 Okay, welcome everyone and thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events and we're very pleased to welcome you to our program Troublemakers, Silicon Valley's Coming of Age with author Leslie Berlin in conversation with journalist Frances Dinkelspiel. So before we begin, I'd like to find out if anyone is new to the Mechanics Institute who's never been here before, a few, wonderful. So just a note, please join us on Wednesday at noon and come for the free tour of the library, which is on the second and third floors. You'll see our International Chest Club, which is down the hallway. And you'll get a nice introduction about our history, since we were founded in 1854 and continue to be a wonderful, rich cultural center in San Francisco. So we hope that you'll take the tour, become a member, and become part of this wonderful ever-growing educational and cultural family here at the Mechanics Institute at 57 Post Street. And for those of you who are on Facebook, once again, come to the tour, come to our programs in person as well. So I'd like to just introduce our guest tonight. First of all, Leslie Berlin is Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. She has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences and served on the advisory committee to the Lemelson Center for Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. She received her PhD in history from Stanford and her BA in American Studies from Yale. And this is the first time that she's been to Mechanics. And so we welcome you, Leslie. Thank you. And also Frances Dinklespiel, who is a longtime member and also her mother, Georgianne Connolly, longtime member and trustee of the Mechanics Institute. So welcome back, Frances. She is an award-winning journalist and the co-founder of the new site, Berkeley Side. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Daily Beast, People Magazine, and other journals. Her first book, Towers of Gold, How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaiah Hellman Created California, which was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and chosen as best book of the year by the Chronicle and the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. Her second book, Tangled Vines, Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an arsonist in the vineyards of California, was a New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, and was named a Best Wine Book of the Year by the Wall Street Journal and Food & Wine Magazine. So once again, welcome Leslie Berlin and Frances Dinklespiel. Thank you. Well, I am really excited to talk to Leslie tonight about her fantastic book, Troublemakers, Silicon Valley's Coming of Age. And I'm not just an impartial journalist here, I am also a friend of Leslie's. And Leslie and I are in the same writing group. So I have seen this book from its very earliest stages when it was just an idea, and Leslie was sort of trying to figure out what it was like. And I read much of the book, but in preparation for this interview, I of course, went back and reread the book. And it was as if I had never really read it at all for the first time at all. And I just sat down, and in two days I devoured this book. It is so wonderfully written. It's got so many fantastic stories. And it tells such an unknown history that it was a real delight to read. So Leslie, first of all, thank you for doing that, for writing such a terrific book. And I guess when we think about Silicon Valley today or the history of Silicon Valley, certain names pop up as the makers of Silicon Valley. Men like Hewlett and Packer, Bob Noyce, of course, Stephen Jobs. But you decided to write a book that was very different than that. It wasn't a book that talked about these names that we're familiar with. It was a book that looked at sort of the lesser known lights of Silicon Valley. And I was hoping you could tell me, first of all, why you decided to write this book and why you chose this way of getting into this history. Yeah, well, thank you for having me. I wanted to write this book for a few reasons. My first book was a biography of Bob Noyce, who was the co-founder of Intel, co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor, and co-inventor of the microchip. And if anyone in the world ever deserved a biography of his own, it was Bob Noyce. He also, on the side, mentored Steve Jobs and started... He played a big role in Silicon Valley's rise in the eyes of the government. So he was an important person. And at the same time, as I was telling his story, I kept feeling like, wow, this is a whole book for one person, and there's so many people who are making this world around him. So I really wanted the chance to tell many people's stories. And I wanted to focus on this time. This is really, in some ways, the second generation in the Valley. It's the second generation, certainly when you're talking about Silicon in the Valley. And I was super interested in this generation because this is the time when Silicon Valley goes from being this sort of obscure little region that is populated by basically gearhead engineers selling chips to gearhead engineers at companies who use chips. And that's 1969. They're still orchards in the Valley. You know, computers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Houses cost tens of thousands of dollars. And there are factories in Silicon Valley. And no one really knows that now. But all of these products were built in the Valley. They built computers in these factories. They built chips in these factories. They built sophisticated telephone systems in these factories. And Silicon Valley then was just a very different place. By the end of this time, this sort of obscure region had become essentially what it is today on a smaller scale. You were now right at the very beginning of this time. You're on the cusp of Silicon Valley exploding in multiple directions all at once. So the personal computer industry is about to be born. The video game industry, which by the way is now bigger than movies, was about to be born. The biotech industry, which very few people talk about in Silicon Valley, also about to be born at this exact same time. Venture capital is really taking root. You have the first transmission of the ARPANET, which eventually morphs into the Internet, coming into the Stanford Research Institute to SRI. You have incredible protests that, among other things, forces SRI off the Stanford campus. These incredibly violent protests against the war at Berkeley and to a less violent such that people were killed at Berkeley. At Stanford, the president was having red paint thrown on him. But still a real level of aggression and fury against the Department of Defense and the war effort, which had some very practical implications for Silicon Valley in that people who at one point would have gone to work for the Department of Defense, specialists on the cutting edge of microelectronics and especially graphics, all of a sudden decided they will not work for the