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

by Adam Fisher

  Tom Suiter: It was somber. It was like, We’re all part of this thing. This is a drag. This sucks.

  John Couch: There was this incredible, quiet respect and a sense of mortality for all of us.

  Mike Slade: So anyway, we get escorted into the church: five hundred, seven hundred people?

  John Markoff: They don’t fill Memorial Chapel completely.

  Jon Rubinstein: It was a beautiful service. Clearly it had been stage-managed by Steve from beyond the grave.

  John Markoff: Yo-Yo Ma played first and wonderfully.

  Andy Hertzfeld: It was really deep, just heartbreakingly beautiful, one of the most emotional pieces of music I’ve ever heard.

  John Markoff: Afterward he briefly introduced the event and told a short, funny story about how Steve had wanted him to play at his funeral and how he had asked Steve to speak at his. As usual, he noted, “Steve had gotten his way.”

  Mike Slade: So then Laurene spoke and had written this beautiful speech about Steve that was surprisingly analytical.

  Ron Johnson: She’s just a very professional, poised, intelligent, articulate person who had a long time to prepare for this. She had a message to convey, and she delivered it very gracefully.

  Mike Slade: She was like, “Look, if you guys think he was a dick, it’s because he was in pursuit of beauty, and that sort of trumped everything, and most people didn’t really get that about him.” And so almost everything that was dickish—she didn’t use those words—was because he was in pursuit of beauty. I’ve been to lots of funerals where the grieving widow was the grieving widow, and that’s not what she did. So it was wonderful—really brilliant, and I actually learned a lot from it—but it was surprising, right?

  John Markoff: Reed followed her and spoke about his dad. He told a sweet story about being a young child and sleeping in a crib in a corner of the house and being afraid and having Steve crawl into the crib with him to protect and stay there until he fell asleep—something that was frequently foiled when he tried to extract himself from the crib.

  Wayne Goodrich: The empathy that I felt for them at that moment in time, knowing that they would never really know or interact with their father as true adults… I felt very bad, very bad, very empathic.

  John Markoff: Evie read “The Crazy Ones” in a clear voice.

  Eve Jobs (from the stage): “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

  John Markoff: I cried.

  Wayne Goodrich: The wave of emotion in the church was such that it was a conscious effort to even keep my perception about me, instead of just breaking down in a pool of my own tears.

  John Markoff: Mona Simpson spoke and told of how she met her brother and about their relationship. It was much closer than I realized. She, too, talked about Steve’s search for beauty.

  Mona Simpson: I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene: “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”

  John Markoff: Joan Baez stood, and her guitar was brought out and she sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

  Mike Slade: She sat down with the guitar and played it. She hit the high note and my spine shivered. I was just blown away.

  John Markoff: Her voice is all still there.

  Mike Slade: She was seventy and it just blew everybody’s doors off.

  John Markoff: Bono and Slash sang. First Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand” and then a U2 song, “One.”

  Mike Slade: Dylan was supposed to play the first song and he blew them off. They asked him to play and he said no.

  John Markoff: To sing Dylan, Bono placed an iPad on a music stand to remember the words with.

  Bono (singing Bob Dylan’s song): “I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea / Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me / I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man / Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.”

  Mike Slade: And then of course Larry Ellison gave this big eulogy, which was, you know, funny and charming and kind of all about Larry.

  Larry Ellison: I wanted to talk about my friendship with Steve, what it was like, and a little bit about what Steve was really like.

  Mike Slade: Bill and I were kind of eye-rolling each other about Larry because it had a lot of the pronoun I in it—shall we say—for a eulogy. But anyway, he meant well.

  John Markoff: After the service everyone filed out and walked across the oval to the Rodin Sculpture Garden.

  Ron Johnson: We get out of the church and the sun is starting to set, and we’ve got a long walk, probably half a mile. It was just like a procession because everyone followed the same path.

  Wayne Goodrich: I don’t remember who I walked over there with, but it was just very quiet, a lot of reflecting back, numbness. Is this really happening? Did this just occur? And the questions of why start to seep in: Why now? Why here? Why?

  John Couch: It wasn’t a boisterous drinking kind of thing. It was very sobering, just dealing with the fact of mortality of us as humans.

  Wayne Goodrich: Everybody had a little bit of a story about their time with Steve, and some people even managed to talk about it. All the stories that all the people there had about him would have been an amazing thing to somehow capture. My hairs are standing up on my arm right now just thinking about it.

