The stories of the inventors and companies that creat that creatl cover valley Silicon Valley the renaissanc renaissance r9 to 76 there was a big bang in Silicon Valley the most significant and diverse with the past 150 years writes the historian Leslie Berlin. The Venture Capital and biotechnologies the belly brought to life new Iconic Companies including apple and made the firm sequoia. They spent six years doing research with many of the Unsung Heroes behind the landmark developments that set in motion the ripple effects that change the world. Tonight she joins us to discuss their new book troublemakers Silicon Valley comingofage. This side of the stage we are pleased to present a small exhibit of artifacts bob swanson and bob taylor and we are thrilled to have several with us tonight. Will you pleaswill you please se recognized . [applause] we will sell the stories of these remarkable people and others. Leslie is the project historian at Stanford University and has been a failover for advanced studies and Behavioral Sciences and other advisory committees at the center at the Smithsonian National museum of american history. I would like to share as is our tradition five members. 14 wild cheers chronicled the books published with upstarts prevailed in troublemakers please join me in giving a very warm welcome to Leslie Berlin. [applause] we are delighted to have you here and enjoyed reading the troublemakers. Youve been a chronicler for two decades and you cant understand whats going on unless you understand what came before from a place that is focused on creating the future why is Silicon Valley importuned . I do believe you cant understand what is happening today with out what came before. It is a remarkable advantage that the history is still here. I think that the young entrepreneurs who know whats up, they coming to try to talk to the people that are living here and have done this before. They convinced the department to start that which became the internet and then a man the Computer Science lab at the park which is one of the two labs that developed a technology that would knock steve jobs socks o off. They told me mark zetterberg came up to try to understand how do you manage innovation and this is something that i think right here for us to learn, that is such an advantage. These people are all around us. How did you choose this particular time you go to focus on the buck . I did something oldfashioned, i took out a piece of paper and drew a timeline and started putting dots on it for important things that happened. There was just this incredible convergence during this period of time and because in addition to everything marguerite talked about a personal computing at the same time this is the sort of birth of the celebrity entrepreneurs and the tim Silicon Valley launches its organizations that set in motion what we see today with the tight connections between dc and Silicon Valley and it was just incredible. In 1970 when the office started, they made less than 3,000 the combined entire faculty staff and students. Now the number is 2 billion this was happening in that same time. How because it was an oversimplification certainly it was this obscure region and i wanted to tell the story. How do you tell a story that is that complex. You have this unusual style of weaving together. How did you come to that . Jus just to give you an overview, i look of seven individuals i look at what they are doing during this window of time. How was this intersected. Regis is the person that introduced first microprocessor to the world. If i were telling the story you would never get back. It looks at each period of time and the tragedy of a window and jump to the next and show again how what everyone is doing and that enabled me to hit those nodes where things are crossing and to grade it into weaving. Many people look at Silicon Valley in terms of heroic individuals how did you choose these people . The person had to be developed into a truly interesting story. I almost exclusively only read fiction and especially when you are talking about something as complicated as this technology into the notion of building a company to be able to take a person and tell their story was important so i needed a people that have interesting stories. I talked about a party i went to a long time ago, a tech company with a very famous celebrity ceo the person started singing a song with the lyrics i did all the work and he got all the credit. The picture had thrown a perfect game. It was a calibrated call that goes into the history books if ththe pitcher threw a perfect game. That was true then and now. I wanted a way to tell the story of the people who were just outside of the spotlight. They can jump up and correct you so a lot of people in the room no proof he is but as i have gone around, not very many people know him as a surprise to me. What they dont know is somebody that owns one third of apple and that was mike. Bob is a very important friend to mike and i knew that there were so many of these little start up Computer Companies all over the valley. The more i looked into this, the more there were a lot of people thats true, one of those people was mike. Steve jobs was 21yearsold and had 17 months of business experience in his entire life and i was working as a tech for ateri. How did they end up the youngest to hit the fortune 500 the answer is he came home and prof with him a cadre of people from the microchip industry including team carter who i know is here. They had the vp marketing and sales, several of the major investors all brought in through his connections to the Semi Conductor industry. It was our couple people didnt know that and it goes back to the importance of building on what