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

by Adam Fisher

  Andy Hertzfeld: But Steve came really close to going bust there in 1992 or 1993. NeXT and Pixar were failing at the same time. He was running out of money. He came pretty close to crashing, because NeXT was on a dead-end path and Pixar had a similar thing in that the technology wasn’t quite there.

  Alvy Ray Smith: Life with Steve was awful. There was this famous board meeting at NeXT. Steve comes in and he’s busting Ed and me for being late on a circuit board for the image computer, which we were. And I said, “But Steve, you’re late on one of your boards.” Which was true. Now normally that would have just been okay. Not this time. He starts insulting me, making fun of my accent, playground bully stuff. This was not two intelligent people having a conversation or even a healthy debate. This was just sheer bullying. And what did I do? I just stood up and went right into him. Now I’m very proud of that, but it probably was an insane thing to do. I went right up into his face, screaming in rage. I still can’t believe it happened. Just weird, just screaming at each other. And at that point I forced my way past him and wrote on the whiteboard. I wished I had written something clever. I was too insane. I just made a mark. It was a forbidden act, so he said, “You can’t do that.” And I said, “What? Write on the whiteboard?!” That was it. He stormed out of the room.

  Ralph Guggenheim: Alvy and Steve, it was just oil and water.

  Alvy Ray Smith: A lot of people jump to the conclusion I got fired. But Steve didn’t have the right to fire me. Steve was the chairman of the board, so Ed would’ve had to fire me, and Ed wasn’t about to fire me. And so even though I was there for another year I knew I had to get Steve Jobs out of my life, because he was a foul bullyboy down underneath it all. So what happened in there is that Disney finally came. They knocked on the door just at the right crank of Moore’s law and they said, “Let’s make the movie that you guys always wanted to make.” This is the big dream, right?

  Ed Catmull: They thought that computer animation looked like it might have a future. But it was “a boutique film.” Those were their words. So they were willing to fund it at a very low level.

  Alvy Ray Smith: So we go off and make the movie and, by the way, I left right in there. What finally freed me up to leave was the movie happened.

  Tom Porter: Toy Story itself took shape in 1993 and 1994.

  Ralph Guggenheim: Toys were something we could easily render realistically on a computer, so it seemed like something practical we could do.

  Joss Whedon: They sent me the script and it was a shambles, but the story that Lasseter had come up with—that toys are alive and they conflict—the concept was gold. I went up to Pixar and stayed there and wrote for four months and completely overhauled the script before it got green-lit.

  Ralph Guggenheim: But the Disney execs kept pushing us to make these characters more edgy: “We want them more hip, more edgy, more aggressive.”

  John Lasseter: “Edgy.” That was the word that they kept using. We soon realized that this was not the movie that we wanted to make—the characters were so edgy that they had become unlikable. The characters were yelling, they were cynical, they were always making fun of everybody.

  Ralph Guggenheim: And so we ran into story problems along the way. Mainly because it got to where Woody and Buzz were just horrible. And so we’re now at like Thanksgiving of ’93 and we show our latest story reels.

  John Lasseter: And the movie was just horrible! The characters, especially Woody, were just repellent. Woody was just awful, awful, awful! And I was embarrassed because it wasn’t the movie we set out to make.

  Tom Porter: Disney actually went to shut down the production because they no longer believed that the story could work, and John and Andrew famously asked for two weeks.

  Ralph Guggenheim: John, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, and Joe Ranft holed up in a room for a week or two and just rewrote the script. Joss Whedon came in again, too.

  Joss Whedon: We sort of went back in the trenches and made sure we had everything we needed and nothing we didn’t.

  Ralph Guggenheim: And they rewrote the script top to bottom. The script got approved. We resumed production. It could have been a total disaster.

  John Lasseter: From that point on, we trusted our instincts to make the movie we wanted to make. And that is when I started really giving our own people creative ownership over things, because I trusted their judgment more than the people at Disney.

  Alvy Ray Smith: So Steve’s busy running NeXT and Disney took the movie to New York and the critics saw it. They went nuts and they said, “This is going to be a huge success!” And as soon as Steve heard that he pushes Ed aside to be there when the cameras roll.

  Ralph Guggenheim: You can see the lightbulb go off in Steve’s head. This thing that he’s not really been much a part of…

  Alvy Ray Smith: He didn’t have anything to do with it! He never had anything to do with any movies. In fact, they never let him in a story room.

  Ralph Guggenheim: I would say between ’86 and ’95 when Toy Story came out Steve probably—I’m not exaggerating—I don’t think he was in our building more than nine times in nine years.

  Alvy Ray Smith: So Ed and I, the way we ran the company was to keep Steve out of the building, because he would come in and give one of his speeches, and it would take us a week or two to get it all back together again.

  Ralph Guggenheim: Steve was a very generous benefactor, but kind of an absentee landlord, all this time. Within a couple of months we have a new CFO who knows how to take companies public. Steve is now going to be the CEO of Pixar, et cetera, et cetera.

