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>> Hey welcome back everybody,
Jeff Frick here with theCUBE.
We are really excited to
have this cube conversation
here in the Palo Alto studio
with a real close friend
of theCUBE, and repeat
alumni, Leslie Berlin.
I want to get her official
title; she's the historian
for the Silicon Valley
archive at Stanford.
Last time we talked to Leslie,
she had just come out with
a book about Robert Noyce,
and the man behind the microchip.
If you haven't seen that, go check it out.
But now she's got a new book,
it's called "Troublemakers,"
which is a really appropriate title.
And it's really about
kind of the next phase
of Silicon Valley growth,
and it's hitting bookstores.
I'm sure you can buy
it wherever you can buy
any other book, and we're excited to have
you on Leslie, great to see you again.
>> So good to see you Jeff.
>> Absolutely, so the
last book you wrote was
really just about Noyce, and obviously,
Intel, very specific in, you know,
the silicon in Silicon Valley obviously.
>> Right yeah.
>> This is a much, kind of broader history
with again just great characters.
I mean, it's a tech history book,
but it's really a
character novel; I love it.
>> Well thanks, yeah; I mean,
I really wanted to find people.
They had to meet a few criteria.
They had to be interesting,
they had to be important,
they had to be, in my
book, a little unknown;
and most important, they had
to be super-duper interesting.
>> Jeff Frick: Yeah.
>> And what I love
about this generation is
I look at Noyce's
generation of innovators,
who sort of working in the...
Are getting their start in the 60s.
And they really kind of set the tone
for the valley in a lot of ways,
but the valley at that point
was still just all about chips.
And then you have this new
generation show up in the 70s,
and they come up with
the personal computer,
they come up with video games.
They sort of launch the venture
capital industry in
the way we know it now.
Biotech, the internet gets
started via the ARPANET,
and they kind of set the
tone for where we are
today around the world in this modern,
sort of tech infused, life that we live.
>> Right, right, and
it's interesting to me,
because there's so many things that kind
of define what Silicon Valley is.
And of course, people
are trying to replicate
it all over the place, all over the world.
But really, a lot of those
kind of attributes were started
by this class of entrepreneurs.
Like just venture capital,
the whole concept of having
kind of a high risk, high return,
small carve out from an institution,
to put in a tech venture with basically
a PowerPoint and some faith was
a brand new concept back in the day.
>> Leslie Berlin: Yeah,
and no PowerPoint even.
>> Well that's right, no PowerPoint,
which is probably a good thing.
>> You're right, because
we're talking about the 1970s.
I mean, what's so, really
was very surprising to me
about this book, and really
important for understanding
early venture capital, is that now a lot
of venture capitalists are
professional investors.
But these venture capitalists pretty much
to a man, and they were
all men at that point,
they were all operating guys, all of them.
They worked at Fairchild,
they worked at Intel,
they worked at HP; and
that was really part
of the value that they brought
to these propositions was
they had money, yes, but they
also had done this before.
>> Jeff Frick: Right.
>> And that was really, really important.
>> Right, another concept
that kind of comes out,
and I think we've seen
it time and time again is
kind of this partnership
of kind of the crazy
super enthusiastic visionary that maybe is
hard to work with and
drives everybody nuts,
and then always kind of
has the other person,
again, generally a guy in this time
still a lot, who's kind of the doer.
And it was really the
Bushnell-Alcorn story
around Atari that really brought that home
where you had this guy
way out front of the curve
but you have to have the person behind
who's actually building the
vision in real material.
>> Yeah, I mean I think something that's
really important to
understand, and this is
something that I was
really trying to bring out
in the book, is that we usually only have
room in our stories for one person
in the spotlight when
innovation is a team sport.
And so, the kind of relationship
that you're talking about
with Nolan Bushnell, who started Atari,
and Al Alcorn who was
the first engineer there,
it's a great example of that.
And Nolan is exactly this
very out there person,
big curly hair, talkative, outgoing guy.
