 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are really excited to have a CUBE conversation here in the Palo Alto studio with a real close friend of theCUBE and a repeat alumni, Leslie Berlin. I want to get her official title. She's the historian for Silicon Valley, archived at Stanford. Last time we talked to Leslie, she had just come out with a book about Robert Noyce and the man behind the microchip. If you haven't seen that, go check it out. But now she's got a new book. It's called Troublemakers, which is a really appropriate title. And it's really about kind of the next phase of Silicon Valley growth. And it's hitting bookstores. I'm sure you can buy it wherever you can buy any other book. And we're excited to have you on. Leslie, great to see you again. So good to see you, Jeff. Absolutely. So the last book you wrote was really just about Noyce and obviously Intel, very specific. And you know, the Silicon and Silicon Valley, obviously. This is a much kind of broader history with again, just great characters. I mean, it's a tech history book, but it's really a character novel. I love it. Oh, thanks. Yeah, I mean, I really wanted to find people. They had to meet a few criteria. They had to be interesting. They had to be important. They had to be, in my book, a little unknown. And most important, they had to be super duper interesting. And what I love about this generation is I look at Noyce's generation of innovators who sort of working in the, or getting their start in the 60s. And they really kind of set the tone for the Valley in a lot of ways. But the Valley at that point was still just all about chips. And then you have this new generation show up in the 70s and they come up with personal computer. They come up with video games. They sort of launch the venture capital industry in the way we know it now. Biotech, the internet gets started via the ARPANET. And they kind of set the tone for where we are today around the world in this modern sort of tech infused life that we live. Right, right. And it's interesting to me because there's so many things that kind of define what Silicon Valley is. And of course people are trying to replicate it all over the place, all over the world. But really a lot of those kind of attributes were started by this class of entrepreneurs like just venture capital. The whole concept of having kind of a high risk, high return, small carve out from an institution to put in a tech venture with basically a PowerPoint and some faith was a brand new concept back in the day. Yeah, and no PowerPoint even. No, that's right, no PowerPoint. Which is probably a good thing. Right, cause I mean we're talking about the 1970s. I mean what's so, really was really surprising to me about this book and really important for understanding early venture capital is that now a lot of venture capitalists are professional investors. But these venture capitalists pretty much to a man and they were all men at that point. They were all operating guys. All of them, they'd worked at Fairchild, they'd worked at Intel, they'd worked at HP. And that was really part of the value that they brought to these propositions was they had money, yes, but they also had done this before. And that was really, really important. Right, another concept that kind of comes out and I think we've seen it time and time again is kind of this partnership of kind of the crazy super enthusiastic visionary that maybe is hard to work with and drives everybody nuts. And then always kind of has the other person. Again, generally a guy in this time and still a lot who's kind of the doer. And it was really the Bushnell Alcorn story around Atari that really brought that to home where you had this guy way out front of the curve but you have to have the person behind who's actually building the vision in real material. Yeah, I mean I think something that's really important to understand is and this is something that I was really trying to bring out in the book is that we usually only have room in our stories for one person in the spotlight when innovation's a team sport. And so the kind of relationship that you're talking about with Nolan Bushnell who started Atari and Al Alcorn who was the first engineer there is it's a great example of that. And Nolan is exactly this very out there person, big curly hair, talkative outgoing guy. After Atari he starts Chuck E. Cheese which kind of tells you everything you need to know about someone who's dreaming up Chuck E. Cheese, super creative, super out there, super fun oriented. And you have working with him Al Alcorn who's a very straight laced for the time by which I mean he tried LSD but only once, you know. Engineer. And I think that what's important to understand is how much they needed each other because the stories are so often only about the exuberant out front guy to understand that those are just dreams, they are not reality without these other people. And how important, I mean Al Alcorn told me look I couldn't have done this without Nolan kind of constantly pushing me. And then in the Apple example you actually see a third really important person which to me was possibly the most exciting part of everything I discovered which was the importance of a guy named Mike Marklah because in jobs you had the visionary and in waz you had the engineer but the two of them together they had an idea they had a great product, the Apple too but they didn't have a company. And when Mike Marklah shows up at the garage you know Steve Jobs is 21 years old. He's had 17 months of business experience in his life and it's always a tech for Atari actually and so how that company became a business is due to Mike Marklah, this very quiet guy very, very ambitious guy. He talked them up from a thousand stock options at Intel to 20,000 stock options at Intel when he got there just before the IPO which is how he could then turn around and help finance