 watch that mic Well, thank you all for coming. I really appreciate it and You kind of stole my theme there. Oh, I want to I'm not gonna read too much. We're gonna talk mostly, but I Think I should read the legal note to the nudist on the late shift Because this this conveys really the kind of where right and where right about people legal note There are some people in this book who asked that their names be changed They and their reasons for seeking pseudonymity are as follows The individual identified here as Michael Zilly was freely open and on the record about his unusual manner of funding his startup venture Growing marijuana and selling it wholesale until he got a job with a respectable corporation did not want his background to catch up to him In a similar dynamic the individual identified here as John slash David Foster Retroactively requested a pseudonym for himself and his employer only when the latter ran to unexpected financial difficulty In exchange for pseudonymity the oracle salesperson identified as Mars Garo Allowed me to pose as his assistant while he made his rounds without requesting permission from his superiors The individual identified as Claudia Gomez asked for a pseudonym since lying about one's identity in order to trick Receptionists into giving out employee names might be viewed as fraudulent behavior The individual identified as B who had developed an intricate plan to murder one of his co-workers Asked that I not use his name for obvious reasons The um yeah, I I I came out of college in the mid 80s and I read what was to be you come out and and Everybody was focused on what are you going to do? What are you going to do? What are you going to do with your life? and and What you it seemed that we didn't even know I didn't know who I was like how can I tell you what I'm going to do? I didn't know who I was and there was this Emerging phenomenon of this idea that you're going to try to find yourself through your work that that you're not going to Check your personality at the door when you come into work in the morning that work would become It self almost like a a self empowerment movement at the same time that these and there's incredible ambition for the job That that you would you would not only bring home a paycheck that you bring home a better self in the end or a happier person uh Really hadn't but thrust upon the idea of work and started to really sort of emerge in You know slowly over time in the course of our history, but really come upon us now and I was just always fascinated with that question that you know the search for the self In most people's sort of real life takes place upon What job am I going to take? What job am I going to take? And you took a job as a bond salesman, didn't you? Well, it took me a while to get there. I uh, I went and I came out of college in 1986 I went to manhattan to write a novel and I sat down to write on a friend's couch and started writing in notebooks and Everybody who'd moved in new york that summer started to work in investment banking. This was the thing This was the rage. I didn't understand it. But here I was writing about I'd studied studio art when I was in college at stanford and economics and uh, I was going to write a novel about Some art and art historian and an artist or something. I was set in soho And boy was I out of it I mean all these people who were my age were wearing suits and they were marching across town and they were going to parties And I had no money. I couldn't I couldn't afford to go I saw one movie that summer that I didn't have and I couldn't even go to a bar You know and new york is not fun. If you don't have any money kind of thing and So I realized something was going on like I was missing it And if I wanted to even to write about what was going on with my generation or to stay in touch with With that And maybe even for myself to learn from it I'd better do this thing and get a suit and go work downtown to some big building You know, it was scary. I thought it would be big prison. Those big buildings look like it to me And I went and got a job as a litigation consultant at a company I was defending PG&E's Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor construction costs And I was in the back of this room And I was wearing a suit and I was being paid $31,000 a year Which was a tremendous amount of money back then and I was just guy just out of college And it was enough for me to make my student loans, you know and have an apartment in town but There was this just this lie going on we were marching downtown like yeah, the young executives and we were in this windowless room 12 of us and my job 60 hours a week was to add up Numbers that the computer had already added up to make sure the computer hadn't made a rounding error And we were being billed out to PG&E at the rate of 120 an hour We were being paid something like $12 an hour and PG&E was billing you for my services And I was like I I was going crazy So I was so depressed one day I went down to the YMCA at the Barca Darrow I would go down there every day at lunch and kind of work out And so this was in San Francisco in San Francisco. Yeah, and at the YMCA people was they would go down to the pool I'd swim with the pool They would step onto the scale and they'd weigh themselves And I finally one day I stepped onto the scale to weigh myself and I kept tapping the thing and tapping it back And I was like what's happened to me. I'm like withering away. I had without even knowing it lost 17 pounds I was down to 137 pounds And I weigh I weigh about 175 now or something like that So imagine me 40 pounds lighter than I am right now And I was like I was literally withering away on the job and I realized something was going on And I had to do something about it. So I had this dream of creating of greeting cards So I started to draw greeting cards. I had the art background And next thing, you know, for the 12 people in the room, I raised stock from them And they all bought into my company And they were like my army so the executives would come by and they would they look like they're working away And I was working my national sales reps out of the back of this office And I'm pretending to tap away on a 10 key and I started this greeting card company and I quit and I thought this is just It's bread and butter now. It's just gonna pay the bills I'm set for life because the sales went like this it took off And and you still wanted to write, you know, oh, yeah, and I was yeah, and I wanted to write another novel and But immediately the sales fell out of the floor because I didn't know a thing about being an entrepreneur I didn't know a thing about managing sales reps and I printed the cards on the wrong kind of stock and it was Life was suddenly bad and and I panicked and I said I need a job somewhere And I gave a friend a resume and it was at an investment banking firm And they had me in the next day and I got a job the next morning And there I was a bond salesman with a billion dollars running through my hands every day I was trading overnights and short-term securities And I traded I was 22 years old and a billion dollars would literally go through my hands I was like wow, you know, so now I look down at silicon valley and you meet a billionaire and you think You know, I was like that was just a day's work for me So well, you've said that you You have this ability not to care About money and that that makes people who have money not be weird around you Yeah, and That helped you in being able to research this book and the other books that you've written as well So, where do you think you get that? Is that from your investment investment banking Stint, or do you