Department of Defense and they will not work for the military subcontractors and they suddenly become available to work at places like Atari and places like Apple, where they start building this equipment that the Valley became so famous for. So I was just really excited because I felt like you are about to see the big bang happen. And this was my chance to sort of tell that story through the... And you can't do that through the life of one person. And I didn't want to do it through the lives of the people that everyone has heard about a million times. Because I mean, I opened the book. One of the things I talk about is being at a party. A very... This is a true story. I was at a party and also at this party, I don't tend to go to parties where this happens, but there was the COO of a company, a very big company with a very well-known CEO. And this COO started singing this little song. And the only words were... Let me make sure I get them right. I did all the work, he got all the credit. That was the entirety of the song. And I think a lot of times the people who get the credit do deserve credit and they don't deserve all the credit. And so I wanted to be able to talk about everybody else around them. So when we think about Silicon Valley today, there are a lot of things that we take for granted. Number one, personal computers. Number two, software being a huge market. Number three, rise of video games. Number four, the internet. And none of these things were really in existence when you opened this book in 1969. And so what I was thinking we might do would be to go through a couple of the stories that you talk about and discuss a little bit about who the characters are in the book and the role that they played in creating all these industries that we take for granted today. So of course probably the place to start would be the story of a man named Bob Taylor who as it turns out was a really important founder in a number of ways in Silicon Valley and yet is not a well-known man. And in fact when he died this, it was earlier this year, right? You ended up writing a number of pieces about him because most journalists didn't even really understand how important he was. Can you tell us who Bob Taylor was, where he came from and a little bit about how he put the pieces of Silicon Valley together? Yes, and Bob Taylor would have grabbed me by the scruff of my neck for not saying what Francis just did, which was of course, this was also the birth of the software industry. And Bob would say it shouldn't be called Silicon Valley, it should be called Software Valley. And in fact, more than half of venture capital investments now are in software. And the reason that you all now have all these Google buses and all these tech companies up here is thanks to software because we don't need factories anymore to be a high tech company. Basically you need a computer, it can even be a laptop, and you need an internet connection and you're in business. And so people who have always wanted to say live in the city and work for a tech firm, now they can or they can live in the city and take a giant white bus down 101. Where I live. And so Bob Taylor was really a remarkable person to learn about for me. Bob is the person who told the Department of Defense that they really needed to start some way to network computers together so they could talk to each other. This is 1966 when he has this conversation and the book opens in 1969, when that computer network is functional and the first transmission is coming in to SRI. And what did computers look like at this point? Yeah, so computers, so at this point computers were moving beyond the Bob Taylor was in his office in the Pentagon where, and I mean this is such an incredible image, they delivered mail on these giant tricycles. So I mean it's like something out of Charlie in the chocolate factory. You know, like in the Pentagon there were these people, I think they were men. I'm not sure, but I think they were men on giant tricycles with a basket in the back delivering the mail, which is just, your defense dollars at work. And so Bob was in his office and he looked over and he saw three different terminals that he could talk to. He knew what was going on at each of these terminals. No one who was connected to these systems, they were called time sharing systems, so that it looked to people like they had unique ownership of a computer, but in fact they were all sharing a big computer together. It's a lot like cloud computing today. And Taylor said, well wait a second, this doesn't make any sense. I can talk to all three of these, but they can't talk to each other. And so he decided we need a way to network this together. This is something people have been talking about in different ways for a while. But it was Bob who said, okay, we can do this now and the DOD has to do it. And contrary to popular belief, just so you know, there was not an argument that we should start the internet to, in case of nuclear war, we will be able to survive. This is a myth that grew up over time. It just wasn't why he did it. So step one, I'll start the internet. Step two, he comes to California. He was a native Texan. And he just missed kind of wide open spaces. And also he didn't want to work for the DOD anymore either. He comes to California and he starts the lab at Xerox Park that is probably most famous for being the lab that Steve Jobs visited in 1979, Taylor's lab and a sister lab. And that is where he saw for the first time the graphical user interface, a bitmap display, what you see is what you get, the use of a mouse, networked computers. They had email going on. This was just insane in the mid-1970s. Tell us what his office looked like because he did a couple of interesting things. He was a psychology major. He wasn't an engineer. Right. And tell us about the beanbags. Oh yeah. Because I think, you know, we think, what did we think about in Silicon Valley today? You know, ping pong tables, candy dispensaries. But at this time, when Bob Taylor came, it was, you know, people still more formal and desks and things like that. What did he do? Right. So, I mean, Silicon Valley in general has always been more casual than the East Coast. And Taylor in particular had a bunch of PhD researchers. Taylor had a master's degree from the University of Texas. But he was, someone described him as a concert pianist without fingers. So, he didn't know how he could build these things that he was imagining. But he was a magnet for the people who did. And he just wanted to create the best possible environment he could for innovation aimed at building his idea of a fundamentally very easy to use computer. And so, someone suggested they should have beanbag chairs. They should have their meetings in a room with beanbag chairs. And actually, I have a picture of that in the book. And you can just picture the sort of like 70s rainbow color of like burnt orange and avocado green. And you know, they're all there. And actually, I mean, if you guys are interested