After Atari he starts Chuck E. Cheese,
which kind of tells you
everything you need to know
about someone who's
dreaming up Chuck E. Cheese,
super creative, super out
there, super fun oriented.
And you have working with him, Al Alcorn,
who's a very straight laced for the time,
by which I mean, he
tried LSD but only once.
(cumulative laughing)
Engineer, and I think
that what's important
to understand is how much
they needed each other,
because the stories are so often
only about the exuberant out front guy.
To understand that those are just dreams,
they are not reality
without these other people.
And how important, I mean,
Al Alcorn told me look,
"I couldn't have done this without Nolan,
"kind of constantly pushing me."
>> Right, right.
>> And then in the Apple example,
you actually see a third
really important person,
which to me was possibly
the most exciting part
of everything I discovered,
which was the importance
of the guy named Mike Markkula.
Because in Jobs you had the visionary,
and in Woz you had the engineer,
but the two of them
together, they had an idea,
they had a great product, the Apple II,
but they didn't have a company.
And when Mike Markkula
shows up at the garage,
you know, Steve Jobs is 21 years old.
>> Jeff Frick: Right.
>> He has had 17 months of
business experience in his life,
and it's all his attack
for Atari, actually.
And so how that company
became a business is
due to Mike Markkula, this very
quiet guy, very, very ambitious guy.
He talked them up from
a thousand stock options
at Intel to 20,000 stock options at Intel
when he got there, just before the IPO,
which is how he could then
turn around and help finance
>> Jeff Frick: Right.
>> The birth of Apple.
And he pulled into Apple
all of the chip people
that he had worked with, and that is
really what turned Apple into a company.
So you had the visionary,
you had the tech guy,
you also needed a business person.
>> But it's funny though
because in that story
of his visit to the garage
he's specifically taken
by the engineering elegance of the board
>> Leslie Berlin: Right.
>> That Woz put together,
which I thought was really neat.
So yeah, he's a successful business man.
Yes he was bringing a lot
of kind of business acumen
value to the opportunity,
but what struck him,
and he specifically talks
about what chips he used,
how he planned for the power supply.
Just very elegant engineering stuff
that touched him, and
he could recognize that
they were so far ahead of the curve.
And I think that's such another
interesting point is that
things that we so take
for granted like mice, and UI, and UX.
I mean the Atari example,
for them to even think
of actually building it that would operate
with a television was just, I mean
you might as well go
to Venus, forget Mars,
I mean that was such a crazy idea.
>> Yeah, I mean I think
Al ran to Walgreens
or something like that and
just sort of picked out
the closest t.v. to figure out how
he could build what turned out to be Pong,
the first super successful video game.
And I mean, if you look also
at another story I tell is
about Xerox Park; and
specifically about a guy named
Bob Taylor, who, I know I keep saying,
"Oh this might be my favorite part."
But Bob Taylor is
another incredible story.
This is the guy who
convinced DARPA to start,
it was then called ARPA,
to start the ARPANET,
which became the internet
in a lot of ways.
And then he goes on and he starts
the computer sciences lab at Xerox Park.
And that is the lab that Steve Jobs comes
to in 1979, and for the first time sees
a GUI, sees a mouse, sees Windows.
And this is...
The history behind that, and these people
all working together,
these very sophisticated
Ph.D. engineers were all working together
under the guidance of Bob Taylor, a Texan
with a drawl and a Master's
Degree in Psychology.
So what it takes to lead, I think,
is a really interesting question
that gets raised in this book.
>> So another great
personality, Sandra Kurtzig.
>> Yeah.
>> I had to look to see
if she's still alive.
She's still alive.
>> Leslie Berlin: Yeah.
>> I'd love to get her in some time,
we'll have to arrange for that next time,
but her story is pretty fascinating,
because she's a woman, and we still have
big women issues in the tech industry,
and this is years ago,
but she was aggressive,
she was a fantastic sales
person, and she could code.
And what was really interesting is
she started her own software company.
The whole concept of software kind
of separated from hardware
was completely alien.
She couldn't even convince
the HP guys to let
her have access to a machine to write
basically an NRP system that
would add a ton of value
to these big, expensive
machines that they were selling.