think that was part of you from before? That's a really good question. I You're describing this phenomenon that people down in the valley They like having me around that that a lot of other reporters come in and all the reporters can just see the money You know, they and they don't see the real person there They just see like this billion dollar bill floating above your head and and I come in and I just like see the person And I can be able to look past the money and I think that a lifetime of having sort of like that experience as a best maker was a factor but I think it goes way back To me. Your father was an entrepreneur. Yeah, my father was original entrepreneur back in the 80s What it meant to be an entrepreneur or late 70s really was not to start your own business It was for a white collar person to leave the white collar world and buy a blue collar business And run it better than it had been run before and make money that way So a bunch of my dad's friends were doing that in the late 70s They're all divorced guys, you know, and this was sort of recapture their youth and one guy bought a Steel boiler company and my dad bought out of bankruptcy A company to refurbish the rotary dial housings on rotary dial telephones to take the plastic off and Buff it up again. And back then, you know, we didn't have push button phones. We just had rotary dial phones and my dad knew that AT&T was in this lawsuit to be broken up by this monopoly, but he thought Yeah, but even if they break up AT&T, we'll still have phones I mean, we're always going to need these rotary dial phones. We're never going to not need a phone So he was sure that this was a good business to buy out of bankruptcy And for the first year and before AT&T got broken up It was a great business and he was making money And being an entrepreneur was cool And then AT&T was broken up and nobody wanted rotary dial telephones anymore And he had this business going down the tubes And so all during my high school We lived in a situation where it was really tough to get by and be careful when you're answering the phone at night Because you might be a creditor who's going to, you know, trying to get money from you We had to go pay the phone bills in cash because we couldn't have any checks and that kind of thing And to me then that was when I learned that the world of work wasn't just this sort of men in a gray flannel suit This sort of boring world that, you know, my dad had a safe house where he stored his cash You know, and he was an entrepreneur. It was a very sort of Raymond Chandler novel You know, it was just to be an entrepreneur and I learned that it was very dramatic life And, you know, the years was incredibly under tremendous pressure and taking out his anger on the family Those all were big factors, but he was even younger before that, right? So I remember when I was in Eighth grade, I worked at the Millstone restaurant in Seattle and I was a bus boy and I got promoted to be assistant manager And the owner of the Millstone restaurant, most of his employees were These people who made sandwiches and stuff were like Harvard grads that had come out to be actors in Seattle during the summer And to be, you know, a Harvard grad who's an actor making two dollars and 35 cents an hour was extremely humiliating So payday was a very humiliating experience And so he would hand out the paychecks and people resented him for those paychecks, you know That was the day that people quit like they got their paycheck and they're like, I can't believe this is all I'm making And they would quit so one day he was like not around he told me to hand out the paychecks and nobody quit And I had this thing that I would hand out the paychecks and people wouldn't get mad And it was like I had this aura like people didn't go weird around the money So I became the guy who handled the money. I was in eighth grade and I was the money guy For this restaurant and everybody else was, you know, at least twice my age I mean, I was 14 and I was handling the books for this this big downtown restaurant kind of thing So what do you think that was? Is it was it did you not care about the money even then? Yeah, I guess so you think it's just something that emanates from you. Um, well, first of all, it's extremely facile with numbers I have a just I would I was in high school had a math whiz and I was third in the state in Washington state math championships one year I mean, I had no idea that I had that but one day we were down at the basketball gym and This guy says come take this test and I didn't know what it was. I'm like, I'm shooting baskets What are you talking about? So come take this test. So it was some sort of like caltech Entrance exam thing and your average score for students is like a 40 out of 100 And the highest score had been posted by someone who got a 77 one year or something And our teacher would regularly get like a 70 or something and but I didn't know that I just wanted to take this Test and it was the hardest test I'd ever taken. I'm used to getting a hundred out of a hundred on math tests And I feel like I can only get about two-thirds right And the next day they said, you know, you got the highest score in two years or something. I was like, what are you talking about? So I went off to the math championship. So I think that money just doesn't make me uncomfortable the digits, you know Okay, that sounds fair, but what happens when you go down to the valley And you said as you said when you're with other when you're around other reporters The other reporters don't get the same reception that you get Well, so you've also turned down a great many jobs And opportunities that would have made you a great deal of money Seeing as how you've been in the valley for so long Would you like a Kleenex? I Guess what I'm saying is I find this to be very admirable That because I also live in the valley myself and I see this tremendous, you know money being the measure of success And many times wish that there was something else that was the measure of success You know, maybe our heads would grow as more successful we became and so we would care more about how big our heads were Rather than how much money we had Just thinking about it in terms of not in terms of buying things but in terms of a feeling of success So you obviously have that because you've turned all of these opportunities down and you you've decided to follow your career as a writer Um Where do you get that? I've been offered a lot of these jobs lately. I mean, I think that particularly lately I've I've reached this sort of critical mass point where I'm going to write about things And I know a lot more than the people about the business than the people I'm writing about Not only I mean, I know who to call to get that done that they're having trouble getting done And I have strategy ideas for their internet business and I can translate I would remember I was the recent job offer I was hanging out at this start-up And this program was supposed to interview this community guy who's a big content specialist, you know it doesn't know a thing about programming and The two couldn't talk to each other But I was like, let me try to tell you what he's saying and let me try to interpret his answer for you And they understood and I was like, wow, you know, you should be managing this place You know, don't you want to job? You'll be the first vp will hire and we'll give you, you know two and a half percent equity in the company or something and I'm like Well, I can't do that because I'm writing about you. That's a conflict of interest but There's also that part of it that the stories that I most love the people that I most love I would like to