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Name: Valley of Genius
Rating: 4.1 (54 reviews)
Author: Adam Fisher

Adam Fisher

The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

4.1 (54 ratings)

26 mins

Brief summary

'Valley of Genius' by Adam Fisher takes readers through the history of Silicon Valley, from the creation of the microchip to the rise of Google and Facebook. The book includes candid interviews and stories about some of the biggest names in tech.

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Table of Contents

Valley of Genius
Summary of 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Hear the stories behind the technological innovations that have shaped the modern world.

The mainstream media often spins the story of Silicon Valley as one of pure business and finance. And certainly, huge fortunes have been made. But the real tale of Silicon Valley is one of people and ideas, and how these people – sometimes nerdy, sometimes brash, but always talented – have pursued their dreams and turned their ideas into realities.

Silicon Valley is a region in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. This area, a mixture of suburbs and modestly sized cities, is now the world’s leading center for high technology and innovation. Its history is short in terms of time but incredibly rich in terms of discoveries made. Since the late 1960s, Silicon Valley has been at the heart of the invention of personal computers, the internet, handheld devices, online retail, social networks and much, much more. And all of these innovations have been birthed in a profoundly unconventional business environment, one where business founders were often in their early 20s, working all night was common and drug use was practically obligatory.

In these blinks, you’ll hear the story of young people working, having fun, innovating and sometimes finding themselves in charge of multimillion- or even multibillion-dollar companies.

You’ll also learn

how Xerox played a huge role in the development of the modern computer;
that one Silicon Valley business almost invented the iPhone, ten years before the iPhone; and
why Google’s founders never really wanted to start a business.

Atari was the first huge Silicon Valley boom and bust story.

The classic Silicon Valley story goes something like this: some kid with a radical idea puts together something cool, builds around it a freewheeling business with like-minded techies and becomes insanely rich in the process.

Atari, and its founder, Nolan Bushnell, pretty much wrote that script.

As a student in the 1960s, Bushnell once snuck into a computer lab late at night to play Spacewar, one of the first computer games. Seeing the possibilities this completely new form of entertainment offered, the entrepreneurial Bushnell set up Atari.

Atari’s first completed game was Pong. It was a simple game – like table tennis, played on an arcade machine, with incredibly basic graphics and controls. But it became a phenomenal success.

Bushnell put the first Pong arcade machine in the corner of a local bar. Soon thereafter, Atari got a call from the bar owner to say the machine had stopped working. When an Atari engineer got to the bar, they realized that the problem was simple: the coin box was so full of quarters that it wouldn’t take any more. In this one bar, Pong was taking in $300 a week – a huge amount, considering Bushnell could manufacture more Pong machines for $350 each.

To deliver as many new machines as possible, early Atari employees worked incredibly hard. But, at the same time, there was a hedonistic side to the culture at Atari. Out back, the smell of marijuana smoke was always in the air. Coworkers slept with each other. There was cocaine use in the company hot tub.

This culture started to cause problems after the company was sold to Warner for $30 million in 1976, by which point Atari had progressed beyond just arcade machines and launched one of the first-ever video game consoles. The takeover brought a more corporate approach, as well as a new CEO, a serious businessman named Ray Kassar who’d previously headed Ralph Lauren. His ethos could hardly have differed more from Bushnell’s. Indeed, when the men met for the first time, Bushnell was wearing a T-shirt with the words “I like to fuck” written on it.

The culture clash between the new corporate owners and the freewheeling company atmosphere started to cause problems. Key engineers left, unsatisfied with the company culture, and Atari struggled to reinvent itself after its early success. By 1984, it had crashed completely. Split into smaller parts, the company was sold off.

In the early 1970s, Xerox established the foundations of modern personal computing.

Most people, if asked who built the first personal computer, might think of Apple or perhaps IBM. But, in fact, the business that first built something close to a modern-day PC was Xerox.

Today, Xerox is synonymous with photocopying. Indeed, you can use its name as a verb, and ask someone to xerox something for you. But back in the early 1970s, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center – or PARC, for short – made a major breakthrough in computing when it built the first computer with a modern, visual user interface.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak formed an unconventional partnership and created Apple Computers.

