Adam Fisher > Quotes

“Sean Parker: Prior to the release of Napster, prior to that pivotal moment, the web was one-way. It was a client-server model, you accessed information that was stored on a server. It was very much this broadcast model where individuals passively consumed what had been published. It wasn’t a two-way street. But the moment Napster launched, you were fully utilizing the capabilities of the internet. Everybody was sharing content. Everybody was downloading content. Everything is interactive. That was the original potential of the internet. Napster was ahead of its time.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“John Battelle: With the benefit of hindsight, Google’s IPO in 2004 was as important as the Netscape IPO in 1995. Everyone got excited about the internet in the late nineties, but the truth was a very small percentage of the world used it. Google went public after the dot-com crash and reestablished the web as a medium. Web 1.0 was a low-bandwidth, underdeveloped toy. Web 2.0 is a robust broadband medium with three billion people using it for everything from conducting business to communicating with your friends and family.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Kevin Kelly: The biggest invention in Silicon Valley was not the transistor but the start-up model, the culture of the entrepreneurial start-up. Marc Porat: It’s the style of thinking and behaving that’s called “being an entrepreneur.” Megan Smith: I grew up in it. It’s extraordinary. An entrepreneurial culture of like, “Hey, how can we solve this?” And really caring about helping each other. Carol Bartz: It really is just this need to change as fast as possible to enable the next great thing. We don’t even have to imagine the next great thing yet. We just have to get the tools to do something and use trial and error until we have the next great thing.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Kevin Kelly: So when I think of the future of Silicon Valley I see it as still being the center of the universe as defined by having the least resistance to new ideas, and that’s just its cultural history of being tolerant of wild ideas. Lee Felsenstein: Silicon Valley is a state of mind in a generalized physical area.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Steve Jobs: The people who really create things that change this industry are both the thinker and the doer in one person. The doers are the major thinkers. Did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out about the future? About what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not. Leonardo was the artist—but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy. And combining all those skills together—the art and the science, the thinking and the doing—was what resulted in the exceptional result.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Stewart Brand: It had great continuity and those people stayed in touch online for decades and all that. But it ossified… Fabrice Florin: And a lot of the intellectuals that were sharing ideas on The Well went on to branch out into different areas. But you can really trace back a lot of the origins of this new movement to The Well. A lot of the folks were there. Howard Rheingold: I remember I got a friend request on Facebook early from Steve Case and I said, “I know who you are. But why do you want to friend me?” And he said, “Oh, I lurked on The Well from the beginning.” So I think, yes, it did influence things. Larry Brilliant: Steve Jobs was on it—Steve had a fake name and he lurked. Howard Rheingold: Steve Jobs, Steve Case, Craig Newmark: They would all say that they were informed by their experiences on The Well. Fabrice Florin: The Well was the birthplace of the online community. Larry Brilliant: All that goes back to Steve giving me the computer, letting me use it in Nepal, the experience I had with his software to access the satellite, and then coming back and Steve seeing what Seva-Talk could be. We showed it to hundreds of people and nobody saw anything in it. Steve got it immediately. Fabrice Florin: And Stewart basically gave the technology a set of values and ethics that all the developers could share. They already had their own hacker ethic, but he helped to amplify it and bring people together. And then it became big business, and it was hard for intellectuals to be the primary driving force anymore. It became the businesspeople who started driving it. Which is understandable given the scale and scope of what happened. It just became too large for intellectuals to hold.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“The quote in full is “Information wants to be expensive and information wants to free, and that’s a paradox which will never go away.” And the quote keeps reviving, because that paradox keeps driving people mad. Ha-ha!”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Matt Rogers: Apple is a unique place. Apple is tens of thousands of people and they work on five products. And those products are awesome. And every engineer, every designer, every product manager, knows that everything must be awesome. When you set a schedule, you don’t miss a schedule. There are thousands of people depending on it.