Transcripts For CSPAN2 Leslie Berlin Troublemakers 20180107

Diverse burst of technological innovation of the past 150 years, writes historian leslie berlin. Quote, five Major Industries were born; personal computing, video games, advanced semiconductor logic, modern Venture Capital and biotechnology. Unquote. The valley brought to life new Iconic Companies including apple, atari, genentech and major venture firms. Berlin spent six years doing research with many of the Unsung Heroes of this era behind these landmark developments and that set in motion these ripple effects which have literally changed the world. Tonight she joins us to discuss her new book, troublemakers Silicon Valleys coming of age. This side of the stage were really pleased to present a small exhibit just for you tonight of artifacts related to each of the seven Silicon Valley trouble merricks featured in troublemakers featured in her book. And were very thrilled to have several of the reimaginer troublemakers remarkable troublemakers with us tonight. So, al, mike and sandy, would you please stand and be recognized. [applause] thank you. So to tell the stories of these remarkable people and others is leslie berlin. Leslie is the project historian for the Silicon Valley archives at stanford university. Shes been a fellow at Stanford Center for advanced studies and Behavioral Sciences and on the Advisory Committee for the [inaudible] center at sewn januarys National Museum of american history. To introduce her id like to share, as is our tradition, five numbers. So 35 square miles were the ones that changed the world as described in her book. 14 wild years chronicled. 2 books published. 7 valley upstarts profiled in troublemakers and two children. Please join me in giving a very warm welcome to leslie berlin. [applause] great to have you. Thank you. So, leslie, really delighted to have you here at the museum. Thank you. And enjoyed reading the troublemakers. So youve been a chronicler of the valleys history for two decades, and you often quote steve jobs who says you cant really understand whats going on unless you understand what came before. For a place thats focused so much on creating the future, why is Silicon Valley history important . Well, i mean, its hard to outspeak steve jobs on that. So i do believe that you cant understand whats happening today without understanding what came before, but more importantly or as important at least is that Silicon Valley has this remarkable advantage which is that the history is still here. The people, i mean, in this room and all over this community are here and quite accessible. And i think that the young entrepreneurs who know whats up, they come and try to talk to the people who are living here who have done this before. Bob taylor, who i talk about in my book who is the person who convinced the the president of defense the department of defense to start the ash net that became the internet and ran the Computer Science lab at xerox park which is one of the two labs that developed the technology that so knocked steve jobs socks off in 1979, you know, taylor told me that Mark Zuckerberg came up to try to understand, said, well, how to you manage innovation . And this is something that i think right here for us to learn, thats such an advantage to have those mentors and people who have done it before right here. So these people are are all around us are all around us, and how did you choose this particular time period to focus on for this book . You know, i did something really oldfashioned which is i took out a sheet of paper, and i drew a timeline, and i started putting little dots on it for important things that happened. And there was just this incredible convergence during this period of time, and because in addition to everything that marguerite talked about with the birth of biotech and modern Venture Capital and personal computing and video games and advanced semiconductor logic, i mean, at the same time this is sort of the birth of the celebrity entrepreneur. This is the time that Silicon Valley launches two of its most important lobbying organizations that really kind of set this motion what we see today with the tight connections between d. C. And Silicon Valley, and it was just incredible. This was when stanford starts its office for technology licensing. Mostly engineers. And now suddenly exploding on the scene and i really wanted to tell that story and the challenge became how do you tell a story that is that complex with so many moving parts . We talked earlier when you were talking about the process you have this unusual style to weave together individuals. How do you come to that unravel what is happening . I sweated blood. That you would read it just to give you an overview, i get seven individuals and a look at what they are doing with this window of time. I figured right about person a and person b and what quickly became apparent i was losing the really cool part of the story is how all of this intersected somebody like regis popup who introduced first the microprocessor to the world and the personal computer than biotech industry. And if i were just telling the story as a silo you would not get that. Or Don Valentine keeps showing up. So i really needed to find a way to do that. The way the book is structured as it looks at it. Of time to say here is what each person is doing and i offer a window into what is happening into Silicon Valley and then i jump to the next window in time and show what everyone is doing that enables me where they are crossing and interweaving. Looking from the outside with those heroic individuals we started talking about steve jobs but many were not household names. I have three criteria. Number one, the person had to be important or teach us something