in Xerox Park, on November 30th, I'm gonna be speaking at an event down at Xerox Park with Chuck Gesheke. Because another thing that Bob Taylor did was Xerox Park eventually, Taylor's lab dissipates like a seed pod in the wind because Taylor is fired. And his people who worked for him go on to, I mean, Ethernet was invented under Taylor's watch. They go on to start 3Com. They go on to become major researchers at Google eventually. One of them is Eric Schmidt who ran Google. And two of his researchers started Adobe. So one of those is Chuck Gesheke. So I'll be talking to Chuck Gesheke and Eric Schmidt actually on November 30th if you want to come down to Palo Alto and learn everything about Xerox Park and this incredible presentation that they did 40 years ago where they imagined the office of the future. So that's gonna be pretty exciting. So that was the second thing Taylor did. He starts the internet, he launches a research lab that is so extravagantly populated with geniuses that literally the president of MIT worries about the future of academic computer science labs because they're all going to work for Taylor. And then the third thing he does is he goes to deck when he's fired from, he technically resigned but he was fired from park and he starts their systems research center where among other things they build an early electronic book. They have very sophisticated systems going and those researchers contribute to the birth of Alta Vista which is the first truly magnificent search engine. And this is years before Google existed. So I like that you talk about how Bob Taylor sort of was the pinnacle in his lab people came and then spread themselves out throughout Silicon Valley. This is a theme you bring up a lot and indeed in the introduction you talk about this famous Steve Jobs speech where he talks about passing of the baton between generations. And I think that this book really shows how particularly in this era there was a lot of cooperation in Silicon Valley as opposed to necessarily just competition. And I think one of the best examples that you bring up in of the importance of passing the baton and one generation tapping into the knowledge base of another generation comes with your story about Mike Marcula and Apple Computer. And I think this you know you're probably getting a lot of press and a lot of people are asking about Mike Marcula because it is indeed such a shocking and wonderful story at the same time and it's not a very well-known story and it illustrates this connection. Can you talk a little bit about what you know Mike's beginnings and sort of what happened with Apple and just tell us tell us that story. Yeah, sure. So if Bob Taylor is like the take no prisoners it's good to work for Bob Taylor but you sure as heck don't want him working for you. He if that is Bob Taylor. Mike Marcula is like the quietest lowest key man you will ever have met. He's deeply ambitious. He's very quiet about it. So Mike is an engineer. He works first at Fairchild Semiconductor which is the first successful Silicon Company in Silicon Valley and then he leaves Fairchild having fielded many offers from the companies that spun out of Fairchild which are hilariously called the Fairchildren. He ends up eventually accepting an offer from one of those which is Intel. So he gets to Intel before the IPO, before the microprocessor is invented and very quietly this is very typical of Mike negotiates instead of a thousand stock options which is the typical grant to an engineer 20,000 stock options. So he has 20,000 pre IPO stock options at Intel and four years later realizes he can retire and never needs to work another day in his life. And Mike is just he is the most systems oriented person in the world. I really like Mike Marcela and he just gets his kicks like he says that flips my switch and the kind of things that flip his switch are like a really well organized system to track order processing. And I mean this is the kind of stuff that really gets Mike excited. So he realizes that he can retire and he just kind of keeps that thought in the back of his head. His options haven't all vested. He's having a really good time but he starts to keep this list on literally like on a three by five index card of what I would do if I could retire. And he has a rule for himself if it doesn't fit on the card he's not going to do it and if he wants to add something else to the card he's got to cross it off. So eventually things transpire such that he wants to leave and he does and he's like great I'm going to retire for good. I think it's 1974 just the beginning of 75 I'm going to retire for good and his list is things like I'm going to do public service. So he serves on the planning commission of his town. He teaches fourth grade math for a while. He does woodworking. He hangs out with his kids. He's a great athlete. He becomes a better tennis player. He teaches himself to read music. And I mean he's just having a blast and but he has this little itch which is that he really misses being around what he calls sort of bright you know people with just eagerness in their eyes. So he announces to a couple of his friends who are venture capitalists who he knows them all because they were all in the semiconductor industry together. So Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers. This Kleiner was one of the eight who started Fairchild. Perkins actually was a Hewlett Packard guy. Sequoia Capital which starts at the same time Don Valentine was another Fairchild guy. So he starts just putting the word out among these VCs that he's essentially going to hold office hours. And he gets a call from Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital who says they're these two guys. They're in a garage. They need so much help. Can you go meet with them? And Marcela normally I mean he's only he said he's only going to do this on Mondays. And he decided well okay I'll you know I'll go. But he goes there and against his will come see me when he goes there. I'm about to tell. Oh sorry I thought you were about to just talk about okay. He goes there kind of almost against his will because he's just all he's heard is these two young guys are there. And of course it turns out that it's Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. And they're in this garage and Mike describes walking in and of course there's just like wires everywhere. And I don't know if you've ever seen the pictures of the old garage and you know Steve Jobs has like all this hair and a mustache and they're on their jeep they're in jeans. You know they couldn't really they aren't acting like people who realize they're meeting a millionaire sort of investor guy. And they and he walks in and he looks around and he falls in love with the layout of the circuit board for the Apple too. And he just looks at this and he just he can't believe everything this computer can do. And he is really loving his life with his tennis and his woodworking. And and but and so he said he this looks so promising