Including apple, and major venture firms. They spent six years during research with many of the Unsung Heroes of this era were behind the landmark developments. They have literally change the world. Just for you tonight. Cindy could sing. Bob swanson and bob taylor. Al, mike and sandy would you please stand. [applause]. The stories of those remarkable people and others is leslie berlin. The project historian for the Silicon Valley archives she has been a fellow at the center for advanced studies and behavioral scientists i would like to share five numbers. So, 35 square miles were the ones that change the world. Fourteen wild years. Two books published seven upstarts. Please join me in giving me a very warm welcome to leslie berlin. Great to have you. Leslie, really delighted to have you here. And enjoyed reading the troublemakers you had been a chronicle of the history for two decades you cant really understand what goes on unless you understand what came for. It is hard to out speak steve jobs on that. I do believe that you cant understand whats happening today without understanding what came before more important for as importantlys is that they have this remarkable advantage which is the history is still here. The people in this room and all over this community is quite accessible. I think that the young entrepreneurs that know what is 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 that convinced the department of defense to start the arpanet that became the internet and then ran the Computer Science lab which is one of the two labs that developed the technology that this in 1979. Taylor told me that Mark Zuckerberg came up to try to understand. How do you manage innovation. This is something i think right here for us to learn and that is such an advantage to have those mentors that have done it before. These people are all around us. How do you choose this particular time to focus on for this book. 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 time in addition to everything they talked about. In personal computing and video games. At the same time this is the birth of the celebrity entrepreneur this is the time that it launches two of its most important lobbying organizations that set in motion what we see today with a tight connections and it was just incredible this is when stanford starts its office for technology license. In 1970 when that office started in the previous 13 years stanford have made less than 3,000 in the combined ip of the entire faculty staff and students. And now that number is 2 billion. And this is something that was happening during the same. Of time as well. What was in the water. What was going on here. Because it had been a place its a little bit of an over simplification the sum secure region. It explodes on the scene. I really wanted to tell that story and then the challenge became how do you tell a story that is that complex. It has some moving parts. We talked earlier while you are writing about the process and you have this unusual of weaving together. How did you come to choose that as a way to unravel things at that time. The structure of a lot of books like this that you would read and just to give you an overview i look at seven individuals and i look at what they were doing during this window of time. And the way that i initially have imagined i would write this book is right about person a and person b and quickly became apparent that i was losing the really cool part of the story which is how all of this intercepted and how you have someone like Regis Mckenna pop up the person that introduced the microprocessor to the world and then the personal computer to the world and then the biotech industry to the world. If i were just telling the story kind of silo and you sideload you would never get that. I really needed to find a way to do that. The way it is structured now as it looks at a. Of time heres what each of these people are doing. And i give a window into what is happening in terms of how it is seen in changing. And then i jump to the next window in time and i show again what everybody is doing. That enables me to hit those nodes where things are quiet crossing many people look at that is socially from the outside in terms of a heroic individual we started talking off about steve jobs but youve chosen for this book people who may not had been household names for many years. How did you choose these people and the criteria was the person had to be important or teach something important about the valley. They have to have a truly interesting story for fun i almost exclusively when youre talking about something as complicated as that. To be able to take a person and tell their story was important. I needed people that had interesting stories. People who were not as well known. I talk about this party that i went to. A long time ago. And he was a cio from a very famous celebrity ceo and this person started singing a little song. I did all of the work he got all of the credit. I think innovation is a team sport. The analogy that i usually use is of a baseball game where the pitcher has thrown a perfect game. Anybody who was at that game they just step on the back. It is making it the perfectly calibrated the pitcher through a perfect game. And anyone who is honest about how they succeeded in the valley is going to tell you it was a team effort. I really wanted a way to tell the story of the people who were just outside the spotlight but without whom the person in the spotlight would not had been there. I will tell the story of mike and always dangerous when the person sitting in the audience they can jump up. And correct you. I think a lot of people in the room know who mike is. As i have gone around to other places asking who knows mike markel is. Not many very many people do. When people know about the founding of apple they know about the two seats. What they dont know is that they have Something Else who owned a third of apple and that was mike markel