work with are the ones that I choose to write about And then I I can't deal to myself. I can't write about things that I would take an interest in So what it comes down to is that the writing really is more important to you than anything else? Yeah, the right. I mean, you know when I'm happiest I write in When I when I do my serious writing I have this closet and it's about three feet wide by four feet deep by about five feet tall It's dark in there It's just me and my laptop And I'll put the headphones on and I'll put one song on and I'll play the same song repeatedly all day long and People think why are you torching yourself for your writing? Why are you making these like sacrifices? He's I'm pulling all-nighters for your writing And punishing yourself and I'm like no that's I'm I'm Blocking out the rest of the world for a moment because there's nothing that makes me Happier and gets me more jazzed than to find the right words For a thought to be able to express thoughts and feelings and in in the right way You know to work on a sentence to the point that it actually says, you know, what you feel I'm one of my crucial moments in my sort of development as a writer my grandmother who lives in seattle had flown into san francisco and She was She was dating a guy who had once run the west in san francisco hotel And they were staying in some suite down there and I was like wow, it's just fancy And went in there and I mailed her a couple of my stories recently. This was 10 years ago and and She said I said, what did you think of those stories? She said, well, you're a lot more interesting in person than you come across and you're writing and I was Oh, no, I mean that was but what I mean what great advice is to get all yourself on the page And when you can actually be all on the page, you know, your sense of humor your sense of drama your sense of excitement about your love of people And your soul ideally you get your soul on the page too then Writing is not suffering You know writing the writer's block so often my experience as a publisher and working with other writers comes from Not putting all of yourself on the page and attempting to just write from a small sort of pie piece and So nothing makes me happier than than to write. That's when I just just like gosh, I feel confident I like myself And I can't I can't replace that with anything Did you as a child know that you wanted to write or I mean all writers I think are keen observers And you of course are very keen at observing I know that there were many things in my childhood that I observed about people especially nuances and people's character And the little things that other people wouldn't bother with or wouldn't care to think about or reworking dialogue and imagining scenes Do you remember that from childhood or do you do you think that as a child you knew you wanted to write or did you Did you learn that later when you when you grew older? I love to make haunted houses I mean you talk about real real childhood experiences. I was just mr. Haunted house all the time You know just constantly working on it and and around fifth grade Friends said let's write some horror stories So I had some tremendous fun for a couple of years writing little horror stories And that was great. That was sort of taking that haunted house experience I like to work with my hands and I liked that kind of craft and I just didn't make and so I think I even then I thought you know, I loved this. I thought what writing is cool I didn't make the transition to books without pictures Very well at all. So I kind of stopped reading in eighth grade until I was about 24 Oh, don't tell my son that please. It's not it's not it's not a really I mean You know sophomore year in high school. They assigned grapes of wrath and I'm like just go get the movie and the cliff notes Forget it, you know, I did read The Great Gatsby and I read The Stranger And so then I started dreaming of being a writer and I liked to write but Reading was something that was very hard for me to find the love again because you go to class and you know Great Gatsby. It's you know Tom and Daisy and Gatsby and love and this thing and my teacher's talking about green and the end of the dock Symbolizing money and I'm like, what about you know, the passions in the heart and no one would talk about that in class And they would write about talk about them the way English would do but never the way people would write about them or really who read them so the the love of reading just got drilled out of me and It wasn't until I didn't take a single English class during college And major in economics Yeah Yeah, I wanted to take writing classes, but you had to sleep overnight outside the writing department and to get it into the class Unless you were in the major I was studying economics and I learned I wrote four honors theses And I was like wow, I love to write, you know, I didn't know there's no one had ever written four honors theses four You know 80 page undergraduate papers or something And I was like, I like oh, I like to write, you know, but I wasn't reading any books So right before I graduated from college I read like three or four books And I was like, oh books aren't so bad anymore But what I'd done is when I was studying studio art and through that I kind of hit a wall with studio arts And I found that I liked to draw but beyond that I couldn't do it very well So I started to Illustrate children's books and I loved that and through that I started reading young adult literature And I really started reading for pleasure again when I was about when I was an investment banker And I started reading for pleasure again for the first time adult literature as an escape in a way Yeah, I said try to escape. I wrote a novel while I was an investment banker And I thought I was just you know, it's just the entire opposite of investment banking It was it was like a young adult novel sort of a cross between Watership down an animal farm And it was to be by these animals in this colorado forest and all this research on what the wildlife was like Sounds like an investment banking firm. Well Yeah, so I wrote this whole novel and I didn't know who to give it to us I gave it to a friend at work and he read it and he said this is the best book about investment banking. I've ever read you know And like the command characters are like a beaver and stuff like that and you know, I was like So I had no idea that I really was writing about that world without doing it And I didn't didn't occur to me to write about investment banking until I went to the writing program at San Francisco State And when I was in investment banking, I was I started in that world. I was 22 and after two year and a half They were like, listen, you're really good at this you ought to Commit to doing this as a career and if you do we'll start you out at $300,000 a year salary And plus and you'll probably make twice that with all your commissions and that kind of thing And I was like, no, I'm going to go to the writing school at San Francisco State That's really a calling that's really nice. Yeah, and uh When I was out there I was out there writing stories for years and they tell you right about what you know and One day after years. I just said, you know, I've I've I feel jealous of other writers. They've they've traveled around the world or they come from his interesting experiences I don't know anything except for what it's like to haul my butt down to work every day and So sometimes I said, well, I'll write about that And I started to write about that experience and like wow I mean I suddenly had so much to say And my writing wasn't just like some pilly little story It was like