Explaining why troublemakers, intensity and stress fuel Silicon Valley
Published on Published onNovember 27, 2017
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A new book delves into the backstory of today
Roughly halfway between San Francisco and San Jose, Calif., a large Ampex logo is visible to commuters and to the Google and Facebook employees being shuttled by bus up and down Highway 101. The sign is all that is left of a company, founded by a Russian immigrant, that gave the world the first practical audio and videotape recorders and, among other things, revolutionized sports broadcasting. It was Ampex that provided Al Alcorn, a young University of California, Berkeley, engineering graduate, with his first full-time job in 1969. A few years later, he was lured by another Ampex employee, Nolan Bushnell, to become the chief designer of Atari, the first videogame company of any note.
The period between the heyday of Ampex and the first presidential term of Ronald Reagan lies at the heart of “Troublemakers,” a fetching portrait of the less chronicled years of Silicon Valley. Its author is Leslie Berlin, the project historian for the Silicon Valley archives at Stanford University. Via sensitively wrought portraits of Alcorn and five others—who, for the most part, are unfamiliar figures except to longtime Silicon Valley habitués—Ms. Berlin tells the tale of how an area once known for companies such as Lockheed, Philco-Ford, Sylvania and Fairchild Semiconductor gave rise during the 1970s to Apple, Genentech, and their many siblings and progeny.
“Troublemakers” is a good reminder of how some things seem constant. Even in the early 1970s, when IBM Selectric typewriters were used to compose business plans and phone messages were jotted down on pink slips of paper, residents of the area were complaining about traffic congestion, rising housing prices and the loss of production jobs. By the mid-1970s, fear of technology was running amok in Washington, and politicians staged hearings where they fretted over the loss of individual privacy or the prospect of computers interpreting peoples’ brainwaves. When word spread about advances in biotechnology, it did not take long before scientists were warning of “pre-Hiroshima” risks, and Time magazine, worried about a superbug being unleashed on an innocent public, ran a cover titled “Doomsday: Tinkering With Life.”
On a happier note, there was the workplace of ROLM, a maker of computer-based telephony systems led by Ken Oshman, a Stanford Ph.D. and one of the most decent and accomplished people ever to set foot in Silicon Valley. ROLM provided its employees with medical coverage, tuition subsidies, sabbaticals, six-lane lap pools, subsidized lunches and jogging trails.
Two of the principal characters in “Troublemakers,” Bob Taylor and Niels Reimers, were not directly involved in any startup but played an important rolew in the development of Silicon Valley. Taylor, who died earlier this year, was the adopted son of an itinerant Texas minister and trained as a psychologist before joining the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research arm of the Defense Department, where he provided research grants to leading computer scientists. In 1968, Taylor wrote a paper predicting that electronic networks would be as important as, if not more important than, computers. He also worried that connected devices would contribute to further divides in society.
By 1970, Taylor had formed Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, known as PARC, to which he recruited researchers who produced a networked computer, email, hyperlinks, a graphical user interface, an integrated mouse, the concept of toggling between multiple software programs, and easy printing. This was such a stunning array of work that it took almost 20 years and the collective might of Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Adobe and Hewlett-Packard to capitalize on all the innovations. Little wonder that Taylor was driven crazy by corporate infighting and Xerox’s refusal to capitalize on these advances, and by the Eastern establishment’s belief that men were not ordained to type.
Three miles from PARC, Mr. Reimers, at age 26, had created a job for himself—as the head of a program to provide commercial licenses for inventions created at Stanford University. The son of a Norwegian electrician, Mr. Reimers contended with stubborn opposition from both academics who believed that their discoveries should be free and university bureaucrats who worried about the cost of patent filings. Pressures mounted after Mr. Reimers began the long process of securing a broad patent for gene cloning. Like Taylor, Mr. Reimers was showing what the future might hold. Stanford would help give the world the recombinant DNA patent, the music synthesizer and the search engine (through Genentech, Yamaha and Google).
Sandra Kurtzig was a distinct oddity in the early 1970s: A math major at UCLA, she became one of only seven women among 800 graduate engineering students at Stanford. Ms. Kurtzig entered a workplace that, in today’s parlance, was extremely hostile toward women who, though they constituted 40% of the U.S. workforce, accounted for only 17% of the managers and 1% of the engineers. They were almost always paid a fraction of what men received. This was a time when, down the road at the Atari animal house, nobody blew the whistle when meetings were held in hot tubs or when the company newsletter, called the Gospel According to St. Pong, contained a short piece of fiction about a “Beauti Bust” machine developed by the “famous European Breastologist Wolfgang Tittleboob.”
After selling computers made by General Electric, Ms. Kurtzig started her company, ASK Computer Systems, in 1972 by doing work for hire—specializing in software (a word that, at the time, required an explanation) to help companies manage their manufacturing operations. When a potential customer recoiled at her product acronym MAMA (for Manufacturing Management), she changed it to MANMAN and consoled herself with the thought that it took two men to do the work of one woman. Ms. Kurtzig had the last laugh—she still owned 81% of ASK when it became a public company in 1981 and, more important, had herself become a symbol of what was possible for half the human race.
Ms. Berlin’s accounts of Ms. Kurtzig and Mike Markkula, the first chairman of Apple, reinforce some elemental truths about the sleep-deprived intensity, emotion, stress and operatics that attend the formation of any company—especially in Silicon Valley, where competitors frequently spring up at about the same time and engage in a bruising battle for life.
When he first visited Apple’s garage, Mr. Markkula was 33 and already retired—he had beaten the goal he had set himself at age 20 to reach financial independence by the time he was 35. He had paid his way through USC and worked at Hughes Aircraft and Fairchild before joining Intel as a product marketer where his employee stock had made him wealthy. Mr. Markkula invested $91,000 in Apple, guaranteed a $250,000 credit line to the company and owned the same share of it as its two co-founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. His dislike of the limelight was so great that when he wrote an early checkbook-balancing program for the Apple II, he did so under the pseudonym Johnny Appleseed. But it was Mr. Markkula who wrote Apple’s business plan, raised venture money and, crucially, recruited its management team. He did this by turning to contemporaries who had been firsthand witnesses of startup success (in their case, in the semiconductor industry) but had never held a position as senior as the one for which they were hired at Apple.
Mr. Markkula understood an essential element of Silicon Valley’s propensity to produce startling companies: The world is full of people with impressive-looking résumés who would be fish out of water in the hurly-burly world of a startup.It’s no coincidence that some of the companies Ms. Berlin writes about went off the rails after hiring leaders who had held high-ranking jobs at established companies for whom technology cast no spell. Mr. Markkula’s Apple later experienced a decline under the former president of Pepsi-Cola, and Al Alcorn’s Atari fell apart under the leadership of a recruit from Burlington Industries, the textile manufacturer.
Those are two harsh reminders of what happens when polite convention becomes a substitute for drive. For today’s Silicon Valley founders, it’s useful to beware of outsiders who are eager to re-label “war rooms” as “peace rooms” or who urge startups to maintain a “work-life balance” or who serve company dinners at a time that signals an earlier end to the workday. Those people would be happier in Sweden than alongside Highway 101.
This review originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.