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Google was a dot-com poster child, but unlike the others it managed to escape immolation in the dot bomb. Brin and Page had the good fortune to secure $25 million of venture money in 1999, just before the fever broke. They also had the good sense to bank most of those millions. It took them a few years to figure out how to make search profitable, but again luck was on their side. The money sustained the young company through the launch of AdWords, a self-service ad-buying tool, in 2001. Two years later, Google perfected their advertising system with AdSense, which turned the entire internet into a billboard that Google could then sell. The timing was, again, perfect. Google became enormously profitable at the very moment that the rest of the Valley was at its most desperate. Google was able to expand on the cheap. With ad money pouring in, Brin and Page went on a buying spree: sucking whole companies, buildings by the dozen, and thousands and thousands of PhDs into their ever-expanding headquarters: the Googleplex. The much-anticipated Google IPO in 2004 marks the start of what Silicon Valley calls Web 2.0—a reboot, a leveling up, a phase shift. Post-Google, the Valley began to abandon the notion of the internet as a free “cyberspace” that one could “surf,” and instead started to regard the web as a vast machine possessed of a native intelligence—which it could direct, program, even own.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Aaron Sittig: Everyone who had come to pursue a quick fortune left, and the only people still around were people who believed in the real promise of what the internet could provide, what technology was capable of doing for people. A lot of the cynicism that happens during flush times went away, and the attitude changed. There was a lot of mutual support and looking out for each other, hoping that someone would find a way to break through and succeed. Sean Parker: So you have this really narrow population of people who believed. The only people who got through that period were the ones who were truly passionate or the ones who had incredible capability.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Mark Zuckerberg: Why are most chess masters under thirty? Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family… I only own a mattress. Kate Geminder: Imagine being under thirty and hearing your boss say that! Mark Zuckerberg: Young people are just smarter.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Ralph Guggenheim: John, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, and Joe Ranft holed up in a room for a week or two and just rewrote the script. Joss Whedon came in again, too. Joss Whedon: We sort of went back in the trenches and made sure we had everything we needed and nothing we didn’t. Ralph Guggenheim: And they rewrote the script top to bottom. The script got approved. We resumed production. It could have been a total disaster. John Lasseter: From that point on, we trusted our instincts to make the movie we wanted to make. And that is when I started really giving our own people creative ownership over things, because I trusted their judgment more than the people at Disney.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Eddy Cue: It was the only event I took my wife and kids to because, as I told them, “In your lifetime, this might be the biggest thing ever.” Because you could feel it. You just knew this was huge. The iPhone was the culmination of everything for Steve.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“John Markoff: Steve didn’t look backward very much. NeXT and the Mac were really targeted at this notion of augmentation that Engelbart had thought up years before: Computers were these tools that could really enhance your ability to do intellectual work. Steve was turning the computer into a new entertainment device—first with audio, but later with video.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Scott Hassan: I hope that these quantum entanglement systems will allow you to transmit information faster than the speed of light. If it happens, that’s going to allow us to colonize the whole entire galaxy, and other galaxies. If that’s actually, really possible, it’s going to be phenomenal, and that’s being developed right now.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Andy Hertzfeld: The most important thing really is the motivation. Why are you doing what you’re doing? That seeps into the product at every level, even though you think it might not. Your basic values are essentially the architecture of the project. Why does it exist? And in Silicon Valley there are two really common sets of values. There are what I call financial values, where the main thing is to make a bunch of money. That’s not a really good spiritual reason to be working on a project, although it’s completely valid. Then there are technical values that dominate lots of places where people care about using the best technique—doing things right. Sometimes that translates to ability or to performance, but it’s really a technical way of looking at things. But then there is a third set of values that are much less common: and they are the values essentially of the art world or the artist. And artistic values are when you want to create something new under the sun. If you want to contribute to art, your technique isn’t what matters. What matters is originality. It’s an emotional value.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“David Kushner: Atari was the company that established Silicon Valley’s casual culture as we know it today. Just the idea of showing up to work in jeans and a T-shirt? Prior to Atari the Valley was the era of Intel and essentially men in suits. With Atari it became smelly hippies in jeans smoking weed. Atari was the counterculture come to Silicon Valley. And so it was no coincidence that one of the smelly hippies that walked into Atari was Steve Jobs.