infused with meaning and commentary and like a tone of an essay and my humor came out And I was suddenly writing about I realized I knew a whole lot about this experience of trying to You know channel your whole self through that sort of narrow pipe of your job And the agony of that experience and trying to find You know work that is truly meaningful in life and how you of all to do that and I had been through that I had I had a greeting card company and I worked in litigation sultan investment I taught at mission high school for a year here As a as a as I was getting on teaching credential I had a newsletter on san francisco politics. I was trying everything I worked at a small public publishing company, you know looking for gathering material Yeah, I was looking for you know, I really wanted to be a writer But who you couldn't it was I wouldn't let myself really believe that it would ever happen When you go down to the valley or when you are doing your research, how do you get people to talk to you? Like people who are growing marijuana to find a starter I listen I think that's just it's just that simple. Uh I love people's stories. I love them to wash over me and the hardest thing for me is to Take the time to weed through 19 entrepreneurs who have got some uninteresting idea that they think is somehow great And to have the persistence to keep looking for the gems that are really inspiring And or really human. I mean looking for really human stories and When I find them it's never been a problem to get them to talk to me and I think mostly because They hear they see me listening. They hear me listening They like talking people like talking about what they do and they feel great passion for what they're doing They find it to be very exciting and very dramatic yesterday we were we were at the taking a Camera around for the gym layer news hour around Silicon Valley and we were down at this startup in Fremont And boy, it couldn't have been a more boring locale I mean there was a couple of Porsches and Ferraris in the parking lot But it was just the sea of cubicles and this one-story tilt up building most anonymous low-slung office park you could find and This guy I had introduced the correspondent to was saying boy. It's so exciting and the correspondent was like What are you talking about? I mean you're sitting here in a cubicle You spent a hundred hours a week in a cubicle inside this incredibly boring building. What is so exciting about it? And he was stumped. He didn't know how to answer. He's like, oh, well, it's you know, but I really like to Type these things in and think and I had to intervene and I said listen it's It's just a job But it's exciting because you'd have no idea what the outcome is going to be In 12 weeks this company could be three times its size or it could be totally disappear The entire stock market the entire financing system for the whole thing could vanish Could crash the next 12 weeks the incredible uncertainty And it takes an ordinary job you put it all on the line take an ordinary job And you and you say no salary no salary no security all risk And it becomes sort of heart beating for the people who go through it and that's I think that's exciting that you know for my generation to come into the world of work And particularly people who are sort of right behind me They looked at the workplace as A place that they were going to have to sell their soul to be a part of And a lot of people would just say no and we got this sort of moniker for a generation called slackers And people say, you know, we just don't want to join the working world We don't want to enlist we're not going to be part of the rank and file And so we'll just hang out or be waiters or work at a cafe or something And it's been really fascinating to watch those same people in silicon valley Actually find work really exciting because It's kind of twisted, but if you don't guarantee the money up front, you're not selling out You know if you you know, there's tons of people making millions of dollars down there at yahu You know it's something like 600 out of 1000 people are are millionaires and it hotmail Where I followed the story of severe batia He when they sold their company to microsoft They had about 80 employees over half or millionaires a lot of millionaires down there But when they started they didn't know anything. They were completely unknown product No one knew if it would succeed and that's what makes it exciting for them What about for you? What do you think about the valley? I mean generally you're an optimist From what I've read in your books and you you have a great deal of empathy Which I think is is the mark of a good writer and you But you still are very clear about The good things and the bad things well the bad things that that have come out of this or the or the changes that have happened Because of this gold rush that's going on in the valley So generally do you feel that these people that you followed around for nudist on on the on the lay shift? Um are happy people Do you think that they're uh and people like them are heading in the direction of A good place this different kind of culture that you talk about Yeah, um, or not happy people sinister. No, but And no ambition to be happy meaning I think it's some something as poet I don't know there's been a cold ridge or something said that happiness is a dog sunning itself on a rock That's happiness a dog sunning itself on a rock People in silicon valley the people that I write about they're not interested in sunning themselves on a rock They're interested in leading great lives. They're interested in experiencing extraordinary things. They're interested in You know making a lot of money fast and then and living lives of great uncertainty and risk and At each choice in life between the path of more security and the path of greater risk They would take the path of greater risk now. That's not all the valley overall But that's the people that I I would find inspiring and write about in the book Do you think this is a generational thing? um That crosses out of crosses over from silicon valley to or is crossing over to other Parts of the country or do you think I felt my optimism in that way that After running bombardiers, which was I think business week described it as The most scathing portrait of wall street ever to see print and uh, even though I liked the characters, you know or something like that they said and I I loved the people in that world, but the system was crazy and the system drove people nuts and what we would do in investment banking basically was take A table and Buy the table and sell off the legs and the tabletop separately for more than we've bought the table for And then we'd go out into the market and buy a bunch of legs and tabletops and put them together as tables And sell the table for more than the parts We're just one day in and one day out like that and that's what we'd make money We never built anything. We never added anything to the world You know market liquidity or something like that all those brains people coming out of these great schools Who had were really bright people who worked there Were wasting themselves and not contributing to the productive economy and we were paying them outrageous sums of money to do this And that's what they wanted to do to me. They wanted to pay me, you know $300,000 to add nothing to the world and I couldn't do that And I can so maybe in comparison. I see yeah, there's a lot of rich people in Silicon Valley But they are building things and they are constructing things and you could argue Whether or not what they're building really adds value or not You know is the ability to trade furbies