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Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley
"This is the most important book on Silicon Valley I've read in two decades. It will take us all back to our roots in the counterculture, and will remind us of the true nature of the innovation process, before we tried to tame it with slogans and buzzwords." -- Po Bronson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nudist on the Late Shift and Nurtureshock
A candid, colorful, and comprehensive oral history that reveals the secrets of Silicon Valley -- from the origins of Apple and Atari to the present day clashes of Google and Facebook, and all the start-ups and disruptions that happened along the way.
Rarely has one economy asserted itself as swiftly--and as aggressively--as the entity we now know as Silicon Valley. Built with a seemingly permanent culture of reinvention, Silicon Valley does not fight change; it embraces it, and now powers the American economy and global innovation.
So how did this omnipotent and ever-morphing place come to be? It was not by planning. It was, like many an empire before it, part luck, part timing, and part ambition. And part pure, unbridled genius...
Drawing on over two hundred in-depth interviews, VALLEY OF GENIUS takes readers from the dawn of the personal computer and the internet, through the heyday of the web, up to the very moment when our current technological reality was invented. It interweaves accounts of invention and betrayal, overnight success and underground exploits, to tell the story of Silicon Valley like it has never been told before. Read it to discover the stories that Valley insiders tell each other: the tall tales that are all, improbably, true.
A candid, colorful, and comprehensive oral history that reveals the secrets of Silicon Valley -- from the origins of Apple and Atari to the present day clashes of Google and Facebook, and all the start-ups and disruptions that happened along the way.
Rarely has one economy asserted itself as swiftly--and as aggressively--as the entity we now know as Silicon Valley. Built with a seemingly permanent culture of reinvention, Silicon Valley does not fight change; it embraces it, and now powers the American economy and global innovation.
So how did this omnipotent and ever-morphing place come to be? It was not by planning. It was, like many an empire before it, part luck, part timing, and part ambition. And part pure, unbridled genius...
Drawing on over two hundred in-depth interviews, VALLEY OF GENIUS takes readers from the dawn of the personal computer and the internet, through the heyday of the web, up to the very moment when our current technological reality was invented. It interweaves accounts of invention and betrayal, overnight success and underground exploits, to tell the story of Silicon Valley like it has never been told before. Read it to discover the stories that Valley insiders tell each other: the tall tales that are all, improbably, true.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published July 10, 2018
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4238 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 189 reviews
July 13, 2018
This book is “genius” on a number of fronts. The first is the writing itself. There isn’t any. With little narrative support the book is entirely made up of individual quotations grouped and stacked around the story of one Silicon Valley venture or another.
At first this gives the impression that the author played more the role of researcher and curator than traditional author. And then it hits you. Fisher, in choosing the quotes and stacking them as if they represent the conversations taking place at a group therapy session, is creating the narrative through context. And that is both ground breaking and ingenious—and that makes it a perfect way to tell the story of Silicon Valley.
By the end of the book, in fact, the individuality of the speakers begins to fade away and it begins to read like a traditional narrative. Although, journalistic to the end, the citations are never compromised. Brilliant writing, to be sure, on a par with the brilliance he writes about.
The stories are fascinating and there is little question that there is an abundance of genius on display here, or that technology really has changed the world. But did the people portrayed here drive the change or were they propelled along by it? The same can be asked of Napoleon, or Thomas Jefferson, or take your pick. The answer, of course, is a little of both, but there is always a tendency to over-personalize larger historical trends that are far more complex than that.
And I believe the choice of writing style may have been a tacit recognition of that on Fisher’s part. Individual to history to individual and back again. It’s powerful stuff from a purely literary perspective.
The Buddhists refer to “dependent origination”, the idea that nothing exists in isolation. We can understand many aspects of reality but can never know it completely, meaning that all reality must be interpreted in context and is, given the infinite number of variables that define reality, ultimately illusory.
During the Enlightenment, science and philosophy were considered two sides of the same coin. One was considered meaningless without the other. The word philosophy actually meant all knowledge, including scientific knowledge.
That, of course, isn’t the current thinking among scientists. All sense of philosophical context has been lost and, as a result, we are essentially “dumbing down” knowledge in order to make it fit the scientific paradigm of the day. Which is why so much scientific discovery is ultimately proven to be in error, or at least not complete.
Technology, it seems, is suffering a similar fate. Does AI take us to a new world beyond human intelligence or does it dumb down what it means to be human to fit the technological paradigm? Yes, autonomous driving cars will reduce the number of mistakes that human drivers typically make. But that’s within the context of human driving and that context will change. Will there be a whole new range of accidents that are enabled by the context of AI driving that don’t exist today?
At the end of the book Fisher asks the geniuses (not used pejoratively at all) of the Valley what the future holds. And to a person there are two themes: 1. We are the masters of technology because we have a culture of disruption and innovation. 2. Technology will change the world.
Fair enough. But what about context? A quick browse of any newsfeed suggests the world is imploding. And technology is certainly playing a role in that. Who is asking the larger contextual question about what that role is and how technology can become more than weaponized disruption in search of the next billion dollar payday?
If the technologists don’t address the larger issues of social context they won’t have the freedom to create the wonderful technologies they envision. Nothing, not even the Valley, exists in isolation. (And, no, I am not a Luddite. I actually went to the CEO of my first corporate employer to convince him to buy me a 128k Mac, at a cost of $4,500, as I recall, over the strongest possible objections of our corporate IT department, just because I could smell change in the air and thought we should at least understand it.)
This really is a brilliant book, brilliantly written, that everyone should read. I only hope that the genius outlined here finds context in the larger issues of social responsibility and progress. Technological progress without philosophical context will be hollow, at best, and destructive at worst.
