Valley of Genius

by Adam Fisher

  Andy Hertzfeld: the programmer-hero behind the first Macintosh who went on to prototype the equivalent of a working iPhone—back in the 1990s

  8

  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.

  Bruce Sterling, Brenda Laurel, and Steven Levy: The Hackers Conference, which was first held in 1984, is where Silicon Valley technical types started to recognize themselves as a culture

  9

  Left to right: Bruce Sterling, Brenda Laurel, Steven Levy.

  This was the moment where the consciousness of that time really became something that you could pick up on. Just like in the gay movement where there was a time when people just felt incredibly alone, that there was no one else like them. There was this consciousness that came out there: Oh, this is who I am! I think it’s fantastic that now in high schools people can be themselves whether they are gay or a hacker, right? The other thing was the laughter. Every session was joyous. People were really funny. There was so much laughter throughout. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a conference where people laughed more. It was a shared humor out of a shared experience there. And even though some people had never met each other, it was like you were part of a crew that had worked together for years and years. It was like inside jokes with people you’d never met before. They were also just genuinely funny.

  —Stephen Levy

  Stewart Brand: the Zelig Silicon Valley avant-gardist who first put the phrase “personal computer” in print, popularized the word hacker, and created The Well, the first wildly successful experiment in social media

  10

  I had seen online teleconferencing. And I had seen things that had made it wonderful and things that had made it terrible, and there were also bulletin board systems around at that time which had also established a certain amount of behaviors that were wonderful and not so wonderful. So, based on those experiences, we designed what became called The Well to reflect what had been learned about online discussions at that point. I priced it to be very inviting. We made it easy to make conferences, and people would invent conferences. Anybody could start a conference. I wanted hackers inside the system, so we invited them in and writers, journalists, all got free accounts and that was our marketing. Initially it was just sort of friends of the Whole Earth Catalog. People learned how to deal with trolls. If you respond to them, they will make the flame even brighter. So, The Well kind of grew and got a life of its own and established a certain amount of online practice.

  Jaron Lanier: the coiner of the phrase “virtual reality” and the first to sell a complete VR rig—googles and gloves paired with the hardware and software to make it all work

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  My whole field has created shit. And it’s like we’ve thrust all of humanity into this endless life of tedium, and it’s not how it was supposed to be. The way we’ve designed the tools requires that people comply totally with an infinite number of arbitrary actions. We really have turned humanity into lab rats that are trained to run mazes. I really think on just the most fundamental level we are approaching digital technology in the wrong way.

  Survival Research Laboratories: an outlaw art troupe that catalyzed the Valley’s “cyberculture” with terrifying spectacles of robotic carnage and mechanical mayhem

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  There were pianos, about twenty-five pianos stacked against a part of the freeway, and at one point the pianos caught on fire and the Highway Patrol shut the freeway down because the flames got high enough that they were coming over the top of the freeway, fifty feet above us. So it was pretty out of control. We also had a huge flamethrower that was making forty- or fifty-foot flames down underneath there also. All this stuff was happening at once, and huge huge fires, smoke and just a lot of chaos, a lot of explosions and just a lot of crazy stuff. There was too much chaos to really pay close attention. I just know that the fire was melting things in the control booth from a hundred feet away! It happened because there was a ceiling. There is a phenomenon that happens with infrared radiation called “flame focusing” where if there’s something on top and on the bottom the infrared can’t radiate up or down, so the flame felt much more concentrated than it would have if it was outdoors. That also damaged the freeway pretty badly, but fortunately the earthquake came a couple months later and so Caltrans just said “Don’t worry about it. We don’t even want to admit that you did this. So we’re just going to let it slide.” So they never charged us to fix it because of that earthquake, which was lucky. But the interesting thing about it was nobody ever told us to stop. The police never said a word afterword. The fire department never said a word. The Highway Patrol never came down and said, “Hey, we had to stop the freeway because of your fucking fire. What the fuck?”

  —Mark Pauline

  Jane Metcalf and Louis Rossetto: the cofounders of Wired magazine who captured and popularized Silicon Valley’s distinctive voice and point of view

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  I was at Columbia in ’67, ’68, ’69, and ’71, and of those four years in college, two of them were wiped out by eruptions in the spring. It felt like the world was coming unglued. And if you had eyes you could tell that there were issues in society that weren’t right. But the analysis from the left just seemed wrong. It was like refried Marxism and this colonial grievance bullshit and that was so inauthentic and their prescriptions—what they wanted to have happen—so wrong! So then I started looking for other stuff. And I think I’d read Ayn Rand and then from there you realize there’s more than Objectivism. There’s this libertarian strand and then you realize that libertarianism is really deep. It goes back to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and beyond and has all sorts of other manifestations in American history. And I just got farther and farther into that and realized this is a kind of good way of thinking about things.