came before. How foolish would it have been because everyone else tried to do it themselves. That is such an important theme throughout the book. Passing the baton can you say more about how that has happen happened. That is actually another term from his commencement address at stanford and its something everyone just kind of glides right over that he talks about how when he was fired in 1995, he got on the phone to David Packard and apologized for what he called dropping the baton and he had a sense of this baton but he passed it forward and mark considered him and he did pay it forward as well. Of course the financial incentive, but it does motivate a lot of the people and Venture Capitalists. Its happened in informal ways informal investment. One of the nicest things anyone has said about this book is the problem of the analogy is there is one baton. They said your book can be a baton for people and i really like that idea. How do we make sure there are people who are not in that network right now. It became a very Important Network and i would now like to talk about bob taylor. How do you develop that story and its ripple effects for the institution . It is between the birth of the personal computer industry and that is something i just didnt appreciate that it was so many of the people that got their funding through and helped to develop and turn around and went to places like the park and built the alto and launched the computer revolution. It starts his group. He is one of the most important people behind one of the first really great surgeons in several years. He has a masters degree from the university of texas and is responsible for a cadre of some of the more Computer Science phds this is before, so from all over all these different disciplines. They are staffing the departments because anyone and everyone would eveeveryone wouls working for bob taylor. I talked to about 100 people for this book as ther at there are e whose iqs are way up here. That wine captures its because he was able to hear the music that what we today would call distributed computing and yet he couldnt do it himself. He was able to find the people and described the vision and get that moving forward. That makes for an incredible story. The first woman to take a tech Company Public tell us about her story and how it weaves together with these others. That is what i was interested in and i wanted to tell the story because she was an example of someone who made this work outside of the networks we are e talking about. She didnt have Don Valentine helping her out from the beginning. Her startup story is not i was in a garage, but its i was outt my kitchen table, and its definitely part of the story. She was selling software at the time no one knew what software really was. People ask how much does the software way. People have no idea. They tell th told the story of o get Venture Capital and a lot of people dont know they have several cofounders. Hes basically being shown the door soon. It was incredibly shady kind of fabrication. She said she was selling software and people thought she was selling lingerie. [laughter] that is the part of the story that i wanted to tell. Reasons to look again at how women are leaning and how they have opportunities or dont and do you using along the way in the book. The things that were a part of the culture at the time. I think it may surprise people how it was viewed at the time. This is an interesting thing to talk about. One person asked me Silicon Valley, good or evil and the question i get asked about gender all the time wasnt a better or worse. Another person i talk about in my book starts out in the book over and shes 12yearsold picking up crumbs for pocket money. She ends up immediately after high School Getting a job on the manufacturing line and another one of these vitally important suburban valley companies. Essentially the chief of staff to the president of ibm. There were women programmers and designers and the biotech industry and in general have a lot of women. The colleagues treated them as just one of the boys. They were still remarkably operating in a sexist world they mean this on the level of the law before a married woman could get a credit card without her husbands approval and it was 1980 before they recognized Sexual Harassment in the workplace and so this is an environment which the newsletter could publish a story about a breast enhancing machine and this is in the pages of your company newsletter. The stories i would hear the day were subjected to a thought that is terrible Sexual Harassment perception as i was just a church or this is just what happened. So people were treated as equals and that was a logical way for women to go at the time, but on the other hand i occurred name of these women. It was impossible to imagine now a and the way that its going to get better we need to have more women and underrepresented minorities in positions of authority and power and we need the ability to hire and fire and control budgets and that is the way that the change happens. [applause] tell us some of the themes you build out of the counterculture, the rise, the growth and change and fall of companies. The story opens with him a hearing tear gas canisters going off on telegraph avenue when he is working at a tv repair shop and it just as an aside, berkeley has a lot to do with early Silicon Valley. A lot of the players were berkeley graduates and kind of the core of the Computer Science lab. It starts with the whole battle over the parking districts people faced and the reason i do that is of course its an important part of the story and very interesting and dramatic and terrifying. It was important for the valley largely because it ended up going to