At first this gives the impression that the author played more the role of researcher and curator than traditional author. And then it hits you. Fisher, in choosing the quotes and stacking them as if they represent the conversations taking place at a group therapy session, is creating the narrative through context. And that is both ground breaking and ingenious—and that makes it a perfect way to tell the story of Silicon Valley.
By the end of the book, in fact, the individuality of the speakers begins to fade away and it begins to read like a traditional narrative. Although, journalistic to the end, the citations are never compromised. Brilliant writing, to be sure, on a par with the brilliance he writes about.
The stories are fascinating and there is little question that there is an abundance of genius on display here, or that technology really has changed the world. But did the people portrayed here drive the change or were they propelled along by it? The same can be asked of Napoleon, or Thomas Jefferson, or take your pick. The answer, of course, is a little of both, but there is always a tendency to over-personalize larger historical trends that are far more complex than that.
And I believe the choice of writing style may have been a tacit recognition of that on Fisher’s part. Individual to history to individual and back again. It’s powerful stuff from a purely literary perspective.
The Buddhists refer to “dependent origination”, the idea that nothing exists in isolation. We can understand many aspects of reality but can never know it completely, meaning that all reality must be interpreted in context and is, given the infinite number of variables that define reality, ultimately illusory.
During the Enlightenment, science and philosophy were considered two sides of the same coin. One was considered meaningless without the other. The word philosophy actually meant all knowledge, including scientific knowledge.
That, of course, isn’t the current thinking among scientists. All sense of philosophical context has been lost and, as a result, we are essentially “dumbing down” knowledge in order to make it fit the scientific paradigm of the day. Which is why so much scientific discovery is ultimately proven to be in error, or at least not complete.
Technology, it seems, is suffering a similar fate. Does AI take us to a new world beyond human intelligence or does it dumb down what it means to be human to fit the technological paradigm? Yes, autonomous driving cars will reduce the number of mistakes that human drivers typically make. But that’s within the context of human driving and that context will change. Will there be a whole new range of accidents that are enabled by the context of AI driving that don’t exist today?
At the end of the book Fisher asks the geniuses (not used pejoratively at all) of the Valley what the future holds. And to a person there are two themes: 1. We are the masters of technology because we have a culture of disruption and innovation. 2. Technology will change the world.
Fair enough. But what about context? A quick browse of any newsfeed suggests the world is imploding. And technology is certainly playing a role in that. Who is asking the larger contextual question about what that role is and how technology can become more than weaponized disruption in search of the next billion dollar payday?
If the technologists don’t address the larger issues of social context they won’t have the freedom to create the wonderful technologies they envision. Nothing, not even the Valley, exists in isolation. (And, no, I am not a Luddite. I actually went to the CEO of my first corporate employer to convince him to buy me a 128k Mac, at a cost of $4,500, as I recall, over the strongest possible objections of our corporate IT department, just because I could smell change in the air and thought we should at least understand it.)
This really is a brilliant book, brilliantly written, that everyone should read. I only hope that the genius outlined here finds context in the larger issues of social responsibility and progress. Technological progress without philosophical context will be hollow, at best, and destructive at worst.
August 14, 2018
I really liked this book, which is sort of the Please Kill Me of Silicon Valley in that it’s an oral history attempting to cover crucial cultural events from different points of view.
Things I liked:
- Hearing the good old stories about Xerox PARC, The “demo,” and Homebrew Computer Club. (Did I mention that I have a mouse signed by Douglas Englebart?)
- Getting a refresher on the founding of the old-timey companies like Apple, General Magic, and Netscape.
- An explanation of first tries “big things to come” that didn’t quite come yet like VR and personal assistants. (I remember a CEO calling me an idiot because I bought a Newton.)
- How far the book goes back into Silicon Valley history instead of picking up with Google or social media companies.
Things I didn’t like:
- The book seemed to equate the technical companies like Google, Apple, etc. with publishing efforts like Wired and Mondo 2000. I don’t know of anyone down in the B2B trenches with me who read those magazines and anyone under 50 who has even heard of The Whole Earth Catalog (though I’m totally going to buy a copy).
- The book leans very heavily on the narrative that the Internet and personal computing came out of a group of idealistic rebels who dropped acid and went to Burning Man naked or whatever. This is a convenient narrative that the early people in the industry put forward about themselves. The Internet was and always has been a government sponsored instrument for surveillance and counterinsurgency. It would have been nice to have even a few counter voices to this narrative. It sort of drives me crazy that they get away with this in book after book.
- The book Machines of Loving Grace is excellent on this topic, but I would have loved to have heard more about the machine learning/AI thread throughout Silicon Valley.
Recommended because this is important history to understand, but maybe temper it with Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine or Kill All Normies by Angela Nagel.
Things I liked:
- Hearing the good old stories about Xerox PARC, The “demo,” and Homebrew Computer Club. (Did I mention that I have a mouse signed by Douglas Englebart?)
- Getting a refresher on the founding of the old-timey companies like Apple, General Magic, and Netscape.
- An explanation of first tries “big things to come” that didn’t quite come yet like VR and personal assistants. (I remember a CEO calling me an idiot because I bought a Newton.)
- How far the book goes back into Silicon Valley history instead of picking up with Google or social media companies.
Things I didn’t like:
- The book seemed to equate the technical companies like Google, Apple, etc. with publishing efforts like Wired and Mondo 2000. I don’t know of anyone down in the B2B trenches with me who read those magazines and anyone under 50 who has even heard of The Whole Earth Catalog (though I’m totally going to buy a copy).
- The book leans very heavily on the narrative that the Internet and personal computing came out of a group of idealistic rebels who dropped acid and went to Burning Man naked or whatever. This is a convenient narrative that the early people in the industry put forward about themselves. The Internet was and always has been a government sponsored instrument for surveillance and counterinsurgency. It would have been nice to have even a few counter voices to this narrative. It sort of drives me crazy that they get away with this in book after book.
