Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985-2000

by Doug Menuez

  The Mathematical Equations of a Nobel Prize Winner.

  Zurich, Switzerland, 1997.

  Dr. Gerd Binnig (foreground), a 1986 Nobel laureate in Physics, has scribbled notations on a whiteboard describing aspects of his nanotechnology research at IBM’s Micro and Nanomechanics Group laboratory. Binnig won the Nobel Prize for Physics with the late Heinrich Rohrer for their invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), a device often described as one of the most significant accomplishments in the history of science. They are considered the fathers of nanotechnology, a field that has given rise to such innovations as highly targeted cancer drugs; AIDS-resistant condoms; 3-D printers that can output toys—or human skin; artificial muscles; and self-healing plastic. Despite these seemingly beneficial developments, many have warned of potential threats to humanity raised by this powerful new technology that allows scientists to measure and manipulate atoms.

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  Contents

  Foreword by Elliott Erwitt

  Introduction by Kurt Andersen

  A Trillion Lines of Code by Doug Menuez

  Fearless Genius

  Acknowledgments

  About Doug Menuez, Elliott Erwitt and Kurt Andersen

  Para Tereza e Paolo, meu amor sempre.

  And for those formerly awkward geeks

  who now stride like giants

  through a technology wonderland

  of their own creation.

  Behold the new cool kids!

  Foreword

  by Elliott Erwitt

  Photographing the unphotographable has long been the passion and the mission of Doug Menuez. How does one photograph genius? How does one visually communicate the creation and dynamics of world-altering concepts and somehow give insights into the personality of the men and women responsible, the people who essentially just sit and think and in so doing profoundly change our lives?

  The answer is, call on Doug Menuez.

  Photographs of business meetings and of disheveled people sitting and thinking for hours is hardly sexy visual material. But somehow with his extended time spent in the digital trenches of Silicon Valley and with his diligence applied, not unlike the intensity of his subjects, Mr. Menuez has managed to give us an insight into the minds and processes of these (for the most part) enigmatic people who have and will continue to influence our future more than we can imagine. You only have to consider the short trajectory of fifteen years of amazing technological evolution as chronicled in the pages of Fearless Genius.

  In all great affinity groups, one individual raises above all others and we lesser humans are fascinated to know more about him or her. This is true of groups formed around matters religious (Jesus) or martial (Napoléon); revolutionary (Tom Paine) or cinematic (Marilyn Monroe); geek (Steve Jobs) or gangster (Al Capone); evangelical (Billy Graham) or political (Abraham Lincoln) or mathematical (Isaac Newton). Steve Jobs, a complicated man, surely belongs among the above group of remarkable individuals. His death long before his time compels us to wonder about his inner person. So we are fortunate indeed to have such insightful and intimate access to Steve Jobs and his peers through the exclusive photographs collected in this book.

  Mr. Menuez was there, camera in hand, documenting the fundamental period of the digital phenomenon. He was deeply involved with many of its principal players, making the best possible use of his special access and bearing witness to a place, a time, and a people of extraordinary genius.

  Introduction

  by Kurt Andersen

  Like everyone in Silicon Valley in 1985, Doug Menuez was twenty-eight. During the previous four years IBM had introduced the first PC and Apple had brought out the first Mac, and six years hence the World Wide Web would be born. Like everyone else in Silicon Valley in 1985, Menuez was smart and curious and energetic, with a sense that he’d stumbled into exactly the right place at precisely the right time, that the future was being invented by twenty-eight-year-olds staring at screens and pecking at keyboards all over the suburbs south of San Francisco. If he were a poet instead of a poetic photojournalist, he might now be chronicling those giddy days the way William Wordsworth recalled the beginnings of the French Revolution two decades after his idealistic youth in Paris:

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

  But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times,

  In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways

  Of custom, law, and statute, took at once

  The attraction of a country in romance!

  When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,

  When most intent on making of herself

  A prime Enchantress—to assist the work,

  Which then was going forward in her name!

  Menuez, just returned in 1985 from covering Ethiopia’s drought and civil war, was looking for a new long-term project that wouldn’t involve documenting misery and hopelessness. His contemporary Steve Jobs, just purged from the company he’d founded, was embarking on a new project that wouldn’t involve pleasing shortsighted board members and investors at a mass-market computer company. Jobs agreed to give Menuez total access to his nascent enterprise, NeXT, and Life magazine agreed to underwrite and publish Menuez’s portrayal of the making of Jobs’s new new thing. Day after day, Menuez drove from Marin down to Redwood City to hang, chat, and shoot pictures. By the time the NeXT computer was finally ready to unveil three years later, however, Jobs had, um, you know, sorry—changed his mind. “I just decided that Life sucks,” he told Menuez. “But don’t worry—you’ll have a great time with these pictures someday!”

