.

  Jim Levy: To me, by the nineties it wasn’t fun anymore. Though I’m sure a lot of people had a lot of fun. I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg had a lot of fun putting his thing together. I know the Google guys had a lot of fun. They are still having a lot of fun.

  Steve Wozniak: The iPhone is the coup de grâce. When you use your iPhone you still have a personal computer—but your PC is in a data center. It’s taking data off hard disks, analyzing it and determining what to show, and it sends it to your iPhone to show you, so you really have a PC but you don’t see it, it’s not yours, so it’s not personal. You have a computer but it’s not personal.

  Sean Parker: And then it becomes the post–social media era. It’s all the people who would have become investment bankers who want to go start internet companies, and it’s a purely commercial, purely transactional world. It’s just become this transactional thing, and it’s attracted the wrong type of people. It’s become a very toxic environment. A lot of people have shown up believing, maybe correctly, that they can cash in. But that’s Silicon Valley the ATM machine, not Silicon Valley the font of creativity and realization of your dreams.

  Biz Stone: Only in Silicon Valley can you be like, “Yeah, we would like $10 million and we’ll sell you a percentage of our theoretical company that may one day have lots of profits and if we lose all the money we don’t have to give it back to you. And maybe we’ll start something else.” In what crazy world does something like that exist? Like wait, you can just blow the money and then you don’t owe it back, just wash your hands clean, done? “Sorry about that. Sorry, I spent all your money. Oh, well.” I mean it’s just crazy. And not only that, here’s another scenario. Here’s what some people do. They say, “We need $25 million, but you know, just so we can stay focused my cofounder and I each need $3 million of that money in our bank accounts. Then we don’t have to worry about bills so we can really focus. Okay?” And then they blow the money and they say, “Oh, well, that didn’t work out, but we’re still keeping the $3 million each, so now we’re rich.” What the hell? That is crazy. So, it’s a crazy world. This is like some kind of nutty place where you can do that kind of stuff.

  Steve Perlman: We, today, in Silicon Valley, are at a similar level of maturity as the automobile industry in 1950. What happened in Detroit was that the winners ended up getting consolidated to the Big Three, and there was no other player that could enter that industry that could possibly compete. The people that succeed in these large companies are the ones that make the safe bets. The people that don’t rock the boat, the people that get along with everyone. The people that don’t do things which show up the other lifers there, and disrupt their opportunities to advance in the organization. Those are the people that gravitate to and stay at the larger companies.

  Steve Wozniak: That turns me off a lot. Now your importance is measured by what company you are in and what you do. I don’t like that.

  Steve Perlman: Is there any way that Silicon Valley can recover what it’s lost?

  Andy Hertzfeld: The most important thing really is the motivation. Why are you doing what you’re doing? That seeps into the product at every level, even though you think it might not. Your basic values are essentially the architecture of the project. Why does it exist? And in Silicon Valley there are two really common sets of values. There are what I call financial values, where the main thing is to make a bunch of money. That’s not a really good spiritual reason to be working on a project, although it’s completely valid. Then there are technical values that dominate lots of places where people care about using the best technique—doing things right. Sometimes that translates to ability or to performance, but it’s really a technical way of looking at things. But then there is a third set of values that are much less common: and they are the values essentially of the art world or the artist. And artistic values are when you want to create something new under the sun. If you want to contribute to art, your technique isn’t what matters. What matters is originality. It’s an emotional value.

  Chris Caen: This is a little clichéd and eye-rolling—and it’s not true for all the entrepreneurs—but I think for a large portion of the entrepreneurs here they generally kind of make the world better. Look at all these entrepreneurs who are living five to an apartment, who are not making a lot of money, and may never make a lot of money. They can get a six- or seven-figure job at a bank or a large company but they choose to do this. At the end of the day it’s not money, it’s this emotional connection: “I am somehow connected with this world in a different way, and I can act upon that.” I think that is unique to Silicon Valley. Even back to the original days of Atari, there was this idea that you can have an emotional-professional career, and that’s okay. You can say, “I want to do this because I want to do this,” and that’s accepted.

  Andy Hertzfeld: Woz might not say that he is driven by artistic values, but if you look at the work—that’s what it is. All that crazy creativity in the Apple II was art. Steve was fundamentally motivated by artistic values. I had artistic values. The artist wants to spiritually elevate the planet.

  Ev Williams: Larry Page and Sergey Brin are driven to create. I saw this at Google. They are like this.

  Steve Jobs: The people who really create things that change this industry are both the thinker and the doer in one person. The doers are the major thinkers. Did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out about the future? About what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not. Leonardo was the artist—but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy. And combining all those skills together—the art and the science, the thinking and the doing—was what resulted in the exceptional result.

  Ev Williams: Tons of other businesses are driven by people who like to transact, to “do business” or “make money”—I mean you can be on Wall Street and just transact. What’s different about Silicon Valley are those people who are driven by the creation.