- The book Machines of Loving Grace is excellent on this topic, but I would have loved to have heard more about the machine learning/AI thread throughout Silicon Valley.
Recommended because this is important history to understand, but maybe temper it with Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine or Kill All Normies by Angela Nagel.
August 11, 2018
This was an enjoyable book, but it's difficult for me to say how much of my enjoyment comes from having lived through a fair amount of what's discussed. The verbal history-type approach of the book works well, so the story is told by the people who lived it. After an initial sort of overview of "what makes Silicon Valley what it is", the story really starts with Douglas Engelbart and the NASA/SRI/Xerox PARC days, through Atari, and early Apple. I was entertained by the section on the Well, since I installed the first conferencing software on the Well when it was getting set up, during a summer job while in college. Similarly, the story later about Survival Research Labs was fun since I did the live sound for the show under the freeway that's discussed in the book. The ties between techies, musicians, artists, and writers are touched on, but run deeper than you'd think.
It's easy to read this book and pick apart what was included and what wasn't, because everyone will have their own opinions about what's important. So with that caveat, for me the section about Wired magazine felt unnecessary; pieces of it should instead have been woven into other sections. But in particular, the section about Steve Jobs' death and funeral really doesn't belong in the book. It's purely a memorial, and while nice in that sense, it doesn't help expand on the story that the book is ostensibly trying to tell. What was missing from the book: Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Yahoo!, and especially PayPal. Given the impact that the founders and early employees had on the Valley, leaving PayPal out of this story is baffling. And rather than two sections about Google, some time on Yahoo! would have made more sense due to their early importance.
That said, what's here was fun. Having lived in SF through the beginning of the web, the boom, bust, and successive boom, working in tech and in the arts, it's almost a personal history of the past few decades. But I suspect it will be interesting to those who are newer to the area and/or the industry as well.
It's easy to read this book and pick apart what was included and what wasn't, because everyone will have their own opinions about what's important. So with that caveat, for me the section about Wired magazine felt unnecessary; pieces of it should instead have been woven into other sections. But in particular, the section about Steve Jobs' death and funeral really doesn't belong in the book. It's purely a memorial, and while nice in that sense, it doesn't help expand on the story that the book is ostensibly trying to tell. What was missing from the book: Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Yahoo!, and especially PayPal. Given the impact that the founders and early employees had on the Valley, leaving PayPal out of this story is baffling. And rather than two sections about Google, some time on Yahoo! would have made more sense due to their early importance.
That said, what's here was fun. Having lived in SF through the beginning of the web, the boom, bust, and successive boom, working in tech and in the arts, it's almost a personal history of the past few decades. But I suspect it will be interesting to those who are newer to the area and/or the industry as well.
October 18, 2018
A decent index for other great books to read
I just finished reading this, and in a word, it was decent.
What made this book unique and interesting was not so much the content, but the way that it was presented: specifically, the narrative structure - there just isn't one.
Fisher's text is an assemblage of line-by-line quotations from individuals interviewed directly by Fisher, or by other members of the technology journalism community. Before reading it, I was not quite sure what to expect, given this structure could easily lend itself to participants being quoted out of context.
That said, it reads in a fair and seemingly honest manner, and while the weaving of many interviews together is done quite well considering the undertaking, it still gives the reader whiplash during the reading process. Despite already being familiar with many of the origin tales of tech milestones referred to, I still found myself having to do too much context switching multiple times per page. It is an interesting structure for sure, which makes the book interesting more as a piece of "art" than it does as a book.
There is a companion podcast that features interviews with some of the names that appear in the book, and honestly these are more enjoyable as they are not spliced line-by-line with other interviews. The continuous thread of thought on one topic from one person before moving to the next is a refreshing change from the text of the book. These interviews and stories would make for an excellent documentary.
I can appreciate the literal years of effort it must have taken to weave these thousands of hours of interviews into a coherent narrative structure that needs no surrounding writing, but it does not fully translate to value for the reader, which is unfortunate.
One of the more enjoyable parts of the book for me was that many of the names in these interviews are from folks that you typically do not hear about from other sources. Everyone knows every word Steve Jobs ever spoke, but what do you know about people such as Mike Slade and Charles Simonyi? Typically the story of Xerox PARC is told at its end in terms of what Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were able to leverage to usher in the next era of computing, but a great amount of detail was given to the earlier stages. Napster is another great example of a company that is more often referred to in a footnote, but gets a nice degree of coverage end-to-end here.
Valley of Genius serves as a great outline for what other topics you should go read more deeply about. Find the genesis of the GUI interesting? Great, now you know to seek out more information on Doug Engelbart's "The Mother of All Demos" and Xerox PARC. Want to know more about how Twitter began from the ashes of a podcast company? Great, Nick Bilton's book should be in your Amazon cart by now. That said, the structure of the book makes it hard to digest for readers not already familiar with many of the facts, so who is it really for?
So, what are these other books you should check out?
for a general sweeping text like this but with a more coherent story to it, read: The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson
for Apple, read: The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant AND Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
for Google, read: How Google Works by Eric Schmidt
for Twitter, read: Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Nick Bilton
for Atari (and the surrounding games industry), read: Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier
for Pixar, read: Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
Other canonical books on big tech companies that are not mentioned much in this book include:
for Amazon, read: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
for Airbnb/Uber, read: The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley are Changing the World by Brad Stone
for Facebook, read: Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley (and a bit of Netflix/Twitter in here too) by Antonio Garcia Martinez
I just finished reading this, and in a word, it was decent.