a. And the way that his story came to me luckily we have gotten it was a biography who was a really important friend to mike 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 all over the country. And they all had the brilliant engineer not as brilliant as that. What was it that made apple come up in the more i looked into it the more i realized and he would say there are a lot of people. One of those people was mike. When you look at apple in 1976 steve jobs was 21 years old. He had 17 months of business experience in his entire life and that was working as a tech for atari and Steve Wozniak he wanted to stay in engineer. How did those two guys end up with a genghis company ever to hit the fortune 500. In the answer is that mike came in and he brought with him a cadre of people from the micro trip micro chip industry. If you look at the s1 when they went public you have the president the vp of manufacturing the vp of marketing and the vp of sales the cfo. You have several of the major investors all brought in by mike through his connections to the semiconductor industry. And that to me is a story that is just remarkable goes back to what i was saying about the importance of building on what came before. For those two guys to feel like organa do it ourselves. They do not have the same success. A passing the baton and a generational connection. Can you say more about how that has happened in the valley midst disruption and there has been a passing of a baton from generation to generation. It is actually another steve jobs term from his 2005 commencement address. And something something everybody just alights right over. 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 he really have the sense of a baton being passed. He did not really talk about it. But he passed it forward. He talked with the google founders. He didnt pay did pay it forward as well. And bob noised called it restocking the stream i fished from. It really does motivate a lot of the people the sense of pain back. It has happened in the number of ways. Through formal investment. That is a classic way. There had been Informal Networks of people one of the nicest things that anyone has said to me about this book was they said the problem is with the analogy is that there is one baton i cant go up to Mark Zuckerberg and say give me the baton this person said your book can be a baton. I really like that idea. Its also incumbent has been the ballys great strength which is that handing things off within a network in a tight network. People that are not in that network who are able to also get folded into the stream. Such an important question. I would like to not i would now about bob taylor his role and how you develop that story. This is something that im a little ashamed to admit. The inside story of the valley how do they not know. I really had not been aware of how tight the ties were. That was something that i just didnt appreciate someone in the same people who helped to develop that. And launched the personal computer revolution. And bob taylor in some sense he was an incredible way to tell the story. This gets back to my point about what he did was undeniably important. Run a Computer Science lab. One of his key researchers one of the most important people behind altavista which is the first really great Search Engine several years before google gets started. Actually very unknown. When i have done surveys. It is very rare for hand to go up. If theres one thing i hope this changes. Is that. What a story. Bob taylor is the guy has a masters degree in psychology from the university of texas. And he ends up responsible for a cadre of some of the more Computer Science phds. From all of their all over. And taylor was in charge. In the caliber of these people was so extraordinary that the president of mit worried aloud about the possibility staffing the Computer Science department. They were all working for bob taylor. And the story of how he managed and someone described him to me as a concert pianist without fingers. This is an incredible analogy. In of course there are people whose iqs are way up here. And let these people will just print everything they say. And that line captures it because he was really able to hear the music and even more impersonal computing. In yet he couldnt do it himself. He didnt really know how to code. He was able to find the people and get that moving forward. He was an amazing person to work for. And a very difficult person to have work for you. That makes for an incredible story. So far weve talked a lot about a lot of the great men and its really important that we include some some extraordinary women who are part of this. A lot of people say its so good. A software entrepreneur. I wanted to tell sandy story because she was an example of someone who made this work outside of the network that were talking about. She didnt have done valentine helping out from the beginning. Her startup story is i was in the garage. And its definitely a part of the story. The way i talk about sandy is that she was a double outsider. She was selling software at a time when no one used software and knew what it was. People ask bob taylor how much does the software way. I love the people dont know that they have several cofounders. Larry tells the story. As soon as they came out of their little mouth. To make sure he hasnt stolen a copy of businessweek on his way out. It was a shady kind of operation. People thought they were selling laundry. That is an incredible story. That is part of the way you have things that happen. The story of course extends forward. There had been reasons to look again and how women are leading. How to have opportunities and they dont. Do you think along the way in your book you tell about that. About breast enhancement and other things. The things we are a part of. The culture at the time. I think it may surprise people how gender was viewed. This is in a really the really interesting thing to talk about. I