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

by Doug Menuez

  Sunlight.

  Sonoma, California, 1986.

  At tech start-ups it was rare to get outside or even see the sun for days at a time. A young NeXT employee working on an early Macintosh at a company retreat focuses on the task at hand, closing the shades and ignoring the insistent sunlight she has no time to enjoy.

  Steve Jobs Pretending to Be Human.

  Menlo Park, California, 1987.

  Steve was not the kind of guy who ever seemed to relax. He was usually focused like a laser on the task at hand. So it was surprising to see Steve kicking this beach ball around at a company picnic. He seemed to be having a good time, but it felt more like a performance designed to encourage the team to relax. He knew well from previous experience that his team needed breaks in order to sustain the forced march that would culminate in shipping the product.

  Steve Jobs Views the NeXT Computer Case Prototype.

  Santa Cruz, California, 1987.

  A rare view of Steve Jobs in action, in this case agonizing over the surface texture of the anodized cast-magnesium cube for the NeXT computer with Ken Haven, director, mechanical engineering. Magnesium is lightweight and strong, but the complications of manufacturing the cube to Steve’s exacting standards were quickly adding to the costs and delaying the product. Part of his process was based on his need to trust. Steve was sometimes ruthless because he understood the stakes and knew that each of his thousands of decisions mattered—if the majority were correct, it could tip the project to success, but if not, to rapid failure. He had to trust that the person presenting a solution or an option had thoroughly done his or her homework before Steve could gamble on the suggestion. That might mean twenty minutes of intense shouting until he was satisfied. Then a switch would flip in his brain and a big smile would break out. “Okay, great,” he’d say as he turned to the next issue. Often, people would shout back, giving as good as they got, which Steve appeared to appreciate and encourage, saying he wanted to work with people with strong character. Eddie Lee described his interactions with Steve as one of the greatest experiences of his life. Sure it was tough, he says today, but he never took it personally because it was always about “making the thing better.”

  Evolution of the Species.

  Palo Alto, California, 1988.

  This cheeky tableau of a robot dominating a primate seen decorating a cubicle at NeXT is symbolic of today’s big debates in Silicon Valley about nothing less than the future of humanity. As the pace of technological innovation is expected to increase exponentially, experts believe that the next stage of our evolution will see humans actually merging with machines. Today exciting advances have already been made in artificial intelligence, nanotech, and genomics that when put together might lead to this outcome. But a minority of concerned scientists are now speaking out in books and at conferences, expressing their fears that these technologies might threaten our future as a species. Virtual-reality pioneer Jaron Lanier worries that in the future we’ll be able to upload our brains into a “hive mind.” We’ll leave our bodies behind to achieve immortality, but will end up working forever as slaves tasked with writing free Wikipedia entries all day.

  NeXT Days, NeXT Nights.

  Palo Alto, California.

  Step by step the company makes progress. In Redwood City, 1988, NeXT manufacturing engineers examine a circuit board fresh off the advanced robotic production line at the NeXT factory.

  Service coordinator Paula Lorenz takes a break (without leaving her desk) from her work at the NeXT factory, Fremont, 1990.

  In Redwood City, 1998, engineers watch colleague John Anderson’s free-roaming pet boa.

  In Palo Alto in 1987, software engineers Trey Matteson (on floor) and Chris Franklin (standing at computer) and colleagues are working near the sunny rooftop hangout area they called Silicon Beach.

  How to Sell Ten Thousand Workstations a Month.

  Santa Cruz, California, 1987.

  At a NeXT off-site meeting at a Santa Cruz resort, Steve presented Dan’l Lewin with a newly devised and wildly ambitious manufacturing plan. He then demanded that Dan’l and his sales and marketing team instantly create a sales strategy to match it and present it to the company. That day. Dan’l later told me, “Steve had a binder he was waving around saying, ‘Look what Randy did, this is brilliant’ and ‘You guys now figure out how to sell ten thousand units a month.’ I gathered my team and said, ‘Okay, let’s have some fun with this. Let’s do Plan One Billion.’ We did the math, and to generate one billion in revenue we’d have to have a two-hundred-person sales organization. Steve’s fantasy was that by some magical date we would be shipping the ten thousand from Randy’s plan.” At this point the factory had not even been built. Still, Dan’l and his group quickly devised a rousing, theatrical presentation of Plan One Billion, replete with props such as a bowie knife, Barbie dolls, and a dozen eggs, which he cracked into a bowl onstage. He then dumped everything into what appeared to be his briefcase. The presentation satisfied Steve and was cheered by their colleagues.

  Only Connect.

  Silicon Valley, California.

  So much of life in Silicon Valley was about explaining and selling ideas—to investors, to colleagues, to the press. I grew to love watching hands as a way to understand the emotional state of my subjects. Farallon Computing, Emeryville, California, 1990.

  Adobe Systems, Tokyo, Japan, 1991.

  Adobe Systems, Mountain View, California, 1989.