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Steven Johnson: What I find so beautiful about Twitter is that it’s literally like the serendipity of the front page of the newspaper, times one hundred. So when people sit there and say, “Oh we’re killing serendipity because Google has ruined all that. Now you just go to the web and search for what you want and you get it,” I look at those people and think, Have you never used Twitter? Literally every time I hit Refresh there is an interesting hint of a take about something. And more often than not, a link to something longer that opens my mind in some way. Twitter is a serendipity engine.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Al Alcorn: I would come home and tell Katie, my wife, “Nolan is crazy. He wants to build a hundred machines a day.” We didn’t have the money, the capacity, the experience. This is insane, but I’m going to go along with the gag to see how far it gets.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“John Markoff: Still, Steve was emblematic of the Valley, rising to represent how it touched the popular culture. He is the vector for Alan Kay’s insight. Kay was the person who understood that computing was a universal medium, that it wasn’t a calculation tool, and as a universal medium it transformed any medium that it touched. Before computing, there had been paper, there had been music, there had been video, and computing sort of relentlessly transformed each one of them, and Steve was the vector. He was the messenger who sort of implemented Alan’s vision. Steve was the one who shaped those products so that they were usable by mortals and so we could get beyond the original personal computers. And the modern world is different because of that.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Ron Johnson: It was a familiar interface that was beloved. Everyone understood how to use the scroll wheel. And we could bring it out at, like, $400. To do the touch phone would be six or seven hundred dollars. So there was a long debate. There was a choice we had to make. We had to pick one, and I’m pretty sure everyone was leaning toward the iPod-phone. But Steve always leaned toward the future. Steve always leaned to the most innovative. I remember Steve saying, “If we don’t do this all-display phone, someone else might do it first—and the all-display phone is the big idea.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Ezra Callahan: It’s the very first time we actually bring in outside people to test something for us, and their reaction, their initial reaction is clear. People are just like, “Holy shit, like, I shouldn’t be seeing this, like this doesn’t feel right,” because immediately you see this person changed their profile picture, this person did this, this person did that, and your first instinct is Oh my God! Everybody can see this about me! Everyone knows everything I’m doing on Facebook. Max Kelly: But News Feed made perfect sense to all of us, internally. We all loved it. Ezra Callahan: So in-house we have this idea that this isn’t going to go right: This is too jarring a change, it needs to be rolled out slowly, we need to warm people up to this—and Mark is just firmly committed. “We’re just going to do this. We’re just going to launch. It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid.” Ruchi Sanghvi: We pushed the product in the dead of the night, we were really excited, we were celebrating, and then the next morning we woke up to all this pushback. I had written this blog post, “Facebook Gets a Facelift.” Katie Geminder: We wrote a little letter, and at the bottom of it we put a button. And the button said, “Awesome!” Not like, “Okay.” It was, “Awesome!” That’s just rude. I wish I had a screenshot of that. Oh man! And that was it. You landed on Facebook and you got the feature. We gave you no choice and not a great explanation and it scared people. Jeff Rothschild: People were rattled because it just seemed like it was exposing information that hadn’t been visible before. In fact, that wasn’t the case. Everything shown in News Feed was something people put on the site that would have been visible to everyone if they had gone and visited that profile. Ruchi Sanghvi: Users were revolting. They were threatening to boycott the product. They felt that they had been violated, and that their privacy had been violated. There were students organizing petitions. People had lined up outside the office. We hired a security guard.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Kevin Kelly: That became one of the biggest jobs that we had: people having to moderate the conversation. Lee Felsenstein: And so I had to bust up some kind of paranoid discussion threads that mostly had to do with other personalities in the conference. A couple of times I had to jump in and say, “Now you are all making far too much out of this. There’s nothing there.” And, you know, “Calm down, for God’s sake.” It was worth the effort. But it took effort. Kevin Kelly: These systems are natural amplifiers, and negative things are somehow easier to amplify or become much louder than positive things, there’s something about a negative amplification that just powers up. And so we saw these phenomena where small slights would be amplified into huge harm and pilings on, and people who were normally very civil would get sucked up into battles. And they would have what we call flame wars. It was