  Larry Brilliant: I met Steve Jobs because all of us hippies who had gone to India to hang out with gurus were very poor, and we got very skinny, and we never had any money to buy any food. And when one of us—any one of us—got a gig, then everybody would go find that person and say, “Hey, I knew you from the ashram, I’m hungry,” or something like that. And I got a gig, my gig was at the United Nations and so I was working at the WHO office in Delhi, and by the time Steve came in ’74 the cafeteria had gotten a reputation for having good, safe lettuce. So Steve showed up looking for lettuce, and I took him to lunch, and he inhaled lettuce, he inhaled the salad. He was trying so hard to eat only living food, and in India, the best and the healthiest thing you can do with food is make sure it’s dead, killed, boiled. So he was constantly getting sick, getting skinnier, and I just remember the first meeting we had was contentious because I at that time was eating liver. I had been a vegetarian for almost ten years and I didn’t feel like I had much energy, which was fine when I was in the ashram but it wasn’t so fine when I thought that if I didn’t give an extra hour of work that day, then maybe babies would die of smallpox. I was skinny, vegetarian, and my boss said, “Oh, having a little trouble keeping up, eh?” She said, “Eat liver.” Of course there was no cow liver, being India, so you eat buffalo liver. And so my first meeting with Steve was a debate between eating buffalo liver in order to get enough calories so that you could fight longer to stop more children from dying from smallpox, or eating living food because the planet would be better off in the long run if you only ate living food. And it was a great conversation.

  Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs was very different before we started Apple. Personality settles in around age twenty. So, going to India was before that. When we started Apple and he was the founder of a company that had money, it was, “I’m going to be in a suit. I’m going to be on the covers of magazines. I’m going to be the one that will get credit for it.” Steve had changed so much.

  John Couch: One of the stories that I tell is from when we were very close to each other in the early Lisa days. And you know Steve was a minimalist: He had a beautiful English Tudor home; he had a Maxfield Parrish painting; he h
ad a Tiffany lamp; he had a Swedish sound system; and then he had a mattress on the floor and a dresser. And I walked up to the house one day and it was always impeccable, but there was a piece of paper on the front lawn, and I thought, Well, that’s really strange, and I picked it up, and it was an Apple stock certificate: seven-point-five million shares of stock. And I knocked on the door and I said, “Steve, I think this belongs to you.” And he goes, “Oh, oh yes,” and he just kind of opened the dresser drawer and he put it in and he closed it and he said, “It must have blown out the window.” And so I knew from that point on that it was never about money for Steve.

  Steve Wozniak: He wanted to be one of those important people that really changed things—like from that Ayn Rand book—and that led him to exclude everything else. He wanted to do it his way. He was always fighting me.

  Mike Slade: I’ll tell you my last Steve Jobs story: Okay, so I love marketing, right? And one of the reasons I love it is that it’s a lot of bullshit. And so I’m at Microsoft and Steve is trying to get me to come to work at NeXT and so we’re sitting there talking and he’s telling me, “You’re going to rot up there in Seattle! It rains all the time. It’s beautiful in Silicon Valley,” and he was saying, “You know, Mike, Palo Alto is a special place.” He goes, “Palo Alto is like Florence in the Renaissance. You walk down the street, and you meet an astronaut and a scholar,” blah, blah, blah. I’m like, “Yes, that sounds cool!” So I come to work for NeXT. And so my wife and I, we didn’t have kids yet, and so we’d eat a lot at Il Fornaio on University Avenue in Palo Alto. We were sitting there, in early ’91, and I’m reading the menu, and on the back of the menu at Il Fornaio it says, “Palo Alto is like Florence in the Renaissance…” And it goes through the whole spiel! The fucking guy sold me a line from a menu! From a chain restaurant!! Bad ad copy from Il Fornaio, which was his favorite restaurant, right? Such a shameless bullshitter!

  Jon Rubinstein: Steve was a very complicated individual—very complicated. There were so many aspects of him. I mean he was so passionate about product, not just our products, but products in general. He was really good at choosing a path: not a long-term path, this isn’t a vision thing. This is, “You get to a fork in the road. What fork do you take?” He surrounded himself with good people and kept them motivated through both the good times and the bad times. He was a good marketing guy: He could sell ice cubes to Eskimos, right? When he was in front of an audience—it didn’t matter if it was ten people or ten thousand people—everyone felt like Steve was speaking directly to them. And that’s a remarkable talent.

  Alvy Ray Smith: This will sound like a sick comparison, but Hitler had this articulate speech thing, too. Steve had this charisma that was just awesome, but to misuse that is evil—and I think he was evil.

  Larry Brilliant: I saw the behavior that people described as mercurial and preemptory and harsh. But seventeen thousand people worked for him and would have killed to continue working for him, because he made them better.

  Steve Wozniak: But people close to Steve had to deal with just wrong behavior.

  Jon Rubinstein: Steve had all kinds of issues, but he had a bunch of really, really important gifts that allowed him to accomplish the things he wanted to accomplish.

  Ron Johnson: I think even Steve recognized that the measure of life is not time, it’s impact. And Steve’s impact is as profound as anybody who has walked this planet.

  Steve Wozniak: Look, I came up with the product that made Apple! If Steve Jobs had started without me, where would he have gone? Keep in mind, Steve tried to make four computers in his life—with millions of dollars—and they all failed: the Apple III, for marketing reasons; the Lisa, because Steve didn’t understand costs; the Macintosh, which wasn’t really a computer, just a program that looked like a computer and led to big problems later on; and the NeXT.