he tells Jobs and Wozniak look I'll help you write a business plan. And he gives them almost like homework assignments. You know now you need to define a market. And they go and then they wouldn't they wouldn't do it. And they they kept not doing what he asked them to do. And when you think about it how could they do it. I mean Steve Jobs was 21 years old. He had worked for 17 months total in his life as a tech for Atari. He didn't know what he was doing. Steve Wozniak so was an interested in starting a company that A. He tried to give the Apple one to Hewlett Packard to sell and they turned it down. And B. He basically Markle had to say to him you cannot work. You can't do this on the side anymore. Like this can't be a little side project for you. And Markle basically dragged himself kicking and screaming into the chairmanship of Apple. Because he loved it so much. He loved this computer. And he just felt like there was a Markle shaped hole at Apple. Because there were these these big companies like I just mentioned Hewlett Packard. Xerox is a great example of a company that could have done what Apple did. But they weren't the big companies that actually knew how to build companies and build products in volume weren't interested in these little computers. And the people who were desperately interested in these little computers were hobbyists who like thought it was they thought building a computer was like building a model airplane. And they were perfectly happy to program a computer by flipping switches and reading the lights. And you know that was that that was their idea. They wanted to build a computer but they didn't know how. And so Mike was the person who was able to bridge this and sort of see the potential in this computer and know how to build a company. And and I would just point out that there were dozens of these little companies trying to build personal computers at this time. It's not as if Apple was the only one. But what made that company go from two extremely bright guys with an excellent design in in a garage to the youngest company ever to hit the Fortune 500 for my money was Mike Marcula. And if you look at their S1 when they went public in December of 1980 the the president the VP manufacturing the VP marketing the VP sales the VP HR the chief counsel the CFO they all had worked in this in the semiconductor industry. They all had been brought in by by Mike Marcula Regis McKenna who was the person who introduced the personal computer to the world this incredible PR and marketing guy. Also incidentally the guy who introduced the microprocessor and biotech. He was a semiconductor guy. He worked at National the the main funders Van Rock and Sequoia Capital. They had funded Intel or he had they'd worked with Art Rock. They had worked with him at in the semiconductor industry. So this to me was an incredible sort of example of this baton pass because Marcula people usually have talked about as this guy who came gave them money and sort of left. They never noticed oh he owned a third of Apple with Jobs and Wozniak and he is the person who built that company and you would never know it. He's just been perfectly happy to stand in the background all this time. So that's Mike. Maybe we'll just ask you for one more example of sort of some of the stories that are in the book because I don't want to give away the entire book. What you know Stanford University is one of the richest universities in the country. I'm an alum and when they asked me for money I say well you have a 10 million billion dollar endowment. What do I need to do to you know why do I need to help you. And one of the reasons they're so incredibly wealthy is that they had a huge chunk of Google stock before it went public. And so you know that's a very common thing for universities to do these days. But back in the 60s and 70s it wasn't a routine for universities to make a priority of getting professors ideas out to the public and they didn't really encourage patents and that kind of thing. And it took the sort of efforts of a particular one person that you talk about in this book that really saw the possibilities in licensing the intellectual property of a university. And it's led today to some of you know the richness it's not only at Stanford it's also at Berkeley it's at MIT. Can you tell us a little bit about what it looked like and then tell us about how it changed. Yeah sure so I mean and I consider a theme of this book to be that there were all these great ideas that no one knew about in at the time. And some somewhat what you see during this time is these ideas that had sort of been locked in the Department of Defense or locked in university labs make their way out to the rest of us. At Stanford there there was a process by which professors could patent their ideas and they would be licensed for use outside. It was well I'll just tell you how effective it was. In the 13 years leading up to 1969 which is when the person Francis is talking about his name is Niels Ramers showed up in those 13 years Stanford for all the inventions by all its faculty staff and students from across the university had earned in total over 13 years less than three thousand dollars. And Niels Ramers said there's got to be a better way to do this and started what's now known as the Office of Technology Licensing started it as a pilot program in a little trailer next to Encina Hall. Encina Hall meanwhile is literally having this is again 1969 students breaking the windows running in stealing files you know absconding with the files and and Niels is you know Niels meanwhile is the kind of guy who his his definition of a swear word is so he's the most mild guy and Niels starts this office and in the first year it brings in 55 thousand dollars and to date it's brought in two billion dollars to Stanford not just because of ownership of the Google algorithm which was developed at Stanford by two graduate students under actually a federal contract but also the recombinant DNA patent which is the story that I tell it's sort of the the combination of the story of the birth of the Office of Technology Licensing and the birth of the biotech industry and Niels really had it it seems obvious now that of course a university would want to be able to not simply profit from its faculty and staff inventions but actually be able to disseminate those more widely because this is this is one of the things that Niels feels very strongly about which is that once ideas are patented they are often more likely to be used than if no one knows about them it seems like an obvious idea now but it's it was something that it was a huge issue at Stanford and rightfully so because the job of a university is to increase the stores of knowledge for the world and now this is someone saying well you're gonna have to pay to use our knowledge um and particularly there were a lot of issues around because a second fight that Niels put up was whether or not they could take equity in companies and there was there were