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 outside the country is running at about twice the u. S. As a whole. Now above statistics that might seem oui seenow that the joint e Silicon Valley shows of the people working in science and tech between 25 and 44, 66 of them, two thirds were born outside of the united states. For the women, it is 76 . This speaks to one of the secrets of the valley which is we have been able to draw from the population of the planet, sort of the best and the brightest. When you think of the kind of person that decides to pick up and leave their country and start someplace else, thats risktaking has been at the heart of the valley from the very beginning when people looked out here and saw nothing, why would anyone come here. So right now you have more than half of the companies more than half of them have a founder or cofounder born outside of the united states. This has been a constant refresh in the system. When people ask what is the biggest threat to the valley, i always say its screwing down the nozzle on immigration and if you choose to couple that with public education, i have no words. [applause] with risktaking often comes failure. Not everything is up on the edge. What are some of the stories that you discovered not only Companies Born or industries growground that there was failu. I wrote about a moment when they were sure that it was all going to end. You gave yourself a number of months and then youre going to go be a consultant, shes going to be a doctor. So many books are about the people that need it that it is incredibly hard. They told when they went from intel to fairchild and i think there was a simon and garfunkel song called faking it and he thought it was directed at him. I think that having the ability to persist is in the face of those intense selfdoubt and is a really important attribute of the people that have been successful. It requires you to not be foolish about it and understand i need to redirect. It isnt working this way. I need to do something different. Or if it even is working this way. The story of atari where the people inside source started sag very early 2600, which was where you could plug the cartridges. This was the most incredible cultural phenomenon of the 1980s, and people inside very loudly among them were saying what we need to say we need to disrupt ourselves and have the next thing ready to go. I think its a strange combination of what i characterize as persistence and audacity because i think oftentimes the most audacious people are the ones that go jumping off the cliff and then when they land they dont really know what to do. What you need are the people or to be the person who has those kinds of huge risktaking ideas but now what you were going to do and if it works or doesnt work. Those are actually two really important attributes. I will save another one because i know you were going to ask me about it at the end. I think that is quite important. The other thing that i would really point to is, i think that right now, the book is called troublemakers and i think its easy to state the means before the end sometimes. These people were making trouble not because that was their goal in life but because there were something that they needed to do our wanted to do that they couldnt do inside the structures that existed at the time so any time you are pushing against the existing structure you are making trouble for everyone around you. And i think that thats recognizing that you arent just being reckless or trying to cause disruption for the sake of doing it which sometimes it seems like its a badge of honor that people talk about now. This was just an incidental effect of the larger purpose that people had in mind. In the book you talk about myths that you want to dispel, an approach to history that you want to counterbalance. What have we not talked about that you would like todays technologists or entrepreneurs to take away from your book . That we have not already talked about ourselves tonight, well im going to mention what i think is a really underappreciated aspect of people who really get things done in the valley, which is humility. I think that very often the people who are truly excellent dont mistake their own egos for their products or their companies and they just sort of understand that if what they are doing is great, that is what really matters. I think that is an underappreciated important aspect to being a successful entrepreneur and also the other thing i would really point to his knowing how to be a team player. I think alien lee who is a Venture Capitalist and the person who came up with the term unicorn company, she famously said no one likes to make money for a holes. I actually think that is true so i think not being a jerk, and knowing how to be part of the team, remembering that most companies that you can name had founders and some like fairchild had. This is something you need to learn to play with others. Lets get the audience into the conversation. The first question the similarities between bob taylor and some were charismatic, visionary with people more technical themselves to create create one in research and the other products but folks could be dismissed as of those who didnt get it. Similarities or differences . They were actually both adopted and both told by their parents that unlike most kids who had to take whatever showed up, they had been chosen especially by their parents. There are some real analogies there and i do think they were both absolutely brilliant people with no time to waste. Heres a question, how do you fit bill gates into your story . He has from seattle. So this is actually something that my next book, whatever it is, i hope to address more. I told you this was a very complicated hook so my focus is type, type, type on the valley. Obviously when you talk about the ibm pc you need to be talking about gaetz and of course gaetz comes up in the early meetings where hes talking about hey you guys need to pay for software and the sort of thing. But you know he is very much part of this generation. I dont talk about him explicitly but he is right in there. A lot of the things that we just pick through, everything ive talked about would absolutely apply there as well. The next question how will the increasing gap between technological advances such as selfdriving cars and drones and global poverty and the need for basic Services Play out . Dont ask a historian to predict the future. [laughter] what i can say is this widening gap is something that prescient people i find a quote from