  John Markoff: Still, Steve was emblematic of the Valley, rising to represent how it touched the popular culture. He is the vector for Alan Kay’s insight. Kay was the person who understood that computing was a universal medium, that it wasn’t a calculation tool, and as a universal medium it transformed any medium that it touched. Before computing, there had been paper, there had been music, there had been video, and computing sort of relentlessly transformed each one of them, and Steve was the vector. He was the messenger who sort of implemented Alan’s vision. Steve was the one who shaped those products so that they were usable by mortals and so we could get beyond the original personal computers. And the modern world is different because of that.

  Steve Wozniak: I swear he didn’t have to be a bad person, he didn’t even have to be a controlling person, even a closed person, to create all the good technology he did. So he was good and bad.

  Wayne Goodrich: It got dark quite late.

  Steven Levy: There was this beautiful moon hanging there and it was perfectly clear. I said to Laurene, “I bet Steve had a couple of earlier versions of the weather that he sent back until he came up with this.” It was just a beautiful event.

  Ron Johnson: The Rodin Sculpture Garden is a very peaceful place. It’s one of my favorite places to go sit at Stanford and they had transformed it into almost like a nightclub. It was just really a lovely place to be. It was just this beautiful, beautiful setting, and the temperature is coming down, but there’s a warmth and a freshness to the evening, and everyone just didn’t want to leave.

  Wayne Goodrich: Then it just started thinning out, and everybody just kind of disappeared.

  Marc Benioff: And then we were all leaving, and on the way out they handed us a small brown box, and I received the box and I said, “This is going to be good.” Because I knew that Steve made a decision that everyone was going to get this—and so whatever this was, it was the last thing he wanted us to all think about. So I waited until I got to my car and I opened the box. And what is the box? What is in this brown box? It was a copy of Yogananda’s book.

  Andy Hertzfeld: They gave Autobiography of a Yogi to every attendee as they were leaving. It was kind of an interesting thing to do.

  Marc Benioff: Yogananda was a Hindu guru who had this book on self-realization, and that was the message: The message was “Actualize yourself.”

  Dan Kottke: I was actually surprised, because Steve was much more of a fan of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. That, I would say, is more his favorite book.

  Marc Benioff: “Actualize yourself”—that was Yogananda’s message. And if you look back at the history of Steve—that early trip where he went to India to the ashram of his maharishi. He had this incredible realization that his intuition was his greatest gift and he needed to look at the world from the inside out.

  Larry Brilliant: You just wouldn’t get a conversation with anybody else the way you would get it with Steve Jobs. You could be talking about politics, you could be talking about space travel, you could be talking about movies or music, technology, spiritual life. He was so smart, and his mind was so agile, and what he could do was he could take the experiences that he had with computers or the experiences that he had with a mystical quest and he could apply them to analyzing today’s news or to political events, or geopolitical events even more so. I never had a conversation with him where I didn’t learn something.

  Marc Benioff: And here his last message to us was: “Look inside yourself, realize yourself, look to The Autobiography of a Yogi, which is a story of self-realization.” I think that is so powerful. It gives a tremendous insight into who he was but also why he was successful. He was not afraid to take that key journey.

  Ron Johnson: Steve was clearly a spiritual being.

  Marc Benioff: He was the guru.

  EPILOGUE

  The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.

  —WILLIAM GIBSON

  The Endless Frontier

  The future history of Silicon Valley

  They come West seeking fame and fortune. They work their claims. Some even strike it rich. Swap the pickax for some coding chops
and the six-shooter for a standing desk, and suddenly Silicon Valley becomes a much more familiar place. It is what it has always been: a frontier—the boundary between what is and what could be. It’s a place where the future is dreamed up, prototyped, packaged, and ultimately sold. But what is the future of this place that makes the future? Where is Silicon Valley going? Where is its technology taking us? What are we to become? The best answers to those questions come from those who’ve already built the future: the one that we live in today.

  Kevin Kelly: The biggest invention in Silicon Valley was not the transistor but the start-up model, the culture of the entrepreneurial start-up.

  Marc Porat: It’s the style of thinking and behaving that’s called “being an entrepreneur.”

  Megan Smith: I grew up in it. It’s extraordinary. An entrepreneurial culture of like, “Hey, how can we solve this?” And really caring about helping each other.

  Carol Bartz: It really is just this need to change as fast as possible to enable the next great thing. We don’t even have to imagine the next great thing yet. We just have to get the tools to do something and use trial and error until we have the next great thing.

  Jim Clark: The venture capital business is a big part of that. They are in the business of betting on these people, and the good ones make money at it. Then it becomes kind of a self-fulfilling organism.

  Tony Fadell: That’s going to be Silicon Valley’s legacy: It has cast a mold, cast the die, for this ever-evolving way of taking up risk, taking on new ideas, funding them, and making things happen.

  Marc Porat: The elements that made Venice are the elements that made Palo Alto, are the elements that will make Silicon Valley, and it just grows and grows.

  Ev Williams: Once it gets started then it just snowballs.

  Scott Hassan: I try not to predict the future very much, but the one thing I know for certain is that in the future, there are going to be more computers, they’re going to be faster, and they’re going to do more things.