  Alvy Ray Smith: It was when I looked at the prospectus for the IPO when I first realized that Steve lies. He claimed to be the cofounder of Pixar and the CEO since its founding. In the prospectus! Cofounder and CEO forever! Bullshit. Both of those are wrong: lies. I don’t like this “reality distortion field” idea. He lies. But you know his genius was to take the company public on nothing. The movie wasn’t even a hit yet, and there was essentially no cash at all. But he saw his chance to make his $50 million back. And he did.

  Alan Kay: Steve just hung in there and hung in there until they got into the sweet spot where everything that they knew suddenly was applicable in a way that made commercial sense.

  Al Alcorn: Steve thought he was going to make a computer, and he wound up making one of the best movie companies in the world. Who would have thought?

  Jobs timed the Pixar public offering to take place exactly one week after Toy Story’s theatrical premiere, thereby insuring that the value of Pixar’s public offering would be pegged to Toy Story’s box office. It was a bold bet on synergy, and Jobs hit the trifecta. His movie was the highest-grossing film of 1995, his IPO was a blockbuster, and his reputation was restored.

  Alvy Ray Smith: Steve made a billion dollars overnight. It may have made him a billionaire for the first time. So businesswise the guy was a genius, and he got everything he deserved on that front.

  Alan Kay: I remember feeling extremely good when I saw that Pixar had become such a success, because any funder like that should be rewarded. Ten years! That was an incredible thing.

  Ed Catmull: It was the biggest IPO of the year, it was bigger than Netscape. It was an incredible thing.

  Jerry Garcia’s Last Words

  Netscape opened at what?!

  The internet is almost as old as Silicon Valley itself, but before the browser was invented, the Valley took the ’net for granted. There were online experiments like The Well, but for most the internet was simply the ether that carried e-mail hither and thither. In the eighties and early nineties, the conventional wisdom was that the real action online was inside the great walled gardens of AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy. The world wide web was a latecomer that floated on top of the already-existing internet, providing an open-source alternative. Yet at the time few in the Valley took the web very seriously at all—if they had even heard of its existence. It was little more than an academic curiosity until Jim Clark, a Silicon Vall
ey hardware mogul who had made a fortune selling specialized computer-graphics machines to Pixar and others, decided that the conventional wisdom was wrong. He founded Netscape in 1994 and in just over a year the company laid the foundation for virtually every technology that defines today’s online experience.

  Alan Kay: A lot of people think the internet appeared in the nineties. It started in 1969.

  John Markoff: Today’s internet started with the ARPANET, and the ARPANET started with two nodes, and one of them was in Southern California and the other one was at Menlo Park in Doug Engelbart’s Augment project.

  Doug Engelbart: Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts, the two guys running that office, told us all that they were going to go ahead and put together this network, and I volunteered to start a Network Information Center and that’s sort of why they put me on early.

  John Markoff: The NLS system was supposed to be the first killer app for ARPANET, which became the internet.

  Bob Taylor: But the ARPANET was not an internet. An internet is two or more interactive networks. The first internet was put together by PARC. They put together three: the Ethernet—which they invented—with the ARPANET, with the SRI packet-radio net. That was in about 1975 or 1976. We had an internet without a world wide web or a browser. Those things we did not invent.

  The first version of the world wide web was hacked together in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist working in a French physics lab. The embryonic web was a geeky but efficient way to link a couple thousand physicists to a tiny number of supercomputers. Then Marc Andreessen, an American student working at NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, built NCSA Mosaic—the first decent web browser.

  Steven Johnson: You can’t imagine how hard it was just to get on the internet in like 1991 or 1992. It was a colossal battle. You knew that there was this incredible thing out there, but it was just really difficult to get to. All the online spaces were discontinuous—there was The Well, CompuServe, AOL, but they were all separate dial-up universes. To go from one site to another you had to hang up the phone and make another call and listen to this crazy sound that the modem would make and then hopefully you would get a connection. It took so much work to move from one place to another. You really had to be committed to find anything useful on it.

  Jim Clark: The web’s original genesis was with Tim Berners-Lee, as a means for physicists to share publications and to pass around written documents of that sort. HTML and all of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that is used is basically a format for passing around these documents, for shipping them electronically to other people.

  Aleks Totić: Everything was academic on the internet. It was all .edu’s. It was not that interesting.

  Steven Johnson: And then starting in 1993 or 1994 you started to hear word about Mosaic, this new browser that was here—but we didn’t really know what that meant.

  Sergey Brin: I used Mosaic at the time. I tinkered with it, like a hobby. It was more of a fun thing to do than an Oh! This is going to change the world.

  Brian Behlendorf: In the early days the internet was really small. Everybody knew everybody: researchers, programmers, people working in academia…

  Stephen Johnson: And then the Mosaic browser becomes Netscape. Suddenly you had a unified front end for the internet.