on ebay really a great culture renaissance or not But The way that I found my inspiration was seeing that people were moving here from all over the world and all over the country So I said well, listen That's the project in the tradition of Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck and Joan Didion I'm going to record the lives of those people and so I found people I followed 23 people from the day nearly the day they moved here To follow them for up to three years to see how they fared because this there was this dream Being held out to people all over the world. I met yesterday yesterday alone a couple from sweden who had come here A couple from france who had come here a woman from santa barbara who had moved up here and people are coming in in droves And they're coming on the basis of this dream and I wanted to say is that dream real or is it just an illusion? and you think about you know Upton Sinclair's work or John Steinbeck's work and The the sort of genetic imprint for me as a serious writer is to record that cold truth of fate and to show that in fact You know this is a vague and hollow promise because it has always been a vague and hollow promise before and if you were an Okie and you came out here during the depression You know life was just as tough out here and there was no golden heyday for you and no promised land And so that was the instinct that I came to this project with and I was going to record that But I I couldn't help it the optimism one old one me over when I watched this guy david foster who was 28 years old He's on his fifth startup and Four have failed but his fifth one is succeeding the people who have failed here are not our downtrodden They are willing to pick themselves up and do it again And so the sort of the conventional paradigm by which we look at sort of success and failure was not the same And to watch a young guy like ben jiu move here from taiwan and not know a soul And have his venture cap his business plan rejected by every venture capitalist on sandhill road And then nevertheless not to give up the hope and to put in yes the 80 90 hour weeks But then to sell his company Then sells coming for outrageous figure nearly 50 million dollars. I mean No other time in no other place could that happen could an immigrant to this country Succeed in that manner and you've written a lot about iranian-american affairs And I have many iranian friends who have come here whose father You know was very successful before the revolution in iran and came here to be a bagger at safeway Because that was all that they could do But their sons have grown up to start companies to succeed and and be millionaires and this is an incredibly special time and To actually witness that firsthand with many many people that I wrote about to watch them succeed No matter how jaded it was to start I just that serious intellectual gene in me that wants me to say oh, it's all a lie You know people dreams don't really come true Well for some they have been And I can't lie about that So I've been turned into this kind of very careful optimist, but an optimist nonetheless I think it's it's great. It really came through in the book and and I appreciated it because living in the valley When you go outside the valley you hear Many people sort of demean the valley and and you know Because of of how well it's doing in the same way that we used to look at investment bankers in the 80s And so it's nice. It's nice to see that You've shown that people have worked very hard to get where they've gotten Even even on the road to getting there. Perhaps they've not gotten there It's very weird to see Though some of them sell their company for 50 million dollars because you're like at that point You're like boy just be great if he could just sell his company as a deal would come through You know like for a million or something and then it would all pay off But 50 million like does anybody deserve that and that's when it becomes twisted, you know you spend And that's what's hard and in the medium You know in relative prices and all that kind of thing we could go into that forever But it That there's always some funny wrinkle to it You know, it would just be a great herosia herosia alger story if you sold his company for a million dollars and selling for 50 million is like There's the twist. There's something very modern and very ironic always embedded in whatever happens in the valley In the nudist on the late shift You have several chapters, of course you go through the different kinds of people that you Um That you followed in the last three in the three years You have the newcomers who are Some of the people you met who had just arrived here and what their hopes and aspirations are Then you follow an IPO And then you have a chapter about the entrepreneur Then the programmers then the salespeople The futurist and finally the dropout How do you Are there are you were any of these more interesting to you than others? Or did you admire any of them or or which which one of these kinds of people? Um, were you more interested in? as people I was I was drawn To more than anything to two kinds of people One was The pilgrims the people who had picked up their life and put it all on the line Yesterday I was down at the First annual august capital, which is a sand hill road venture capitalist party and I have no party And I was taking the the gym layer news hour camera there and you look around it's like This is not the these are none of our geeks, you know I mean, this is people they look good. They're young. They have a high energy of a steady eye a firm handshake You know their khakis are Pressed, you know their shoes shine Yeah, you know and uh They've come with good pedigrees that come from good business schools and I I still get along with those people, but those aren't the kind of people that I'm drawn to I'm a much more interested in people like The Ben shoes who put it all on the line and have Don't know people and don't have everything going for them And I'm just really drawn to that so much at stake in their life Then the other people that I'm drawn to I think of a few in the book or ones that who could be anywhere In the world right now and have actually tried being anywhere in the world and come here by choice Because they find it exciting. I think of someone like Steve Sellers who Before he came to Silicon Valley He was counting tanks and the Sinai's for to help reinforce peace accord flying around helicopters Or his business partner john hanky who was a press officer in Burma During the time that the students were rioting and the police were clash cash clashing down on the students and another guy greg slayton who Used to do airdrops into africa and do and do micro development lending It doesn't still very involved a lot of micro development lending around the world And these are people who've had an instinct for adventure and an instinct for A very worldly pursuit And that people who are that worldly would be here Says something about what the valley is up to these days That it isn't just people who sort of don't have a life and order dominoes pizza anymore something radically changed when We shifted from Silicon Valley's had these sort of three incarnations A hardware incarnation a software incarnation and this internet incarnation and People down there couldn't quite figure out where to go. It was About four or five years ago the ideas were getting incredibly complicated You had to have a phd and double e to understand these things 64-bit chipsets a massively parallel processing of fiber optic routing and who knew what these things were And it was getting out of hand. So our culture at that period of time We