24. Chamath Palihapitiya, interview with the author; Palihapitiya interviewed by Kara Swisher, Recode Decode podcast, March 20, 2016, https://www.recode.net/2016/3/21/11587128/silicon-valleys-homogeneous-rich-douchebags-wont-win-forever-says, archived at https://perma.cc/PK2L-DDCR; Evelyn M. Rusli, “In Flip-Flops and Jeans, An Unconventional Venture Capitalist,” DealBook blog, The New York Times, October 6, 2011, https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/in-flip-flops-and-jeans-the-unconventional-venture-capitalist/, archived at https://perma.cc/C7X7-KWJ2; Eugene Kim, “Early Facebook Executive on Mark Zuckerberg,” Business Insider, November 23, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com.au/chamath-palihapitiya-on-mark-zuckerberg-2014-11, archived at https://perma.cc/9CLK-S8RS [inactive].
25. Caroline McCarthy, “Facebook f8: One Graph to Rule them All,” CNET, April 21, 2010, https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-f8-one-graph-to-rule-them-all/, archived at https://perma.cc/W4T5-49CM. Scholars began raising red flags about the ethics of such information-sharing practices as soon as they started. See for example Michael Zimmer, “‘But the Data is Already Public’: On the Ethics of Research in Facebook,” Ethics and Information Technology 12, no. 4 (December 2010): 313–25; Rebecca McKee, “Ethical Issues in Using Social Media for Health and Health Care Research,” Health Policy 110, nos. 2–3 (May 2013): 298–301. As Facebook’s user base skyrocketed and “like” buttons metastasized around the Web, the company attracted the attention of the FTC, which required Facebook to adopt stricter and more transparent privacy standards (Federal Trade Commission, Decision and Order in the Matter of Facebook, Inc., Docket No. C-4365, August 10, 2012).
26. Nick Bilton, “A Walk in the Woods with Mark Zuckerberg,” The New York Times, July 7, 2011, https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/a-walk-in-the-woods-with-mark-zuckerberg/, archived at https://perma.cc/86DU-LAWF.
27. Heather Brown, Emily Guskin, and Amy Mitchell, “The Role of Social Media in the Arab Uprisings,” Pew Research Center, November 28, 2012; Benjamin Gleason, “#Occupy Wall Street: Exploring Informal Learning About a Social Movement on Twitter,” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 7 (2013): 966–82; André Brock, “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 56, no. 4 (2012): 529–49; Russell Rickford, “Black Lives Matter: Toward a Modern Practice of Mass Struggle,” New Labor Forum 25, no. 1 (2016): 34–42.
28. Joshua Green, “The Amazing Money Machine,” The Atlantic, June 1, 2008, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/the-amazing-money-machine/306809/, archived at https://perma.cc/V67S-PX4W; Brian Stelter, “The Facebooker Who Friended Obama,” The New York Times, July 7, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07hughes.html, archived at https://perma.cc/U74U-XQ7Z [inactive].
29. Kristina Peterson, “Obama opening Silicon Valley office,” Palo Alto Daily News, January 13, 2008, 1; Green, “The Amazing Money Machine”; Cecilia Kang and Perry Bacon Jr., “Obama Holds Silicon Valley Summit with Tech Tycoons,” The Washington Post, February 18, 2011, C1.
30. “I am Barack Obama, President of the United States—AMA,” Reddit, August 29, 2012, https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z1c9z/i_am_barack_obama_president_of_the_united_states/, archived at https://perma.cc/BB8Z-D7GZ; Brody Mullins, “Google Makes Most of Close Ties to the White House,” The Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-makes-most-of-close-ties-to-white-house-1427242076; David Dayen, “The Android Administration,” The Intercept, April 22, 2016, https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationship-with-the-obama-white-house-in-two-charts/, archived at https://perma.cc/NUP2-6XW6; Cecilia Kang and Juliet Eilperin, “A Clear Affinity Between White House, Silicon Valley,” The Washington Post, February 28, 2015, http://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-washington-post/20150228/281784217548185. Also see Thomas Kalil, “Policy Entrepreneurship at the White House,” Innovations 11, nos. 3/4 (2017): 4–22.
31. “The ‘Anti-Business’ President Who’s Been Good for Business,” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 27, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-obama-anti-business-president/, archived at https://perma.cc/RG5N-VP2P.
32. Barack Obama, Speech at the White House Summit on Cybersecurity, Stanford, Calif., February 13, 2015. Obama’s speechwriters had produced a knowing riff on the cathedral-vs.-bazaar software metaphors so familiar to Silicon Valley insiders, gloriously updated for a social-media age.
CHAPTER 24: SOFTWARE EATS THE WORLD
1. John C. Abell, “Aug. 6, 1997: Apple Rescued—By Microsoft,” Wired, August 6, 2009, https://www.wired.com/2009/08/dayintech-0806/, archived at https://perma.cc/2RRH-FUBH.