What made this book unique and interesting was not so much the content, but the way that it was presented: specifically, the narrative structure - there just isn't one.
Fisher's text is an assemblage of line-by-line quotations from individuals interviewed directly by Fisher, or by other members of the technology journalism community. Before reading it, I was not quite sure what to expect, given this structure could easily lend itself to participants being quoted out of context.
That said, it reads in a fair and seemingly honest manner, and while the weaving of many interviews together is done quite well considering the undertaking, it still gives the reader whiplash during the reading process. Despite already being familiar with many of the origin tales of tech milestones referred to, I still found myself having to do too much context switching multiple times per page. It is an interesting structure for sure, which makes the book interesting more as a piece of "art" than it does as a book.
There is a companion podcast that features interviews with some of the names that appear in the book, and honestly these are more enjoyable as they are not spliced line-by-line with other interviews. The continuous thread of thought on one topic from one person before moving to the next is a refreshing change from the text of the book. These interviews and stories would make for an excellent documentary.
I can appreciate the literal years of effort it must have taken to weave these thousands of hours of interviews into a coherent narrative structure that needs no surrounding writing, but it does not fully translate to value for the reader, which is unfortunate.
One of the more enjoyable parts of the book for me was that many of the names in these interviews are from folks that you typically do not hear about from other sources. Everyone knows every word Steve Jobs ever spoke, but what do you know about people such as Mike Slade and Charles Simonyi? Typically the story of Xerox PARC is told at its end in terms of what Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were able to leverage to usher in the next era of computing, but a great amount of detail was given to the earlier stages. Napster is another great example of a company that is more often referred to in a footnote, but gets a nice degree of coverage end-to-end here.
Valley of Genius serves as a great outline for what other topics you should go read more deeply about. Find the genesis of the GUI interesting? Great, now you know to seek out more information on Doug Engelbart's "The Mother of All Demos" and Xerox PARC. Want to know more about how Twitter began from the ashes of a podcast company? Great, Nick Bilton's book should be in your Amazon cart by now. That said, the structure of the book makes it hard to digest for readers not already familiar with many of the facts, so who is it really for?
So, what are these other books you should check out?
for a general sweeping text like this but with a more coherent story to it, read: The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson
for Apple, read: The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant AND Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
for Google, read: How Google Works by Eric Schmidt
for Twitter, read: Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Nick Bilton
for Atari (and the surrounding games industry), read: Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier
for Pixar, read: Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
Other canonical books on big tech companies that are not mentioned much in this book include:
for Amazon, read: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
for Airbnb/Uber, read: The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley are Changing the World by Brad Stone
for Facebook, read: Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley (and a bit of Netflix/Twitter in here too) by Antonio Garcia Martinez
January 2, 2019
I put this down 1/3 of the way through and then tried again and put this down again permanently 2/3 of the way through not because of format or content but because of the personal feelings it invoked. I worked in the valley in the 90s and it was overflowing with spoiled, privileged, narcissistic males. Exciting stuff, no doubt.
May 8, 2025
"Valley of Genius" is a fast-paced oral history of Silicon Valley, packed with insider accounts of tech's biggest players and moments. It's a revealing and engaging look at the ambition and drama behind the digital revolution.
July 9, 2021
An awesomely inspiring book for those who are interested in the history and contemporary heartbeat of the valley. I would highly recommend this book to anyone in tech, and will likely read it again in the coming years. Full of candid commentary on the valley’s most notorious and iconic characters, companies, and products, Valley of Geniuses presents a raw and authentic view into the heart of the valley over the past 4 decades. If you want a good characterization of how software exploded onto the valley scene, ever nipping at the the heels of incessant hardware revolutions, this book will captivate you from start to finish. The candid accounts will leave you in tears of laughter, lead you to deep introspection, tug at your heart strings, and inspire you to be the world’s next revolutionary technologist.
Let’s take up the torch, follow in our predecessors’ giant footsteps, and build the future together! Computers have, are, and will never stop driving societies next technological, political, or societal revolution; it’s up to us to guide those revolutions, to usher them in intentionally and for the sake of the greater good.
Let’s take up the torch, follow in our predecessors’ giant footsteps, and build the future together! Computers have, are, and will never stop driving societies next technological, political, or societal revolution; it’s up to us to guide those revolutions, to usher them in intentionally and for the sake of the greater good.
October 24, 2018
3.5 stars. I don't recommend consuming this outside of a physical paper page-turner; it's essentially a series of quotes from various technorati from over the years. At times it was quite difficult to keep track of who everyone is — this made the lack of diversity in the industry quite painfully obvious — there's an appendix with a list of names and short bios, but jumping back and forth like this on a Kindle is not easy.
I enjoyed learning more about some of the old school technology history that I did not experience firsthand, e.g. from the 50s / 60s through to the tech 1.0 boom of the 2000s. I wish there had been more firsthand commentary from the "author".
I enjoyed learning more about some of the old school technology history that I did not experience firsthand, e.g. from the 50s / 60s through to the tech 1.0 boom of the 2000s. I wish there had been more firsthand commentary from the "author".
August 19, 2018
Valley of Genius" tells the story of the birth, growth, and coming of age of Silicon Valley in the Bay Area of California. It is the story from Atari and PARC Xerox to Twitter and Facebook and it is told by the players themselves. This makes for very interesting reading and I was fascinated by it. This is a story of intense creativity and hard work. Along the way some of the participants made hitherto unheard of amounts of money. The story tells of rewards that come from risks, and booms and busts. A must read regardless of whether you are a Silicon Valley resident or just someone who is interested in technology and the internet.
