Atari, genentech, venture firms, berlin spent six years doing research with many Unsung Heroes of this era behind landmark developments and set in motion Ripple Effects which changed the world, tonight she joins us to discuss her new book troublemakers, Silicon Valleys coming of age. The side of the stage we are pleased to present a small exhibit tonight of artifacts related to each of the Silicon Valley troublemakers featured in her book. Bob swanson and bob taylor, we are thrilled to have several of the remarkable troublemakers with us tonight so please stand and be recognized. [applause] thank you. To tell the story of these remarkable people and others, leslie is the project historian for Silicon Valley archives, a fellow at the center for advanced studies of Behavioral Sciences at Smithsonian National museum of american history. To introduce her i would like to share as our tradition five members. 35 mi. As described in her book, 14 wild years chronicles, two books published, sound of 7 valley upstarts filed in troublemakers and two children, please join me giving a warm welcome to Leslie Berlin. [applause] great to have you. Leslie, enjoyed reading the troublemakers. You have been a chronicler of the valley history for two decades and you often quote steve jobs, you cant understand what is going on unless you understand what came before, for a place focused on creating the future why is Silicon Valley history important . It is hard to out speak steve jobs on that. I do believe you cant understand what is happening without understanding what came before, but more importantly or as important is Silicon Valley has this remarkable advantage which is the history is still here, the people in this room and all over this community are here and quite accessible and i young entrepreneurs who 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 who convinced the department of defense to start what became the internet and ran the Computer Science lab at xerox park which is one of the two labs the developed the technology that knocked steve jobss socks off in 1979, taylor told me Mark Zuckerberg came to try to understand how do you manage innovation . This is something here for us to learn, and advantage to have those mentors, people who have done it before right here. Host people are all around us, how did you choose this time. To focus on . I did something oldfashioned, took out a sheet of paper and i drew a timeline and started putting dots on it for important things that happened and there was this incredible convergence during this period of time and because in addition to everything marguerite talked about, the birth of biotech and modern Venture Capital and personal computing and video games and advanced Semi Conductor logic, at the same time this is the birth of the celebrity entrepreneur. This is the time that Silicon Valley launches two of its most important lobbying organizations that kind of set in motion what we see today with the tight connections between dc and Silicon Valley and it was just incredible, this is when stanford starts its office for Technology Licensing and 1970, when that office started in the previous 13 years stanford had made less than 3000 in the combined it of its faculty, staff and students and in Something Like three years that number was 52,000 and now that number is 2 billion. This was something happening in the same period of time as well and i just thought, what was in the water . What is going on here . It had been a place, and oversimplification to say it was just chips but certainly Silicon Valley is an obscure region, mostly spearhead engineers selling to other engineers, suddenly it explodes on the scene in all these different ways and i really wanted to tell that story of the challenge became how do you tell a story that is that complex . So many moving parts . Host we talked about your process and you have this unusual style of weaving together individuals, how did you choose that as a way to unravel what was happening at that time . Sweat and blood. The structure a lot of books like this that you would read and just to give you an overview, i look at seven individuals, did you run through the seven . I look at what they were doing during this window of time and the way that i initially imagined i would write this book is to write about person a during that time, write about person b and what became apparent was i was losing the really cool part of the story which was how all of this intersected, how you would have someone like Regis Mckenna popup, the person who introduced first the microprocessor to the world, than the personal computer and the biotech industry. If i were just telling this story you would never get at, or Don Valentine showing up in these stories. I needed to find a way to do that, if it looks at a period of time and says here is what each of these people is doing is i give a window into what is happening in terms of how Silicon Valley is seen and changing and jump to the next window in time and show what everyone is doing and that enables me to hit those nodes where things are crossing and it is interwoven. Host many people look at Silicon Valley from the outside in terms of heroic individuals, we started talking about steve jobs and you have chosen people who may not have been household names, how did you choose these people . I had three criteria and the criteria were person had to be important or teach something important about the valley. They had to have a truly interesting story. For fun i almost exclusively read fiction. I the narrative arc especially when you are talking about something as complicated as the technology and the notion of building a company, to be able