2. Ken Siegmann, “Veteran Apple Exec Leaves for Top Job at Go,” The San Francisco Chronicle, January 19, 1991, 1C; Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 308.
3. Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone (New York: Little, Brown, 2017), 148–62.
4. Morgenthaler Partners had been an investor in the company that made that voice recognition software, called Siri in homage to being developed at SRI. A DARPA grant had helped seed its early development. See SRI International, “Siri,” https://www.sri.com/work/time line-innovation/timeline.php?timeline=computing-digital#!&innovation=siri, archived at https://perma.cc/7SNR-V6MQ.
5. “For Apple Chief, Gadgets’ Glitter Outshines Scandal,” The New York Times, January 9, 2007, B1; Erica Sadun, “Macworld 2007 Keynote Liveblog,” Engadget, January 9, 2007, https://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/macworld-2007-keynote-liveblog/, archived at https://perma.cc/4394-QYDG.
6. Martyn Williams, “In his own words: The best quotes of Steve Ballmer,” PC World, August 19, 2014.
7. Merchant, The One Device, 162–71; Doug Gross, “Apple trademarks ‘There’s an app for that,’” CNN, October 12, 2010.
8. Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 204, 207–210.
9. “Mobile Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center, February 5, 2018, http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/mobile/, archived at https://perma.cc/44L8-W6EN.
10. Horace Dediu, “The iOS Economy, Updated,” Asymco blog, January 8, 2018, http://www.asymco.com/2018/01/08/the-ios-economy-updated/, archived at https://perma.cc/W2Z5-MT6G.
11. Bruce Newman, “Steve Jobs, Apple Co-Founder,” San Jose Mercury News, October 5, 2011.
12. “Remembering Steve,” Apple.com, https://www.apple.com/stevejobs/, archived at https://perma.cc/7SES-3F5F; Maria L. LaGanga, “Steve Jobs’ death saddens Apple workers and fans,” The Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2011.
13. “Steve Jobs’ Memorial Service: 6 Highlights,” The Week, October 25, 2011.
14. “What Happened to the Future?” Founders Fund, http://foundersfund.com/the-future/, archived at https://perma.cc/82XW-VA2A.
15. Adam Lashinsky, “Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: The Ultimate Disrupter,” Fortune (December 2012); Jeff Bezos, “1997 Letter to Shareholders,” Investor Relations, Amazon.com.
16. Jeff Bezos, “2005 Letter to Shareholders,” Investor Relations, Amazon.com; Julia Kirby and Thomas A. Stewart, “The Institutional Yes,” Harvard Business Review, October 2007, 8, https://hbr.org/2007/10/the-institutional-yes, archived at https://perma.cc/XV5H-GULN.
17. Jeff Bezos, “2011 Letter to Shareholders,” Investor Relations, Amazon.com.
18. Ingrid Burrington, “Why Amazon’s Data Centers are Hidden in Spy Country,” The Atlantic, January 8, 2016.
19. Frank Konkel, “Daring Deal,” Government Executive, July 9, 2014. An advantage for Amazon’s securing national security cloud business was that it was not one of the American tech companies ensnared in PRISM, the intelligence-gathering program revealed in 2013 by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Nearly every other boldface tech name appeared in the cache of classified documents, but 98 percent of the data came from only three: Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft. The NSA had been in the electronic
surveillance business since its 1947 inception, but involvement of consumer tech’s biggest brands—including the “don’t be evil” empire of Page and Brin—precipitated a major scandal. See Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, “U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program,” The Washington Post, June 7, 2013, A1.
20. Nick Wingfield, “Amazon Reports Annual Net Profit for the First Time,” The Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2004; Ron Miller, “How AWS Came to Be,” TechCrunch, July 2, 2016; Jordan Novet, “Microsoft narrows Amazon’s lead in cloud, but the gap remains large,” CNBC, April 27, 2018.
21. Ashton B. Carter with Marcel Lettre and Shane Smith, “Keeping the Technological Edge,” in Keeping the Edge: Managing Defense for the Future, ed. Ashton B. Carter, John Patrick White (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001), 130–63.
22. Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” The Cato Institute, April 13, 2009.
23. Rachel Riederer, “Libertarians Seek a Home on the High Seas,” The New Republic, June 1, 2017; George Packer, “No Death, No Taxes,” The New Yorker, November 28, 2011.
24. Andy Greenberg, “How a ‘Deviant Philosopher’ Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut,” Forbes, September 2, 2013.
25. Rick E. Yannuzzi, “In-Q-Tel: A New Partnership between the CIA and the Private Sector,” Defense Intelligence Journal (2000), Central Intelligence Agency, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/intelligence-history/in-q-tel#copy, archived at https://perma.cc/AV9M-JTCA.