a lot of questions around is Stanford now going to start to focus on inventions that they know are going to be profitable to the university are those departments going to get more attention or those researchers going to get more attention it was it's really was a very hair tearing time at Stanford and watching them go through these questions and also at the same time what they're trying to do is bring recombinant DNA to the public which was completely terrifying the notion that you could open up a little ring of DNA and insert DNA from a foreign species and then plant that now recombined DNA into bacteria that then sort of worked like a little factory and made you know millions of these these little recombined DNA circles and then they expressed proteins and it could just go on forever and ever and people were picturing literally the end of humanity as we know it and and serious people like the mayor of Cambridge Massachusetts asked the public and and specifically the scientists at Harvard if it was possible that the orange eyed monster that some people had reported seeing around Harvard yard could be due to recombinant DNA and they they a number of researchers including one who won the Nobel Prize were forced off campus and actually out of the country to do their research in secure labs in England and so something that I I think is really important for us to recognize now because the tech industry and again rightfully so is the subject of a great deal of attention right now and a lot of questions around the kind of power it has and our is the is the ability of the technology outrunning our ability to control it and is it going the direction we want and all this and these are very real questions that come up when you are pushing beyond the established boundaries that already exist and this is something that you see happen again and again here and it's part of the reason that I actually called the book troublemakers because these are people they they aren't destroyers you know they they aren't disruptors they certainly aren't intending to be disruptors they I think of them as rebels with a cause they are making trouble because there's something that they feel needs to happen and they can't do it within the existing definition of how to do things so you know regions around the country regions around the world are always trying to replicate what's gone on in Silicon Valley and the amount of I heard something on the radio today that the Silicon Valley produces one sixth of the wealth of the entire world or some crazy number about how important and influential it is other places have managed to sort of certainly create some areas where tech flourishes but nothing has been done on the scale of Silicon Valley or as successfully as Silicon Valley as the archivist for the Silicon Valley archive at Stanford uh can you talk a little bit about why what you know what was the magic and why it hasn't been able to you know be cloned and sent everywhere else yeah and are we in danger of losing that magic it's a good question um so uh so I'm a historian which means that I tend to try to find the long the long trends here and it's absolutely true that all over the world people seem to think if you take a university and you plop it down you put a red tile roof on it and you build some houses and drop a few venture capitalists in you're going to you know it's like instant Silicon Valley and we've seen again and again that that isn't what happens I guess I have a couple things to say about this uh the first thing I would say is that just because we haven't reproduced Silicon Valley uh doesn't mean that that that makes sense that we haven't reproduced Silicon Valley because Silicon Valley is the product of a specific time and place uh Silicon Valley was established at a time it was established in essentially orchard land at a time when the rest of the American economy was highly highly developed and that the the what the effect of that was that you had an incredibly powerful technology the transistor and then the microchip and everything that has come after it dropped into a place that really didn't have an industrialized economy yet and in the way that we do now sophisticated economy and what happened was that the ecosystem was able to grow up around that little seed that was dropped in and be sort of perfectly sculpted so and and it was a highly entrepreneurial environment itself so yes you had the people starting companies but you had the people building the equipment for the companies and you had the suppliers to the companies and you had these specialized law firms and you specialized HR firms and you just it went on and on and on this whole world geared you know you had junior colleges that started offering courses that were specifically designed to get jobs in these companies I just found out yesterday that uh there's their towns I think Sunnyvale is one of them we're in the same way that you can get water and um you know natural gas pumped to to your facility you can also get certain chemicals that are like important to the production of semiconductor chips and such you could they were plumbed right into the building so I mean the whole system was set up to support this and what that means is now Silicon Valley is going on almost 50 years of a highly developed self-perpetuating system and that's what Silicon Valley has more than most other places that the baton pass and immigrants those are the three things that Silicon Valley has in abundance so at this point more than half of the unicorn companies which are the privately held companies with valuations over a billion dollars more than half of them have at least one founder born outside of the United States two-thirds of the people working in tech two-thirds of the men working in tech in the valley 76% of the women working in tech in the valley between the ages of 25 and 44 were born outside of the United States so there's you know think there's again legitimate concerns that should be brought up around our h1b visas being used the way that we want them and the way that it was designed in such but in the broader picture if you don't have immigrants you don't have Silicon Valley and it's been this way forever I mean at the time that I'm looking at already you're at twice the number of immigrants in the valley as in the rest of the country and even before that almost no one was born there they all just came rushing in in the two decades before this book opens the population of Silicon Valley triples from 300,000 to a million people it's as if a new person's moving into the valley every 15 minutes for 20 years without stopping it's just like this huge rush of people that is a constant refresh to the system so when you ask me is Silicon Valley going to continue to be at the top of the game my answer is if we continue to let in immigrants yeah I think that Silicon Valley will be but that is not to say that these other regions I mean look at Seattle for heaven's sake I mean look they're there in their huge