john young in 1980 at h. P. Talking about how this, not this technology but this place is going to completely bifurcate and we are going to lose the middle. And i mean everything that was asked in that question is a valid point to make. I would also point out the role that this technology plays now in developing economies. Cell phones have been absolutely essential for microlending and all sorts of other things that are happening. I dont know how many of you ever go to the museum of innovation awards in the social realm and doing well for the world but they are remarkable to see how this technology is put into the service of higher ideals. I was just talking to someone who is working on an oprah for a a notforprofit Blockchain Technology to certify the validity of elections in places like columbia. I think the technology is a tool and we need to figure out all the different ways it can be used. You were telling me you had been a conversation with a young entrepreneur thinking about whats next for the valley or the threat to it. Lets talk about what you see developing now for Silicon Valley. I think some of that we have already hit in terms of the threat that i see. As i said foremost among them is slowing down immigration. That is the one to be the most worried about and i think in terms of what is coming next and the valley has had this incredible ability reinvent itself again and again and again. You see that so much more in the question of why did Silicon Valley happen here . What is interesting is how one earth has the valley gone from instrumentation to microchip, the stuff that im talking about in this book to the Networking Companies to cloud and social and mobile and now we have all of this ai stuff happening and again and again that reinvention question. So do i think that the valley is going to continue . He yes. Do i know how . No. You are a historian and thank you for your views on really how history matters. This question comes from facebook livestream. What are you thoughts on places that are trying to copy Silicon Valley and is it possible to have a second Silicon Valley or other places that have their own model . Absolutely. I think the notion that its a zerosum game for regional tech economies is flat out wrong. We were just talking about seattle for heavens sakes. Seattle is incredible and all over the country and all over the world you have these enclaves of innovation without which Silicon Valley would not exist. I was just asked this question in my hometown of tulsa, oklahoma, how we become Silicon Valley. I said first of all you need to figure out why you would want to become Silicon Valley. You know, yeah. The second thing to take the tulsa example is you sort of need to figure out what is it that you are already doing that you are an equally good at and how do you parlay that into being part of this economy. In tulsa, williams pipeline had all this pipeline that was empty and someone had the idea of filling it in with fiberoptic cable and that he came will tell which became worldcom which got absorbed into mci and that was building on an existing infrastructure or her a corning new york where they guerrilla glasson iphone came from. They have been in the glass business since at least the 19th century. Im not sure when it got started but it was the mid19th century. Those are places that have figured out we are going to copy Silicon Valley. Silicon valley rows at a very specific time, very specific place. There was this unique confluence of very sophisticated technology, namely the transistor showing up in a place that was still largely agricultural and then having the ability to essentially decide this ecosystem around the hightech industry and thats just not going to happen again. To say you want to build an immunity of Silicon Valley you can go to places and they have literally filled university with red tile roofs. That is not going to do it. [laughter] you talk some about unintended consequences and some of the costs become to people in the middle class and others. The cost of living continues to increase. Do you think its becoming accessible to new people and perhaps new innovations . Ive would be worried about this. I worry about it. I think there are plenty of people who are willing to sacrifice for a few years. They come over here and they arent in a relationship or they dont have children and they are willing to go for it. I do worry about what comes next though and i do worry, i mean i wasnt hollow alto and basically none of our teachers, none of our firefighters, none of our police, none of them can afford to live in the community anymore. People are dealing with two hour commutes each way and we are dealing with all that traffic. So that really does worry me. And then i put on my historian hat and literally in the early 1970s people are talking about that its too crowded and too expensive. It seems really, really difficult right now and San Francisco is something thats really going to be the testing ground on this because there is a lot of activism around Affordable Housing in such an a lot of these issues because San Francisco is seeing something new on this scale. We have seen it in the battles of google buses for example the socalled google buses and this question of how do we have a Livable Community when there are of such enormous side being built. Some of those people building those are trying to answer these questions. Id like a closer conversation tonight with you putting your historians have fun to think about another sort of word of advice that you might give to us young troublemaker for the next generation. What is one word of advice that you would give them can you tell us a story . Yes, this is my word. Humility and i talked a little bit why i think that matters. Another word that i think i could have used his balance. Someone who is full of humid humility to the extent that they never promote themselves or their ideas obviously thats not going to work. I would say in general taking advantage of where you are is key and its not just in the valley although its very strong here. But finding people who have done this before and get there at iceberg doesnt have to be a perfect analog. We just need someone who has done this before and get their help. Its really important. Thank you. This is Leslie Berlin in her book el camino troublemakers will be downstairs. Please join me in giving a very warm thanks to Leslie Berlin. [applause] thank you. Thank you very much. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conve in cambridge massachusetts and is one hour and 45 minutes