26. Greenberg, “How a ‘Deviant Philosopher’ Built Palantir”; Ellen Mitchell, “How Silicon Valley’s Palantir wired Washington,” Politico, August 14, 2016.
27. Anonymous, comment to “What is the interview process like at Palantir?,” Quora, February 17, 2011, archived at https://perma.cc/R4FM-LPXL [inactive].
28. Julie Bort, “What It’s Like to Work at the Valley’s Most Secretive Startup,” Business Insider, July 31, 2016; Ryan Singel, “Anonymous vs. EFF?” Wired, November 14, 2011.
29. Andrew Ruiz, Twitter, April 30, 2018, archived at https://perma.cc/FZ6X-VU84. Thiel also was unafraid to throw his weight around, most notably when he bankrolled a defamation suit brought by wrestler Hulk Hogan against the online newspaper Gawker, which had also outed Thiel against his wishes. After the suit went in Hogan’s favor, a bankrupt Gawker had to shut down.
CHAPTER 25: MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE
1. Adam Gorlick, “‘I wanted to see with my own eyes the origin of success,’ Russian president tells Stanford audience,” Stanford Report, June 23, 2010; “Dmitry Medvedev visits Twitter HQ and tweets,” The Telegraph (UK), June 24, 2010.
2. “Medvedev targeted with mock Twitter account,” The Telegraph (UK), July 5, 2010; @Kerm linRussia, Twitter, January 8, 2011, archived at https://perma.cc/K4V8-K7VK.
3. Vivek Wadhwa, AnnaLee Saxenian, and F. Daniel Siciliano, Then and Now: America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, part VII, Kauffman Foundation Research paper, 2012; “International Students,” Stanford Engineering, accessed May 27, 2018, archived at https://perma.cc/EFS3-3X7N.
4. Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” The Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011.
5. Richard L. Florida and Martin Kenney, “Venture Capital, High Technology and Regional Development,” Regional Studies 22, no. 1 (1988): 33–48; Florida, “America’s Leading Metros for Venture Capital,” CityLab, June 17, 2013; Chris DeVore, “The Venture Capital Stack + Regional Seed VC,” Crash/Dev, June 15, 2017, archived at https://perma.cc/T493-FALD.
6. Tim Wu, tweet, 5/24/2018 8:14AM; Regis McKenna, interview with the author December 3, 2014. Peter Thiel believed in this market-definition-and-domination strategy so strongly that he co-wrote a book on the subject, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Random House, 2014).
7. Zuckerberg, Facebook post, March 30, 2015, archived at https://perma.cc/S9DW-RVPW.
8. Margaret O’Mara, “The Other Tech Bubble,” The American Prospect, Winter 2016.
9. Katie Hafner, “Google Options Make Masseuse a Multimillionaire,” The New York Times, November 12, 2007; Kevin Maney, “Marc Andreessen puts his money where his mouth is,” Fortune, July 10, 2009.
10. In September 2018, after reported infighting within Kleiner, Meeker abruptly quit, bringing along several other of its senior late-stage investors to start a new venture firm under her own leadership. Theodore Schleifer, “Mary Meeker, the Legendary Internet Analyst, Is Leaving Kleiner Perkins,” Recode, September 14, 2018, https://www.recode.net/2018/9/14/17858582/kleiner-perkins-mary-meeker-split, archived at https://perma.cc/FJ8S-DVUM.
11. Jesse Drucker, “Kremlin Cash Behind Billionaire’s Twitter and Facebook Investments,” The New York Times, November 5, 2017; Michael Wolff, “How Russian Tycoon Yuri Milner Bought His Way into Silicon Valley,” Wired, October 21, 2011.
12. Chris William Sanchirico, “As American as Apple Inc.: International Tax and Ownership Nationality,” Tax Law Review 68, no. 2 (2015): 207–74; Rebecca Greenfield, “Senators Turn Tim Cook’s Hearing into a Genius Bar Visit,” The Atlantic, May 21, 2013.
13. David Kirkpatrick, “Inside Sean Parker’s Wedding,” Vanity Fair, August 1, 2013.
14. “Yammer Raises $17 Million in Financing Round Led by The Social+Capital Partnerhip,” Marketwire, September 27, 2011.
15. Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing about Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (New York: HarperBusiness, 2014), 62.
16. Ellen McGirt, “Al Gore’s $100 Million Makeover,” Fast Company, July 1, 2007.
17. John Doerr, “Salvation (and profit) in Greentech,” TED2007, March 2007; Marc Gunther and Adam Lashinsky, “Cleanup Crew,” Fortune 156, no. 11 (November 26, 2007).
18. Jon Gertner, “Capitalism to the Rescue,” The New York Times, October 3, 2008.
19. Jerry Hirsch, “Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies,” The Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2015; Sarah McBride and Nichola Groom, “Insight: How cleantech tarnished Kleiner and VC star John Doerr,” Reuters Business News, January 15, 2013.
20. David Streitfeld, “Kleiner Perkins Denies Sex Bias in Response to a Lawsuit,” The New York Times, June 14, 2012; Ellen Huet, “Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr and Ellen Pao: A Mentorship Sours,” Forbes, March 4, 2015.
21. Gené Teare and Ned Desmond, “The first comprehensive study on women in venture capital and their impact on female founders,” TechCrunch, April 19, 2016; “Despite More Women, VCs Still Mostly White Men,” The Information, December 14, 2016.
22. Laszlo Bock, “Getting to work on diversity at Google,” Google blog, May 28, 2014; Maxine Williams, “Building a More Diverse Facebook,” Facebook Newsroom, June 25, 2014; Mallory Pickett, “The Dangers of Keeping Women out of Tech,” Wired, January 26, 2018.
23. Emily Chang, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley (New York: Portfolio, 2018), 145–46; John Doerr, interview with Emily Chang, Bloomberg TV, June 18, 2015.
24. Graham, “Why to Move to a Startup Hub,” PaulGraham.com, October 2007, archived at https://perma.cc/TYF6-G3KT.
25. Kara Swisher, interview with Chamath Palihapitiya, Recode/Decode, March 20, 2016; Palihapitiya, interview with the author, December 5, 2017.
26. Ashley Carroll, “Capital-as-a-Service: A New Operating System for Early-Stage Investing,” Medium, October 25, 2017, https://medium.com/social-capital/capital-as-a-service-a-new-operating-system-for-early-stage-investing-6d001416c0df, archived at https://perma.cc/G5QD-DUCF. Social Capital did not have much opportunity to test whether the new model would make a significant difference in the diversity of venture-funded entrepreneurs. The partnership imploded in the early fall of 2018 after an exodus of Palihapitiya’s co-founders and other key executives, leaving the future of the firm and “CaaS” unclear.
27. Trish Mill
ines Dziko, interview with the author, April 3, 2018.
28. Issie Lapowsky, “Clinton Owns Silicon Valley’s Vote Now That Bloomberg’s Out,” Wired, March 8, 2016.
29. Thiel, “Trump Has Taught Us This Year’s Most Valuable Political Lesson,” The Washington Post, September 6, 2016.
30. Mitch Kapor, interview with the author, September 19, 2017.
DEPARTURE: INTO THE DRIVERLESS CAR
1. This also was a reminder of the Pentagon spending still lurking behind the Valley’s entrepreneurial audacity, for a DARPA “Grand Challenge” competition a decade earlier had revved up the race to bring driverless vehicles to market. As ever, the Valley’s next generation was helped along by the military’s willingness to make far-out bets. See Alex Davies, “Inside the Races that Jump-Started the Self-Driving Car,” Wired, November 10, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/darpa-grand-urban-challenge-self-driving-car/, archived at https://perma.cc/EWN5-8XCD.
2. Tiernan Ray and Alex Eule, “John Doerr on Leadership, Education, Google, and AI,” Barron’s, May 5, 2018, https://www.barrons.com/articles/john-doerr-on-leadership-education-google-and-ai-1525478401, archived at https://perma.cc/S2W5-5GMY [inactive]; James Morra, “Groq to reveal potent artificial intelligence chip next year,” ee News: Europe, November 17, 2017, http://www.eenewseurope.com/news/groq-reveal-potent-artificial-intelligence-chip-next-year, archived at https://perma.cc/FQ3G-YAEK.
3. Maria di Mento, “Technology Investor Pledges $32 Million to Rice U,” Chronicle of Philanthropy 18, no. 18 (June 29, 2006), via Nexis Uni, accessed August 30, 2018; Burt and Deedee McMurtry, “Remarks at the McMurtry Building Groundbreaking Ceremony,” May 15, 2013, Stanford Arts, https://arts.stanford.edu/remarks-by-burt-and-deedee-mcmurtry/, archived at https://perma.cc/H59G-B2LW; McMurtry, interview with the author, October 2, 2017.
4. Gary Morgenthaler, e-mail correspondence with the author, August 17, 2016; “Startup developing new battery technology wins $12,000 in first MIT ACCELERATE Contest,” MIT News, March 6, 2012, http://news.mit.edu/2012/battery-technology-startup-wins-accelerate-contest, archived at https://perma.cc/QAN9-ZHXB; Morgenthaler, interviews with the author, 2015 and 2016. David Morgenthaler died on June 16, 2016, at the age of 96, survived by his wife Lindsay, sons Gary and Todd, daughter Lissa, seven grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. Katie Benner, “David T. Morgenthaler, Who Shaped Venture Capitalism, Dies at 96,” The New York Times, June 21, 2016, A21.
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