  NeXT Computer, Palo Alto, California, 1986.

  NetObjects, Redwood City, California, 1998.

  Dupont salesmen, Maryland, 1991.

  Kleiner Perkins, Aspen, Colorado, 1996.

  Farallon Computing, Emeryville, California, 1990.

  Steve Jobs Is Thinking.

  Santa Cruz, California, 1987.

  Steve was a technologist, an editor, a cool hunter, and a savvy businessman, but he also had an artist’s intuitive mind, dreaming up new ways to combine existing technologies to create something completely new. Mostly, he was staking out virgin ground at the intersection of the humanities and science. Another of the many attributes that set him apart was his refusal to take no for an answer. Steve surrounded himself with the most brilliant scientists, marketers, and managers on the planet, sometimes interviewing a hundred people for every one he hired. Then he pushed them, sometimes kicking and screaming, to do what they thought they knew was impossible—until they somehow rose above their own considerable talents to deliver the miracles Steve demanded. Despite the unhappy fate of the NeXT hardware, he never gave up on his ideas. The innovations he engendered during the NeXT years would be the key to his triumphant return to Apple.

  Loose Lips Sink Ships.

  Redwood City, California, 1988.

  Shortly before the official launch of the NeXT computer, Steve had the completed prototype computer, screen, printer, and peripherals working in his office. He kept them covered in black velvet to keep them hidden from visitors. Tech companies were extremely competitive and secretive, so precautions were taken even behind closed doors. As you entered the original NeXT building in Palo Alto, visitors and employees were greeted by a vintage World War II British poster warning that “enemy agents” were in their midst and to avoid “careless talk.”

  Exhortations, Incantations, Promises, and Threats.

  Redwood City, California, 1988.

  Steve gives a rousing pep talk to inspire his weary employees while also indulging in a short rant about revenge on Apple and John Sculley. The company was preparing to demonstrate the NeXT prototype at gala demonstrations in San Francisco and Washington, DC, although it would be almost another year before finished workstations would be shipped.

  You Catch More Flies with Honey.

  Washington, DC, 1988.

  NeXT board member and early investor Ross Perot charms fans and potential customers from higher education at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum during the East Coast launch of the NeXT workstation. Once, while watching Steve b
erate an employee, Ross said, “Steve reminds me of myself when I was his age [thirty], but then I learned you catch more flies with honey.”

  The End of the Beginning.

  Washington, DC, 1988.

  Ross Perot, Steve Jobs, and NeXT marketing executive Kathy Kilcoyne enjoy the brief afterglow from a promising series of days presenting the NeXT workstation to their key market at Educom ’88. After three years of exhausting, almost superhuman development with his small team, Steve Jobs’s redemption and return from the technology wilderness seemed at hand. It was not to be. The launch was a massive PR success, but ultimately his key partners in education felt betrayed by the workstation’s $6,500 base price, more than double what was promised. This was just days after the glittering San Francisco launch, and Steve and his team were utterly spent, yet still months away from having a finished product. Sadly, the company slowly faded as sales stalled. The company was late to market, faced fierce competition from former partners such as Sun Microsystems, initially lacked a color monitor, and used the Canon optical disk drive for storage—revolutionary and cool, but frustratingly slow. Steve had to close the NeXT hardware division in 1993 in a painful, public failure. A few years later, he’d almost run thorough all his money between funding NeXT and Pixar and was close to broke. But then Pixar released the megahit Toy Story, and the subsequent Pixar IPO made him a billionaire. And the intense effort at NeXT finally paid off: the software was years ahead of its competition, and in 1996 Apple bought his object-oriented operating system called NeXTSTEP. This allowed Apple to innovate again and became the basis for the OS X operating system found today in all its products. Steve gained a seat on the board and was soon back running Apple. He began releasing one successful product after another while Pixar was producing back-to-back movie hits. Apple was on its way to becoming the most valuable company in the world. After more than a decade of disappointment and failure, Steve Jobs was living out one of the greatest comebacks in American business history.

  “If you give someone a hammer, they can build a house or tear it down. Photoshop is just a better hammer.”

  —Russell Brown, Adobe Systems creative director and Photoshop evangelist, addressing criticism from traditional photographers that digital technology was destroying photography

  The Founders of Adobe Systems Preparing to Release Photoshop.

  Mountain View, California, 1988.