had been asked some really strange and hard questions. One person asked me Silicon Valley good, or evil. You cant answer that question simply start picking that. And they are taking them for pocket money. Of cupertino california. Getting a job on the manufacturing lines. The Silicon Valley companies that it was a really exciting for this book. And being able to talk about rome. They cant seem to be on the manufacturing she didnt care where. She ends up the chief of staff. I talked to sandy. I talked to a lot of women as well. The story is very complex because from the inside there were women videogame they have a lot of women in positions of relative power. They were treated just one of the boys. At the same time they were still operating in the remarkably sexist world and i mean this on the level of the laws. It was in 1974 before a woman could get a married woman could get a credit card without her husbands approval. And it was 1980 before the eeoc exercise that. This is an environment in which a Company Newsletter and the atari Company Newsletter can publish a short story that is flat out this is in the pages of your Company Newsletter. And the stories that i would hear to me i would just say that is so terrible. In the perspective was no deck i was just a jerk where this is just what happened. From the inside people were treated as equals or sandy has always pointed out that she was in charge. That was a logical way for women to go. At the time. But on the other hand i could just name for you these women. It wasnt like there was clusters in scads of these women all over the place. What was accepted as the norm is impossible to imagine now. So of course its better now. Then it used to be. And the way its can get better still because it is still not great as we need to have more women the position of authority and power i would like to weave in. Until some of them. The culture counter the culture. The growth and change and fall of companies. The atari story the story opens with him hearing teargas canisters going off as a student. They actually have a lot to do and the core of the Computer Science lab. A lot of them. It starts with the whole battle over peoples in the strife that this area faced in the country as a whole face. And the reason i know that is because of course its an important part of als story and very interesting in germanic and terrifying but at the same time the anti vietnam war attitudes here were really important for establishing the valley largely because a lot of the people that ended up going to Companies Like atari in the late 60s early 70s the logical place for you to go was some form of a defense contractor. That was important. When i think about what happened at this time about this incredibly powerful technology which is the silicon chip. Its 1971. Intel brings out the first microprocessor and you really see this incredible powerful Technology Fall into the hands of people who did not trust the prevailing institutions. And i really think that led to that sort of flowering innovation around the area. The other thing i really like about als story is that Everybody Knows a story the story of nolan bush. He was the ideas a guy behind atari. But again, its concert pianist without fingers. Its a very generous. And he needed nolan they are completely absurd. I am doing this just for the pleasure of having it blow up in my face and telling nolan i told you. And then it works now says its like the dog in the car. I like that story. So many things that happened in the valley happened in these teams. We talked about we still had one more to talk about. Lets introduce him. Bob swanson story it actually gets and the birth of the biotech industry is very interesting the way the overlap happens is the patent for dna the whole idea to even pat not came from neil who would be the first to tell you he was just a chemical engineer he have no idea what the heck it meant. To build anything in this whole universe and he talked about going on vacation unlike a 4pound book. This technology could be in the beginning of something huge. He have to really a battle battle and work through the question of what is the purpose of the university. The way you do this is to increase the Public Knowledge at the same time patent some of your ideas. And how do you determine what ideas you patent. And only pursuing profitable at the same time they are wrangling with these sorts of questions bob swanson has just gotten fired from what was then kleiner and perkins and is literally living on welfare trying to interest people he basically goes down a list of people who attended a conference on what we would call biotech today and starts stops calling them. Do you think we could make any money. And they just kind of hang up on him. Until he gets to ucsf which is one of the two inventors along with stanek at stanford. Of the dna process. That is a really interesting story because bob swanson was so persistent and really went into this without any idea of how to build a Biotech Company in the ended up building a company that in some ways was in the beginning almost a precursor to the virtual Virtual Corporation and a time when people did not even think that way. That was largely due to tom perkins. That was toms idea. See mac we think you so much for introducing us to all of these main characters of the story and i would like to now pull back and look at the broader space. The larger ecosystem that was happening. Could you talk about how thats the catalyst that it was then. And how you would compare to how the venture world. And that ecosystem now. This is an interesting question because Silicon Valley is no longer home to just the outsiders. It has become a very mainstream place to put your money the best and brightest from various universities and people who want to make their mark on the valleys but also people who just want to make money. They all come here now. There had always been people here who just want to make money.