>> Yeah, you know what's interesting,
she was able to get access to the machine.
And HP, this is not a well
known part of HP's history,
is how important it was in helping launch
little bitty companies in the valley.
It was a wonderful sort of...
Benefited all these small companies.
But she had to go and read to them
the definition of what an OEM was to make
an argument that I am adding value to
your machines by putting software on it.
And software was such an unknown concept.
A, people who heard she
was selling software
thought she was selling lingerie.
And B, Larry Ellison
tells a hilarious story
of going to talk to venture
capitalists about...
When he's trying to start Oracle,
he had co-founders, which
I'm not sure everybody knows.
And he and his co-founders
were going to try
to start Oracle, and these
venture capitalists would,
he said, not only throw
him out of the office
for such a crazy idea, but
their secretaries would
double check that he
hadn't stolen the copy
of Business Week off the table
because what kind of nut
job are we talking to here?
>> Software.
>> Yeah, where as now, I mean
when you think about it,
this is software valley.
>> Right, right, it's
software, even, world.
There's so many great stories,
again, "Troublemakers"
just go out and get it
wherever you buy a book.
The whole recombinant DNA story
and the birth of Genentech,
A, is interesting, but
I think the more kind
of unique twist was the guy at Stanford,
who really took it upon himself to take
the commercialization of academic,
generated, basic research
to a whole 'nother level
that had never been done.
I guess it was like a sleepy
little something in Manhattan
they would send some paper to,
but this guy took it to
a whole 'nother level.
>> Oh yeah, I mean before Niels showed up,
Niels Reimers, he I believe
that Stanford had made
something like $3,000 off of
the IP from its professors
and students in the previous
decades, and Niels said
"There had to be a better way to do this."
And he's the person who decided, we ought
to be able to patent recombinant DNA.
And one of the stories that's
very, very interesting is
what a cultural shift that required,
whereas engineers had
always thought in terms of,
"How can this be practical?"
For biologists this was seen as really
an unpleasant thing to
be doing, don't think
about that we're about basic research.
So in addition to having to convince
all sorts of government agencies
and the University of California system,
which co-patented this,
to make it possible,
just almost on a paperwork level...
>> Right.
>> He had to convince the
scientists themselves.
And it was not a foregone conclusion,
and a lot of people think that what kept
the two named co-inventors
of recombinant DNA,
Stan Cohen and Herb Boyer,
from winning the Nobel Prize is
that they were seen as having benefited
from the work of others,
but having claimed
all the credit, which
is not, A, isn't fair,
and B, both of those men had worried about
that from the very
beginning and kept saying,
"We need to make sure that
this includes everyone."
>> Right.
>> But that's not just the
origins of the biotech industry
in the valley, the entire
landscape of how universities get
their ideas to the public was transformed,
and that whole story, there
are these ideas that used
to be in university labs,
used to be locked up
in the DOD, like you know, the ARPANET.
And this is the time
when those ideas start
making their way out in a significant way.
>> But it's this elegant dance,
because it's basic research,
and they want it to benefit all,
but then you commercialize it, right?
And then it's benefiting the few.
But if you don't commercialize
it and it doesn't get out,
you really don't benefit very many.
So they really had to walk this
fine line to kind of serve both masters.
>> Absolutely, and I mean it was even more
complicated than that, because researchers
didn't have to pay for it, it was...
The thing that's amazing to me is
that we look back at these people and say,
"Oh these are trailblazers."
And when I talked to
them, because something
that was really exciting
about this book was
that I got to talk to every
one of the primary characters,
you talk to them, and they say,
"I was just putting one
foot in front of the other."
It's only when you sort of look behind
them years later that you see,
"Oh my God, they forged
a completely new trail."
But here it was just, "No
I need to get to here,
"and now I need to get to here."
And that's what helped them get through.
That's why I start the book with the quote
from Raiders of the Lost
Ark where Sallah asks
Indy, you know basically, how are
you going to stop, "Stop that car."
And he says, "How are
you going to do it Indy?"