the birth of Apple. And he pulled into Apple all of the chick people that he had worked with and that is really what turned Apple into a company. So you had the visionary, you had the tech guy you also needed a business person. But it's funny though because in that story of his visit to the garage he's specifically taken by the engineering elegance of the board that waz put together which I thought was really, so yeah he's a successful businessman yes he was bringing a lot of kind of business acumen value to the opportunity but what struck him and he specifically talks about what chips he used, how he planned for the power supply. You know just very elegant engineering stuff that touched him and he could recognize that they were so far ahead of the curve. And I think that's such another interesting point is that things that we so take for granted like mice and UI and UX. I mean the Atari example for them to even think of actually building it that would operate with a television was just, I mean you might as well go to Venus, forget Mars. I mean that was such a crazy idea. Yeah I mean I think Al ran to Walgreens or something like that and just sort of picked out the closest TV to figure out how he could build what turned out to be Pong, the first super successful video game. And I mean if you look also at another story I tell is about Xerox Park and specifically about a guy named Bob Taylor who I know I keep saying oh this might be my favorite part but Bob Taylor is another incredible story. This is the guy who convinced DARPA to start the art, it was then called ARPA to start the ARPA net which became the internet in a lot of ways. And then he goes on and he starts the computer sciences lab at Xerox Park. And that is the lab that Steve Jobs comes to in 1979 and for the first time sees a gooey, sees a mouse, sees windows. And this is the history behind that and these people all working together, these very sophisticated PhD engineers were all working together under the guidance of Bob Taylor, a Texan with a draw and a master's degree in psychology. So what it takes to lead I think is a really interesting question that gets raised in this book. So another great personality, Sandra Kurtzig. I had to look to see if she's still alive, she's still alive. I'd love to get her in sometime, we'll have to arrange for that next time but her story is pretty fascinating because she's a woman and we still have big women issues in the tech industry and this is years ago but she was aggressive, she was a fantastic sales person and she could code and what was really interesting is she started her own software company. The whole concept of software kind of separated from hardware was completely alien. She couldn't even convince the HP guys to let her have access to a machine to write basically an ERP system that would add a ton of value to these big expensive machines that they were selling. Yeah, you know, I mean, what's interesting, she was able to get access to the machine and HP, this is a not well known part of HP's history is how important it was in helping launch little bitty companies in the Valley. It was a wonderful sort of benefited all these small companies but she had to go and read to them the definition of what an OEM was to make an argument that I am adding value to your machines by putting software on it and software was such an unknown concept. A, people who heard she was selling software thought she was selling lingerie. And B, Larry Ellison tells a hilarious story of going to talk to venture capitalists about when he's trying to start Oracle with, he had co-founders, which I'm not sure everybody knows. And he and his co-founders were going to try to start Oracle and these venture capitalists would, he said, not only throw them out of the office for such a crazy idea, but their secretaries would double check that he hadn't stolen the copy of business week off the table because what kind of nut job are we talking to here? Software. Yeah, whereas now, I mean, when you think about it, this is software valid. Right, right, software in the world. There's so many great stories. Again, troublemakers, just go out and get it wherever you buy a book. The whole recombinant DNA story and the birth of Genentech, A, is interesting, but I think the more kind of unique twist was the guy at Stanford who really took it upon himself to take the commercialization of academic generated basic research to a whole nother level that had never been done. I guess it was like a sleepy little something in Manhattan they would send some paper to, but this guy took it to a whole nother level. Oh yeah, I mean, before Niels showed up, Niels Ramers, he, I believe that Stanford had made something like $3,000 off of the IP from its professors and students in the previous decades. And Niels said there had to be a better way to do this. And he is the person who decided we ought to be able to patent recombinant DNA. And one of the stories that's very, very interesting is what a cultural shift that required. Whereas engineers had always thought in terms of how can this be practical for biologists, this was seen as really an unpleasant thing to be doing. Don't think about that, we're about basic research. So in addition to having to convince all sorts of government agencies and the University of California system, which co-patented this, to make it possible just almost on a paper work level, he had to convince the scientists themselves. And it was not a foregone conclusion. And a lot of people think that what kept the two named co-inventors of recombinant DNA, Stan Cohen and Herb Boyer, from winning the Nobel Prize, is that they were seen as having benefited from the work of others, but having claimed all the credit, which is not A, isn't fair, and B, both of those men had worried about that from the very beginning and kept saying we need to make sure that this includes everyone. But that's