Around the same time that Atari and Xerox were getting started, two Valley geniuses – Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the cofounders of Apple – were also hard at work.

Jobs and “the Woz,” as he came to be known, first worked together building and selling highly illegal “blue boxes” – devices that emitted a tone that, when played into a telephone, tricked the network exchange into letting the dialer place free calls.

Apple’s big breakthrough was inspired by Xerox and assisted by incredible marketing.

By 1979, Apple was an established business.

Nonetheless, what Xerox was doing at its PARC research facility was still far superior to everything at Apple. But Xerox’s head office showed little interest in personal computers. This meant that, commercially, Xerox PCs were going nowhere fast. Steve Jobs exploited this brilliantly.

General Magic, a hotbed for talent, invented the iPhone ten years before the iPhone was invented.

General Magic might just be the greatest company you’ve never heard of.

The stuff of Silicon Valley legend, General Magic was spun out of Apple in 1990, with many people from the team behind the original Macintosh computer on board. It had an incredible product idea, something far ahead of its time: a handheld gadget, called a personal communicator. The gadget, plugged into a television line, would be able to handle email and phone calls, as well as send SMS-style instant messages with emojis and stickers. It would have an app store with downloadable games, music and programs for checking stock prices and similar activities. A camera attachment would be available.

Ebay started as a backroom side project, became a global success and gave us the feedback system.

In 1995, Pierre Omidyar was a longhaired young idealist who believed in the inherent goodness of people and the power of markets to improve lives.

When a colleague idly suggested that an internet auction site would be cool, Omidyar spent a Labor Day weekend hammering out the code for a primitive online marketplace.

The founders of Google didn’t really want to launch it as a business.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t originally want to build a search engine. Both graduate students at Stanford, they were working toward doctorates in computer science.

And they both loved coming up with imaginative new ideas and concepts. Larry was interested in automating vehicles, and both liked to talk about building a space tether – a rock orbiting earth with a cable coming down that you could use to simply climb up into space.

Decisions to open up Apple’s closed-system approach enabled the business’s explosive growth.

Back in the late 1990s, Apple was struggling. The Macintosh may have wowed audiences at it’s launch, but, by 1997, Apple’s personal computers held a risible two-percent share of the market.

That year, Steve Jobs returned to Apple after a period running a different tech business, and he started to change things. He drove the launch of the original iMac, with its translucent, colored shell, the first really beautiful desktop computer. And he got behind the creation and launch of the iPod.

Facebook moved fast, broke things and it now dominates.

Fifteen years ago, it was practically impossible to think of a person by name – some guy you’d met in class, for example – and then find a picture of him. At Harvard, individual dorms had paper directories called face-books, with pictures of all their students, but there was no overall listing. Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz decided to create a unified, online version, called The Facebook. A future colossus was born.

After rolling out their site as a dorm-room project, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz moved to Silicon Valley with the intention of turning it into a proper business. At the time, Facebook’s mantra was “Move fast and break things,” and in the early days they lived up to it. If new code was ready, it simply got pushed out live, usually in the middle of the night to reduce the impact if it all went wrong. Facebook’s engineers got used to staying up till 6 a.m. to fix things.

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What is Valley of Genius about?

Few areas have risen to global prominence as quickly as Silicon Valley. Valley of Genius (2018) takes us on a roller-coaster ride of invention, discovery, reinvention and disruption, tracing the history of Silicon Valley from the advent of the personal computer through to the creation of the social media platforms of today.

Best quote from Valley of Genius

There was never an Atari business plan; we were just making it up as we were going along.

—Adam Fisher

Who should read Valley of Genius?

Anyone interested in the history of the computers and technology we rely on every day
People curious about the culture of the tech community
Anyone who enjoys a tale of endeavor, ideas and personality

About the Author

Adam Fisher is a thinker and writer focused on technology, its origins and its future. As well as researching and writing Valley of Genius, Fisher has written for Wired, MIT Tech Review and the New York Times Sunday magazine.

Categories with Valley of Genius

Technology & the Future History

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