places in India and China that are highly developed ecosystems around specific technologies and that's I think it's no longer as if there's and really it whenever was one sort of gold medal that a region gets to win at this point they all need each other we all need each other this is an incredibly sophisticated global system at this point so one of the biggest issues in Silicon Valley today is gender inequity we read a lot about disparity in pay we there are very few women on the boards there are very few women high in the tech world you do profile two women in your book they they represent different things but but I know that you actually had to it wasn't as easy to find the women that you you profile in the book as it was to find the male men and I think that's reflective of some of the difficulties women have had traditionally in historically in Silicon Valley could you talk a little bit of that about that you know maybe tell us a little bit about the women that you look at and and sort of what were the barriers and you know to their rising to the top although some of them did rise to the top right so I look at two women there's seven people in the book book excuse me two of them are women one is a woman named fawn Alvarez and fawn starts out when the book opens she's 12 years old and she is picking plums for pocket money in the orchards of the you call it Hamlet of Cupertino California and she ends up working on the manufacturing line at Rome and then building a sophisticated telephone systems it's like the first time that people are in office is a really using voicemail and she tells some very funny stories about how people had to learn to use voicemail which is something we don't even think about now and she eventually ends up rising through the ranks until she is the chief of staff to the president of IBM Rome after IBM acquires Rome and I wanted to tell fawn story a because it so perfectly follows the trajectory of Silicon Valley itself where she's seen she starts out in the orchard she goes to the manufacturing line and then she moves into the more professional as they call it work at the same time that these manufacturing jobs are all starting to move away she was very and she's just absolutely a fascinating person and so I wanted to tell her story and the second story I tell is the story of Sandy Kurtzig who started Ask which was a very early software company in Silicon Valley just as an aside the software industry the independent software industry is born at this time because of something that we rarely talk about which is the role of the government and in 1969 IBM was forced to unbundle its hardware from its software and that really led to the birth of the independent software industry Sandy Kurtzig is one of the people to take advantage of that and so Sandy contrary to that sort of baton pass that I was describing Sandy comes up completely outside of the system for most of the time that she is running Ask most of the Silicon Valley stories origin stories we hear often have to do with a garage Sandy started Ask at her kitchen table we don't think of garages as gendered spaces they are highly gendered spaces and so was her kitchen table and and and well I'll finish Sandy's story and Sandy has said that she really feels like it part of what helped her at this time was that she was in charge I mean she didn't need to worry about a lot of the rules around what women could or couldn't do because she was making the rules at the same time she faced you know people would ask her to get coffee she was a very attractive woman people thought she was a booth babe at the different trade shows that she would go to it was you know but she also she really played it up she felt like you as she was she was best in the sort of a sales role and she felt like as a salesperson you want to be memorable and so she had a pink briefcase she had lavender business cards she dressed very femininely she was I asked her why she did that and she said you know at the time men didn't know it was all men everyone she encountered was a man they didn't know what to do with women who weren't dressed like stereotypical women's clothes and so she just felt like she would do better playing that part than dressing you know in men's suits I mean in the 80s you know you can find her with the same giant shoulder pads as everybody else um and what was interesting to me and and and there are women inside these companies um you have I mean the fact that I can give you their names probably tells you how few there were you know I'm like Susan Care was on the Macintosh team a very important player on that team there were women video game designers at Atari um there were women inside all of these companies I mean the hidden figures kind of concept was a real thing and in in a lot of these cases they felt like they were treated completely on par basically they needed talent and this it didn't matter what kind of body it came in on the other hand the the stuff they had to face I they wouldn't let me put a lot in the book of some of the stuff that was said to them and and that they had to contend with um and and it was just so much par for the course I mean it's hard to believe this but until 1980 it sexual harassment was not defined as illegal 1974 it was almost impossible for a woman to get a credit card without her husband's permission this was still in no way a woman's world and so they were for my money the the problems that they faced I don't think were any worse in the tech industry than they were anywhere else in the world but you know that's not saying much I mean the best selling advice book for the career woman advise that the best thing to do um if a man makes a pass at you at work is to say I'm flattered but you know and I mean that that was the career advice so it was a completely different time and the last thing that I just point out about gender because I thought this was so interesting is um you know the software that really made the personal computer breakthrough was the spreadsheet um and the word processor that that was developed before that was that was available at Xerox park um and I spoke to someone who had what I think is a very very interesting theory which is that the reason that the word processor was not the software that led to the breakthrough of the personal computer into wider acceptance is that the personal computer um sorry the the word processing the end product basically looked a whole lot like what you would get off of the typewriter it didn't make that much difference but it required a huge cultural shift which was that men had to type and that keyboards were seen as this very they were very clerical um there was just it was what secretaries did men did not type the spreadsheet by contrast uh offered almost no cultural shift because men had been keying in numbers for a long time and a huge payoff right I mean you you change one number and it sort of permeates the entire entire spreadsheet I just thought that was interesting I actually