  —Louis Rossetto

  The world was changing. And so everybody’s seeing it from their own worldview. Some of them thought it was changing because we were all doing the same drugs. Other people thought it was changing because we were using the same digital tools. And so there were people who could surf in between those worlds and so there were some common threads there in terms of contributors.

  —Jane Metcalfe

  Sean Parker: one of a long line of bad-boy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs—but the first to destroy a traditional industry

  14

  There was so little greed on the part of the people who worked at Napster. We would have given the company to the record labels! Like, you can just have it! We just wanted the idea to survive. We knew that we were the best chance that the record business had of a seamless and orderly transition to a future where artists and labels and publishers all would have been paid—because we had every user all in one place. I made the argument to the heads of every record label that was willing to listen. They didn’t listen to us.

  Mark Zuckerberg: the cofounder of Facebook who came to California as a teenager with little more than an idea and quickly rose to become Silicon Valley’s most powerful man

  15

  Mark sat down with me and described to me what he saw Facebook being. He said, “It’s about connecting people and building a system where everyone who makes a connection to your life that has any value is preserved for as long as you want it to be preserved. And it doesn’t
matter where you are, or who you’re with, or how your life changes: because you’re always in connection with the people that matter the most to you, and you’re always able to share with them.” I heard that, and I thought, I want to be a part of this. I want to make this happen. Back in the nineties all of us were utopian about the internet. This was almost a harkening back to the beautiful internet where everyone would be connected and everyone could share and there was no friction to doing that. Facebook sounded to me like the same thing. Mark was too young to know that time, but I think he intrinsically understood what the internet was supposed to be in the eighties and in the nineties. And here I was hearing the same story again and conceivably having the ability to help pull it off. That was very attractive.

  —Max Kelly

  Biz Stone and Ev Williams: the dynamic duo that discovered what the written word meant for the web by building the presses that power its blog posts and its tweets

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  Stone is wearing glasses; Williams, the bow tie.

  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.

  —Ev Williams

  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.

  —Biz Stone

  Acknowledgments

  I’m deeply grateful to Chris Calhoun, my agent, and Sean Desmond, my editor. This book was Desmond’s idea and it was Calhoun who suggested my name to him. I’m a first-time author, and the faith that those two put in me was what kept me going when the light at the end of the tunnel was remarkably dim.

  A profound appreciation to all those who sat for interviews: The names are all listed in the Cast of Characters section, so I won’t list them again here, but I would have never been able to pull this book together without their cooperation. Very important and extremely busy people throughout Silicon Valley not only made time for me but also spoke with remarkable candor—and it happened time and time again. That openness to new people tackling an ambitious project is, to my mind, Silicon Valley’s core value, as well as the key to its success.

  Thank you too to those who helped me with contact information, advice, and photo research—and who aren’t quoted in this book. The full list could literally go into the hundreds, and I’m grateful to all, but there were some who showed a generosity of spirit that was humbling. In no particular order, they are: Alissa Bushnell, Clive Thompson, Steve Coast, John Markoff, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Christina Engelbart, Bruce Damer, the guys from the RetroGaming Roundup podcast (Mike Kennedy, Mike James, and Scott Schreiber), Leonard Herman, Zak Penn, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ted Greenwald, John Ince, Eleanor McManus, John Tayman, Lynn Fox, Erin Trowbridge, Dan Parham, Dee Gardetti, Eric McDougall, Claudia Ceniceros, James Nestor, Joe Brown, Julian Dibbell, Hugo Lindgren, Brian Lam, Blaise Zerega, Michael Rubin, Katie Geminder, Nate Tyler, Van Burnham, Sebastien de Halleux, Richard Jenkins, Ben Mezrich, Nicholas Thompson, Gary Wolf, Steven Johnson, Meredith Arthur, Josh Abramson, Tania Ketenjian, Michael Naimark, Maura Egan, Fred Vogelstein, Lindsey Spindle, Laurel Touby, Alexander Rose, James Chiang, Kara Swisher, Michael Caruso, Julian Guthrie, Brad Stone, and Yves Béhar. Thanks also to my transcribers, most especially David Marcus.