to take a person and tell their story is important so i needed people with interesting stories, to have people who were not as well known. When the book opens i talk about this party i went to a long time ago. And a tech company with a very very famous celebrity ceo, and the lyrics to the song where i did all the work, he did all the credit. I think innovation is a team sport and the analogy i use is of a baseball game where the picture has thrown a perfect game because anyone who was at that game watches in our has the first baseman steps on the bag, the outfielder, making this perfectly calibrated call, the only thing that goes in the history book is the picture through a perfect game. Anyone who was honest about how they succeeded in the valley is going to tell you it was a team effort, that was true then, that is true now. Really wanted a way to tell the story of the people just outside the spotlight without whom the person in the spotlight had been there. Sorry, mike. I will tell the story of mike, always dangerous, jump up and you. A lot of people in this room know who mike is. Having gone to other places asking, not many people do which is always a surprise to me. When people know about the founding of apple and the two steves, steve jobs and Steve Wozniak in the garage in 1976 and somebody else owns a third of apple and that was mike markohliz. We got friendly after my first book which is a biography of bob noyce, a really important friend, since i do a lot of history, there were so many of these startup computer companies, they all have their brilliant engineer, not as brilliant as Steve Wozniak but a marketing guy, not as brilliant as jobs perhaps but what was it that made apple come up . The more i looked into it the more i realized, he would say there were 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 at a tech for atari. And Steve Wozniak wanted to stay an engineer at hewlettpackard, didnt want to start a company so how did those two guys end up the youngest company ever to hit the fortune 500 and the answer is mike came in a cadre of people from the microchip industry including jean carter who is here. If you look at apples f1, when they went public, good night, the president , marketing, vp sales, cfo, several major investors like sequoia all brought in by projections to the Semi Conductor industry that is just remarkable. The importance of building, how foolish would it have been to those two guys, to feel like the same success. Your book passing the baton, intergenerational connection, can you say more about how that happened in the valley . A passing of the baton from generation to generation . That is another steve jobs term, talking about something everyone rides over but he was fired from apple, he got on the phone to bob noyce and david hacker and apologized for dropping the baton. He had this sense of the baton being passed from generation to generation and he didnt talk about it but passed it forward. Mark zuckerberg continues to mentor him, he talked with google founders, he did pay it forward and bob noyce called it restocking, something that motivates the financial incentive too, Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists, the sense of paying back into the system what you got out of it. It happened in a number of ways, formal investment through hiring people who are putting them on your board, there have been Informal Networks taking other people under their wings. One of the nicest things, passing the baton, give me the baton. And i really like that idea and it is incumbent with how we make the valleys great strength which is handing things off in a tight network and how do we make sure they are in that network, who are also able to get folded into that you focus on what became a very important network, lets talk about bob taylor. Tell us about his role and how you develop that story and its Ripple Effect in many industries. This is something i am a little ashamed to admit because anyone who knows the inside story of the valley, how does someone not know . I had not been aware how tight the ties where between the arpanet and the birth of the computer industry, that was something i didnt appreciate, so many of the same people who got their funding through our part who helped develop the arpanet who turned around and went to places like xerox park and the computer revolution. Bob taylor, an incredible way to tell the story, this gets back to my point, what he did was undeniably important. Start the arpanet, he goes on and starts, his group developed electronic books, one of his key researchers, Mike Burroughs is one of the most important people, one of the great Search Engines before google get started, and bob taylor, if there is one thing it changes his is that. What a story, bob taylor has a masters degree on psychology in the university of texas. It is responsible for cadre, is beforescience, anything anyone would want working for bob taylor. The story, described as a concert pianist without i talk to hundred people with this book, over here, i felt i should turn on the tape recorder and let these people print what they say, really captures it. It is what we call today distributing more than personal computing. He didnt do it himself, able to find the people and get that moving forward. He was an amazing people to work for, and an amazing person to have work for you and makes for an incredible story. It is important we include extraordinary women who are part of the story. The first woman to take a company public. Tell us how that weaves together with others. A lot of people say to me it is so good you included a woman but that is what i included, a software what i was interested in and