think there's something to that um and so when we talk about gender it's not simply the the individuals we're talking about but just sort of the cultural moment and the way that work was defined um so I think we'll open it up to questions now uh Lord do you want people to speak into the microphone because of the Facebook live going on yes okay so my question is um uh I worked at Xerox in the 80s early 80s and I saw some people through the tail end who were like fans of like the whole earth catalog and they were kind of like ready to stick it to the man type of thing right and I don't know if that's true or it's just my perception and I was wondering and they weren't really in it for the money they were ready for the change and do you think we've lost that now and and whether it's uh sort of a detriment that we don't have a kind of culture anymore yes so Xerox park definitely did have its um idealistic hippie types um although nothing compared to a lot of other places but certainly uh you know like at Atari people were literally smoking pot on the on the assembly line and um at Xerox park there there was a no alcohol rule so they were all drinking tea um but philosophically it was very much the notion of getting computing to the people because that is the way uh that the world was going to get better um I I think that um there's so much money available now that it is some does sometimes seem like you know people are getting tens of millions of dollars to do burrito delivery by drone and you know that doesn't really fit that idea I do really think um that there's a lot of idealism still here and there are a lot of people who come to tech and come to the valley precisely because you're with you're you're able to have such a widespread impact and and I think that's all to the good and I I hope it will stay that way I mean tinder has really changed our lives like the apps and stuff I mean it is it seems like it is a different culture today than it was what you're writing about the the vision of what people are trying to accomplish is narrow much more narrow um well I mean I'm not sure that's fair I mean I think that I think that um now again because companies like Facebook and Twitter are in the crosshairs of so many um you know on the on the right they're seen as too left leaning and on the left they're seen as too powerful and there's a whole question of how the russians and fake news and you know there's so much going on but I do think if we can sort of dial it back to the arab spring do you remember how there was all Twitter is making the spread of democracy possible and everyone is going to I mean the right now we're dealing with a warped moment in the change that they brought but I think that and let's not forget Facebook was started to rate whether people were hot or not at on the Harvard campus but I think it did and does and Google too the notion of organizing the world's information I do think that there is something idealistic that continues to animate these companies I think what we're seeing now is what I talked about earlier which is sort of like the invention has is outrunning the inventors um but I do think that spirit is is there still question here if someone at Stanford as a student comes up with something that's viable for a patent how does that individual benefit with the university that's a great question uh so I have to admit that since I live largely in the past I can't promise you that this is exactly how it happens now um but the split was a third of um so first of all was not a required disclosure to the university so the uc system for example university I mean professors are required to disclose everything to the university patent office and I should have said that UCSF actually was joint on the patent for recombinant DNA with Stanford um but then the royalties are split uh some percentage to the inventor some percentage to the department or school and then some percentage to the university and the other thing that I should point out is that these fees that are charged are not charged to research institutions to other universities it's for commercial use of of the inventions so there is it's definitely designed to try to make sure that these very fundamental inventions that are coming out of university labs are available for free to the research community it used to be a third a third a third uh I don't know what it is now 36 and I was born long enough ago that I've basically seen the world go from a non-internet world to an internet dominated world and I have two questions because I grew up on PBS in Sesame Street and what do you think the ideal internet would look like and if the internet was a person how old would you say it was right now oh that's an interesting question um um what's the ideal internet look like I mean this is the question we're debating right now um we have we we have right now the wild west model of the internet and we're trying to figure out what do we do about that and to me the other alternative which is that someone like facebook starts controlling what we do and don't see in terms of what's real news and what's that's scary I mean I I you know I don't know exactly what this internet's gonna look like I mean something I was extremely surprised to discover was that the Department of Defense tried to sell the ARPANET in the mid 70s there's actually a conversation about whether Xerox should buy the internet I mean it's called the ARPANET um and that would have led to a much more constrained sort of experience than we have now um I it depends on how you define the internet I mean if you're just talking about networked computers then I mean it you take it back to 1969 if you're talking about sort of really usable uh sort of the web world then let's let's say it's I don't know 20 years old-ish but sort of has a long way to develop you see that yeah I mean we're definitely in the sort of adolescent stages and um yeah yeah yeah if you think about it just a few years ago Facebook and Twitter nobody knew about them they're so dominant now everyone's waiting for another technology that's going to be as transformative and right I mean just think about what a difference this has made right um because so much of the alarm that we're feeling today is a reflection of how intimate our relationships with these devices are and and so when all of that power started moving around with us that was a big change I have a little bit of a different question um it's more kind of thinking of it in a different way Silicon Valley more like political maneuver kind of a broad scale fraud like gold rush um so like seeing software as as gold and like engineers as miners and I was wondering if you ever thought about the whole thing that way and just your thoughts in general on that view can I answer one I want to answer that because I've written a lot of books on California history and then I'll let her maybe answer the fraud element I mean I think yeah California has had a series of rushes that have brought it uh you