August 8, 2019
en gennemgang af silicon valleys opstart, vækst og nuværende status? more like her er en gruppe mænd der tager coke og slås om retten til penge og damer og toppen på highscorelisten. knap nok noget om teknologi eller innovation, alt for meget om feuds og personligheder. sorry *insert generic white name* idgaf abt u or ur credit score. alt for subjektiv hyldest til lukrative miljøer og hypermaskulinitet. nej tak herfra.
September 4, 2018
Fisher's work is too much of a hagiography rather than a thoughtful analysis. It only focuses on the founders rather than the people who work in these companies and the people who live in the valley who have been displaced by the expansion of the tech giants.
January 1, 2019
Valley of Genius : The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) (2018) by Adam Fisher is an interesting book that is a history of Silicon Valley from the late 1960s that is given entirely in quotes by people who were involved in the creation of the technologies involved.
The book is in three sections, the first covering Atari, Apple, Xerox PARC, the second is all about the ‘Hacker Ethic’ and Silicon Valley in the late 1980s and early 1990s, VR, The Whole Earth Electronic Link (the Well) and the third part covers the birth of the consumer internet, the birth of the iPhone and Google.
As the book is all history in quotes from various people it can be a little hard to read but after a while the style becomes easier to read. The quotes are from an incredible array of Silicon Valley personalities.
The material in the book covers a lot of different subjects, many of which are to be expected like Apple, Netscape and Google but there are also some surprising omissions. Searching for ‘Intel’ doesn’t give much. Also the role of the military and NASA in developing Silicon Valley is given little attention. The book has a slant on how hippies, Wired magazine and Burning Man were all a big part of Silicon Valley. This take has some justification to it but the story is oversold.
It would be hard to read the book and not find something new however, for me there was a great deal of new things I’d not heard of or heard much of. Subjects that are not central to Silicon Valley such as VR are interesting to read about as well.
For a history of the modern Internet Brian McCullough’s ‘How the Internet Happened’ is a better read but Valley of Genius is really worth reading for anyone interested in the history of modern computing.
The book is in three sections, the first covering Atari, Apple, Xerox PARC, the second is all about the ‘Hacker Ethic’ and Silicon Valley in the late 1980s and early 1990s, VR, The Whole Earth Electronic Link (the Well) and the third part covers the birth of the consumer internet, the birth of the iPhone and Google.
As the book is all history in quotes from various people it can be a little hard to read but after a while the style becomes easier to read. The quotes are from an incredible array of Silicon Valley personalities.
The material in the book covers a lot of different subjects, many of which are to be expected like Apple, Netscape and Google but there are also some surprising omissions. Searching for ‘Intel’ doesn’t give much. Also the role of the military and NASA in developing Silicon Valley is given little attention. The book has a slant on how hippies, Wired magazine and Burning Man were all a big part of Silicon Valley. This take has some justification to it but the story is oversold.
It would be hard to read the book and not find something new however, for me there was a great deal of new things I’d not heard of or heard much of. Subjects that are not central to Silicon Valley such as VR are interesting to read about as well.
For a history of the modern Internet Brian McCullough’s ‘How the Internet Happened’ is a better read but Valley of Genius is really worth reading for anyone interested in the history of modern computing.
February 27, 2024
It's a bunch of interviews compiled together that goes over the early history of Silicon Valley, and some of its more recent history
Some specific messages that I am attracted to:
1. You can also invent your own culture, it's not something that is given to you.
2. Young energy and ideas can do a lot.
Pretty inspirational stories.
I'd like to get a similar type of story of failures in the valley, not from frauds or incompetent people, but people who were the same as Steve Wozniak or Sergey Brin who just didn't make it
Some specific messages that I am attracted to:
1. You can also invent your own culture, it's not something that is given to you.
2. Young energy and ideas can do a lot.
Pretty inspirational stories.
I'd like to get a similar type of story of failures in the valley, not from frauds or incompetent people, but people who were the same as Steve Wozniak or Sergey Brin who just didn't make it
June 5, 2021
An interesting history of Silicon Valley. Like most modern books about Silicon Valley this one too is less silicon and more software (my job deals with the design of chips). The author conducted a bunch of interviews (and where missing used older published interviews) and cut up the pieces to create in essence a dialog about the subject of each chapter. While much of what is presented was already known to me, there were still many pleasant surprises.
March 10, 2019
Really interesting and impressive. Filled in a whole lot of gaps in my knowledge about recent tech history. It’s also written in a unique way in that it’s a stitched together series of interview transcription snippets that flow in a chronological order. Highly recommend to anyone interested in tech.
August 29, 2018
Amazing book, will take some time to finish but something different and something to just quickly read a chapter and then put it down and read the next later.
Read
July 20, 2024I liked this a lot. I listened to the audio and the quote/clip style worked well.
September 7, 2019
An oral history of Silicon Valley, as told by the people who were there? Count me in baby! This book is fucking awesome.
This book is unique in its presentation as it largely just consists of different people telling stories about the various legendary companies that make up Silicon Valley legend. What makes that so great is that you really get a feel for how things were really. For instance, Dealers of Lightning, the definitive history of Xerox PARC, reads entirely different after realizing from Valley of Genius that half the team were hippies that constantly got stoned :)
This book is unique in its presentation as it largely just consists of different people telling stories about the various legendary companies that make up Silicon Valley legend. What makes that so great is that you really get a feel for how things were really. For instance, Dealers of Lightning, the definitive history of Xerox PARC, reads entirely different after realizing from Valley of Genius that half the team were hippies that constantly got stoned :)
September 24, 2018
One of the best books about the history of Silicon Valley startups.