sort of like a flame in the sense that the hotter it got, the more that would be sucked into it and burn. Lee Felsenstein: We discovered early on about the tendency to flame. Hackers do that, of course. But we thought that was just a hacker thing and it turned out not to be. Kevin Kelly: And we began to see trolls, although we didn’t use that term at the time, where there were people who were getting satisfaction out of starting fires or nudging people. They would do that over and over again just because they liked to see what would happen. Stewart Brand: People learned how to deal with trolls. If you respond to them, they will make the flame even brighter. Kevin Kelly: So we had to deal with that. And issues about people wanting to remove what they had said and whether that was okay. And so there were all these things that are now very familiar dynamics that were completely new to us. And each one we had to address, and we were spending days and nights and evenings trying to manage these things.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Kay: Computing is terrible. People think—falsely—that there’s been something like Darwinian processes generating the present. So therefore what we have now must be better than anything that had been done before. And they don’t realize that Darwinian processes, as any biologist will tell you, have nothing to do with optimization. They have to do with fitness. If you have a stupid environment you are going to get a stupid fit.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Andy Grignon: The iPhone is a product that by all accounts should never have succeeded. There wasn’t a single stable proven element in the entire stack: We’d never made a phone before! Now granted, lots of people have been building phones, so what do you do? The very first thing is you start to go shop for people who know how to do this. Well, Steve being crazy, but also being the genius that he was, told us we were not allowed to hire people who knew how to build phones! It was not because he was being a dick. Actually he was a little bit—but he wanted us to invent the knowledge ourselves.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Stewart Brand: In any community, new people show up, and they want to participate, and the old hands typically close ranks and sneer at the newbies. I should have known that would happen at The Well. We should have made it the case where part of your job as a member of The Well was to make new people feel welcome. We never did that. It was a part of what kept The Well from growing. Kevin Kelly: After Stewart left, everything started to kind of get really big. This was the era of ISPs, and you had Pipeline and Echo and AOL, and it was clear that this was going to stick around. Some of them were growing fast. And so why can’t we grow fast? The problem was we were a nonprofit. Who’s going to invest into this nonprofit? And so that was the issue. I looked at it in different ways. Do we want to sell it? Do we want to turn commercial? What’s the point of that? So in the end it was like, No, I think we can be more useful being who we are. We could grow and we could make a lot of money, but a lot of people are going to do that. And that might have been the wrong decision or the right decision to make, but it was my decision to keep it sort of experimental. Stewart Brand: It was never a commercial success. It may have paid its own way, just barely. What could be tried with this medium? That was the thing. Kevin Kelly: Eventually it was sold to Salon, but it was really too late at that point.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Tony Fadell: Tomorrow will get faster and every year after it’s only going to continue to get faster in terms of the amount of change. That means all of these incumbents with these big businesses that have been around for a hundred or two hundred years can be unseated, because technology is the unseating element. Technology is the levelizer.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Nick Bilton: Twitter today is one person talking to a lot of people—not a conversation. And I don’t think that we as human beings were designed to enable 320 million people to have a conversation together.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Howard Rheingold: It was like there was a party happening in the walls of your house. You know, people were talking about serious things and exchanging knowledge, but they were also having fun. Kevin Kelly: Stewart and I, we were living on The Well. This was the beauty of it. Lee Felsenstein: It was an experiment. An attempt to infuse their culture into an online system. They were feeling their way, as anybody would have to, since it really hadn’t been done before. Kevin Kelly: I can’t remember what the first conference was, but very quickly there was a conference about The Well itself, because we quickly learned that talking about The Well and the policies of The Well would kind of creep up in every single discussion. “Why can’t we do this? Why can’t we do that?” Because nobody knew anything. We didn’t even know we needed moderators! That was not even clear. That was not something we thought about before. Why do you need moderators?”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Ev Williams: Twitter didn’t find immediate product-market fit. Why did it then grow? Because we changed it! And—little-known fact—after that fateful South by Southwest, growth stalled again. And then we changed it more.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley