William Shockley: the traitorous eight

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The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Others begin the story five years later, when William Shockley, the father of the semiconductor, abandoned the East Coast to launch a company on Terman’s campus, bringing silicon to the Valley for the first time. But the most compelling origin story—the one that aims the spotlight squarely at the force that makes the Valley so distinctive—begins in the summer of 1957, when eight of Shockley’s young PhD researchers rose up in revolt and went out on their own. Shockley’s seniority, his fame, and even his Nobel Prize did nothing to deter the rebels; the “Traitorous Eight” were fed up with Shockley’s heavy-handed leadership and resolved to find a different home.

In similar fashion, venture capital has stamped its mark on an industrial culture, making Silicon Valley the most durably productive crucible of applied science anywhere, ever. Thanks to venture capital, the Traitorous Eight were able to abandon William Shockley, launch Fairchild Semiconductor, and set this miracle in motion. By 2014, an astonishing 70 percent of the publicly traded tech companies in the Valley could trace their lineage to Fairchild.[12] In the year before they turned to liberation capital, the young researchers at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory were discovering that their boss was at once a scientific genius and a maniacal despot. When Shockley had recruited them, they had felt honored to be chosen: getting a call from the great scientist was “like picking up the phone and talking to God.”[13] Handsome, bespectacled, with a professorial receding hairline, Shockley was not only the father of semiconductors but also a fine showman: he would begin lectures by promising to get into a hot subject; then he would open up a book and smoke would burst from the pages.[14] But as soon as the young recruits entered the presence of this deity, his flaws became apparent.

See also Y Combinator Seeq, 106, 107 Sematech, 94, 430n SenseTime, 393–95, 400 Sentry Towers, 403 September 11 attacks (2001), 190–91 Sequoia Capital, 303–38, 454–55n Apple, 83–84, 85–86, 90–91, 160–61 application of behavioral science to venture capital, 309–11 Atari, 62–63, 64–66, 80 Botha and, 305–8, 309–11, 313–14 China business, 225, 238–48, 321 Cisco, 113–19, 131, 158, 161, 434n Company Design Program, 311–12 Facebook, 194–96, 207, 258 founding of, 60–62, 337–38 fundraising, 61–62, 92, 394 Google, 179, 181–83, 190, 382 growth funds, 324–30, 347 hedge funds, 331–33 Heritage funds, 321, 333–36 India business, 321–24 Kleiner Perkins compared with, 303–4 Plaxo, 197 scouts program, 311, 316, 455n Seeq-3Com alliance, 106, 107 Stripe, 317–20 success formula of, 304–6, 307, 312–16, 377–78 team building, 307–8 Uber, 352 Webvan, 178 WeWork, 347–48 WhatsApp, 314 X.com, 201–7 Yahoo, 150–54, 155–56, 160–61, 170, 173 Sequoia Capital Global Equities, 331–33 Sequoia China, 225, 238–48, 314, 321, 448n Sequoia India, 321–24, 326 Series A, 65, 70–71, 140, 160, 189–90, 343, 350, 382 Series B, 71–72, 155–56, 158, 160, 343 Series C, 358–61, 363 Series D, 206, 358, 359 ServiceNow, 326–30 Severino, Paul, 112, 118, 435n sexism, 117, 267–71, 360, 384–85 sexual harassment, 270–71, 365, 367, 384 Shah, Kunal, 322–24 Shanghai, 222–23, 231 Shao, Bo, 447n shareholder capitalism, 189–90 Shaw, George Bernard, 3 Shen, Neil, 224–25, 237–41, 276, 312, 314 background of, 224–25 Ctrip, 237–38, 243, 285 Meituan, 243–48 Shleifer, Scott, 278–88 Sina, Sohu, and NetEase, 279–82 Shockley, William, 17, 21–24, 31–32, 67 Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, 21–24, 31–33, 41 Traitorous Eight and, 17–18, 21, 25, 28, 31–33, 53, 67, 423n Shopify, 332–33 “short,” 283 Shriram, Ram, 176, 178–79, 180, 182–83, 199, 441n Siara Systems, 9, 10 Sidecar, 358 Sidgmore, John, 142–43, 168 Silicon Alley, 223 Silicon Compilers, 107–8 Silicon Desert, 223 Silicon Forest, 223 Silicon Graphics, 145, 146 Silicon Hills, 223 Silicon Valley, 302–3, 391 competitors vs., 93–96 origin story of, 17–21 Saxenian’s thesis on, 94–96, 389–90 Silver Lake Partners, 289, 297–98 Simon Personal Communicator, 20 Sina, 226, 233, 279–82 Singh, Shailendra, 321–24 Singleton, Henry, 53–54 SixDegrees.com, 20 Skype, 399 Accel Capital’s investment, 191, 251–52, 285–86 Andreessen Horowitz’s investment, 297–98 eBay acquisition of, 191, 297, 448n Silver Lake and, 297–98 Slack, 451n Slim, Carlos, 341 Small Business Investment Companies (SBICs), 41–43, 52, 61, 80, 395, 421–22n Smith, Hank, 86–87, 90 Snowflake, 330 Snow-Job, 69 social impact, 14–15 social networks.


The Big Score by Michael S. Malone

Apple II, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, creative destruction, Donner party, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, lone genius, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, packet switching, plutocrats, RAND corporation, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, The Home Computer Revolution, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yom Kippur War

He was a marvelous intuitive problem solver… in terms of being able to attach the mathematics to the essence of the problem and get an answer out where other people might get stuck in the complexity of the calculations… Shockley was an inspiring leader to work for in that he was a tremendous generator of ideas.” But Shockley’s oppressive style, combined with the fact that Shockley Transistor just couldn’t seem to get anything out the door, finally blew the place apart. It was years before Shockley forgave any of the Traitorous Eight, particularly Bob Noyce, who had been Shockley’s favorite. Noyce says, “I remember his wife talking to Betty, my first wife, when we were all leaving and saying, ‘How could you possibly do this without telling me?’ ” Three years later, Noyce ran into Shockley at a trade dinner.

With big bucks hanging in the balance, the seven set out to recruit the only holdout at Shockley Labs, the only member of the original eight who seemed to exhibit characteristics of a budding leader, Bob Noyce. It didn’t take much effort. Noyce, Shockley’s golden boy, was as disenchanted as the rest. The eight soon submitted their resignation en masse to a stunned, then enraged, Bill Shockley. He called them traitors—and “the Traitorous Eight” is how they are known—and wouldn’t speak to any of them for many years. Shockley’s dream had collapsed. The most famous electronics scientist in the world would never again be part of Silicon Valley.

Like all who worked for the great scientist, he still speaks in awe of Shockley’s brilliance, of how he would develop and solidify his latest ideas by patiently explaining them to a younger scientist, like Noyce. Noyce never forgets that had not Shockley decided to come home to Stanford, and had he not had the ambition to start his own firm, there would never have been a Fairchild and, by extension, never the Silicon Valley that has made Robert Noyce a rich and famous man. But at the time, having walked out of Shockley Labs with the rest of the Traitorous Eight, Noyce found himself almost by default taking over Shockley’s role at the new company, Fairchild. How he did in this new role in comparison to that eminence he had just left is apparent in the esteem in which Noyce is still held by those who worked for him.


Microchip: An Idea, Its Genesis, and the Revolution It Created by Jeffrey Zygmont

Albert Einstein, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, computer age, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, invisible hand, popular electronics, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

They were the price of failure too because talented scientists and engineers didn't need to cling to a company as it foundered. In Palo Alto, the Shockley Semiconductor Lab limped forward 32 MICROCHIP for a little while after the traitorous eight departed. An outfit called Clevite Transistor purchased it from Shockley in 1960. The doors closed for good in 1969. Shockley found residence as a senior don of science at Stanford University, the alma mater he'd left in 1932. He completed the sabotage of his own reputation with stunts like a run for the U.S. Senate as an advocate of controlled human breeding. Bill Shockley died from cancer in 1989. He had accomplished his life's work early, first by his semiconductor discoveries of the 1940s, then through the magnetism that pulled together the traitorous eight in '56 and '57.

Two were mechanical engineers. Bill Shockley branded the group the traitorous eight. But in fact, the desertion by his star thinkers was really just another Shockley first. Just as the Bulldog himself set a certain high standard for the elan and esprit that would possess the best of the semicon seekers, the departures from his company established the industry's common pattern of business regeneration: The brightest researchers would run away with their best ideas to use as the basis to start their own companies. They weren't always driven away by dissatisfaction, as Shockley's eight had been. Often they were merely lured by opportunity.

He had accomplished his life's work early, first by his semiconductor discoveries of the 1940s, then through the magnetism that pulled together the traitorous eight in '56 and '57. Technoscenti who encountered him even briefly while he lived remain awed to this day by his brilliance and sparkle. The eight moved in at Fairchild just about when Jack Kilby was beginning his quest for life outside of Centralab. Kilby restricted his search to the semco powers. Fairchild at the moment was scarcely a hopeful whim. But the founders carried their zeal from Shockley Lab to their start-up. They also brought accumulated experience and a good many hunches about how to go about diffusing silicon to make transistors. Communicating at Shockley's with winks, nods, nudges, and wisecracks; huddling furtively behind vats and furnaces to whisper low-toned with excitement about sudden findings; smirking over their employer's latest outrage; comparing lab notes while sipping frosty beers at Dinah's Shack-up on the El Camino Real, the group had acquired conviction enough to support their bold resolve.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

Dubbed “the traitorous eight,” Noyce and his posse set up shop just down the road from Shockley on the outskirts of Palo Alto. Shockley Semiconductor never recovered. Six years later, Shockley gave up and joined the faculty of Stanford. His paranoia deepened, and he became obsessed with his notion that blacks were genetically inferior in terms of IQ and should be discouraged from having children. The genius who conceptualized the transistor and brought people to the promised land of Silicon Valley became a pariah who could not give a lecture without facing hecklers. The traitorous eight who formed Fairchild Semiconductor, by contrast, turned out to be the right people at the right place at the right time.

Said his high school girlfriend, “He was probably the most physically graceful man I’ve ever met.”53 Years later the literary journalist Tom Wolfe wrote a glimmering profile of Noyce for Esquire, in which he came close to canonizing him: Robert Noyce (1927–90) at Fairchild in 1960. Gordon Moore (1929– ) at Intel in 1970. Gordon Moore (far left), Robert Noyce (front center), and the other “traitorous eight” who in 1957 left Shockley to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Bob had a certain way of listening and staring. He would lower his head slightly and look up with a gaze that seemed to be about one hundred amperes. While he looked at you he never blinked and never swallowed. He absorbed everything you said and then answered very levelly in a soft baritone voice and often with a smile that showed off his terrific set of teeth.

“He could put things together out of sealing wax and paper clips,” recalled an engineer he worked with at Bell Labs.8 But he also had a laid-back cleverness that led him to seek shortcuts rather than plod through repetitious trials. Shockley had an idea for finding a solid-state replacement for a vacuum tube by putting a grid into a layer of copper oxide. Brattain was skeptical. He laughed and told Shockley that he had tried that approach before, and it never ended up producing an amplifier. But Shockley kept pushing. “It’s so damned important,” Brattain finally said, “that if you’ll tell me how you want it made, we’ll try it.”9 But as Brattain predicted, it didn’t work. Before Shockley and Brattain could figure out why it had failed, World War II intervened. Shockley went off to become a research director in the Navy’s antisubmarine group, where he developed analyses of bomb detonation depths to improve attacks on German U-boats.


pages: 293 words: 91,110

The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution by T. R. Reid

Albert Einstein, Bob Noyce, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, George Gilder, Guggenheim Bilbao, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Turing machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

There was something about Noyce—a fundamental confidence matched with a compelling sense of presence—that prompted people to look to him for leadership. The physicists, chemists, and engineers working at Shockley Semiconductor in 1956 were required—it was part of William Shockley’s unique management style—to give one another report cards. When the grades were tabulated, Noyce emerged as the consensus choice to be the group’s technical director. Accordingly, when the “traitorous eight” left Shockley in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor, the group turned to Noyce as soon as it became clear that somebody was going to have to act as a manager. His colleague Gordon Moore recalled that “Bob was everybody’s choice.

He couldn’t fire Shockley, who had just gotten this great international honor, but he had to change the management or else everyone else would leave.” In the end, Beckman stuck with Shockley—and paid a huge price. Confused and frustrated, eight of the young scientists, including Noyce, Moore, and Hoerni, decided to look for another place to work. That first group—Shockley called them “the traitorous eight”—turned out to be pioneers, for they established a pattern that has been followed time and again in Silicon Valley ever since. They decided to offer themselves as a team to whichever employer made the best offer. Word of this unusual proposal reached an investment banker in New York, who offered a counterproposal: Instead of working for somebody else, the eight scientists should start their own firm.

The results described Noyce as an introvert, a conclusion so ludicrous that it should have told Shockley something about the value of such tests. Early in 1956, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories opened for business in the sunny valley south of Palo Alto. It was the first electronics firm in what was to become Silicon Valley. In Robert Noyce’s office there hung a black-and-white photo that showed a jovial crew of young scientists offering a champagne toast to the smiling William Shockley. The picture was taken on November 1, 1956, a few hours after the news of Shockley’s Nobel Prize had reached Palo Alto. By the time that happy picture was taken, however, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories was a chaotic and thoroughly unhappy place.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Enough for Rock to branch out from his day job and go on the hunt for an angel investor—someone comfortably rich, but quirky enough to take a willing gamble on a new technology and a pack of unknowns. He found Sherman Fairchild, an eclectic high-tech enthusiast who had become a multimillionaire thanks to his inheritance of a massive amount of IBM stock. The eight scientists of Shockley became the founding employees—and shareholders—of a new company called Fairchild Semiconductor.24 Modern Silicon Valley started with Fairchild and the “Traitorous Eight” who founded it. Financed by an eccentric trust-funder in a deal brokered by an East Coast financier, the firm’s origins underscored how tightly wedded the Valley was to outside, old-economy interests from the very start.

Also see James Gibbons, oral history interview by David Morton, May 31, 2000, IEEE History Center, https://ethw.org/Oral-History:James_Gibbons, archived at http://perma.cc/6Z4M-MHMG. The story of the transistor, Shockley Semiconductor, and the “Traitorous Eight” has been explored by a number of authors, most originally and notably in two biographies: Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2005), and Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock, and Rachel Jones, Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary (New York: Basic Books, 2015). 24. Arthur Rock, interviews by Sally Smith Hughes, 2008 and 2009, “Early Bay Area Venture Capitalists: Shaping the Economic and Business Landscape,” Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California; Arthur Rock, “Strategy Versus Tactics from a Venture Capitalist,” 1992, in The Book of Entrepreneurs’ Wisdom: Classic Writings by Legendary Entrepreneurs, ed.

By the end of his life, Shockley had come to consider his work on eugenics more significant than his discovery of the transistor. See Wolfgang Saxon, “William B. Shockley, 79, Creator of Transistor and Theory on Race,” The New York Times, August 14, 1989, D9; Joel N. Shurkin, Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age (New York: Macmillan Science, 2006). Shockley’s white supremacism often goes unmentioned in discussions of his role in the genesis of Silicon Valley. A monument and historical plaque installed in August 2018 on the site where Shockley Semiconductor once stood made no mention of the founder’s eugenics research, nor did the several speakers who celebrated Shockley’s legacy at the marker’s unveiling ceremony.


pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

Within a year of joining Shockley, the new hires sat around a breakfast table at the Clift Hotel to plot their escape. Although they were America's most brilliant scientists and engineers, they were distinctly unhappy working for Shockley. In a brazen display of disloyalty, they decided to leave and found a new company: Fairchild Semiconductor. Later dubbed the “Traitorous Eight,” they signed dollar bills in place of formal contracts – a symbol of nonconformity. Many consider this act of employee treachery as the definitive moment of Silicon Valley's creation, though the term would take another 10 years to enter the public lexicon. The defection set a precedent of ‘can-do’ entrepreneurialism and loyalty to lofty ideas, rather than individual firms and egos.2 The ringleader was Noyce, only 29 at the time, and the group's resident transistors expert.

Santa Clara County was little more than apple trees.1 Most renowned technology companies had headquarters in Massachusetts along Route 128, near the research hubs of MIT and Harvard. William Shockley was as close to a rock star as it got in the science world. He was a Nobel Prize winner who had coinvented the transistor. When he moved to Palo Alto to found Shockley Semi-Conductor Laboratory, people thought he had gone mad. It was far removed from Route 128, but he had his reasons. He had grown up in the area, and he wanted to return home to help his ailing mother. Shockley hired an all-star cast to join him. They were all experts in physics, metallurgy and mathematics, and they abandoned the East Coast to work with Shockley to commercialize the transistor.

Robert Noyce, one of the hires, said getting the call from Shockley was like picking up the phone and talking to God. Shortly after arriving, however, they discovered that Shockley was an erratic and difficult boss. He was a genius, but a jerk, and not just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill jerk. He was an epic egomaniac. When his colleagues at Bell Labs discovered the transistor, he tried to claim sole credit. Later in life, he spent his time espousing a racist eugenics agenda, promoting a high-IQ sperm bank, and losing all contact with his children. He was, by most accounts, a horrible boss. Within a year of joining Shockley, the new hires sat around a breakfast table at the Clift Hotel to plot their escape.


pages: 218 words: 63,471

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Even though he had a transistor license, he spent his time perfecting the 4 layer switching diode. You know, that’s the device that’s in every…, okay I can’t think of anything that uses a 4 layer switching diode. And as a manager, Shockley was awful. Everybody hated him. His team of Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce and Jean Hoerni had figured out how to make transistors cheaply and were working on multi-transistor devices, but were restless. In September 1957, eight employees up and left. They were known as the “Traitorous Eight”: Gordon Moore, Sheldon Roberts, Eugene Kleiner, Robert Noyce, Victor Grinich, Julius Blank, Jean Hoerni and Jay Last (left to right from a famous photo of them.)

This was happening all the time, at random amplifiers. *** TRANSISTORS AND ICS PROVIDE SCALE 121 At Bell Labs, back in 1936, William Shockley was assigned the task of finding a replacement for tubes. Within a couple of years, he figured out he needed either NPN or PNP transistors. But for a decade after he began the project, he couldn’t for his life build one. Management was getting impatient as phone traffic was increasing rapidly after World War II ended. In 1945 they assigned two engineers to help him, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. Shockley had gone off to try to make field effect transistors like the one Lilienfield had described, as well as a junction or bipolar transistor, which are better amplifiers than switches.

It first worked on December 23, 1947. AT&T didn’t tell the rest of the world until June of 1948, buying time to file for patents as well as make more than one prototype. Shockley was the boss, so he insisted that only his name go on the patent. Bell Labs lawyers got involved, and after doing a patent search, found the Lilienfield patents, so they hedged their bets. They applied for four patents. Bardeen and Brattain got their names on a point contact transistor patent and Shockley’s name went on a junction transistor patent. Two different patents were filed on types of field effect transistors that Schockley conceptualized and B&B worked on.


pages: 550 words: 154,725

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, business climate, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, Edward Thorp, Fairchild Semiconductor, Henry Singleton, horn antenna, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Karl Jansky, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Picturephone, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Russell Ohl, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Teledyne, traveling salesman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

He felt it necessary to check new results with his previous colleagues at Bell Labs, and he generally made it difficult for us to work together.” The young men under Shockley now understood what Bell Labs’ research staffers had long known: Shockley was an exceedingly poor manager, or perhaps something worse. In 1957, Moore and seven other colleagues, later nicknamed the “traitorous eight,” decided to leave Shockley’s company to form their own. Shockley felt that someone within the office was sabotaging the firm’s work. “The final straw,” Moore noted, had been when Shockley asked his entire staff to take polygraph tests.10 “One of Shockley’s characteristics,” his former Bell Labs colleague Ian Ross recalls, “was that he didn’t like to be ignored.

In a private letter to Jim Fisk a few years later, Baker seemed to enjoy passing on the gossip about the collapse of Shockley’s transistor business on the West Coast. “You may know the Shockley saga has come full cycle in which he has been appointed the Alexander M. Poniatoff professor of engineering science at Stanford,” Baker wrote. The new owners of Shockley’s transistor shop had now “snatched all production and development operations away from the Shockley Laboratory in order to consolidate them at Waltham, Massachusetts. Shockley is identified as remaining a consultant to the research activities in the Shockley Laboratory, but, of course, I do not know what will come further in connection with this money loser.”30 DESPITE BAKER’S APPARENT SOCIABILITY, no one at the Labs ever socialized with him.

Moll, “William Bradford Shockley: 1910–1989,” National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, 1995. 13 Shockley’s sensitivity had apparently been evident from a very young age, back when his father had recorded in his journal that “Billy always gets angry because he is thwarted or denied something.” Shockley Collection, Stanford University. 14 Victor Cohn, New York Post, April 25, 1968, p. 79. 15 William Shockley, “Proposed Research to Reduce Racial Aspects of the Environment-Hereditary Uncertainty,” April 24, 1968. Shockley Collection, Stanford University. 16 W. Shockley, memo to F. D. Leamer and J.


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Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

For decades there have been heated debates about what led to the creation of Silicon Valley, and one of the breezier explanations is that Shockley, who had grown up near downtown Palo Alto, decided to return to the region that was once the nation’s fruit capital because his mother was then in ill health. He located Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory on San Antonio Road in Mountain View, just south of Palo Alto and across the freeway from where Google’s sprawling corporate campus is today. Moore was one of the first employees at the fledgling transistor company and would later become a member of the “traitorous eight,” the group of engineers who, because of Shockley’s tyrannical management style, defected from his start-up to start a competing firm.

Beckman chaired a banquet honoring Shockley alongside Lee de Forest, inventor of the triode, a fundamental vacuum tube. At the event Beckman and Shockley discovered they were both “automation enthusiasts.”3 Beckman had already begun to refashion Beckman Instruments around automation in the chemical industries, and at the end of the evening Shockley agreed to send Beckman a copy of his newly issued patent for an electro-optical eye. That conversation led to Beckman funding Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as a Beckman Instruments subsidiary, but passing on the opportunity to purchase Shockley’s robotic eye. Shockley had written his proposal to replace workers with robots amid the nation’s original debate over “automation,” a term popularized by John Diebold in his 1952 book Automation: The Advent of the Automatic Factory.

A detail-oriented historian specializing in the semiconductor industry, Brock was painstakingly poring over the papers of William Shockley for his research project on the life of Intel Corp. cofounder Gordon Moore. After leading the team that coinvented the transistor at Bell Labs, Shockley had moved back to Santa Clara County in 1955, founding a start-up company to make a new type of more manufacturable transistor. What had been lost, until Brock found it hidden among Shockley’s papers, was a bold proposal the scientist had made in an effort to persuade Bell Labs, in 1951 the nation’s premier scientific research institution, to build an “automatic trainable robot.”


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

His insistence that computerprocessing power would double and the price would half every eighteen months became known as Moore’s law, and became another of the crucial memes for commercial computing.13 Moore’s law means that processing heavy, overly expensive concepts you develop today will still be feasible next year when the power goes up and the price comes down. Moore was to establish another of the memes that the Plutocrats contributed to the culture of computing: the spin-off. Moore and Philip Noyce, another of the Intel cofounders, were both members of the famous “Traitorous Eight,” who quit working with the increasingly unstable William Shockley at the pioneering Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to set up their own, competing company, Fairchild Semiconductors. Moore and Noyce spun off again to found Intel, which has inspired literally tens of thousands of entrepreneurs with dreams of establishing their own computer companies and becoming the Plutocrats of their generation—a variation of the participation meme.

., 11 Royal Dutch Shell, 112, 112–113 Royal Library of Alexandria, 89 R-PR (Really Public Relations), xvi, 123–127 RSS feeds, xvii Rumsfeld, Donald, 99 Running room, 74–77 Run time, 57 212 INDEX environmental perception and, 16 memes and, 19, 53–54, 76, 87, 91, 98, 113, 143–144, 149–150, 156–162, 165–170, 178, 194n1 mimicry and, xvii MP3s and, 27 participation and, 15–17 stickiness and, 15–19, 27, 32, 35 unimodernism and, 39, 49, 53–54, 57, 71–76 Sinatra, Frank, 63 Skype, 15 Skyscrapers, xiv Slow movements, 5–7, 181n7 Slurpees, 4 “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Nirvana), 62 Smith & Hawken, 113 Snakes on a Plane (film), 30 Snow White (Disney film), 20 Social issues advertisement and, 23, 52, 57, 59, 107, 175–177, 184nn12,15 Aquarians and, xv, 144, 152, 157, 159–169 atomic age and, xi (see also Atomic age) Berlin Wall and, 85, 97, 99, 104 bespoke futures and, xvi, 97–139 blogosphere and, xvii, 30, 34, 49, 68, 80, 92–93, 101, 175, 177, 181n7 capitalism and, 4, 13, 66, 75, 90, 97–100, 103–105 capitulationism and, 7, 24, 182n1 cell phones and, xiii, 23, 42, 53, 56, 76, 101 Communism and, 97–98, 103 computers and, xvi, 5, 15–19 (see also Computers) Cuban Missile Crisis and, xi dangers of overabundance and, 7–10 desk jobs and, 3 89/11 and, xvi, 97, 100–102, 105, 130 Enlightenment and, xvi, 129–139 Sacred texts, 28 Saint Laurent, Yves, 60 Saks Fifth Avenue, 31 Samizdat, 59 Scenario planning bespoke futures and, 111–119, 191n19, 192n20 chaos theory and, 117–119 crafting of, 113–116 Ogilvy and, 113–114 Schwartz and, 113–114 Scènes de la vie Bohème (Murger), 61 Schindler, Rudolph, 45 Schrödinger, Erwin, 49 Schwartz, Peter, 113–115, 119 Scott, Ridley, 107 Scratching, 53 Searchers, 167, 177–178 Brin and, 144, 174–176 description of term, xv–xvi Page and, 144, 174–176 Sears, 103–105 September 11, 2001, xvi–xvii, 99–101, 130 SETI@home, 122 Sex, 7, 19, 88, 129–130, 167 Shakespeare, William, 28, 44 Shannon, Claude, 148 Shockley, William, 156 Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, 156 Silicon Valley, 149, 161, 164 Silly Symphonies (Disney film), 88 Simon, John, Jr., 39 Simulation, xvi, 2, 11 affordances and, 16–17 bespoke futures and, 98, 121, 124, 126–127 buttons/knobs and, 16 communication devices and, 15–16 culture machine and, 143–144, 147– 152, 156–160, 166–168, 175–178 downloading and, 143, 168 emulation and, 183n3 213 INDEX Social issues (continued) figure/ground and, xvi, 42–43, 46, 102 folksonomies and, 80–81 hackers and, 22–23, 54, 67, 69, 162, 170–173 Holocaust and, 107 Hosts and, xv, 144, 167, 175 hypercontexts and, xvi, 7, 48, 76–77 information overload and, 22, 149 MaSAI and, xvi, 112, 120–123, 127, 193nn32 meaningfulness and, xvi, 14, 17, 20, 23–29, 42, 67, 77, 79, 119, 123, 128–129, 133, 173 narrative and, xv, 2, 7–8, 58–59, 67, 71, 76, 108, 110, 130–132, 143– 145, 174, 178, 180n4, 188n25, 193n34 personal grounding and, xiv–xv play and, xvi, 13, 15, 32–34, 39, 53, 55, 62, 64, 67–77, 85, 88, 110–111, 130–131, 143, 153, 160–163, 185n22, 188n25 Plutocrats and, xv, 144, 152–159, 163–166, 170 plutopian meliorism and, xvi, 127–129, 133, 137–138 power and, xvi, 8, 13, 17, 22 (see also Power) relationship with data and, 32 religion and, xi, 1, 13, 76, 130–135, 138 R-PR (Really Public Relations) and, xvi, 123–127 Searchers and, xv–xvi, 144, 167, 174–178 suburbs and, 3, 8 television and, xii (see also Television) terrorism and, 99–101, 130–131, 134, 137 unfinish and, xvi, 34–37, 51, 67, 70, 76–79, 92, 127–129, 136 urban planning and, 84–86 utopia and, 36, 73, 97, 101, 104, 108, 110, 120, 127–129, 138 wants vs. needs and, 13, 37, 57 wicked problems and, 158 World War I era and, 21, 107, 123, 146, 190n1 World War II era and, xi, 18, 25, 32, 47, 73, 107–108, 144–150, 157, 170 Socialists, 102–105 Software platforms, 15, 164, 170 Sontag, Susan, 135 Sopranos, The (TV show), 7 Soundscapes, 53–55 Soviet Union, 31, 85, 88, 146 Berlin Wall and, 85, 97, 99, 104 Cuban Missile Crisis and, xi Exhibition of the Achievement of the Soviet People’s Economy (VDNX) and, 102–105 fall of, 104 gulags of, 107 samizdat and, 59 unimodernism and, 49–52, 73 Space Invaders, 71 Spacewar!

, 71 Spielraum (play space), 75 Spin, 124 Stallman, Richard, 170–171 Stanford, 144, 149, 158–159, 162, 175 Stardust@home, 122–123 Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector (SIDC), 193n33 Sterling, Bruce, 101–102 Stewart, Jimmy, 44 Stickiness defining, 28, 184n15 downloading and, 13–17, 20–23, 27–29, 184n15 duration and, 28 fan culture and, 28–32, 48, 49, 87 gaming and, 70–74 214 INDEX Systems theory, 151 Stickiness (continued) information and, 22–23, 32–35 markets and, 13, 16, 24, 30–33, 37 modernism and, 36 networks and, 16–17, 22, 24, 29–36 obsessiveness and, 28 play and, 32–34, 70–74 power and, 32–34 simulation and, 15–19, 27, 32, 35 Teflon objects and, 28–32, 49, 87 toggling and, 33–34, 43, 102, 197n30 tweaking and, xvi, 32–35, 185nn22,23 unfinish and, 34–37, 76–77 unimodernism and, 70–74 uploading and, 13–17, 20, 23–24, 27–29 Web n.0 and, 79, 87 Stock options, 98 Stone, Linda, 34 Storage, 47, 60, 153, 196n17 Strachey, Christopher, 18–19 Strachey, Lytton, 19 Strange attractors, xvi, 117–120, 192n27 Sturges, Preston, 88 Stutzman, Fred, 22 Stewart, Martha, 49 Suburbs, 3, 8 Suicide bombers, 100–101 Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges), 88 Sun Microsystems, 172, 176 Superflat art, xi, 49 Supersizing, 3–4 Suprematism, 117 Surfing, 20, 80, 180n2 Surrealism, 31 Sutherland, Ivan, 160–161 Swiss Army Knife theory, 17 Symbiosis, 151–152 Synthetism, 117 Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (Jacobs), 85–86 Take-home consumption, 3 Tarantino, Quentin, 49 Taxonomies, 80–83 Technology analog, 18, 53, 150 anticipated, 108–110 bespoke futures and, 98–104, 107–113, 116, 119, 125–127, 131– 133, 136–139 broadband, 9, 57 cell phones, xiii, xvii, 17, 23, 42, 53, 56, 76, 101 commercial networks and, 4–5 compact discs (CDs), 2, 48, 53 computer mouse, 158–159 culture machine and, 143–163, 173–174 cyberpunk maxim on, 87 determinism and, 131–132 difference engine, 149 digital video discs (DVDs), 2, 7–8, 15, 58 dot-com bubble and, 79, 174 Dynabook, 161–162, 196n17 Ethernet, 161 Exhibition of the Achievement of the Soviet People’s Economy (VDNX) and, 102–105 film cameras, 15 Gutenberg press, 11, 137–138 hierarchical structures and, 123, 155, 175–176, 189n8 historical perspective on computer, 143–178 hypertext and, 158 information overload and, 22, 149 Jacquard loom, 11 mechanical calculator, 149 Metcalfe’s corollary and, 86–87 microfilm, 149–150 215 INDEX Technology (continued) Moore’s law and, 156, 195n13 New Economy and, 97, 99, 104, 131, 138, 144–145, 190n3 personal digital assistants (PDAs), 17 Photoshop, 131 progress and, 132 RFID, 65 secular culture and, 133–139 storage, 47, 60, 153, 196n17 technofabulism and, 99–100 teleconferencing, 158–159 3–D tracking, 39 tweaking and, 32–35, 185nn22,23 videocassette recorders (VCRs), 15, 23 wants vs. needs and, 4 woven books, 10–11 Teflon objects, 28–32, 49, 87 Teleconferencing, 158–159 Television as defining Western culture, 2 aversion to, xii bespoke futures and, 101, 108, 124, 127–129, 133–137 delivery methods for, 2 dominance of, xii, 2–10 downloading and, 2 as drug, xii, 7–9 general audiences and, 8–9 habits of mind and, 9–10 Internet, 9 junk culture and, 5–10 Kennedy and, xi macro, 56–60 marketing fear and, xvii overusage of, 7–9 as pedagogical boon, 14 quality shows and, 7 rejuveniles and, 67 Slow Food and, 6–7 spin-offs and, 48 as time filler, 67 U.S. ownership data on, 180n2 Telnet, 169 “Ten Tips for Successful Scenarios” (Schwartz and Ogilvy), 113 Terrorism, 99–101, 130–131, 134, 137 Textiles, 11 Text-messaging, 82 3COM, 86 3–D tracking, 39 Tiananmen Square, 104 Timecode (Figgis), 58 Time magazine, xii, 145 Time Warner, 63, 91 Tin Pan Alley, 28, 63 Tintin, 90 Toggling, xvi, 33–34, 43, 102, 197n30 Tools for Thought (Rheingold), 145 Torvalds, Linus, 144, 167–173 Tracy, Dick, 108 Traitorous Eight, 156 Trilling, Lionel, 79 Turing, Alan, 17–20, 52, 148 Turing Award, 17, 156 Tweaking, xvi, 32–35, 185nn22,23 20,000 Leagues beneath the Sea (Verne), 108 Twins paradox, 49–50 Twitter, 34, 180n2 2001 (film), 107 Ubiquity, xiii bespoke futures and, 125, 128 culture machine and, 144, 166, 177–178 folksonomies and, 80–81 Freedom software and, 22–23 hotspots and, xiv information overload and, 22, 149 isotypes and, 125 stickiness and, 22–23 unimodernism and, 39, 53, 57–59, 62, 74 216 INDEX simulation and, 39, 49, 53–54, 57, 71–76 soundscape and, 53–55 stickiness and, 70–74 twins paradox and, 49–50 unconscious and, 43–44 unfinish and, 51, 67, 70, 76–78 unimedia and, 39–40 uploading and, 42, 49, 53, 57, 67, 77 WYMIWYM (What You Model Is What You Manufacture) and, 64–67 WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and, 55–56, 64–65 United States Cuban Missile Crisis and, xi September 11, 2001 and, 99–101, 130 television’s dominance and, 2, 180n2 Universal Resource Locator (URL), 168–169 Universal Turing Machine, 18–19 University of Pennsylvania, 148 University of Utah, 160 UNIX, 170–171 “Untitled (After Walker Evans)” (Levine), 41 Uploading, xiii–xiv, 180nn1,2 activity levels and, 5 animal kingdom and, 1 bespoke futures and, 97, 120–123, 128–129, 132 commercial networks and, 4–5 communication devices and, 15–16 conversation and, 13 cultural hierarchy of, 1–2 culture machine and, 143, 168, 173, 175 disproportionate amount of to downloading, 13 humans and, 1–2 information and, 1, 4, 11 meaningfulness and, xvi, 29 stickiness and, 13–17, 20, 23–24, 27–29 Ubiquity (continued) Web n.0 and, 79–95 Ublopia, 101 Ulysses (Joyce), 94–95 Uncertainty principle, 37 Unfinish, xvi bespoke futures and, 127–129, 136 continuous partical attention and, 34 perpetual beta and, 36 stickiness and, 34–37, 76–77 unimodernism and, 51, 67, 70, 76–78 Web n.0 and, 79, 92 Unimedia, 39–40 Unimodernism Burroughs and, 40–42 common sense and, 44–45 DIY movements and, 67–70 downloading and, 41–42, 49, 54–57, 66–67, 76–77 figure/ground and, 42–43, 46 gaming and, 70–74 hypertextuality and, 51–53 images and, 55–56 information and, 45–49, 55, 60, 65–66, 74 Krikalev and, 50–51 macrotelevision and, 56–60 markets and, 45, 48, 58–59, 71, 75 mashing and, 25, 54–55, 57, 74 mechanization and, 44–45 microcinema and, 56–60 modders and, 69–70 Moulin Rouge and, 60–63 narrative and, 58–59, 67, 71, 76 networks and, 39, 47–48, 54–57, 60, 64–65, 68–69, 73–74 participation and, 54, 66–67, 74–77 perception pops and, 43–49 play and, 67–77 postmodernism and, 39–41, 74 remixing and, 39, 53–54, 62–63, 70 running room and, 74–77 217 INDEX Uploading (continued) unimodernism and, 42, 49, 53, 57, 67, 77 Web n.0 and, 79–83, 86–87, 91 Urban planning, 84–86 U.S.


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The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, ASML, British Empire, business climate, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, GPS: selective availability, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, John Harrison: Longitude, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, means of production, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, trade route, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Within a year, a group of eight of his first hires, all complaining bitterly about his tyrannical and secretive behavior and his overtly paranoid mien (and his inexplicable and unexplained abandonment of silicon as the central semiconducting element of his firm’s research), stormed out. The group, later to be known by Shockley’s dismissive term for them, the Traitorous Eight, formed in 1957 a new company that was to change everything. Their start-up,* named Fairchild Semiconductor, would begin to create a whole raft of new silicon-based products, and then shrink and shrink them, and imprint upon them computing abilities that hitherto could be accomplished only by giant machines that occupied entire suites of air-conditioned rooms.

Two days before Christmas in 1947, the Bell Labs physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley—the last a difficult man, later to be reviled as a keen proponent of eugenics; his cool calculation of likely wartime casualties helped tip the scales in favor of President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—had unveiled the first working device. They would win the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for doing so: in his lecture, Shockley remarked of what had been invented that “it seems likely that many inventions unforeseen at present will be made.” He knew only the half of it. John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain (left to right), joint winners of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the “transistor effect.”

By this time, the young Gordon Moore had entered the picture, having been fully steeped in science during years spent at Berkeley, Caltech, and Johns Hopkins. He had now left the world of the academy to enter commerce, and to explore the commercial possibilities of the fledgling semiconductor industry. He did so specifically at the behest of William Shockley, who had left Bell in 1956 and headed out west to Palo Alto, there to set up his own company, Shockley Transistors, and search for the first of his predicted “many inventions unforeseen.” The first transistor, invented by Bell Labs in New Jersey shortly before Christmas 1947. Arguably no other twentieth-century invention has been so influential, and in the story of precision, its creation marked the moment when moving mechanics gave way to immobile electronics, when Newton passed the mantle to Einstein.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Compulsory universal military service and the New Deal shuffled America’s deck of white men, losing distinctions based on ethnicity and home geography. They all trained on the government’s dime, and Shockley planned to use the military’s investment in these men to produce semiconductors for a new generation of missile weapons, in effect selling the government’s investment back to itself. It was one military-industrial-academic transistor block: the Solid State. Among Shockley’s recruits, the most famous group was a team Shockley later tarred as “the traitorous eight.” It comprised the preacher’s son (Robert Noyce) and the Jewish refugee (Eugene Kleiner), as well as Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Gordon Moore, C.

By the time of the gala, Beckman was the type of successful scientist-inventor-capitalist that the younger man aspired to be. Later in 1955, Shockley called his former professor, Beckman, to ask him to join the board of the speculative Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories.15 When Beckman heard about the plan, he became worried: He, too, saw a bright future for semiconductors, but Shockley didn’t have a sense of the competitive environment. Shockley had spent his career to that point in the Big Science circuit of academia-military-AT&T, and assembling a corporate board was new to him. He tried to launch Shockley Semiconductor with East Coast capital directly, and a deal with Vannevar Bush’s Raytheon almost went through, but he was not able to make it happen.

Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley, 68. 16. Joel Shurkin, Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age (London: Macmillan, 2008), 64. 17. Bo Lojek, William Shockley: The Will to Think (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2021), 59. 18. Michael Kort, The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 102. 19. William Shockley, “On the Economics of Atomic Bombing,” National Archives at College Park, “Dr. W. B. Shockley’s Files, 1942–1946 (Records of William B Shockley Relating to the Use of Radar in Very Heavy Bombardment Operations).” 20. H. H.


pages: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

However, his difficult personality drove off many of his most talented engineers. A breakaway group, whom Shockley later referred to as the “Traitorous Eight,” left his company to start the Fairchild Semiconductor Company in 1958.*7 That company was to have a seminal influence on the entrepreneurial culture of the Valley. Fairchild spawned dozens of spin-off companies and begat a culture in which it was common for people to work several years at a place and then go off and start their own company. In fact, today some Valley companies have a genealogical chart hanging in their offices that shows the history of the Valley’s various companies and their founders leading back to Fairchild.

In fact, today some Valley companies have a genealogical chart hanging in their offices that shows the history of the Valley’s various companies and their founders leading back to Fairchild. Two of the “Traitorous Eight” who went to Fairchild ultimately became members of the Forbes 400: Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. In contrast to the socially maladroit Shockley, Noyce charmed all who met him. In a 1983 Esquire article25, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose in Silicon Valley,” author Tom Wolfe described him as having a “halo effect” and a “Gary Cooper manner.” At Fairchild, Noyce designed26 one of the first integrated circuits, a development that revolutionized the electronics industry. Noyce’s invention made it possible to combine multiple transistors by engraving circuits onto a single silicon chip.

Terman’s influence extended beyond Hewlett and Packard to another notable entrepreneur: William Shockley, a Nobel Prize laureate and a co-inventor of the transistor, the fundamental building block of the modern electrical circuit. Shockley invented the transistor while working on the East Coast at Bell Laboratories, then left in a huff because he was not allowed to share in the profits of his invention. Terman suggested to Shockley that he try making his fortune in the Valley. Following Terman’s advice, Shockley assembled an especially talented team for his new company, the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. However, his difficult personality drove off many of his most talented engineers.


pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

But while Shockley was an excellent physicist (in 1956, he and Bardeen and Brattain were awarded the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor), he was a difficult and demanding boss, and not a particularly astute entrepreneur (the particular form of transistor technology that he chose to develop had limited commercial possibilities). By 1957 he had alienated so many of his employees that eight of them (the so-called Shockley Eight, or, as Shockley himself referred to them, the “Traitorous Eight”) left to form their own start-up company aimed at competing directly with Shockley Semiconductor. The leader of this group was Robert Noyce, who by this time had developed a reputation for being not only brilliant but charismatic. Among his other responsibilities, Noyce was charged with raising capital for the new firm, which at this point required him to again look to East Coast establishments.

Like most observers of the new technology, he reasonably assumed that the focus of development in transistors would be the established East Coast electronics firms. The migration westward began with William Shockley, the most ambitious (and later, notorious) of the original Bell Labs inventors. By the mid-1950s Shockley had left Bell to found his own company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories, headquartered in the then sleepy rural college town of Palo Alto, California. There are a number of reasons why Shockley selected this otherwise inauspicious location, including its proximity to Stanford University (where an entrepreneurial engineering professor named Frederick Terman was actively recruiting electronic firms to locate nearby), its relative closeness to its parent company Beckman Instruments, and, last but not least, the fact that Shockley had grown up in Palo Alto and his mother still lived there.

There are a number of reasons why Shockley selected this otherwise inauspicious location, including its proximity to Stanford University (where an entrepreneurial engineering professor named Frederick Terman was actively recruiting electronic firms to locate nearby), its relative closeness to its parent company Beckman Instruments, and, last but not least, the fact that Shockley had grown up in Palo Alto and his mother still lived there. At the time, there was no reason to suspect that anyone but Shockley’s employees would join him in this largely arbitrary relocation to northern California. One of the twelve bright young semiconductor physicists who did move west to join Shockley on his “PhD production line” was Robert Noyce, who joined the company shortly after its founding in 1956. But while Shockley was an excellent physicist (in 1956, he and Bardeen and Brattain were awarded the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor), he was a difficult and demanding boss, and not a particularly astute entrepreneur (the particular form of transistor technology that he chose to develop had limited commercial possibilities).


pages: 598 words: 140,612

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

In one notorious incident, he made his workers take lie detector tests in order to establish who was responsible for a secretary’s cutting her hand on a pin. By attracting and then repelling genius, Shockley both brought talented people to Silicon Valley and ensured that they would be starting their own firms instead of just working for him. At one point, eight of his best young scientists collectively quit. A cameramaking magnate named Sherman Fairchild bankrolled them, and Fairchild Semiconductor was born. The firm stayed in Silicon Valley. Why would the “traitorous eight” want to leave a paradise packed with Terman-trained engineers? In 1959, Fairchild Semiconductor patented the first integrated circuit.

He sought tenants like Lockheed, General Electric, and Westinghouse. Most important, he convinced the new Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to come to the valley. William Shockley was already a legend in the mid-1950s. Like Terman, his father had taught at Stanford. The young Shockley actually did poorly on an IQ test given by Terman’s father, which says something about the fallibility of IQ tests. Shockley was educated at MIT and then worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey. After earning a medal for his wartime work using technology to fight U-boats, Shockley was put in charge of Bell Labs’ new solid-state physics research group. This group collectively invented the transistor, and in 1956, Shockley and two of his co-workers shared the Nobel Prize in Physics.

This group collectively invented the transistor, and in 1956, Shockley and two of his co-workers shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. By that time, Shockley had left Bell Labs and headed out to California, where his enormous abilities—and a fatal flaw—would both assert themselves and both contribute to the success of Silicon Valley. Like Pericles and the Abbasid caliphs, he had a rare talent for attracting geniuses. In his first years, he searched America’s campuses and brought great young minds eager to come to Silicon Valley and work with the Nobel laureate. But Shockley was a capricious and dictatorial manager who couldn’t keep the talent that he had attracted.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

., 237 Sacks, David, xvi, 35–36, 47, 53, 67, 71, 83, 89–90 The Diversity Myth, 40–42, 47, 53, 145, 202, 252, 344n Salmon, Felix, 312 Sandberg, Sheryl, viii–x, 257, 260, 292 Sanders, Bernie, xvi, 300, 304 San Francisco Chronicle, 47, 120 Sankar, Shyam, 117, 265, 310–12, 318 Saverin, Eduardo, 108–9, 159, 205 Saving Arizona PAC, 332 Scalia, Antonin, 39 Schiavo, Terri, 227 Schmidt, Eric, xiv–xv, 54, 123, 261, 275–76 Schmitt, Carl, 94 Schwartz, Richard, 268 Scowcroft, Brent, 271 seasteading, 136–38, 169, 192, 229 SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), 86, 88, 249, 317 Seder, Sam, 287 SENS Research Foundation, 138, 326–27 September 11 attacks, see 9/11 attacks Sequoia Capital, 57, 66, 85, 86, 108, 119–20, 134–35 Sessions, Jeff, 286 700 Club, 42 Seymour, Stephanie, 228 sharing economy, 189–90 Shelton, Kathy, 243 Shockley, William, 144 Shockley Semiconductor, 143–44 Sicknick, Brian, 322 Signal, 330 Silicon Valley, vii, x, xii, 24, 43, 45–46, 54–56, 63–64, 75–76, 95, 121, 123–25, 134–35, 159, 162, 282–83, 305, 318, 334, 335 Bush and, 93–94 COVID pandemic and, 308–9 ideology of, xii, xiv, xv, xviii Karp on, 317–18 meritocracy in, 54 military-industrial complex and, 144, 145 Obama and, 262 sharing economy and, 189–90 Traitorous Eight and, 143–44 Trump and, 236, 240, 247–49, 257–64, 271, 281 Silicon Valley, 188–89, 326 Simmons, Russell, 53 Simpson, O.

He didn’t just want to persuade college administrators to root out campus political correctness; he wanted to turn fears about political correctness into an issue that could swing an American election. 10 THE NEW MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX Most histories of the American tech industry begin in September 1957, at a laboratory in Mountain View, California, when a group of the country’s best young engineers at Shockley Semiconductor announced that they had decided to quit. The Traitorous Eight, as they would become known, would go on to start Fairchild Semiconductor. Led by the brilliant physicist Robert Noyce, the group developed a process to etch transistors—the building blocks of computers—onto a piece of glass. This was the first commercially viable computer chip—the silicon that made Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley, in its purest form, was the military-industrial complex. Its founders weren’t dropping LSD. They were proud squares, with politics that were closer to those of David Starr Jordan than to the radicals of Stewart Brand’s imagination. The man who’d coined the phrase “traitorous eight” (and the boss whom those eight men rebelled against) was William Shockley, a physicist who worked on radar for B-29 bombers during World War II, then invented a new kind of transistor, and then, after closing his company and taking a job as a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, picked up Jordan’s mantle to become the campus eugenicist.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

In 1954, Terman created a new university degree program that allowed full-time employees of companies to pursue graduate degrees at Stanford on a part-time basis. One of Terman’s greatest coups was to persuade William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize as the coinventor of the transistor, to move from Bell Labs to the park in 1955. Shockley was a difficult customer—an egomaniac in fact—who both attracted and repelled talent. Fairchild Semiconductor was formed in 1957 when “the traitorous eight” left Shockley Conductor because they couldn’t take Shockley’s abusive management style any longer. The Valley had two other ingredients that proved essential for the commercialization of ideas: a large venture capital industry centered on Sand Hill Road and a ready supply of immigrants.

The reason for this was that big East Coast firms such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Data General were self-contained empires that focused on one product, minicomputers, whereas Silicon Valley was much more decentralized, freewheeling, and porous: companies were constantly forming and re-forming. Silicon Valley boasted more than six thousand companies in the 1990s, many of them start-ups. Even big companies, such as Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard, were informal affairs. People hopped from job to job and from company to company. Intel was formed when two of the traitorous eight, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, left Fairchild and recruited Andy Grove to join them. More than anywhere else in America, Silicon Valley was a living embodiment of the principle of creative destruction as old companies died and new ones emerged, allowing capital, ideas, and people to be reallocated.

., 325, 423 Schlitz Brewing, 263 Schmidt, Eric, 355 Scholes, Myron, 383 Schultz, Howard, 333 Schumpeter, Joseph, 9, 14, 138–39, 169, 319, 333, 397, 424 Schwartz, Anna, 236 Scientific American, 147 Scopes, John, 153, 195–96 Scotch Irish, 60, 68 SeaLand Service, 292–93 Sears, Richard Warren, 140–42 “secular stagnation,” 4, 273 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 243, 411 securitization, 340–41, 377–78 Sedition Act of 1918, 186 self-interest, 6–7 semiconductor industry, 317 sentencing guidelines, 398–99 September 11 attacks, 368, 369–70, 372 Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques, 294–95 service sector, 195 7-Eleven, 263 Seventeenth Amendment, 179 Seventies, the, 299–325 sexism, 363 Shane (movie), 111 sharecropping, 87 “shareholder activism,” 338 shareholders, 206–9 Shaw, George Bernard, 310 Sherman, John, 84 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 80, 84 Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, 143, 154, 159–60, 162, 184 Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, 162 Shockley, William, 352 Shultz, George, 329 Silicon Valley, 28, 351–55, 366 Silliman, Benjamin, 101 silver, 152, 161–62 Sinclair, Upton, 177, 245 Singer, Isaac, 47, 48, 422 Sixteenth Amendment, 184, 427 Slater, Samuel, 71 slaughterhouses, 118–19 slavery, 9, 33–34, 43, 60–61, 74–87, 419, 433, 434 average price of prime field hand, 76, 76 Sloan, Alfred, 209–12 Smith, Adam, 6–7, 36, 256 Smith, Fred, 333 Smith, Gerald L.


pages: 260 words: 77,007

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.” In 1957, William Shockley, the most cantankerous of the three men credited with inventing the transistor, moved west to build and market electronics. His Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, the first Silicon Valley start-up, was in Mountain View, a bike ride from where the Googleplex now stands. Shockley was so nuts about using logic puzzles in hiring interviews that he timed applicants with a stopwatch. Maybe that should have been a tip-off. Shockley was a holy terror to work for. Mere months after they were hired, eight of his brightest employees—the “Traitorous Eight”—got so fed up they resigned.


pages: 405 words: 105,395

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

In doing so, and almost by accident, they would sow the seeds of the calculator’s downfall and open the door to a new world of ubiquitous computing. Robert noyce was a legend of the semiconductor industry, a near-mythical figure who had learned at the feet of William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor, and who, in 1957, had been one of the “traitorous eight” engineers who left Shockley’s dysfunctional, eponymous company and struck out on their own. In the ten years since, Noyce and his co-conspirators had turned their new enterprise, Fairchild Semiconductor, into one of the most innovative and influential players in the business—and, latterly, they had watched in dismay as it, in turn, was stricken by defections and losses.

Lilienfeld had patented a device in which a strong electrical current passing through a piece of copper sulfide could be modulated by a second, weaker current applied to the same block of material.42 It was the first use of a semiconductor (that is, a material somewhere between a conductive metal and a non-conductive insulator) to amplify an electrical current, but Lilienfeld never completed a practical working version.43 Even so, the concept was alluring: here was an amplifier with neither the moving parts of a relay nor the fragility of a vacuum tube, and which, comprising as it did only a solid block of a single material, could theoretically be miniaturized almost beyond comprehension.44 After decades of research and experimentation across the globe, a trio of Bell Labs physicists succeeded in bringing Lilienfeld’s idea to fruition in 1948.45 For their momentous breakthrough, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley would be awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize for Physics—yet at the time, the response from the world at large was decidedly muted.46 A press conference announcing the transistor attracted only a desultory back-page article in the New York Times, and industry insiders looked upon the transistor as merely a toy invented by the phone company.47 Even Bell Labs’ parent company, AT&T, was unwilling to bet the farm on this new gadget.

Pat Haggerty, a Navy lieutenant who had bought GSI equipment during the war and who joined the company after it, was anxious to keep up, and in 1953, he poached from Bell Labs a semiconductor expert named Gordon Teal.9 In a twenty-year career at Ma Bell, Teal had learned how to grow extremely pure silicon crystals and also how to “dope” them with impurities to control their conductive properties. His research promised to revolutionize electronics: germanium, the element from which John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley had made their transistors, and which still dominated semiconductor manufacture, was difficult to purify and yielded components that worked only within a narrow band of temperatures. In theory at least, Teal’s putative silicon transistors would suffer neither such problem.10 He pushed forward with this work at Texas Instruments.11 All this led to a now-legendary presentation at a 1954 conference on electronics.


pages: 615 words: 168,775

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

Like Valentine, Eugene Kleiner and Tom Perkins had significant operating experience, not financial backgrounds, and they wanted to take an active role in the companies they funded. The gentlemanly Kleiner, with an accent that he called continental and others compared to Henry Kissinger’s, was one of the famous “traitorous eight” who had launched Fairchild Semiconductor after working for Nobel Laureate William Shockley. Kleiner had also been an original investor in Intel.VIII At fourteen, in Vienna, Austria, Kleiner had watched Nazis force his father to open the family safe before hauling him off to jail. A police officer who had recognized the senior Kleiner as the owner of the shoe factory that made boots for the force had saved his life by pulling him out of a line destined for the concentration camps.

The campus protests that disrupted Niels Reimers’s efforts to launch a licensing office were background noise for Kurtzig. When she was not studying, she spent time with her boyfriend, Arie, then finishing his PhD under Nobel Laureate William Shockley, the same Shockley who had launched a company around the transistor he had coinvented and then hired the eight young men who would leave to found Fairchild Semiconductor. Shockley had not yet fully descended into the paranoia and eugenic fervor that would later mar his reputation. (He would declare blacks intellectually inferior to whites and donate his sperm with the stipulation that it be used only by a female member of Mensa.)

One summer we found that there were no longer any orchards where we could pick our own apricots at a pittance a pailful.”5 By 1969, the newcomers had created a new business culture, much of it centered around silicon microchips. Silicon came to the Valley in 1956, when Nobel Laureate William Shockley launched a company to build transistors. The very next year, eight of Shockley’s top young scientists and engineers left to launch Fairchild Semiconductor, the first successful silicon company in Silicon Valley.6 In the ensuing dozen years, Fairchild gained renown for the quality and innovative record of its researchers, engineers, and sales and marketing teams.


pages: 382 words: 92,138

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Such strategies contributed hugely to the development of the computer industry during the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the technologies later incorporated in the design of the personal computer were developed by DARPA-funded researchers (Abbate 1999). Another key event during this period was the new innovation environment that emerged after a group of scientists and engineers in 1957 broke away from a firm started by William Shockley (Block 2011). The rebellious group of scientists and engineers, often referred to as the ‘traitorous eight’, went on to form Fairchild Semiconductor, a new firm that advanced semiconductor technology and continued ‘a process of economic fission that was constantly spinning off new economic challengers’ (Block and Keller 2011, 12–13). Lazonick (2009) adds that the spinoff culture ultimately began with Fairchild Semiconductor – and the firm owed nearly all of its growth to military procurement.

Soviet Union 37, 39; market failure theory applied to 61; as measure of innovation performance 34, 41; myth of business investment requirements 53–5; myth of innovation being about 44, 159–60; as not enough 142; of pharmaceutical companies 25–6, 188; R&D/GDP 52; SEMATECH funding 99; spending differences 42; of struggling OECD countries 41; technological change investments 59; in wind energy projects 144–5; worker tax credit 54 R&D/GDP 52 R&D Magazine 63 redistributional policies 31 Reenen, John van 46 Reinert, Erik 9n3, 38n5, 73 Reinhart, Carmen 17–18 renewable energy credits (RECs) 115n1 Renewable Portfolio Standards 114 ‘repatriation tax holiday’ 175 ‘representative’ agent 60 research 60, 78, 84, 136; see also science rewards, socialization of 156 risk 58–62, 70; see also socialization of risk risk landscape 22–3, 58, 194, 198 risk–reward nexus framework 186 risk–reward relationships: Apple and the US government 167–8; collective vs. private benefit 165–6, 196; corporate success resulting in regional economic misery 176–8; need for functional dynamic in 182–3, 197–8; overview 165–7; State recognition in 12 Robinson, Joan 34 Roche 82 Rock, Arthur 94 Rodrik, Dani 27, 28 Rogoff, Kenneth 17–18 Roland, Alex 98n7 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 6, 74 Royal Radar Establishment (RRE) 101 royalties 188–9 Ruegg, Rosalie 148 Ruttan, Vernon 62–3 Sanofi 69 Schmidt, Horace 92, 92–3; see also Apple Schumpeter, Joseph 10n4, 31, 35, 58 Schumpeterian innovation economics: creative destruction concept in 10, 10n4, 58, 165; extended protection in 189; influence of on BNDES 5; investment role in 31; macro models of 44; ‘systems of innovation’ view of 35–6; theory of 36n4 science 49, 51, 57, 59n1, 69; see also research Seagate 97 Segal, David 170 Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology (SEMATECH) consortium 99 Shapiro, Isaac 170–71, 171n2 share buybacks 25–7, 67, 171, 175 shareholder-value ideology 184, 186 Shiman, Philip 98n7 Shi Zhengrong 141, 152–4 Shockley, William 76 Silicon Valley 20, 63, 78, 95 Silver, Jonathan 129, 154 SIRI 103, 105–6, 109 SITRA, Finnish Innovation Fund 190 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) 10, 45–6, 45n6, 111n13 Small Business Administration (US) 94 small business associations 19 Small Business Innovation Development Act of 1982 79 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) (US) 20, 47, 79–81, 80, 188 Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) (US) 94 Smith, Adam 30; see also Adam Smith Institute; Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, An; ‘Invisible Hand’ socialization of risk and privatization of rewards: as cause of inequity and instability 185; direct or indirect returns of 187–91; framework for change of 185–7; income-contingent loans and equity 189–90; in the innovation economy 3; ‘innovation fund’ creation 189; IPR 189; mapping innovative labour into division of rewards 184–5; in pharmaceutical development 181; in public–private partnerships 27; skewed reality of risk and reward 181–5 social vs. private returns on investment 3–4 solar power: see wind and solar power Solow, Robert M. 33–4 Solyndra 129–32, 151, 154–5, 162; see also clean technology; ‘No More Solyndras Act’ Something Ventured, Something Gained (documentary) 78 Sony 108 Soppe, Birgit 146 South Korea 40, 61, 120–21 Soviet Union 37–9, 39, 76 Spain 120n4, 121, 121, 157 Spectrawatt 130n11, 162 spillovers 194 spinoff business model 76 SPINTRONICS 97, 97n5 Sputnik launch 76 Stanford Research Institute (SRI) 105–6; see also SIRI State: administrative role of 6, 12; attracting talent 12; capitalintensive investment by 27; ‘crowding in’ of 5–6, 8; ‘Developmental State’ 10, 37–8, 37–8n5, 40, 68; ‘directionality’ provided by 32n2; ‘dynamizing in’ 8; economic role of 1, 29; flexibility of 195–6; funding: see individual US agencies and departments; industrial directives of 21; as leading entrepreneurial force 193; market creation by 62, 167; organizational dynamics consideration 197; performance indicators lacking for 194; as private sector partner 5; response to criticism 19; responsibilities of 13; scope of endeavours of 18–19, 195; sectors funded by 63, 83, 196; targeted catch-up policies of 40; views of 9; see also ‘entrepreneurial’ State; ‘picking winners’ State development banks 2–3, 5, 122, 137–40, 189–91; see also Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES); China Development Bank (CDB); KfW (German Development Bank) stock market 49–50 Strategic Computing Initiative (SCI) 98–9 strategic management 197 Stumpe, Bent 101 Sullivan, Martin A. 174 SunPower 151 Suntech of China 152–5, 152n5 supply-side policies 83, 113–15, 159 sustainability 117, 119, 123, 195; see also green industrial revolution Swanson, Richard 151 Sweden 121 ‘systems of innovation’ approach: defined 36; foundation of 35–7; market failure approach vs. 9–10, 61–2; need for 22; regional 39; State role in 74; see also innovation; innovation ecosystems; Schumpeterian innovation economics ‘systems’ perspective 196 tariffs 108, 157, 157n6; see also feed-in tariffs Tassey, Gregory 32 tax avoidance: by Apple 11, 12, 171–5, 188; corporate 173–5, 187; ‘tax gap’ 187, 187n1 tax breaks 45–7 tax credits: energy 114, 138; impact of on R&D 28, 52–4; and R&D 111n13; and R&E 110; wind and solar power 126n8, 145, 149 tax cuts 10, 19, 23, 54, 69 taxes: antidumping tariffs 108; business as dependent on 69; ‘carbon tax’ 114; Citizens for Tax Justice 174n5; citizens unawareness of uses of 166; global avoidance schemes 174, 174n5; incentives to biotech firms 81; innovation systems not supported by 187–8; insensitivity of investment to 30n1; IRS 529 plans 111, 111n15; ‘patent box’ policy 51–2; policies impacting SMEs 45; policy 51; ‘repatriation tax holiday’ 175; State return from 165; US tax code 174; see also private vs. social returns; risk–reward nexus framework Taxol 188 Tea Party movement 17 technology: causing creative destruction 58; commissioning of advances in 54; core enabler technologies of Apple 95; dual-use 97; and growth 33–4; impact of regions on national performance 39; interagency collaborations in 74; origins of Apple products 109; revolutions 125, 126; SIRI 103, 105–6; State leadership of strategy for 40; unique situations in 59; see also computer field; wind and solar power technology commercialized: from capacitive sensing to click-wheels 99–101, 100n9, 103; cellular 102, 104, 109; from click-wheels to multi-touch screens 102–3; digital signal processing (DSP) 109; GPS 105; GPTs 62; LCD 107–8; lithium-ion battery 108; resistive touch-screens 101; silicon ICs impact on 98; thin-film transistors (TFTs) 107–8; ‘zero-emission’ electric vehicles 108 technology policy 75 Technology Reinvestment Program (TRP) 97 TFP of India vs. 46 TFTs (thin-film transistors) 107–8 Thomas, Patrick 148 ‘trade wars’ 122, 131, 157 ‘traitorous eight’, the 76 Tulum, Oner: on biopharmaceutical industry 67, 69, 82; NIH spending data compilation of 25, 69; on orphan drugs 81–2 United Kingdom (UK): approach to green initiatives 124–6; BBC 16; BERD (business expenditure on R&D) in 24; Big Society theme of 15–16; clean technology investment by 120; energy strategies of 116; government energy R&D spending 121, 121; green revolution in 120; Medical Research Council (MRC) 20, 67; outsourcing in 16; public R&D spending in 61; R&D/GDP 52; sector specialties of 42; SME government support 45; SME performance in 46 United States: Air Force 98, 104, 105; American Energy Innovation Council (AEIC) 26; Apple’s risk– reward relationship with 167–8; Army 107; competitiveness decline in 176; energy policy 158; energy strategies of 116, 137; funding and innovation in 52; funding sources for basic research R&D in 61; funding sources for R&D in 60, 60–61, 60n2; green revolution in 120; ‘hidden Developmental State’ in 38, 38n5; innovation threatened in 24; systems of innovation in 37; tax code 174; tax system 172; ‘trade wars’ of 122, 131, 157; types of venture capital successes in 49; undermining of innovation in 53; wind capacity of 143; see also taxes; specific agencies and departments of University of Southern California 77–8 UNIX 104 USSR: see Soviet Union US Windpower (later Kenetech) 147 Valentine, Don 94 Vallas, Steven P. 67–8 value: extraction 26, 42, 162; measures of 34 Venrock 94 Vensys Energiesysteme 149 venture capital: in Europe 53; Europe’s lag attributed to lack of 20; exit opportunities 48, 67, 81, 130, 138; failure of 107; government stimulation of 116; impatience of 129–32, 146n2; limited role of 131, 138; myth of as risk loving 47–50, 142, 161–2; and NASDAQ’s coevolution 50; presenting as lead risk taker 183; public vs. private 19, 47; short-termist approach of 108, 127; timing of investment by 23; Venrock 94; see also private sector venture capital sector investment: clean technology 161; green revolution 127–8, 128n9; in Solyndra 130; subsectors of within clean energy 128 venture capital stages of investment 47, 48; early stage and seed funding awards by 80; risk of loss in 48 Vestas: Denmark producing 143; DoE research influence on 148; early years of 147; patents purchased by 145; policy responses by 125, 137; rugged designs of 146 vision: Apple’s 93, 94, 99–100; ‘green’ 116, 120, 123; lack of 107; in nanotechnology 83–4; State’s 21–4, 58, 62–4 Warburg Pincus 50 Washington Consensus 40 Washington Post 57 Wayne, Ronald 89, 89n1; see also Apple welfare state institutions 31 Westerman, Wayne 102–3 Westinghouse 107 wind and solar power: clean technology in crisis 158–9; collective failure in 163; decline of US firms in 144, 144n1; grid parity in 141; networks of learning in 146n2; R&D myth in 159–60; small being beautiful myth in 160–61; solar bankruptcies 153–6; symbiotic innovation ecosystems in 162–3; venture capital myth in 161–2; from ‘Wind Rush’ to rise of China’s wind power sector 144–50; withdrawal of government support 149; see also specific corporations; clean technology wind and solar power markets: competition, innovation and market size 156–8; disrupting existing markets 161; global market for 143; growth opportunities in 156–7; growth powered by crisis 142–4; and manufacturing of 144, 146–7, 153 wind and solar power policies: California’s tax programme 147; fostering development 144–5; providing incentives 149–51; subsidies 148–9, 152; tax credits 145, 149 wind and solar power technology: aerodynamics of 148; computer use in 147–8; C-Si 129, 130n11, 151–2, 158; Denmark’s Gedser design 145; oil company role in 161n8; origins of solar technologies 150–53; remote power applications 150; research behind 148–9; see also clean technology wind energy R&D projects 144–6 Witty, Andrew 66–7 World Trade Organization (WTO) 40 World War II 74 Wozniak, Steve 89, 89n1, 94; see also Apple Wuxi-Guolian 152 Wuxi Suntech 153 Xerox 107 Xerox PARC 24 Zond Corporation 147–8 Table of Contents Halftitle Page Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Contents List of Tables and Figures List of Acronyms Acknowledgements Foreword by Carlota Perez Introduction: Do Something Different A Discursive Battle Beyond Fixing Failures From ‘Crowding In’ to ‘Dynamizing In’ Images Matter Structure of the Book Chapter 1: From Crisis Ideology to the Division of Innovative Labour And in the Eurozone State Picking Winners vs.