February 24, 2024
Really interesting writing style that I’ve never seen before! This is the history of Silicon Valley from the words of the founders and leaders themselves. The author picked and rearranged sentences from interviews he had with founders in the Silicon Valley to form a narrative. It was really interesting to learn how many of the founders we know today came from a handful of companies around the Bay Area before tech boomed. The author did a great job setting the stage for how the Bay Area was the perfect breeding ground for tech to boom. My biggest critique is we are hearing a really biased narrative from founders and other people the author felt were influential in the industry which mostly does not include women or people of color.
October 31, 2020
I already read some big tech guys' biographies like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and I like to read and try to understand more about the history of these tech geniuses.
It is not a normal biography or history book, it is more about the guys who created everything giving their point of view, which makes the book much more interesting.
So, in this way, I loved this book. It is funny to understand how everything related to transistors and the internet started in Silicon Valley, from mouse and the GUIs to videogames, smartphones, and eBay, Google, and Facebook, everything that we use on our daily basis started there.
Also, is funny to dive deep into the beginning and reality of these companies and people, which is very different from something that we have today.
In general, this is a MUST READ book for everybody who likes technology or uses it on the daily basis. This is a book for everybody!
It is not a normal biography or history book, it is more about the guys who created everything giving their point of view, which makes the book much more interesting.
So, in this way, I loved this book. It is funny to understand how everything related to transistors and the internet started in Silicon Valley, from mouse and the GUIs to videogames, smartphones, and eBay, Google, and Facebook, everything that we use on our daily basis started there.
Also, is funny to dive deep into the beginning and reality of these companies and people, which is very different from something that we have today.
In general, this is a MUST READ book for everybody who likes technology or uses it on the daily basis. This is a book for everybody!
August 8, 2019
I've never read a non-fiction book like this one. It is mostly dialogue that has been spliced together from tech interviews with over 200 experts who worked in and reported on the rise of Silicon Valley as it became one of the greatest tech centers in the world. At first I had my doubts about whether the author's idea to cut-and-paste words would work; obviously, one would have to be very careful not to quote people out of context. Also, done poorly, the end result could be very dull. But to Fisher's credit I think he succeeds. I really enjoyed it, and I learned some things along the way. (By the way, the "Uncensored" in the title probably refers to the many F-bombs dropped by these intrepid wizards of tech.)
There's something about dialogue that causes it to reach a deeper level within me than mere didactic prose. How 'bout you? And by deeper I mean, in this case, it imparts the feeling that you understand more of what is going on than you would if the stories related in this book were just narratives related in third person by a single author. So much of what makes Silicon Valley interesting to insiders and outsiders alike is how its entrepreneurial promise attracted, and still attracts, a very idealistic type of personality. When one hears these stories, told by its primary actors, in their own words, it allows a subjective function to happen inside the reader. One begins to make correlations and assemble a parallax view that is somehow richer than a straightforward narrative told from only one point of view.
Overall, the book is arranged chronologically beginning from Englebart's concept of a human-friendly computer interface back in the 1950s up to the present time of Facebook and Twitter. Miller does an exceptional job of introducing a theme at the beginning of each chapter - there are approximately 30 chapters - and then arranging the dialogue to stay on point. I found his treatment compelling and, for me, it was a fast read.
There's something about dialogue that causes it to reach a deeper level within me than mere didactic prose. How 'bout you? And by deeper I mean, in this case, it imparts the feeling that you understand more of what is going on than you would if the stories related in this book were just narratives related in third person by a single author. So much of what makes Silicon Valley interesting to insiders and outsiders alike is how its entrepreneurial promise attracted, and still attracts, a very idealistic type of personality. When one hears these stories, told by its primary actors, in their own words, it allows a subjective function to happen inside the reader. One begins to make correlations and assemble a parallax view that is somehow richer than a straightforward narrative told from only one point of view.
Overall, the book is arranged chronologically beginning from Englebart's concept of a human-friendly computer interface back in the 1950s up to the present time of Facebook and Twitter. Miller does an exceptional job of introducing a theme at the beginning of each chapter - there are approximately 30 chapters - and then arranging the dialogue to stay on point. I found his treatment compelling and, for me, it was a fast read.
October 31, 2018
Valley Of Genius
My friend’s description of this book is quite accurate: “A collage of quotes of famous people”. It takes a bit of time to get used to the style of “writing” 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 you’d 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 what’s 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 couldn’t 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 we’ll have to the “Bible of Silicon Valley”.
=====================
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 “The Mother of All Demos”. 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 wasn’t willing to keep up with the future: Linux, Windows, macOS, etc… I couldn’t have been more naive. Alan Kay’s contribution during the “Mother of all demos”, the creation of OOP, his contributions at Xerox PARC, the VR scene at Atari, and much more is unspeakable. Though he’s 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 Atari’s revenue exceed that of all of Hollywood!
One fact I didn’t 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 change….
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 could’ve minaturized. They could have also been the first to have color on a personal computer. Xerox Parc could’ve 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 today’s 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 we’re 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 “Magic” was a decade and a half too early…
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 don’t scale for as long as you can, an Ebay was a prime example of that. Servers that don’t scale, accepting payments via snail mail, etc..
I was impressed by Ebay’s 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
Google was another company where I managed to learn a lot more than expected.
It’s 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 master’s 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 they’re a good pair. Larry was the introverted adult with a grand vision and occasional ephinaies. Sergei was the extraverted math genius who helped bring Larry’s vision to fruition, but also needed some chaperoning. For example, Sergei realized that Larry’s 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 Larry’s ideas into scope, he used to be a big proponent of the “Space Tether”. A rope connected to a space station orbiting the earth could act as an elevator into space. It’s this kind of thing that makes you realize why they thought they could tackle the autonomous car market before it went mainstream.
“South Beatification” 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.
My friend’s description of this book is quite accurate: “A collage of quotes of famous people”. It takes a bit of time to get used to the style of “writing” 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 you’d 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 what’s 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 couldn’t 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 we’ll have to the “Bible of Silicon Valley”.