  John Warnock and Chuck Geschke (seated at left) confidently ready the launch of Photoshop, a landmark program that would utterly transform photography and the graphic arts. This followed their first breakthrough software called PostScript, completed after twenty thousand man-hours of coding, which allowed personal computers to talk to printers. This seemingly small function was incredibly difficult to achieve and represented the biggest advance in printing since Gutenberg invented movable type in 1436. The duo left Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) after their brilliant ideas were ignored and founded Adobe in 1982 with $2 million. They read exactly one business book prior to starting and intended to sell a personal desktop computer with a printer. They did not initially envision revolutionizing the desktop publishing industry with fonts or design software. A few months after they opened for business, Steve Jobs showed up (1982, riding high in his first stint as CEO at Apple) and demanded to buy the company. His then in-development Macintosh was going to ship with a laser printer, but his team could not write the requisite software. Steve pressed them to sell and come work for him. As Chuck told the story, they refused, and Steve responded, “You guys are idiots!” They called their investors, who urged them to work something out with Steve. They agreed to sell him shares worth 19 percent of the company, for which Steve paid a five-times multiple of their company’s valuation at the time, plus a five-year license fee for PostScript, in advance. This made Adobe the first company in the history of Silicon Valley to become profitable in its first year.

  Russell Brown in Costume.

  Mountain View, California, 1989.

  In a public defense of the early Photoshop, Adobe Systems creative director Russell Brown pointedly said that software is just a simple tool, like a hammer. You can use it to build a house or tear one down. Many photographers and graphic designers resisted digital technology and heavily criticized Photoshop. Perhaps more than anyone else, Russell Brown deserves credit for the dominance of Photoshop by winning over the creative community with his Photoshop classes and lectures where influential photographers, graphic designers, and artists were invited to come learn the software.

  Universal Language.

  Mountain View, California, 1988.

  A team of Adobe type designers working on creating PostScript versions of Japanese-language character sets. Adobe added kanji printer products in 1988, making PostScript the first truly international standard for computer printing. Its underlying algorithms describing the letterforms of any language became a new global idiom.

  Thinking Difficult Thoughts.

  Mountain View, California, 1988.

  Much of the arduous work of technology development involves solitary concentration and happens inside people’s heads. It was not only tough to think, but difficult to get away from the constant interruptions of daily work life that we now call multitasking.

  Oasis in the Valley.

  Mountain View, California, 1989.

  Compared to the emotional roller coaster at NeXT and other startups, Adobe had a serene atmosphere that was also conducive to creativity. Their mature management team was quietly building a global brand. Here, graphic designer Luanne Seymour Cohen pauses between meetings with engineers.

  Geek Sex.

  Mountain View, California, 1991.

  Real-life boyfriend and girlfriend act out a rudimentary electrical metaphor at an Adobe Halloween party. Technology workers were notoriously socially inept and often shy, especially male engineers. Fantasy games and role-playing were popular, and any opportunity to dress in costumes was welcomed. This couple repeated the ritual all over the company to the delight of fellow workers.

  The Soul’s Joy Lies in the Doing.

  Silicon Valley, California.

  As Shelley and Shakespeare both suggested, the journey can be its own reward. Although 90 percent of life in Silicon Valley was an unrelenting flow of “doing” with lots of struggle, failure, complications, and pressure, rare but intensely sweet moments of release occurred as well. The work had purpose, so people had a confident optimism to see themselves through. There seemed no greater high than solving a problem or simply blowing off steam after months of intense effort. Sun Microsystems, Mountain View, California, 1995.

  Adobe Systems, Mountain View, California, 1992.

  Keith Yamashita, Apple Computer, Chicago, Illinois, 1992.

  Apple Computer, Singapore, 1994.

  Adobe, Mountain View, California, 1992.

  Tom Rielly (right), Farallon Computing, 1989.

  Adobe, San Francisco, California, 1988.

  Apple Computer, Boston, Massachusetts, 1993.

  On Vacation.

  Mountain View, California, 1994.

  What appears to be an amusing scene carries a subtle subtext about the pressures to keep working. As Silicon Valley companies evolved from kids in garages to global technology behemoths, they began to adopt standard corporate practices such as granting health insurance and paid vacations. Adobe Systems offered everything employees could want, it seemed. Still, the hours were long and competition fierce, so vacations were often deferred or delayed. When people did go ahead and actually take the vacation days they’d earned, they might return to find their office had been “redecorated.”

  The Painter David Hockney Rests during the First Photoshop Invitational.

  Mountain View, California, 1990.

  As digital technology grew more powerful, Silicon Valley became an unexpected crossroads of culture. Artists arrived from all over the world, eager to experiment and hang out at happenings such as the TED conference, creating a freeway
-and-office-park version of what Paris in the twenties must have felt like. Producer Quincy Jones and musicians Peter Gabriel and Herbie Hancock were early adopters. Graham Nash was so taken he started his own fine-art digital-printing business. Tom Wolfe had been out to write about Bob Noyce, the coinventor of the integrated circuit, and lots of writers followed, including Steve Jobs’s half sister Mona Simpson. George Lucas was a pioneer in digital film, as was Francis Ford Coppola. The cultural ground was shifting, with the avant-garde gathering to push new digital ideas into the zeitgeist. Here, painter David Hockney, holding one of his beloved dachshunds, attends Russell Brown’s first Adobe Photoshop Invitational, where he learned how to use the first-release version of Photoshop, happily smoking in the computer room and playing with his dogs on breaks.