  As it turned out—as it so often turned out—Jobs’s hunch was correct. Because everyone in Silicon Valley knew that Steve Jobs, famously difficult and secretive, had given him free run of NeXT, Menuez now had an imprimatur, which for the next dozen years became a kind of all-access backstage pass to the tech epicenter. In his words, he was “a documentary artist with freedom” to wander around Adobe at the moment Photoshop was created, as well as Intel, Sun, NetObjects, Kleiner Perkins, and Apple. He was in the singular position of being embedded in units fighting on all the various fronts of the digital revolution. What made his free-range access especially remarkable was the culture of Silicon Valley—despite the superficial pizza-and-foosball looseness, the rival tribes inventing the digital future were manic, competitive, prone to extreme paranoia.

  During that seminal decade, they dreamed mainly of bringing a cool new world into being, whatever that might mean, of enabling unprecedented communication and diffusion of knowledge and creative expression. Doug Menuez, the son of a Chicago community organizer, was down with that. Utopianism is in the DNA of the Bay Area and has been from its Gold Rush, fairy-tale modern beginnings through the lush countercultural dreams of lifestyle perfection, all fed by coastal California’s perpetually pleasant weather and ethos of limitless self-reinvention. Of course it was here that the giddy, geeky gearhead tribes took root and flourished at the end of the millennium.

  For Northern California baby boomers, even failure could be an opportunity for self-actualization. “The heaviness of being successful,” Steve Jobs said of his prodigal-son time after being forced out of Apple, “was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, le
ss sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

  No place on earth is more baby-boomerish than Silicon Valley, and Jobs was its avatar: a CEO who wore jeans and emitted a “reality distortion field,” a sentimental, countercultural romantic who was also a ruthless mogul, a forever-young tinkerer dedicated to erasing the old distinctions between tools and toys, work and play. (To see what the previous generation of Silicon Valley tech guys looked like, see Menuez’s portrait Engineers at Beckman Instruments. Fullerton, California, 1989.) And, no coincidence, it was precisely during the era depicted here that all the boomers—the youngest twenty-one in 1985, the oldest fifty-four in 2000—occupied the sweet spot of the culture and the economy, no longer children but not yet old, equipped with the means and the will to reshape the world. One big reason John Sculley is not a hero of the Silicon Valley story: he was not just an outsider but a generation too old, already forty-four when he became the CEO/designated driver of Apple.

  Doug’s images are extraordinary, deeply evocative of an unpicturesque virtual circus, as he has an artist’s ability to suggest the drama and passion beneath the office-park banality. But they’re also deeply ironic. In a region rich with sunny natural greens and blues and golds, he chose to shoot almost entirely in black and white and indoors, a self-consciously old-school portrayal of the new dawn. And he was documenting the digital revolution on film just as that revolution was about to make his nineteenth-century medium obsolete.

  When you embark on an open-ended project such as this, how do you know when you’re done? For Doug Menuez, the beginning of the end was unambiguous. The Netscape browser appeared in late 1994, the work of a hacker fresh out of college who’d moved from Illinois to Mountain View. Eureka! For the first time anyone and everyone had free and easy access to the World Wide Web. Connected computing was real! Information wanted to be free! Back in the summer of 1995, when an IPO and monetization were unfamiliar concepts to people outside finance, Netscape went public; a company that had been valued at $21 million less than a year earlier was suddenly worth $2.9 billion. And the Silicon Valley zeitgeist underwent a seismic shift. The young people dreaming up software and devices changed from tech-for-tech’s-sake pioneers to guys in the middle of a gold rush. They hadn’t all been underpaid, madcap tinkerers before, and they weren’t all exit-strategizing money-grubbers afterward, but the calculus changed suddenly, profoundly, irretrievably.

  For Doug Menuez, “the final moment was the cratering of NetObjects.” That was the start-up in Redwood City whose Fusion software enabled regular people to build websites. NetObjects had its IPO in 1999 and, just before the dot-com bubble burst, achieved a value of $1.5 billion, fifty-one times its revenue—ten times Google’s multiple today. “It was the end of an era,” Doug says. “I was done.”

  Part two of the digital revolution began, the part that’s all about advertising and ubiquity, little apps and massive scale, about building on the tinkerers’ late twentieth-century breakthroughs to create a vast new industrial complex. When Doug Menuez began shooting pictures in Silicon Valley, there was no Web; practically nobody had a cell phone; Larry Page and Sergey Brin were in junior high; and Mark Zuckerberg was an infant. When Menuez finished fifteen years later and moved on with his 250,000 negatives (the equivalent of forty-five pictures a day, every day), almost half of Americans were internet-connected and cell-equipped; Page and Brin had started Google; and Zuckerberg was a high school student hacking software for a music player and an instant-messaging system. Part two has been astounding. But part one, the heedless, more innocent era of Fearless Genius? “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”

  A Trillion Lines of Code

  by Doug Menuez

  In the last decades of the twentieth century, a brilliant, eccentric tribe sparked an explosion of innovation that today we know as the digital revolution.

  For fifteen years I documented the efforts of this tribe, made up of engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists, as they invented technology that changed human behavior, culture, our very sense of ourselves. Their habitat was Silicon Valley.