important the valley. Number two, they had to have a truly interesting story. For fun i almost exclusively read fiction and with this narrative arc something as complicated as this technology with the notion of building a company to take a person to tell their story i needed people who had interesting stories and it was important to have people that were not as well known. I talk about this party that i went to a long time ago i think he was the cio of a tech company with a very, very very famous celebrities ceo. This person started to sing a little song the words were i did all the work and he got all the credit. [laughter] and i think innovation is a team sport. It is the baseball game because anyone who was at that game you step on the bag at the last minute and the catcher makes his perfectly calibrated call but the only thing that goes through the history books is the picture through a perfect game but if anybody is exceeded how they were succeeding it was a team effort. I really wanted a way to tell the story of the people who were just outside the spotlight without whom they would not be there. Which one do you want to start with . I will tell the story of mike. It is dangerous when they are sitting in the audience because they could jump up and correct you. A lot of people in this room know who mike is. As i have gone around two other places they know who mike is. Or some dont fit if they know the founding of apple they know of the in the garage 1976. What they dont know is there was somebody else who own one third of apple and that was mike. The way his story had come to me luckily we got friendly after my first book. So since i do a lot of history, i knew that there were so many of these little startup Computer Companies all over the valley and all over the country. And they all had their brilliant engineers. Maybe not as perhaps as brilliant as jobs or t17. But he would say there were a lot of people and that is true but one of those was mike. If you look at apple 1976, steve jobs was 21 years old. Seventeen months of business experience in his entire life working as a tech at atari. And Steve Wozniak wanted to stay as an engineer hewlettpackard. He didnt want to start a company so how did they end up the youngest company to hit the fortune 500 . Because mike came in and brought with him a cadre of people from the microchip industry including jean carter who i know is here. If you look at apple as one. When they went public good night, you have the president , vp of manufacturing, vp marketing, vp sales, cfo, vp hr. Several major investors like sequoia. All brought in by mike. Brilliant connections through the Semi Conductor industry and to me that is a story that is remarkable that people did not know that. It goes back to the importance building on what came before so how foolish would that have been for those two to say we will do it ourselves because everybody else is tried and they didnt have success. The theme throughout your book is passing the baton to this inter generational connection. Can you say how that has happened in the valley . That term passing the baton is another steve jobs term from his commencement address. Everybody glides right over but he talks about when he was fired from apple in 1985 he got on the phone and apologized for what he called dropping the baton and really had a sense of this baton being passed from generation to generation. He passed it forward. Mark zuckerberg considers him a mentor. He talked with google founders, he did pay it forward but bob noyce called it restocking the stream that i fished from. That is something that really motivates, of course there are financial incentives but motivates those Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists to pay back into the system what you got out of it. That has happened a number of ways. Formal ways through formal investment or through hiring people. There have been Informal Networks of people taking other people under their wing. One of the nicest things anybody said to me was that the problem with the analogy is there is one baton. I cant go to Mark Zuckerberg in say give me the baton. This person said your book can be a baton for people. I really like that idea and it is incumbent on us to figure out to figure out the valleys great strength which is handing things off within a tight network. How do we make sure that people that are in this network right now who are able to get folded into the stream . Being at the center of a very Important Network so talking about bob taylor, tell us about his role how you developed that story and how that affected the valley this is something i am a little ashamed to admit now because anybody knows the inside story would say how does somebody with the phd not know . But i really had not been aware how tight the ties were between the arpanet and the birth of the personal computer industry. I didnt appreciate so many of the same people got their funding that helped to develop the arpanet then turned around and went to places like xerox park and launched the personal computer revolution. In some sense bob was in an incredible way to tell the story getting back to my point what he did was undeniably important. To start the arpanet, run the Computer Science lab and then his group develops one of the key researchers one of the most important people behind altavista which is the first really great Search Engine several years before google get started. Very unknown. When i did a survey it is very rare for hand to go up. If there is one thing i hope this book changes is that. But what a story. He has a masters degree in psychology from the university of texas and ends up responsible for a cadre of some of them are Computer Science phd but this was before phds in Computer