would focus on things like when president clinton came to town the first time when he he went down to silicon graphics Why because they made the computers that made the dinosaurs in Jurassic park We could understand dinosaurs computers snaggon get it but dinosaurs i get We had this familiar icon and It was it was getting way too complicated for everybody And then we shifted on to the internet and the ideas that became successful became ideas that anybody could understand A bookstore for the web amazon.com we all know bookstores so easy A yellow pages for the web yahu email on the web hotmail these became the far the most Successful companies that grew like crazy and around the world people who were like Uh yellow pages to the web i get that they were showing up here on planes because they Could get ideas like that The valley's population of women though It's still a problem in these workplaces has gone up significantly because A lot more women are not intimidated by these ideas My the ideas i saw yesterday, you know a place to invite People to come to your parties so a website that helps you manage invitations to parties. Well, who can't understand that? So it and you know you go to this these website screens And the premise of a website screen is you should be able to figure out how to use it just by looking at it No manuals no help screens whatever and if you can't understand it just by looking at it It'll not succeed This is drawn Vastly different kinds of people to silicon valley when it was technological It drew people just out of the engineering schools and now it's drawing everybody You mentioned amazon and and buying books bookstore on the web You're involved as a publisher of mercury house is it i'm on the board of a small press in san francisco called mercury house and um Tell me about that. I mean that's obviously something close to your heart The role of say amazon in in bookselling and Publishing i suppose you know whenever i think about small presses I think about a lot of writers who are unable to get their books read by the general population Yeah, or to get publicity for themselves and and for good books really to be out there and um And also you do talk a little bit about in some of your writings about the publishing industry in general and uh how writers are sort of Um bandied about uh when it comes to it is it is a tough time I i got into book publishing in 1989 and i've been involved since my my biggest role in it is that I am the chairman of the board of a company In st. paul minnesota called consortium book sales and distribution And for over 61 fine independent small press publishers around the country we handle All of their distribution so their sales the shipping of the books the collecting of the money the marketing and they kind of do the editorial and the printing and So i'm very involved with you know small press publishing in that sense and In that period of time publishing has has suffered greatly and It used to be that an author Wrote their book and the publisher said We want to protect your precious author mind and your precious point of view You write your book and we will take it from here And we will do everything else and today now I've been the the pinnacle of it was what I had to do to promote this book My publisher asked me to do this thing called the silicon valley bleeding edge tour So not only today's author you have to you know write the book you have to do your own copy editing your legal vetting You've got to get yourself on oprah. You've got to you know tour around and what I had to do was Tour around tour around two other authors that every night Would critique my book and and and you know tell me what they thought of it and you know in front of the cameras and that kind of thing in front of crowds And you know Criticize my work and I was expected to criticize their work and defend ourselves and you know create a huff and have a fight You know and and I was like this was the bleeding edge Nightly and then on daily was supposed to put these online diary entries up on this website And I have to sub you know as an author I have to subject myself to like defend myself constantly And it was in one day on some hand. It's sort of the ultimate humiliation for a writer like this is what it's come to And I mean I'm afraid as a small press publisher. I know how how easy it is to to rise above the noise quickly and to just disappear forever and On the other hand, I think some interesting things are happening I talked before about the whole idea of selling out and that it was sort of taboo for a writer to Be too aggressive with trying to you know get your name out there So people will buy your book because all you really want is to be able to keep writing books I don't care how well they do just someone tell me I can keep writing for the rest of my life Knowing that people are reading reading your work. Yeah getting something out of it. Yeah Yeah So do you think that that writers need to be more aggressive or do you think that things may Make sure even out and writers should do whatever they feel they need to do and For the writers. I'm one who because I have all the skills of publishing for my years I have a certain amount of savvy And willingness to stand up to what publishers are telling me and say no, I know that that's not true I know that that's not true You're lying to me and I know a lot more about that than you do So they can't get away with things with me, but other authors that get away with stuff all the time and So Small-press publishing has not been the answer. It has been hard. We are able to pay authors Three to five thousand dollars for a novel and we'll sell three to five thousand copies Maybe ten thousand occasional book twenty thousand copies We are not for profit. We barely survive We're not able to vote marketing resources to to these books And then the big publishers are being gutted and scared of what's going on on the internet Because amazon.com knows who my readers are they have their email and they have little customer profiles of my readers Random house my publisher has no idea who my readers are And you know, I want to write books for people if they've read one of my book I like to be able to maybe they'll be maybe five out of my next ten books I could sell them and amazon can help me with that my publisher can't help me with that They put books out and they have no idea who's buying randomly. Yeah, randomly. Yeah so It's very scary time to be a writer and there is this feeling that It's almost like the internet like if you can get known now because it's all gonna come down soon Publishing is is broken and it's gonna fall apart soon and You know the sort of publishing Armageddon is about to happen So you'd better get known now so you can survive then you'll have a name that people recognize When we kind of have this mad max atmosphere of publishing And and because people at random house, you know, it's very very hard to get people to do a really good job Publishing books anymore publicizing also. Yeah That's up to the author. I guess right. Yeah Well, um, I think it's about that time that we can open the audience Up to asking questions for po Please wait for the microphone to get to you so that we can hear you And I think this gentleman down here has a question There was this idea that The internet was going to decentralize power and free people But that idea has been voiced before in the early days of radio and it didn't happen Instead the big powers of money or whatever or the government manages to take over Is this going to be liberation or is it going to be the same takeover by the big powers? That is the question Yeah, that is the question. That's