  Netscape was founded by two people: Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen. At the time Jim Clark was already a Silicon Valley legend. In grad school in the seventies, Clark had worked out the fundamental math behind what eventually came to be called virtual reality. In the eighties he put all that math into a silicon chip, which became the basis for Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI), one of the decade’s highest-flying computer companies. Then in the nineties Clark abruptly quit SGI and teamed up with Marc Andreessen—a young Silicon Valley newbie—to form Netscape. The mission was to rebuild and reimagine the NCSA Mosaic browser—they were going to drag the web out of its ivory tower.

  Howard Rheingold: Jim Clark is sort of like who Bob Taylor was to Doug Engelbart. He found this guy who had an idea and really made it happen.

  Jim Clark: At the end of ’93 I was just finishing my twelfth year after founding and starting Silicon Graphics with a group of my graduate students from Stanford. SGI was a company that primarily made what would now be called a graphics processing unit. The company grew to be quite large, $4 billion a year and ten thousand employees.

  Marc Andreessen: Silicon Graphics at that time was what Google is today—the best technology company in the Valley. It was the one that everyone wanted to work at. They were just phenomenal technologists with phenomenal products.

  Jim Clark: SGI was a hardware business, and it became a workstation business, and we ended up being the biggest high-end workstation company out there.

  Marc Andreessen: It was just a great company.

  John Giannandrea: Jim was like this macho kind of hardware guy. He would come into the lab late at night and say, “What the fuck is this!” and “Why is this not going?” That was how he ran things.

  Jim Clark: I was sufficiently disruptive in that context, with that board of directors, with that management, that if I had pushed it much further I would have gotten fired like Steve Jobs got fired. And it was my company! I taught it everything it knew about graphics, literally.

  John Giannandrea: He just became very frustrated. It was pretty clear that he didn’t have control of the strategy of the company.

  Jim Clark: I decided instead to call a board meeting and, on the phone, resigned. I told them I was not going to compete, I would not actively recruit from the company, and I was not going to stay on the board.

  John Giannandrea: And so then he left. That was a big thing, when Jim left.

  Jim Clark: The last day I was there, a fellow came by my office to say good-bye and I said, “I do not know what I am going to do. Every single high-quality engineer I have ever met, I recruited here. I made a commitment to not try to recruit them wherever I go. And I do not have any ideas about what I am going to do.” He says, “You should call Marc Andreessen.” I said, “Who is that?” He went over, he pulled a web browser down from University of Illinois, opened a search, and typed, “Marc Andreessen.” It came up with this page and he says, “There you go. Just read that,” and walked away.

  Marc Andreessen: Mosaic was very successful and so I had gotten a whole bunch of job offers coming out of school. I had spent my whole life in the Midwest, so I knew I wanted to be on a coast. So it was either East Coast or West Coast. All the interesting job offers in my field came from the West Coast, which I guess is not surprising. And so I came out to Palo Alto and I went to work at a small networking company in Palo Alto called EIT. In fact, I was still getting job offers because in Mosaic there was an area in the Help menu that said “About the author” and it was my résumé. That was automatically generating job offers.

  Jim Clark: I clicked around, I found Marc’s e-mail, sent him an e-mail right there saying, “This is Jim Clark. You may not know who I am, but I am the founder of Silicon Graphics, and if you know me, you know that the news has come out that I am leaving Silicon Graphics. I would like to start a new company. I would like to know if you would like to get together and join me to talk about that.” Ten minutes later, he responded.

  Marc Andreessen: I said, “I know who you are.”

  Jim Clark: We thrashed around literally for months, meeting a couple times a week. My wife would cook dinner and we would drink some nice wine and talk about things. We became pretty well acquainted; he had respect for me and I developed an increasing respect for him.

  Jim Barksdale: My wife, Sally, would work on his table manners. He dressed like a kid, and acted like a kid, but he had a great sense of humor. He was so engaged and engaging.

  Jim Clark: After about March of ’94, somewhere in that time frame, Marc says, “Well, I do not know, but we have to do something if we want to recruit my friends out of the University of Illinois beca
use they are all interviewing for jobs right now.” And I said, “Well, what do you want to do? Have you got any ideas?”

  Marc Andreessen: Remember this is in early ’94. The prevailing view, in the business world and in the world at large, was the internet is not a commercial medium and will never be a commercial medium. It’s not for consumers, ordinary people won’t use it, and there’s no money to be made on it.

  John Giannandrea: There was this sense at the time that it was a weird university thing, and that it wasn’t serious.

  Jim Clark: The world was basically saying, “You are crazy. You cannot make money on the internet, it is free.”

  Marc Andreessen: We were talking one day and we said, “Well, this internet thing—no one takes it seriously but it’s growing vertically…”

  Jim Clark: All I had to do was look at the growth of Mosaic for a year and see that it grew to a million users, and I figured there was a network effect of people getting online.

  Marc Andreessen: The idea was to basically do a new version of Mosaic but from scratch, and in particular do it as a real product.

  Jim Clark: I said, “Okay, let’s hop on a plane and go out and recruit your buddies.”

  Aleks Totić: Then Marc calls: “Hey, we’re flying in—I think we’re doing it: We’re going to do the Mosaic killer.”