Science were common. And taylor was in charge and the caliber of these people were so extraordinary that the president of mit worried out loud about the possibility of staffing academic Computer Science department anybody they would want to work was already working for bob. And the story how somebody described him as a concert pianist without fingers. It is an incredible analogy. I talked to people for this book sometimes i feel i should just tape put on the tape recorder. Just because they are so smart. But that line captures it. He could hear the term distributed computing but yet could not do it himself. He was able to find the people to get that moving forward but yet, an amazing person to work for and a very difficult person to work for you. That makes for an incredible story. So far we have talked about the great men and it is important we include extraordinary women part of the story. Sandy took the company the first want to take a tech Company Public so tell us about her story and how it weaves together. Sure. A lot of people say about sandy it is so good you included a woman. But what i included was a software entrepreneur. That is what i was interested in. I wanted to tell sandy story because she was an example of somebody who made this work outside of the networks we talk about. She didnt have Don Valentine helping her out from the beginning. Her startup story is not i was in a garage but i was at my kitchen table. Gender definitely is a part of this story. She was a double outsider. Yes as a woman that she was selling software at a time no one knew what software was. People seriously asked bob taylor from the dod how much does the software way . They had no idea. Larry ellison tells the story to get Venture Capital for oracle. Actually oracle has several cofounders. [laughter] larry tells the story basically being shown the door since the word software came out of his mouth and have the secretary check his bag to make sure he had installed a copy of business week on his way out. It was a shady operation so because she is operating in this world of the unknown product and a woman she loves to tell the story people thought she was selling lingerie. [laughter] she bootstrapped her way up. That is an incredible story because that is part of the way things happen in Silicon Valley and what i wanted to tell. Of course there are reasons to look again at how women are leading and have opportunities and have opportunities talk about breast enhancement and other things not for sandy but that was the culture at the time. It may surprise people how women were viewed at the time. This has been very interesting to talk about because people come i have been asked some strange and hard questions one person asked Silicon Valley, good or evil . [laughter] and the question i am asked about gender is was it better or worse back then . But you cannot answer that question simply so i talked to a number of women for this book. Of course font is someone else she started out when the book opens she is 12 years old. She is working in the orchards near her home near cupertino california. She ends up immediately after high School Getting a job on the manufacturing line another vitally important Silicon Valley Companies People dont know about now. So this was exciting to talk about. She decided she cannot stand to be on the manufacturing line anymore. I have to land behind the desk and essentially worked for a company that was acquired but i talked to a lot of women and the story is very complex because there were women programmers and videogame designers but biology in general had a lot of women with visions of relative power. So their colleagues generally treated them as equals or one of the boys. But at the same time on the outside. Still operating in a remarkably sexist world on the level. 1974 before a woman if she was married could even get a credit card without her husbands approval. 1980 before the eeoc recognize Sexual Harassment in the workplace. This is an environment that accompany new better and then published a short story that was flatout pornographic about abreast enhancing machine in the pages of your company newsletter. The stories that i would hear that they were subjected to i thought that was the most terrible Sexual Harassment but the perspective was no. He was just a jerk or this is just what happens. So from the inside they were treated as equals but sandy was in charge so that was a logical way for women to go at the time. On the other hand i could name these women. And also what was accepted as normal was impossible to imagine now. So of course it is better now than it used to be. The way that it will get better still is we need to have more women and underrepresented minorities in positions of authority with the ability to hire and fire and control budgets. That is how change happens. B17 so now talk about what you build out of atari of the counterculture. So the atari story it opens with him with tear gas canisters going off working at a tv repair shop and as an aside that berkeley has a lot to do with the con valley. And the core of the Computer Science lab so the story starts with the whole battle and destroy the area faced as a whole and the reason i do that is because it is an important part of als story and also dramatic and terrifying anti vietnam attitude was important to establish the valley but largely because a lot of the people ended up going to Companies Like atari if you were a graphic spurt a logical place for you to go was a defense contractor with a form of simulation but instead ended up with Companies Like atari and on a cultural level when i think what has happened at this time to have incredibly powerful technology and then it brings out the first microprocessor you can see this