the companies particularly if you were a graphics expert in the late 60s, early 70s. They ended up at Companies Like atari and that was important than on a cultural level when i think about what happened at this time, i think about having an incredibly powerful technology which is large of course is the silicon chip that they bring out the first microprocessor. They fall into the hands of people who do not trust the prevailing institutions and ways of doing things. Nolan was the guy that had a lot of ways behind atari but a concert pianist without fingers is that fair to say. He leaned out to make this work and was generous and talking about this because he felt like he needed them to build this stuff. There were a couple of times he tells the story and says im going to do this for the pleasure of having it blow up in my face. Its like the dog caught the car. Now what do you do. So i like that story because so many of the things that happened in the valley happened with these complementary skill sets and you see that fair. Fair. We still have more to talk about. They get folded into the story which is the founder of the officer at stanford but i was talking about. It was very interesting in the way that the overlap happens. He would be the first to tell you he was a chemical engineer and he had no idea what it meant to build anything in this universe. Its like biology 101. This could be something huge. Its to increase the Public Knowledge how do you decide whose ideas you patent in the direction of only pursuing profitable research these are hugely important questions and so at the same time they are wrangling with these sort of questions, he just got fired from what was then kleiner and kirk in and is literally living on welfare trying to interest people. He basically goes down a list of people that have attended a conference on what we would call biotech today and thursday you think we could make any money from recombinant dna and they keep hanging up until they get to one of the investors of the dna process so that is an interesting story. He was so persistent without any idea of how to build a Biotech Company and they ended up building a company that in some ways was like a precursor to the Virtual Corporation at the time when people didnt even think that way and that was largely due to tom perkins. Thank you for introducing us to the main characters of the story. I would like to look at the larger ecosystem that was happening. You talked about the Important Role of Venture Capital. Can you talk about how that was the catalyst that it was and how it compares to that ecosystem now . This is an interesting question because it is no longer the home to just the outsiders. Its become a mainstream place to put your money into the best and brightest people who want to make their mark on the valley on the planet and also people who just want to make money and of course thereve always been people here who just want to make money i dont want to paint it as it was idealistic and now it is not because i think that is an easy trap to fall into. Another then and now question in the book is a contentious relationship that is in the case of the time. Code that you talked about. Can you talk about the role of the government and how you compare that with Silicon Valley and washington . The federal government was imported into launching the valley and literally 100 of them i grow chips microchips. All of this was important to getting the valley started and in some sense it through basic Research Contract except not necessarily expecting a return. Its what made the valley startups and also those that say the spirit of the valley is lost today because there are so many big companies. The way smallcompany started. In the 50s and 60s when the federal government was acting in all the ways i just described in the 1970s what started to happen was the valley realized. There were two key pieces of legislation that i wont go into in great depth. One was a Capital Gains tax cuts ancutand the other was a changen the law about who could invest in which Pension Funds were allowed to invest. And suddenly it was possible to invest in very highrisk companies and that was the capital that rushed into the valley was enormous. Throughout this time it was seen as kind of the golden child of the golden state not only to the economy but National Security it led to significant legislation and defensiveness against japanese imports. For the trials at the end of the 90s as a good example of how things start to shift, but by and large, Silicon Valley from dc. But now its really different. The Biggest Companies are in the crosshairs. They see them as leftleaning, and its a tough place to be because i think some of the questions being raised are important and tough. Who gets to decide whats fake . Are we going to ask them arbitrary for us all what is fake news thats not going to work. We cant even agree what is real or fake news right now. Everyone thinks they know that there are two different perspectives. So i dont know where that is going to go, but i have watched decade after decade people talk about whats going to kill Silicon Valley. The oil shocks, the japanese competition was going to kill Silicon Valley. Y2k, the. Com bust, they just keep going on it is categorically different and a reflection of this is my life. It knows a lot about your work life, your bank, and that is what is making people say wait a second, who is this. And this incredible track record of reinvention even despite the pundits saying its going to die, what do you think is the secret sauce in the generation . I would point to that baton pass. But first i would point to is immigrants. Im looking at the percentage of the population that was born outs