  David Levitt: People make a huge difference and in a crazy way the technology is just incidental.

  John Battelle: Technology is just the artifact, it’s not the culture. Culture is the values we shared. And it’s no longer an outside-the-mainstream cultural movement, it is our culture. What’s different now is not the Valley, it’s every major city in the world.

  Aleks Totić: In the rest of the world, technology didn’t matter. Twenty years later we won. It’s worldwide. There are internet cafés in Zambia; they have cell phones; they know Google; they know Apple: The Valley has utterly conquered the mind share.

  Marc Porat: If you say “New York,” people around the world generally know what it is, and now if you say “Palo Alto” they kind of know what it is, too: That’s kind of weird—it’s a village!

  Aleks Totić: Now what happens here really affects things everywhere else. It’s very different. Now we attract normal people. Before we were like a tribe and now everyone’s in it.

  Brenda Laurel: It’s ironic: Silicon Valley has gone from a countercultural kind of thing that grew out of hippie ethics and the Whole Earth Catalog to a mainstream belief system shared by young entrepreneurs around the world.

  Steve Wozniak: And they are usually young people. Look at the people who star
ted Apple, look at the people who started Google and Facebook—very young people, just out of college.

  Jim Levy: I don’t believe that the guys who founded Google at the time they founded it thought it was going to be what it is now. Certainly Zuckerberg didn’t think Facebook was going to be what it is now. But over time so many of those things happened that now you find the Valley to a great extent populated by people who expect that that’s what they are in it to do—another Google, to do another Facebook. That’s not taking anything away from Silicon Valley as the engine that it is now. It is what it is, right?

  Jeff Skoll: And it’s interesting to think about where it will go. I don’t think that the Valley has ever tried to use its political power in the way that it might. Certainly now it has the money. It certainly has a stranglehold on world dynamics in the way that it just didn’t ten or fifteen years ago.

  John Battelle: I don’t know how I feel about that, to be honest.

  Jeff Skoll: I get this image in my head of these very powerful overgrown kids who don’t quite know what they have, and the rest of the world is just sort of at their disposal, and so what happens next?

  BOOK ONE

  AMONG THE COMPUTER BUMS

  The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

  —ALAN KAY

  The Big Bang

  Everything starts with Doug Engelbart

  Doug Engelbart was the first to actually build a computer that might seem familiar to us, today. He came to Silicon Valley after a stint in the Navy as a radar technician during World War Two. The computer then (and, in postwar America, there was only one computer) was used to calculate artillery tables. Engelbart was, in his own estimation, a “naïve drifter,” but something about the Valley inspired him to think big. Engelbart’s idea was that computers of the future should be optimized for human needs—communication and collaboration. Computers, he reasoned, should have keyboards and screens instead of punch cards and printouts. They should augment rather than replace the human intellect. And so he pulled a team together and built a working prototype: the oN-Line System. Unlike earlier efforts, the NLS wasn’t a military supercalculator. It was a general-purpose tool designed to help knowledge workers perform better and faster, and that was a controversial idea. Letting nonengineers interact directly with a computer was seen as harebrained, utopian—subversive, even. And then people saw the demo.

  Doug Engelbart: In 1950 I got engaged. Getting married and living happily ever after just kind of shook me. I realized that I didn’t have any more goals. I was twenty-five. It was December 10 or 11. I went home that night, and started thinking: My God, this is ridiculous. I had a steady job. I was an electrical engineer working at what is now NASA. But other than having a steady job, and an interesting one, I didn’t have any goals! Which shows what a backward country kid I was. Well, why don’t I try maximizing how much good I can do for mankind? I have no idea where that came from. Pretty big thoughts.

  Stewart Brand: There is a sense about Doug that he is trying to express what humanity needs.

  Doug Engelbart: Well, then I thought, I’m an engineer and who needs more engineering? What are the things the world really needs? So then I started poking around, looking at the different kinds of crusades you could get on. Someplace along there, I just had this flash that, Hey, the complexity of a lot of the problems and the means for solving them are just getting to be too much. The time available for solving a lot of the problems is getting shorter and shorter. So the urgency goes up. The product of these two factors, complexity and urgency, had transcended what humans can cope with. It suddenly flashed that if you could do something to improve human capability to deal with that, then you’d really contribute something basic. That just resonated.

  Jane Metcalfe: Everything starts with Doug Engelbart.

  Doug Engelbart: It unfolded rapidly. I had read about computers. I think it was just within an hour that I had the image of sitting at a big CRT screen with all kinds of symbols, new and different symbols, not restricted to our old ones. The computer could be manipulating, and you could be operating all kinds of things to drive the computer. The radar technician training let me realize that a computer could make anything happen on a display screen and that the engineering was easy to do. That was the spring of 1951. I got accepted to graduate school at Berkeley, because they were building a computer there.

  Steve Jobs: And in those days—again, it’s hard to remember how primitive it was—there was no such thing as a computer with a graphics video display. It was literally a printer. It was a teletype printer with a keyboard on it. And so you would keyboard these commands in and then you would wait for a while. And then the thing would go ta-dah-dah-dah-dah, and it would tell you something out.

  Bob Taylor: Computing was, in those days, believed to be for arithmetic. That’s it. Data processing, calculating payroll, calculating ballistic missile trajectories, numbers… I wasn’t interested in numbers and neither was Doug.

  Doug Engelbart: I finally got my PhD and was teaching and applied to the Stanford Research Institute, thinking if there was anyplace I could explore this augmenting idea it was there. Stanford was a small engineering school then. Hewlett-Packard was successful, but still small. By 1962 I’d written a description of what I wanted to do, and I began to get the money the next year.

  Bob Taylor: There was this proposal called “Augmenting the Human Intellect” by someone at SRI, whom I had never heard of. I loved the ideas in this proposal. The thing that I was most attracted to was the fact that he was going to use computers in a way that people had not: to, as he put it, “augment human intellect.” That’s about as distinct a phrase as I can think of to describe it. I got in touch with this chap, and he came to see me in DC, and we got him started on a NASA contract, which was quite a bit larger funding than he had had previously. It got him and his group off the ground.

  Doug Engelbart: I got the money to do a research project on trying to test the different kind of display selection devices and that’s when I came up with the idea of mouse.

  Bill English: That happened in ’63. We had a contract with NASA to evaluate different display pointing devices, so I collected different devices—a joystick, a light pen—and Doug had a sketch of this “mouse” in one of his sketchbooks. I thought that looked pretty good, so I took that and had the SRI machine shop build one for me. We included that in our evaluation experiments, and it was clearly the best pointing device.

  Bob Taylor: The mouse was created by NASA funding. Remember when NASA was advertising Tang as its big contribution to the civilized world? Well, there was a better example, but they didn’t know about it.

  Doug Engelbart: We had to make our own computer display. You couldn’t buy them. I think it cost us $90,000 in 1963 money. We just had to build it from scratch. The display driver was a hunk of electronics three feet by four feet.

  Steve Jobs: Doug had invented the mouse and the bitmap display.

  Jeff Rulifson: An SDS 940 was used for the demo.

  Butler Lampson: The SDS 940 was a computer system that we developed in a research project at Berkeley, and then we coaxed SDS into actually making it into a product. Engelbart built the NLS on the 940.

  Bob Taylor: Doug and his group were able to take off-the-shelf computer hardware and transform what you could do with it through software. Software is much more difficult for people to understand than hardware. Hardware, you can pick it up and touch it and feel it and see what it looks like and so on. Software is more mysterious. It’s true that Doug’s group did some hardware innovation, but their software innovation was truly remarkable.

  Bill Paxton: Remember—put yourself back. This was a group, an entire group, sharing a computer that is roughly as powerful… If you measure computing power in iPhones, it was a milli-iPhone. It was one one-thousandth of an iPhone that this group was using for ten people. It was nuts! These guys did absolute miracles.

  Don Andrews: We knew from the onset, based on Doug’s vi
sion, what we were trying to do. We were looking for ways of rapidly prototyping new user interfaces, and so building a framework, an infrastructure, that we could go into and build something on top of, over and over, very quickly. We knew that things were going to change very quickly, and essentially we were bootstrapping ourselves.

  Alan Kay: In programming there is a widespread theory that one shouldn’t build one’s own tools. This is true—an incredible amount of time and energy has gone down that rat hole. On the other hand, if you can build your own tools then you absolutely should, because the leverage that can be obtained can be incredible.

  Bill Paxton: Being immersed in the group where everybody was using the same tools and using them on a day-to-day basis, and where the people who were developing the tools were sitting next to the people who were using the tools—that was a really tight loop that led to very rapid progress.

  Doug Engelbart: By 1968 I was beginning to feel that we could show a lot of dramatic things. I had this adventurous sense of Well, let’s try it then, which fairly often ended in disaster.

  Bob Taylor: In those days there were always, at these computer conferences, panel discussions attacking the idea of interactive computing. The reasons were multitudinous. They’d say, “Well, it’s too expensive. Computer time is worth more than human time. It will never work. It’s a pipe dream.” So, the great majority of the public, including the computing establishment, were not only ignorant and would be opposed to what Doug was trying to do, they were also opposed to the whole idea of interactive computing.

  Doug Engelbart: Anyway, I just wanted to try it out. I found out that the American Federation of Information Processing conference was going to be in San Francisco, so it was something we could do. I made an appeal to the people who were organizing the program. It was fortunately quite a ways ahead. The conference would be in December and I started preparing for it sometime in March, or maybe earlier, which was a good thing because, boy, they were very hesitant about us.