  Every author relies most of all on the sacrifices and support of friends, family, and loved ones, and I’m no exception. My deepest and most profound love and gratitude goes to them—you know who you are.

  About the Author

  Adam Fisher lives a quiet life in Alameda, a small island near the center of the greater Bay Area. He has a beautiful wife and daughter and writes for many different magazines: New York Sunday Magazine, MIT Technology Review, and Wired, to name a few. This is his first book, and his greatest interest is in hearing from you, the reader, and staying in touch. So—switching to the first person now—please drop me a line at hello@valleyofgenius.com and I’ll get back to you: I’ve got audio clips, rare photos, outtakes, and other neat Silicon Valley stuff to share. Or, if you prefer, see it all on this book’s website: valleyofgenius.com.

  Thank you for reading my book!

  Note on Sources

  The written language is very different from the spoken word. And so I’ve taken the liberty of correcting slips of the tongue, dividing streams of consciousness into sentences, ordering sentences into paragraphs, and eliminating redundancies. The point is not to polish and make what was originally spoken read as if it was written, but rather to make the verbatim transcripts of what was actually said readable. That said, I’ve been careful to keep intact the rhythms of speech and quirks of language of everyone interviewed for this book so that what you hear in your mind’s ear as you read is true in every sense of the word: true to life, true to the transcript, and true to each speaker’s intended meaning.

  The vast majority of the words found in this volume originate in interviews that I conducted especially for this book. Where that wasn’t possible I tried, with some success, to unearth previously unpublished interviews and quote from them. And in a few cases I’ve resorted to quoting interviews that have been published before. A full list of these secondary sources can be found at ValleyOfGenius.com and below.

  Silicon Valley, Explained

  Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011, before this book was conceived. His quotes in this chapter (and the ones that follow) come from an April 1995 interview conducted by Daniel Morrow for the Smithsonian Institution; a Playboy interview conducted by David Sheff in 1985; a 1994 interview for the Silicon Valley Historical Association; and a WGBH Boston interview from 1990. Gordon Moore’s quote is taken from a YouTube video, “Gordon Moore About Moore’s Law,” posted in December 2014. Don Valentine’s quote is from an interview on Sequoia Capital’s website.

  The Big Bang

  Doug Engelbart died on July 2, 2013, before this book was conceived. His quotes have been gathered from a number of sources: “Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing,” an event hosted by SRI in December 2008; “Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution,” a symposium produced by Stanford University Libraries and the Institute for the Future in December 1998; a Smithsonian Institute interview by Jon Eklund, conducted in May 1994; and two interviews by Judy Adams and Henry Lowood of Stanford, the first conducted in December 1986 and the second in April 1987. Steve Jobs’s quotes in this chapter and others are from Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview conducted by Robert Cringely, and the 1990 documentary Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress by Michael Lawrence and Julian Krainen. Ken Kesey’s “next thing after acid” quote can be found in John Markoff’s excellent history, What the Dormouse Said.

  Ready Player One

  Ted Dabney’s quotes are taken from the RetroGaming Roundup podcast #24, October 2010, conducted by Mike Kennedy, Mike James, and Scott Schreiber, as well as the Computer History Museum’s 2012 oral history of Ted Dabney. Bob Metcalfe’s quotes here and throughout the book are from the Computer History Museum’s
2007 oral history. Steve Mayer’s quote is from the ANTIC “Interview 65” podcast.

  The Time Machine

  Charles Simonyi’s quotes in this chapter and others are from the Computer History Museum’s 2008 oral history. Steve Russell’s quote is from Dean Takahashi’s January 2011 interview: “Steve Russell Talks About His Early Video Game Spacewar!”Larry Tesler’s quotes in this chapter and others are from the Computer History Museum’s 2013 oral history.

  Breakout

  Steve Wozniak’s quotes in this chapter and others are drawn from an in-depth personal interview that he gave to me, as well as two archival sources: a December 2010 interview by Patrick Betdavid and a Game Informer interview from June 2013. Steve Jobs’s “enlightenment” quote comes from Walter Isaacson’s definitive book Steve Jobs. Mike Markkula’s quotes are from the illuminating 2011 documentary Something Ventured. Arthur Rock’s quote is from Stanford University’s “Silicon Genesis” project, 2002.