i wanted to tell sandys story because she was an example of someone who made this work outside the network we are talking about. She didnt have Don Valentine helping from the beginning. Her startup story is not i was in a garage but i was at my Kitchen Table and gender is part of the story, the way i talk about sandy, she was a double outsider, she was a woman but as big a deal, she was selling software at a time when no one knew what software was. People seriously asked bob taylor how much does the software way . People had no idea. Larry ellison tells the story about getting Venture Capital for oracle. And oracle had several cofounders. Basically being shown the door as soon as the word software came out and secretaries check it back, incredibly shady operations, operating in this world, because she is a woman, they were selling lingerie. She bootstrapped her way up. That is part of the way things happen in Silicon Valley. The story extends forward. There have been reasons to look at how women are leading and have opportunities, do you see that along the way that you tell about being mistaken for a booth babe . Not for sandy. Things that were part of the culture of the time. How gender was viewed. An interesting thing to talk about, one person asked me Silicon Valley, good or evil. The gender, better or worse for women back then. You cant answer that question, a number of women for this book, sandy, another person i talk about, someone who started when the book opens, 12 years old and taking plums for pocket money in the orchards near her home in a bucolic hamlet in california. She ends up immediately after high School Getting a job on a manufacturing line at another one of these vitally important Silicon Valley companies a lot of people dont know about now so that was Something Else that was really exciting for this book, being able to talk about rome. She cant stand to be on the manufacturing line, had to lay behind a desk, she didnt care where and essentially the chief of staff to the president of ibm, rome was acquired by ibm in the 1980s. I talked to a lot of women, the story, very complex. From the inside, there were women programmers, there were women videogame designers, the biotech industry and biology in general have a lot of women and a lot of women in positions of relative power. Their colleagues, one of the boys, at the same time on the outside, they were operating in a remarkably sexist world. I means is on the level of the laws. 1974, before a woman, a married woman could get a credit card without her husbands approval and it was 1980 before the eeoc recognized Sexual Harassment in the workplace. This is an environment in which a company newsletter, the e newsletter can publish a short story, flatout pornographic about a breast enhancing machine in the pages of your company newsletter. The stories i would hear, is that these women were subjected to, to me, that is terrible sexualharassment and the perspective, this is just what happened. From the inside people were treated as equals, sandy has always pointed out she was in charge, that was a logical way for women to go at the time but on the other hand i could actually name for you these women, not like they were clusters of women all over the place and what was accepted as the norm is impossible to imagine now. Of course it is better now than it used to be for women and the way it is going to get better, because it is still not great, we need to have more women and underrepresented by minorities in positions of authority and power and the ability to hire and fire and control budgets and that is the way the change happens. [applause] host i would like to weave in atari. Tell us names you build out of the story of atari, counterculture, the rise, the change and fall of companies. Guest so the atari story, hows story opens with him hearing teargas canisters going off on telegraph avenue when he is working at a tv repair shop as a student at cow. Story starts with the whole battle over people park in the strife this area face, you know the country as a whole face in the reason i do that is its important part of the story and also very interesting and dramatic end terrifying. It is at the same time creates a vietnam war attitude here were really important for establishing the valley. Largely because a lot of the people who ended up going to Companies Like atari particularly if you are graphics expert in the late 60s early 70s the logical place for you to go was to some ford of a defense contractor or the dod itself, first work on some form of simulation or something along those lines and instead they ended up at Companies Like atari and that was important and on a cultural level you had what i think about what happened at this time i think about having this incredibly powerful technology which rich large is the silicon chip, but at this particular time in 1971, intel brings at the first microprocessor and you really see this incredibly powerful Technology Fall into the hands of people who did not trust the prevailing institutions and ways of doing things and i really think that led to this sort of the flowering of innovation around the area. Of the other thing i really like about als story is that everyone knows the story of nolan bush now and it nolan was the ideas guy in a lot of ways behind atari, but again, i mean, is concert pianist without fingers fair to say about nolan . He had some real engineering skills, but he leaned on our incredibly heavily to make all of this work and our is a very generous and talking about this because he feels like nolan needed him to actually build this stuff and he needed nolan to push him to try to do things that al thought were complete