And Indy says, "I don't know
"I'm making it up as I go along."
And that really could almost
be a theme in a lot of cases
here that they knew where
they needed to get to,
and they just had to
make it up to get there.
>> Yeah, and there's a
whole 'nother tranche
on the Genentech story; they couldn't get
all of the financing, so they
actually used outsourcing,
you know, so that whole kind
of approach to business,
which was really new and innovative.
But we're running out of time,
and I wanted to follow up on
the last comment that you made.
As a historian, you know,
you are so fortunate
or smart to pick your field that
you can talk to the individual.
So, I think you said, you've been doing
interviews for five or
six years for this book,
it's 100 pages of notes in the
back, don't miss the notes.
>> But also don't think
the book's too long.
>> No, it's a good
book, it's an easy read.
But as you reflect on these individuals
and these personalities, so there's
obviously the stories
you spent a lot of time
writing about, but I'm wondering
if there's some things that you see over
and over again that just impress you.
Is there a pattern, or
is it just, as you said,
just people working hard, putting one step
in front of the other, and taking
those risks that in hindsight are so big?
>> I would say, I would
point to a few things.
I'd point to audacity; there really is
a certain kind of adventurousness,
at an almost unimaginable
level, and persistence.
I would also point to a
third feature at that time
that I think was really important,
which was for a purpose that was creative.
You know, I mean there was the notion,
I think the metaphor of pioneering is
much more what they were doing
then what we would necessarily...
Today we would call it disruption,
and I think there's a difference there.
And their vision was creative, I think
of them as rebels with a cause.
>> Right, right; is
disruption the right...
Is disruption, is that the
right way that we should
be thinking about it today or
are just kind of backfilling
the disruption after the fact
that it happens do you think?
>> I don't know, I mean I've
given this a lot of thought,
because I actually think, well, you know,
the valley at this point,
two-thirds of the people
who are working in the
tech industry in the valley
were born outside of this country
right now, actually 76
percent of the women.
>> Jeff Frick: 76 percent?
Wow.
>> 76 percent of the women,
I think it's age 25 to 44
working in tech were born
outside of the United States.
Okay, so the pioneering metaphor,
that's just not the
right metaphor anymore.
The disruptive metaphor has
a lot of the same concepts,
but it has, it sounds to me
more like blowing things up,
and doesn't really thing so far as to,
"Okay, what comes next?"
>> Jeff Frick: Right, right.
>> And I think we have to be sure
that we continue to do that.
>> Right, well because clearly, I mean,
the Facebooks are the
classic example where,
you know, when he built
that thing at Harvard,
it was not to build a
new platform that was
going to have the power to
disrupt global elections.
You're trying to get dates, right?
I mean, it was pretty simple.
>> Right.
>> Simple concept and yet, as you said,
by putting one foot in front of the other
as things roll out, he gets smart people,
they see opportunities
and take advantage of it,
it becomes a much different thing,
as has Google, as has Amazon.
>> That's the way it
goes, that's exactly...
I mean, and you look back
at the chip industry.
These guys just didn't
want to work for a boss
they didn't like, and they
wanted to build a transistor.
And 20 years later a huge
portion of the U.S. economy rests
on the decisions they're
making and the choices.
And so I think this has been
a continuous story in Silicon Valley.
People start with a cool,
small idea and it just grows
so fast among them and around them
with other people contributing,
some people they wish didn't contribute,
okay then what comes next?
>> Jeff Frick: Right, right.
>> That's what we figure out now.
>> All right, audacity,
creativity and persistence.
Did I get it?
>> And a goal.
>> And a goal, and a goal.
Pong, I mean was a great goal.
(cumulative laughing)
All right, so Leslie, thanks
for taking a few minutes.
Congratulations on the book; go out,
get the book, you will
not be disappointed.
And of course, the Bob Noyce
book is awesome as well, so...
>> Thanks.
>> Thanks for taking a few
minutes and congratulations.
>> Thank you so much Jeff.
>> All right this is Leslie Berlin,
I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE.
See you next time, thanks for watching.
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