not just the origins of the biotech industry in the Valley, the entire landscape of how universities get their ideas to the public was transformed. And that whole story, there were these ideas that used to be in university labs, used to be locked up in the DoD, like the ARPANET. And this is the time when those ideas start making their way out in a significant way. But it's this elegant dance, because it's basic research and they want it to benefit all, but then you commercialize it right and now it's benefiting the few. But if you don't commercialize it and it doesn't get out, you really don't benefit very many. So they really had to walk this fine line to kind of serve both masters. Absolutely. And I mean, it was even more complicated than that because researchers didn't have to pay for it, not for it. It was, the thing that's amazing to me is that we look back at these people and say, oh, these are trailblazers. And when I talked to them, because something that was really exciting about this book was that I got to talk to every one of the primary characters, you talk to them and they say, I was just putting one foot in front of the other. It's only when you sort of look behind them, years later that you see, oh my God, they forged a completely new trail, but here it was just, no, I need to get to here and now I need to get to here. And that's what helped them get through. That's why I start the book with the quote from Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Sala asks Indy, basically, how are you going to stop that car? And he says, how are you going to do it, Indy? And Indy says, I don't know, I'm making it up as I go along. And that really could almost be a theme in a lot of cases here. They knew where they needed to get to and they just had to make it up to get there. And there's a whole nother tranche on the genetic story. They couldn't get all the financing, so they actually used outsourced, so that whole kind of approach to business, which was really new and innovative. But we're running out of time and I want to follow up on the last comment that you made. As a historian, you are so fortunate or smart to pick your field that you can talk to the individual. So I think you said you've been doing interviews for five or six years for this book. It's 100 pages of notes in the back. Don't miss the notes. But also don't think the book's too long. But no, it's a good book. It's an easy read. But as you reflect on these individuals and these personalities, so there's obviously the story you spend a lot of time writing about, but I wonder if there's some things that you see over and over again that just impress you. Is there a pattern or is it just, as you said, just people working hard, putting one step in front of the other and taking those risks that then in hindsight are so big. I would say, I would point to a few things. I'd point to audacity. There really is a certain kind of adventurousness at an almost unimaginable level and persistence. I would also point to a third feature at that time that I think was really important, which was for a purpose that was creative. I mean, there was the notion, I think the metaphor of pioneering is much more what they were doing than what we would necessarily today, we would call it disruption. And I think there's a difference there and their vision was creative. I think of them as rebels with a cause. Right, right. Is disruption the right, is that the right way that we should be thinking about it today or are we just kind of backfilling the disruption after the fact that it happens, do you think? I don't know. I mean, I've given this a lot of thought because I mean, I actually think, well, you know, the Valley at this point, two thirds of the people who are working in the tech industry in the Valley were born outside of this country right now, actually 76% of the women. 76% of the women, I think it's age 25 to 44, working in tech, were born outside of the United States. Okay, so the pioneering metaphor, that's just not the right metaphor anymore. The disruptive metaphor has a lot of the same concepts, but it sounds to me more like blowing things up and doesn't really think so far as to, okay, what comes next. And I think that we have to be sure that we continue to do that. Right, well, because clearly, I mean, the Facebook's like the classic example, where when he built that thing at Harvard, it was not to build a new platform that was going to have the power to disrupt global election. They're trying to get dates, right? I mean, it was pretty simple concept, but yet, as you said, by putting one foot in front of the other, as things roll out, you get smart people, they see opportunities and take advantage of it, becomes a much different thing, as has Google, as has Amazon. That's the way it goes, that's exact. I mean, and you can look back at the chip industry, these guys just didn't want to work for a boss. They didn't like and they wanted to build a transistor. And then 20 years later, the huge portion of the US economy rests on the decisions they're making and the choices. And so I think this has been a continuous story in Silicon Valley. People start with a cool, small idea and it just grows so fast among them and around them, with other people contributing, some people they wish didn't contribute. Okay, then what comes next? That's what we figure out now. All right, audacity, creativity and persistence. I get it? And a goal. And a goal, and a goal. Pong, I mean, it's a great goal. All right, so Leslie, thanks for taking a few minutes. Congratulations on the book. Go out, get the book. You will not be afraid or you'll not be disappointed. And of course, the Bob Noyce book is awesome as well. So thanks for taking a few minutes and congratulations. Thank you so much, Jeff. All right, Lisa Leslie Berlin, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. See you next time, thanks for watching.