Introduction of silicon during this period revolutionized the semiconductor industry and heralded in the start of a new age when access to affordable personal computers for wider consumer markets was made possible. These breakthroughs were the result of research carried out in various public–private partnerships at labs including those at DARPA, AT&T Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Shockley and Fairchild, to name a few. Silicon Valley quickly became the nation’s ‘computer innovation hub’ and the resulting climate stimulated and nurtured by the government’s leading role in funding and research (both basic and applied) was harnessed by innovative entrepreneurs and private industry in what many observers have called the ‘Internet California Gold Rush’ or the ‘Silicon Gold Rush’ (Kenney 2003; Southwick 1999).


pages: 225 words: 70,241

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

It will get worse and prove that sound we hear—the fist thumping on our chest, proclaiming we are the top of the feeding order—is a hollow drum. PART I THE NEW GOLD RUSH The Gold Rush had the Big Four. Silicon Valley has the Traitorous Eight—men who broke away from Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in the ’60s and formed Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild eclipsed Shockley and became the soil from which the industry grew, with companies like Intel and Hewlett-Packard tracing their origins back to that early rift. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that the speed and efficiency of integrated circuits would double each year, accepted wisdom now known as “Moore’s Law.”

It’s hard to understand how it got this way. The best explanation I can think of—and it’s a stretch—is that people here place a huge premium on risk. Being the first person to get naked and jump out on that ledge. It’s a lot more risky than being the fourth person. . . . This city was built off the back of treachery, the Traitorous Eight leaving National Semiconductor. The industry rewards risky behavior. I guess it makes a certain kind of sense. All the great lessons come from failure. People don’t learn a lot from success, they just know that it happened. But surviving is the biggest lesson. LEON FIKIRI He sits by the window of a café on Polk Street, between Nob Hill and the Tenderloin, looking down the street at an old strip club, now flanked by shops and restaurants, hipster barbers, all intended for the young professionals ambling by in the afternoon sun.


pages: 196 words: 57,974

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

It also tolerated failure and even treachery to an unusual degree. Many would argue that its real birth date was not 1938 but the moment in 1957 when the so-called “traitorous eight” walked out of Shockley Laboratories to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which in turn spawned Intel and another thirty-six firms. Virtually every big firm in Silicon Valley was a spin-off from another one. Right from the beginning, it was a place where ties were optional, and first names compulsory. In 1956, the same year that The Organization Man was published, William Shockley (1910–1989) took all his colleagues out to breakfast in Palo Alto to celebrate the fact that he had won the Nobel Prize for inventing the transistor: a photograph shows only two of them wearing ties, and nobody wearing a suit.23 Meritocracy was crucial: youth was promoted on ability alone, and the Valley was unusually open to immigrants.


Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

* * * After graduating from Harvard, Sonja, at twenty-seven, was hired at Menlo Ventures, whose firm had offices adjacent to the Reid Dennis–founded IVP on Sand Hill Road. While Sonja could have remained on the East Coast, Sand Hill was her yellow brick road. It was here that the “traitorous eight” had left the manic but brilliant William Shockley to start Fairchild Semiconductor and later Intel. Here a marijuana- and hot-tub-loving Nolan Bushnell had met Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine to fund Atari. Here Arthur Rock, at first reluctantly, had provided funds and advice to a scruffy and “very unappealing” Steve Jobs to build Apple.

Sonja lobbied her partners to invest $3 million in 1995. By 1998, PCM was a $50 million business and growing fast. Sonja was grateful for her unofficial mentor at Menlo, Tom Bredt, who loved working with entrepreneurs to help them build great companies. Bredt had worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey, where William Shockley and his colleagues had sparked the semiconductor revolution with the fabrication of the first transistor. When Sonja put together the PCM deal, Bredt took the PCM board seat, given his experience. But he told Sonja, “Come with me and let’s see if we can help this company become successful.” He liked to ask entrepreneurs, “What’s keeping you awake at night?”


pages: 394 words: 108,215

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

He went to the newest of Palo Alto’s three high schools, Gunn, which was populated to a great extent by the children of Stanford professors, scientists, and engineers. Indeed, Gunn High backed up against the facilities of Fairchild Semiconductor, the company that in 1957 had begun the Valley’s grandest start-up tradition when the legendary “traitorous eight” had quit their jobs at Shockley Semiconductor to found the new company. Ted had decided to build his own computer in the mid-sixties after reading an article about fluidics in Scientific American. Using liquid as a computing medium was an odd notion, and luckily he was disabused of it when he obtained a summer job at Fairchild, where he learned to program using Fortran.


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The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Working as an investment banker at Hayden, Stone & Company in New York after graduating, Rock was first bitten by the venture investing bug in 1957, when he funded a group of eight pioneering scientists working on silicon semiconductors when they bolted from their current employer, the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Rock helped attract an investment from Sherman Fairchild, one of the largest shareholders of IBM, which led to the creation of Fairchild Semiconductor. Rock soon bolted from his own employer himself, leaving Hayden, Stone for the West Coast. (Depending on who you ask, the eight scientists are either the “Fairchild Eight” or the “Traitorous Eight.”) When Rock and partner Tommy Davis established Davis & Rock in 1961, they weren’t just trailblazers in identifying and investing in promising young technology companies; they also pioneered the model by which it would be done: Theirs was a partnership with profits split 80/20 between its limited partners (that is, its passive investors) and its general partners (that is, Rock and Davis).