Valley Of Genius
My friendâs description of this book is quite accurate: âA collage of quotes of famous peopleâ. It takes a bit of time to get used to the style of âwritingâ in this book, but eventually you get accustomed to it. It is targeted at individuals who enjoy listening to interviews of CEOs of various tech companies, but covers a lot more history and depth than youâd be able to get anywhere else.
The audiobook is almost 20 hours long, but covers everything from the personal computing revolution, gaming consoles, the internet boom, the mobile revolution, and whatâs to come in the next twenty years. Steve Jobs is a prominent character throughout the book, and though many have told his story through many different avenues, I still managed to learn a lot of new things about him. This book helped fill a lot of gaps in my knowledge of how Silicon Valley came to be what it is today. There were companies like General Magic that I had never heard of before, and others, like Atari, whose prominence I never fully understood. Every single chapter was equally engaging and I just couldnât stop listening to it.
There was so much content in this book, that my review will never do it justice. I applaud Ben Fisher on compiling it all together in such an organized and engaging manner. In my opinion, this is the closest thing weâll have to the âBible of Silicon Valleyâ.
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The Mother Of All Demos
A lot of people talk about the unveiling of the iPhone as a monumental moment in history, but prior to reading this book, I had never heard of the âThe Mother of All Demosâ. Dough Engelbart and his team built the hardware & software for a person computer with a mouse that supported live audio+video communication in 1968! This is simply astounding: https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY?t=4587
Alan Kay
When I was taking my computer languages class in College, we had a guest speaker by the name of Alan Kay. He showed us an operating system called Smalltalk where you could make changes to the OS on the fly. To be completely frank, I thought he was an old outdated Software Engineer who was stuck in the past and wasnât willing to keep up with the future: Linux, Windows, macOS, etc⊠I couldnât have been more naive. Alan Kayâs contribution during the âMother of all demosâ, the creation of OOP, his contributions at Xerox PARC, the VR scene at Atari, and much more is unspeakable. Though heâs no Steve Jobs, his contributions are equally as valuable in creating the world of computing that we have today.
Atari
As a millennial who is a tad too young to have witnessed the Atari revolution, I have always been familiar with the name but never thought too much of it. I underappreciated the importance of Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in forming the industry and culture that I have come to love. Atari was one of the first companies to allow jeans & shirts at work, flexible work hours, and unfazed by people smoking weed. The book mentions that there was one year where Atariâs revenue exceed that of all of Hollywood!
One fact I didnât know prior to reading this book is that Atari invested very heavily in VR under the supervision of Alan Kay. Who knew that people thought VR was going to take off 30 years ago?
Activision
According to the book, this was the first software only company creating hundreds of software engineering millionaires. Sounds pretty common now, but someone had to be first.
The Well
Prior to Facebook there was MySpace. Prior to MySpace there was Friendster. However, no one ever talks about The WELL - the first social network on the internet launched in the mid 80s.
The most interesting part about The WELL is that the issues they were discussing 30 years ago are THE EXACT SAME issues people now bring up about FaceBook. Some things never changeâŠ.
Xerox PARC
One of the most well known facts I knew about Xerox PARC prior to reading this book is that they created the mouse almost a decade before Steve Jobs had come in and looked at it. However, they also had an expensive personal computer, the Alto, they couldâve minaturized. They could have also been the first to have color on a personal computer. Xerox Parc couldâve easily been the Microsoft And Apple of the past three decades if they had focused on the future. Sadly, their laser printer business was so profitable that the individuals in charge just kept the status quo. I think this is a big divergence from how everyone views tech and strives for innovation in todayâs world.
General Magic
As I write this, I work at a company called Magic Leap which is trying to build one of the first consumer facing Augmented Reality headsets. Some days I feel like weâre going to change the world, but others days I feel that we are a decade or two too early. Ironically, there was a company called General Magic in the early 90s which built the equivalent of an iPhone - Apps, phone, contacts, touch screen, browser, etc. Unfortunately, the âMagicâ was a decade and a half too earlyâŠ
Ebay
Ebay was cool when I was a kid, but someone got lost in the shadow of Amazon. This book reminded me of how dominant it once was.
Ebay was very much a side project for a very long time until Pierre realized he has to dedicate his full attention to it. Paul Graham says to do things that donât scale for as long as you can, an Ebay was a prime example of that. Servers that donât scale, accepting payments via snail mail, etc..
I was impressed by Ebayâs philosophy early on. The company was really trying to create a transparent and supportive community through its reputation system where everyone has an incentive to trust everyone else. It reminds me a lot about what the Blockchain industry is trying to achieve today.
Google was another company where I managed to learn a lot more than expected.
Itâs ironic to think that Larry used to spend his time writing a web crawler in Java rather than spending time doing research. Even funnier is the fact that Java was so new back then that he was running into bugs at the compiler/JVM level which a masterâs student helped him fix. Furthermore, this student managed to rewrite the whole crawler in python in a weekend, making it several orders of magnitude faster, which took Larry several months to do at first.
I never knew too much about the dynamic between Larry and Sergei, but this book made it seem that theyâre a good pair. Larry was the introverted adult with a grand vision and occasional ephinaies. Sergei was the extraverted math genius who helped bring Larryâs vision to fruition, but also needed some chaperoning. For example, Sergei realized that Larryâs original PageRank algorithm was a basic Eigen vector problem. Sergei was also known to e the one to sleep with interns during company getaways. ;)
To put Larryâs ideas into scope, he used to be a big proponent of the âSpace Tetherâ. A rope connected to a space station orbiting the earth could act as an elevator into space. Itâs this kind of thing that makes you realize why they thought they could tackle the autonomous car market before it went mainstream.
âSouth Beatificationâ of San Francisco
As someone who spent a few years in San Francisco, I never felt like I quite fit in. It has a lot of interesting things to see and do, but it was always too rowdy, loud, hipster and uptempo for me. South Bay has has more of a suburb, family, grad school feel which appeals to me much more. This book brings to light how these two cultures emerged.
San Francisco was the place where hippies got together to do drugs. The media industry set up camp in SF in the early 90s, and slowly started merging with with Silicon Valley (South Bay) during the 90s. At that point, South Bay and San Francisco turned into a a giant melting pot of tech.