=====================
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 “The Mother of All Demos”. 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 wasn’t willing to keep up with the future: Linux, Windows, macOS, etc… I couldn’t have been more naive. Alan Kay’s contribution during the “Mother of all demos”, the creation of OOP, his contributions at Xerox PARC, the VR scene at Atari, and much more is unspeakable. Though he’s 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 Atari’s revenue exceed that of all of Hollywood!
One fact I didn’t 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 change….
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 could’ve minaturized. They could have also been the first to have color on a personal computer. Xerox Parc could’ve 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 today’s 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 we’re 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 “Magic” was a decade and a half too early…
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 don’t scale for as long as you can, an Ebay was a prime example of that. Servers that don’t scale, accepting payments via snail mail, etc..
I was impressed by Ebay’s 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.
It’s 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 master’s 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 they’re a good pair. Larry was the introverted adult with a grand vision and occasional ephinaies. Sergei was the extraverted math genius who helped bring Larry’s vision to fruition, but also needed some chaperoning. For example, Sergei realized that Larry’s 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 Larry’s ideas into scope, he used to be a big proponent of the “Space Tether”. A rope connected to a space station orbiting the earth could act as an elevator into space. It’s this kind of thing that makes you realize why they thought they could tackle the autonomous car market before it went mainstream.
“South Beatification” 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.
December 19, 2018
This was a very detailed book about the history of Silicon Valley. It went back to the early pioneer days talking about some of the original companies, all the way to current companies, talking about Steve Jobs and Apple from beginning to current, Facebook, etc. I enjoyed the behind the scenes stories such as the painter who painted murals at Facebook HQ for shares (a very good decision and return on his investment) and how much Steve Jobs loathed the “Lisa” named device and how the world famous 1984 Apple commercial wasn’t initially approved by the board, they actually hated it. As someone who’s read a lot of books about tech history, I was pleased to see how much good additional information this book offered. If you like technology and you are okay sitting down with a hefty 500+ page book, you won’t be disappointed with this.
July 26, 2018
Really a great read. Love the approach of telling the story through quotes -- some of the quote sequences are devious and clever, especially the sequences where people contradict each other. Some juicy bits, some profound bits, and and also some mundane detail that probably coulda/shoulda been edited out. Overall, a really nice read in SV history.
September 19, 2018
I struggled to finish this book. Although it claims to be the history of Silicon Valley, having grown up here it seemed to be missing huge chunks of information. Why so little discussion of the importance of silicon chip manufacturers? Why minimal references to Yahoo, AOL, HP...Interesting tidbits but a “History of Silicon Valley” this was not.
August 4, 2018
Review title: Working for Silicon Valley
This is an oral history of Silicon Valley following the model adopted by Studs Terkel, and like his great books on working, the Depression, and World War II, applies this deceptively simple approach to telling a complex story. Like those earlier Terkel classics, the technique works best to uncover the hidden nuances in and about the history we think we already know by using the words of the people who really do know because they were there and made the history.
I say deceptively simple because recording and transcribing hundreds of interviews doesn't make a cohesive and readable book. Readability requires judicious correction of grammar and syntax from the spoken language to turn it into written language that reads well. It requires choosing the right quotes to retain accuracy while selectively editing for brevity. It requires research and selection of other sources to pick up the voices of those who couldn't be interviewed by Fisher, such as those deceased (Steve Jobs) or unwilling to talk. Here Fisher smartly relies almost completely on other interviews or blogs to maintain that consistent feel and cadence of reading spoken language.
Cohesion requires organizing the content into meaningful topics and providing context and transitions between them. Here the interviewer's skill in framing the questions and controlling the flow of the individual interviews is important, but also in grouping the content into a useful framework. Fisher approaches the material in roughly chronological order, arranged in three broad sections:
I say roughly because even with a logical framework the wise editor and compositor allows the information to flow to the right place, as Fisher does, and because one minor flaw is the lack of a time line either in the text, as an appendix, or even a bottom margin time line flowing throughout the book that might have helped set the chronological context more precisely. Fisher does include a cast of characters at the back with short biographies, and a small section of photographs of the key characters; keep a bookmark there as you may find yourself as I did flipping there often to refresh your memory who is speaking and why they matter.
And of course the big stories are here, starting with Xerox PARC, where by now it is a well worn trophe that Jobs stole the look and feel of the mouse-driven windowing interface for the first Mac. What is interesting to learn here from those who worked inside of Xerox PARC was that they felt that Jobs was not technical enough to recognize that the real innovation in the lab was the object-oriented operating system underneath the GUI, which Apple did not replicate; while it may seem like nostalgic regret coming from the losers left behind by subsequent history, several of those Xerox veterans talk about how different and better the future they envisioned would be if Apple had. Another surprise for me was how important Atari was in establishing the culture, operating model, and financing model for early Silicon Valley startups. What seemed at the time (I was in my late teens in the late 1970s then) like simple game controllers were in fact some of the first applications of microprocessor hardware, firmware, and distributable software media--and Atari's sudden and dramatic corporate flameout was also an early model for many to follow.
In Book 2, Silicon Valley began to move beyond the Silicon-based hardware to encapsulate the cultural changes that hardware enabled. The WELL modeled online bulletin boards, blogs, and early social media, while General Magic, founded by disgruntled former Apple employees, began to try to build a handheld device that could read and send email, take pictures, run apps, sent text messages, and make phone calls, a decade before the iPhone. While those ideas ran too far ahead of the current technological capabilities and of the company's funding, resulting in another crash landing, the seeds of the future were planted. We also learn here why Wired, a magazine I used to love reading, was so important, and how Pixar united the technology, art, and entertainment fields to uniquely enable computer animation and the making of "Toy Story".