the one that's what I love is like You know, I've written a book about silicon valley and clearly All of the fortune 500 is Looking at what's going on in silicon valley and emulating these new business practices and I no matter no sooner Can I be finished with my book that I can go back and retest the hypothesis? Can you still make it here if you just arrived from taiwan like ben did a few years ago? That's why I was out yesterday meeting people who had just arrived and I do believe I mean, I think I'm ultimately an optimist about this. My fear is not that The internet is going to become the network next network television I look at the particular example of radio radio had a very limited amount of bandwidth from you know, 88.5 to 106.7 kind of 88.1 and When when that was limited it made sense sooner or later that Some corporations came in and started to buy this up by the space up and on the internet bandwidth is unlimited And my fear is more that we we we destroy whatsoever any idea of institution building and I look at say what's going on in companies down in silicon valley That many of us would consider a startup. I mean it's got 160 people or something. That's not very big It's not even profitable yet They've been only three or four years old And half the employees are constantly checking their stock price versus How many they're vesting schedule versus the housing prices to say when do I have enough for my housing payment? And I can quit and jump to a 10 person startup or a 20 person startup because that's where they feel like the action is The people they're not just jumping From oracle they're not just jumping from 30,000 employee companies They're jumping from ones that are 100 employees down to ones that are 10 and that we are going to get to this point where Like authors i'm exposed to the market the public used to say you don't have to be exposed to the market We'll handle that for you now I'm exposed to the market and that we will all be relentlessly exposed to the market constantly That we will have no great institutions that they'll be constantly torn down as fast as we can sort of put them up And that the rare commodity in that kind of atmosphere will be the downshift will be moderation I I work as a freelancer And i'm at this point right now where times are good and magazines are calling me and people want me to do things And i'm afraid to Turn them down. I'm afraid to shift back into second gear because I think this is my one chance This is my one chance and so everybody working as a freelancer They you become a freelancer because you want to slow down you want to work for yourself But you end up just going faster faster faster When you have those opportunities and that that will be the very rare thing is how to have peace in life How to have moderation? That's what I see happening. I look at say what's going on in silicon valley lately And internet stocks have come down 50 percent since april 9th at least across the board and some new companies since then 60 70 percent That may be the case but the rate of entrepreneurship has gone up dramatically the amount of venture capital going into new startups is looking to be at more than twice last year's record rate and I see these startups being coming on the scene just tens of them every day And so the fact that stocks are down isn't keeping people from saying I want to get in on the small action That's my fear is that we won't know how to live in moderation. We won't know how to slow down and spend time with our spouses or our children Hi, um outside of your grandmother's critique of your work Was there another um experience that acted as a catalyst? To let you know That um You were indeed in search for and may have arrived at finding your own voice as a writer Putting your soul on the page. Did something happen that you said? Yes. This is it. I'm here I'm thinking through my mind as you're asking that question. I don't think it was Points of feedback. I think it was hitting creative walls There I think it was about 1991 and I've been writing say Stories I'd written a couple of books that I'd never read never even read myself let alone have someone else read and I'd been writing stories for like four years and I just hit a creative wall. I just thought this isn't interesting anymore and I turned to monologues and oral storytelling And wow that woke me up because I learned that when you take in information through your ears I can start a story out And then shift gears and go into something else totally random Seemingly random and then come back again, and we didn't forget But you do it on the page and you might be harder. So I began to And the humor and people would be this stand-up performances people would be really funny so I started taking some performance classes and some uh monologue oral storytelling classes And my writing got a lot better in that at that period of time, you know to and I think it particularly it's been really helpful for me For writing about silicon value, which can be such a technically complicated place Not just the technology, but the business itself is extremely complicated and it's full of these terms that nobody can understand and so What I would pay attention to to write about it is you know, I'd go off and spend Three days in the woods with salespeople or something Learning all their lingo and I would come back and I'd come down to the edinberg castle and go see my friend the bartender there And it's what he went up to And he doesn't know a thing about that world and I would I would pay attention. What would I say to him? And how would I write it? How would I talk about it to him? What naturally came out of my word my voice talking to him? And that's what I should write about and I was often writing about people and their stories Now those were those are sort of some of the One of the big factor was was letting the influence of these other arts come into what I was doing as a writer I think there's a question way over there Daphne You talk about the 80s and materialism and the silicon valley and all of that and you know the me generation and all of this But um, do you see yourself like politically motivated? Do you see yourself growing like? political awareness Or do you see something like the day of the locus with bill gate replacing those hollywood figures? um Tell me a little more about the what use the day of the locus scenario well It's kind of like a satire on hollywood and People praying up on each other and do you see something like that because at this point? Uh The internet and all these people who are making big money from yahoo and all of that is kind of like the 80s the 90s Money money money money But I don't see anything anyone talking about other issues in the novel about homelessness and even in silicon valley There's possibly poverty level there there too, right? well Is that a concern? Yeah Silicon valley has is not been prepared for the way it's been thrust into It's role as a role model in our society and essentially it has to set an example for people and I've watched this with myself as As I go around silicon valley people recognize me now and they want to know what I think and what I have to say And I feel a strong moral responsibility to exercise that voice So what I'd largely do is I follow startups and I will tell them From the get-go. It's extremely important that you know, you don't wait till The next generation of funding for your business to To get your male-female employee ratio a lot better than it is now It's very important that you start setting aside something like one percent or two percent of Your revenue stream for what you're going to do with Giving back to the community that you