know developed it starting of course with the gold rush and then the silver rush happened uh then there was the railway rush when you know everyone who was a rich man was investing in trolleys and railroads and things like that there have been different technologies along the way and Silicon Valley I think is just the latest one it's curious that you that you want to explore what's fraudulent about it I mean I suppose it does create great social inequity we're seeing that in San Francisco in the Bay Area now there are people who get very very rich and there are people who do not participate in this in this in this rush um but you know I don't you know and of course there are political motivations that each individual has but I'm not sure what really is fundamentally fraudulent about it and I don't know if you think there's any fraud yeah I mean I I agree with everything you said I um I the one one really important difference is that there was a set amount of gold that you could pull out and um the amount of software that we that people can build is that it's not defined you know it's not it's not something that has a certain limit to it um I think another really apt part of that analogy is of course all of the people who have gotten rich around the people who are doing the gold mining you know that whole sort of ecosystem that I was just talking about um and again the important role of immigrants and I mean people used to very much talk about Silicon Valley as a modern-day gold rush that has kind of declined in the way that people talk about it but um yeah absolutely any other question hi how are you my question is do you believe that Google should be investigated for running a monopoly thank you yeah I mean it's it's I kind of want to punt on this um question because I tend to like to talk about things that I know a whole lot about and I don't know a lot about this but one thing I will say is that the argument um that these companies are functioning like utilities I think is an even more persuasive argument against them than the monopoly argument that so much of company of like little companies futures are dependent on you know they have to come up on google search algorithm they're all advertising on facebook I think this is actually a super interesting question whether they need to be regulated as um utilities and meaning they're basic to our they're fundamental they're they're just they're just like um our power grid and that I think is going to be an interesting thing to to try to figure out I'm surprised that your answer to the internet future question was not the carriers will control the internet because you know in the old days the phone companies used to charge per call and that meant that there were very few nuisance calls because there was detailed billing and you could tell who is making the nuisance call yet today anyone can connect to the internet and send packets to anyone in the world and the advertising supported model has been kind of an evil because you have to watch this advertising it's your attention which is being captured and without that we wouldn't have all these free services we'd have charged services which actually would compensate creators of content which more fairly than the advertising model so another thing that the gold analogy presents is the question of bitcoin which is not silicon valley is not heavy into bitcoin although the nvidia chips that are used to calculate bitcoin are made here so I wonder if you have any comments on any of these issues um you know part of the great thing about being a historian is you don't ever have to predict the future and I think that the points that you're making are completely valid and I think I'm just gonna let them stand yeah one quick last question yeah I just have like an addition to the question because you were questioning about the fraudulent aspect so like for example take facebook facebook is basically an email address book and then using those emails to kind of target you with propaganda on a daily basis so that's what like in second world war that was used in any kind of war and that's why we see like interesting companies like palantir you know like also taking all kinds of data about people so that the government has this kind of a directory of everyone who is where what he's doing what's he's gonna buy next you know like amazon customers who bought also bought this you know this kind of a stalker ish kind of somebody is always over your head and predicting your next fool and wants to sell you something right yeah so the question is don't you think that this is illegal in its essence like in real life if I want to stalk somebody I would get arrested but on internet if somebody stalks me it's totally okay and not only it's okay it's the wealthiest company in the world okay so I have so many things to say about this so the first thing that I would say is you're pointing to something very important which is data data collection and how it's not at all transparent to us we don't we're often not aware of what is being collected how it's being used and my latest thought is that I think that it would be great if we had the equivalent you know how on our credit card statements they've all changed so that instead of all that little bitty print right in the corner it says you have to pay this amount if you only pay the minimum amount it's going to cost you however much over you're going to be paying you know 3x something like that in terms of service would be good the second thing is I don't think it's illegal because I think in those terms of service agreements we actually agree to this sort of thing happening the third thing I think I'd point to is that what you're really talking about and this is an important thing for people to be thinking about is the role of AI I mean you don't have a single individual who's stalking us you have the aggregation of all of this data that is being run through these neural networks that are learning about our behaviors and being able to predict them based on just massive and massive amounts of data and compute power and that's what we're dealing with now and that's what it is that is again another one of these things where are we putting the guardrails what's going to happen here and that's something that we I mean I would go so far as to say it's incumbent on us as citizens to be making our voices heard so that we can make sure that these guardrails go up so if you want to know more you have to be troublemakers Silicon Valley's coming of age by Leslie Berlin and she's going to of course sign some books so over to you Lord okay thank you so much Leslie Berlin and Francis Jingle Spill for an inspiring and dynamic talk so please come up the books are available Tangled Vine is also available as well as troublemakers and also I want to remind you that we have our next program is on November 30th which is Thursday night at 6 30 it's the future of cars electric autonomous and coming your way watch out please join us thank you so much