It all builds (the feeling of inevitability only arising because of the recency bias of living through it) to the rise of the internet era and its killer apps: Facebook, eBay, Twitter, and iTunes (after Napster paved the way and uncovered the legal landmines). These "Network Effects", as Fisher titles this section, connected users not just to the internet as we saw in Book 2, but to each other as peer to peer networking transformed searching (Google), shopping (eBay) and social networks (Facebook). While mentioned briefly, Amazon is conspicuously not covered by a separate chapter. It was these distributed connections that opened up the internet economy and started the transformation of the global economic, political, and cultural frameworks that is only just beginning to shatter the certainties we used to depend on. While Fisher concludes with a chapter of speculation by his interview subjects on what the future may look like, I found those of faint interest. Despite, or because of, their history in envisioning, developing, and selling these technologies, I suspect that their visions of the future are likely to fall far wide and short of the changes to come.
But Fisher has provided a fun and necessary look at the recent past that got us to now,and a reminder of how fast and how much our world has changed because of that few square miles of California real estate.
This is an oral history of Silicon Valley following the model adopted by Studs Terkel, and like his great books on working, the Depression, and World War II, applies this deceptively simple approach to telling a complex story. Like those earlier Terkel classics, the technique works best to uncover the hidden nuances in and about the history we think we already know by using the words of the people who really do know because they were there and made the history.
I say deceptively simple because recording and transcribing hundreds of interviews doesn't make a cohesive and readable book. Readability requires judicious correction of grammar and syntax from the spoken language to turn it into written language that reads well. It requires choosing the right quotes to retain accuracy while selectively editing for brevity. It requires research and selection of other sources to pick up the voices of those who couldn't be interviewed by Fisher, such as those deceased (Steve Jobs) or unwilling to talk. Here Fisher smartly relies almost completely on other interviews or blogs to maintain that consistent feel and cadence of reading spoken language.
Cohesion requires organizing the content into meaningful topics and providing context and transitions between them. Here the interviewer's skill in framing the questions and controlling the flow of the individual interviews is important, but also in grouping the content into a useful framework. Fisher approaches the material in roughly chronological order, arranged in three broad sections:
Book 1: The founding of the Valley (roughly 1970-1995)
Book 2: The rise of the dot.com era (roughly 1990-2000)
Book 3: The web era of the internet apps (roughly 2000+)
I say roughly because even with a logical framework the wise editor and compositor allows the information to flow to the right place, as Fisher does, and because one minor flaw is the lack of a time line either in the text, as an appendix, or even a bottom margin time line flowing throughout the book that might have helped set the chronological context more precisely. Fisher does include a cast of characters at the back with short biographies, and a small section of photographs of the key characters; keep a bookmark there as you may find yourself as I did flipping there often to refresh your memory who is speaking and why they matter.
And of course the big stories are here, starting with Xerox PARC, where by now it is a well worn trophe that Jobs stole the look and feel of the mouse-driven windowing interface for the first Mac. What is interesting to learn here from those who worked inside of Xerox PARC was that they felt that Jobs was not technical enough to recognize that the real innovation in the lab was the object-oriented operating system underneath the GUI, which Apple did not replicate; while it may seem like nostalgic regret coming from the losers left behind by subsequent history, several of those Xerox veterans talk about how different and better the future they envisioned would be if Apple had. Another surprise for me was how important Atari was in establishing the culture, operating model, and financing model for early Silicon Valley startups. What seemed at the time (I was in my late teens in the late 1970s then) like simple game controllers were in fact some of the first applications of microprocessor hardware, firmware, and distributable software media--and Atari's sudden and dramatic corporate flameout was also an early model for many to follow.
In Book 2, Silicon Valley began to move beyond the Silicon-based hardware to encapsulate the cultural changes that hardware enabled. The WELL modeled online bulletin boards, blogs, and early social media, while General Magic, founded by disgruntled former Apple employees, began to try to build a handheld device that could read and send email, take pictures, run apps, sent text messages, and make phone calls, a decade before the iPhone. While those ideas ran too far ahead of the current technological capabilities and of the company's funding, resulting in another crash landing, the seeds of the future were planted. We also learn here why Wired, a magazine I used to love reading, was so important, and how Pixar united the technology, art, and entertainment fields to uniquely enable computer animation and the making of "Toy Story".
It all builds (the feeling of inevitability only arising because of the recency bias of living through it) to the rise of the internet era and its killer apps: Facebook, eBay, Twitter, and iTunes (after Napster paved the way and uncovered the legal landmines). These "Network Effects", as Fisher titles this section, connected users not just to the internet as we saw in Book 2, but to each other as peer to peer networking transformed searching (Google), shopping (eBay) and social networks (Facebook). While mentioned briefly, Amazon is conspicuously not covered by a separate chapter. It was these distributed connections that opened up the internet economy and started the transformation of the global economic, political, and cultural frameworks that is only just beginning to shatter the certainties we used to depend on. While Fisher concludes with a chapter of speculation by his interview subjects on what the future may look like, I found those of faint interest. Despite, or because of, their history in envisioning, developing, and selling these technologies, I suspect that their visions of the future are likely to fall far wide and short of the changes to come.
But Fisher has provided a fun and necessary look at the recent past that got us to now,and a reminder of how fast and how much our world has changed because of that few square miles of California real estate.
kindle
July 30, 2018Great book about Silicon Valley that is told via quotes from those that were there. I loved the juicy tidbits that were disclosed and learned a lot more about Silicon Valley. Great read!
September 22, 2018
Great book. Definitely well worth reading.
December 29, 2018
This was an amazing read!
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