come from that you are extremely lucky to live here at this place in this time and uh, I do think that The valley is not been prepared for the way it's being perceived. I think there's a real it doesn't even know It's so claustrophobic down there that it doesn't know that people are making fun of it all around the country It does not know that it does they think it's great. They think everybody around there thinks they're great and You know that you to great get someone to talk about the war in yugoslavia In in may was nearly impossible and people they would feel guilty about it and they would say You know only be sleeping four or five hours a night and spend two hours a night watching cnn or msnbc or something But they couldn't couldn't verbalize their thoughts. They felt choked, you know, you could literally try to talk to them about it And it was great psychological dissonance going on and they couldn't sort of Couldn't put the two together like how they've gotten so wrapped up in what they were doing that this was a problem So I do think that that's a really important issue and you know, I try to talk about the things that i'm that i'm doing and You know, just like yesterday. I was doing the this gem lair news hour And pictures say a thousand words I just say so much So it was really important when I was doing that story that I went down to this women's incubator And I found a lot of women that had just arrived here because I want those pictures out to people to know that You can come here as a woman and you can succeed and there are resources for you Because we do have a problem even in the not just in the internet industry But on the internet in general about users that You know that if you are african-american in this country You are half as likely to be on the internet if you as if you were white and These are these are really serious issues that when it was a fringe element You know, you could sort of look away But now that it's the whole country is watching you can't be responsible about anymore I think the valley is also kinder now to immigrants. I remember when we first moved here My husband is an immigrant and the doors weren't as open opened as easily For immigrants as they are now and I think that a lot of people who just have come here From far from far lands Have a better opportunity of making it. I guess in some ways money Can be helpful in that aspect and in helping People not to be discriminated against because I know that sounds odd But you walk in and and if you have a good idea in in the valley It doesn't matter who you are where you come from The good idea is to sort of Take and and and can be and turn into something something else And it's it's good for that person from that nationality or from a person of color can do that and it's It's it's actually been a good thing in some ways I want to ask you a question Getting back to what this gentleman asked you about And you were talking about family and spouses and not spending enough time Because of this work ethic and you'd written something I read about how 100 years ago Families were pretty much on the homestead as pioneers when they came out here They worked in the fields together and they they went And they had and they had dinner together and their work was pretty much at home and their home was pretty much at work And so there was a a closeness between Family members especially parents and children that That we lost somehow during the times when you and I were growing up and And you talk about how Your father went to work and or my father went to work and and we really didn't know what they did at work And we saw them a few hours a day and and this of course is intensified with the amount of work that The people do now especially in the valley and and and also in other other places in our country What I found and I and I wondered if you would comment on this is that We work so much, but now it's becoming Sort of thing where we work at home almost as much as we work at the office And this boundary that or this artificial boundary that we'd created during the 60s and 70s 50s And and even the 40s The doesn't exist anymore. The boundary is is fuzzier And so I may spend more time with my child and my husband because we're all sort of have our own offices at home And but we're working a great deal And I guess my question to you is do you do you think this fuzziness that has developed between work and home Is good for us. Yeah, or do you I often find it? I can't decide whether it's good for me or whether it's really a detriment Well, I think compared to the creating a clean division between it. I think it is good for us, but it is dangerous I two little anecdotes Yesterday I was raised this question with this Woman entrepreneur And she says oh, it's great, you know I have my husband vetting my business plans and he's doing all this stuff and I've got my parents Surfing the web for me And doing all this prospecting on what my competitors are doing And then and I was like, well, that's that's great. You gotta be involved and I got my kids when they come home from school They're surfing the web and they're like testing my site and finding code bugs and was like she had And they loved it as a family. I'm so I was like, I didn't know what to think about that on one hand They're putting everybody to work on this one thing was sort of like the farm everybody works on the farm on the other hand You know they they were just all Doing this sort of Internetty thing and it seemed less balanced and less wholesome than physical manual labor or something I as a writer Have daily destroyed my life from working too hard at on my writing and So we have a place in san francisco. We call the grotto. Just it was a nickname of a friend's place Currently nine writers are in this space. It was a cooperative working space Um, we're lucky to sort of have found people that can kind of do this And I go there in the morning and I come home in the evening And it's really helped draw a line where I do my work because otherwise I would be doing dinner I just turn that computer on and go back to write a little more and By creating some line establishing some principles. That's better for me the good thing about The blurring is you gotta be yourself and you're gonna be yourself when you blur these borders That's the story of the nudist on the late shift. The nudist was this urban legend I've been hearing about what I liked about it was here's a guy who's Whose personal volume system said I'm clothing optional So whatever, you know, you've proved every personal value system may be but he says I'm not gonna stop being who I am when I come to work And I think that's really important because the demoralizing part of work was like I've talked about as a writer Not putting all of yourself on the page the demoralizing aspect of work is when you're not entirely yourself And you can't really be yourself And that's a problem and to live in that state. It's just utter horror for me And so whatever it takes if it takes this blurring to allow people to say well, this is who I am We're gonna deal with it And we have more honesty in our lives as a result of that I think that's worth some of the trade-off We still have to learn how to draw lines, but when and where we work But it's very it's a really good thing that we've gotten rid of this idea that I'm gonna be a different man at work than I am when I come home It's a good message Thank you, it's been a pleasure talking to you and thank you all for coming. Thank you all for coming. I appreciate Poe will be signing books outside at the table with stacy's and Please remember to fill out your program evaluation forms and thank you all for coming