  Living in their midst as unobtrusively as I could manage, I created a visual record of their everyday lives. They gave us powerful new tools that unleashed our innate creativity and launched an economic expansion the scale of which the world had never before seen.

  I was as surprised as anyone that my life in photography—from shooting street life in New York City to art school in San Francisco to a career in international photojournalism—took me to Silicon Valley. However by the mid-1980s, I was ready for something unexpected. I was burning out on the tragic nature of the stories I had been covering—the crises of AIDS and homelessness, the Oakland drug wars, devastating floods, forest fires, and earthquakes. I’d seen my share of suffering and death. In the spring of 1985, I traveled to Africa for the first time and covered a famine caused by civil war and drought. That human catastrophe was almost incomprehensible to me. Despite being a seasoned news photographer, I began to question what I was doing. I began looking for a subject that might suggest a more positive future for the human race. You could throw a stone in any direction and find injustice and sorrow. But if I could find something that was hopeful yet meaningful in a tangible way for the world, by photographing that I thought I might also find meaning in my own life. Enter Steve Jobs.

  I remember hearing that Steve, at the height of his precocious fame and power, had been forced out of the company he cofounded, Apple Computer. He was starting over with a new company called NeXT and was intent on building a supercomputer that would transform education. His plan was to put the power of a mainframe into an affordable one-foot cube a student could use. That got my interest because I had seen firsthand on many magazine assignments how education could have a determinative, root impact on solving so many social issues. This could be the subject I was looking for. Steve had changed the world once already with the introduction of the Apple II and Macintosh, and I thought he might just be able to pull it off again. The stakes were high.

  I reached out to Steve through a friend and was soon able to propose my idea to NeXT creative director and cofounder Susan Kare. I asked that I be allowed to follow Steve and his team over the next few years, with complete access, as they designed, built, and shipped the NeXT computer. Along the way I hoped to understand his process for innovation. Susan said my timing was perfect as Steve had been thinking about doing something along these lines. He fully believed they had a shot at something historic. A meeting was arranged.

  At the same time, I suggested to Peter Howe, then picture editor at Life magazine, that Steve was an avatar for a new generation of idealists then flooding the Valley. By photographing him, I would learn just how he was able to build breakthrough products and hopefully gain insights into the larger story of Silicon Valley. He agreed to a rare open-ended assignment; now I had only to convince Steve Jobs.

  So in the fall of 1985 I drove down to Palo Alto to meet with Steve and his team. I parked at their nondescript office building near the Stanford campus. Before Pixar, the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, and the greatest comeback in American business history, Steve Jobs was inside beginning a struggle that no one could have predicted would last over a decade. His long journey into a dark wilderness of bitter disappointment and failure was still to come. Years later, from the ashes of NeXT came the seeds of a reborn Apple that would propel Steve permanently into history. I didn’t yet have a clue what was ahead, but I was determined to record whatever happened.

  As I entered the building, Susan was coming down the stairs to greet me with NeXT’s sales and marketing VP, Dan’l Lewin. She said they had already met with Steve and he was all for the idea. There was to be no oversight, I could just shoot whatever I wanted. I was stunned by this good news. Steve came down the stairs as I was soaking all this in and gave me a big smile. We talked for a minute about the project, then he shook my hand and said, “Okay! Great!” and contin
ued on down the hall. I was in. I lifted my camera and went to work.

  Steve’s generation was shaped by the sensibilities of the sixties and years of economic growth. During this unique period of history, these new iconoclasts were disrupters, clashing with the pioneering space-race engineers already in the Valley. The older technologists had a worldview forged from constant crisis: World War II and the Korean War, the Cold War and the rise of nuclear weapons, the shock of Sputnik and subsequent push for the exploration of space. Many of the companies they worked for developed systems and products for NASA and the Department of Defense. They came to work in suits and ties with buzz cuts and maintained a military-style discipline.

  The newcomers wore their hair long, dressed in sandals and jeans, and were determined to harness the power of technology to give ordinary people access to computers. With his new company, Steve wanted to take his vision of easy-to-use computers specifically to students and educators, giving them the power to compute, to create, and to express ideas faster and better than ever.

  After three intense years at NeXT, culminating in the October 1988 launch of the NeXT computer, I reached a bittersweet milestone when Steve and his PR team decided to kill the Life story. He felt Life was no longer “cool,” and anyway they had offers for over eighty other magazine covers to choose from for the launch story. It was hard to let go of all that work, but Steve gave me a glimpse of the bigger picture and convinced me that someday this work would come out. And so with Steve’s continued encouragement, I decided to expand my project to include as much of Silicon Valley as I could.

  Because Steve had trusted me with complete access to his company, so did many of the other leading innovators of Silicon Valley, such as Adobe founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke; Steve’s nemesis at Apple, John Sculley; venture capitalist L. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins; Bill Gates of Microsoft; Carol Bartz at Autodesk; Bill Joy at Sun; Gordon Moore and Andy Grove at Intel; Marc Andreessen at Netscape; Samir Arora at NetObjects; and over seventy other leading innovators and companies.