Opinion: Lessons for today’s Silicon Valley entrepreneurs from the birth of 6 key tech industries

Published: Jan 7, 2018 9:25 a.m. ET


Tales from Apple’s first chairman to some key women in Silicon valley in the 1970s

David McNew/Newsmakers via Getty
An aerial view of Silicon Valley in 2000.



A new book about Silicon Valley tells the story of how five major industries were born in the 1970s through the eyes of six lesser-known individuals, offering lessons for today’s entrepreneurs from the startup culture of decades ago.

Leslie Berlin, the author of “Troublemakers,” focuses on these people to tell the tale of the birth of personal computing, video games, biotechnology, modern venture capital and advanced semiconductors.

History is told through the eyes of Mike Markkula, Apple Inc.’s AAPL, +0.13% first chairman; Bob Taylor, who kick-started the Arpanet which led to the Internet; Sandra Kurtzig, the CEO of ASK Computer and the first woman to take a tech company public; Al Alcorn, the engineer behind Pong, the first wildly successful videogame developed by Atari; Fawn Alveraz, who rose up from a manufacturing job at ROLM Corp. to executive positions at IBM and Siemens; and Niels Reimers, who changed how universities use patents and transfer innovations to the private sector.

The book contains surprising or fascinating anecdotes about the birthing of these core industries and many companies. Markkula, for example, had retired from Intel at age 33 a millionaire and met the two Steves in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos while he was devoting one day a week to give advice to entrepreneurs.

Their long-haired, counterculture appearance was unlike any other clean cut, aspiring company founders he had met with until then. But he was so blown away by Steve Wozniak’s elegant circuit board design for the Apple II computer and Steve Jobs’s passion, he decided to come out of retirement to help them by writing the young company’s business plan, investing in Apple and becoming its first chairman and head of marketing.

Berlin, a project historian at the Silicon Valley archives at Stanford University, is also the author of “The Man Behind the Microchip,” a biography of Intel Corp. INTC, -3.61%  co-founder Bob Noyce, published in 2005.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Question: Can you tell us about the Silicon Valley Archives and how you ended up there?

Answer: Stanford has been collecting in the area of Silicon Valley history since the mid-1980s. I first encountered the archives in my first semester of graduate school, when I thought I would be studying race relations. This was a time machine open to the public. I wanted to remain somehow connected to such an amazing resource. I was fortunate when I finished my Ph.D. that the archives were interested in my working there.

Q.: How did you decide to focus on the individuals you wrote about?

A.: I needed people who had undeniably interesting stories. I wanted people whose work was important in history. I wanted to have people who were not particularly well known.

In the introduction, I tell the story of going to a party and in attendance was the COO of a company with one of these celebrity CEOs. That person started to sing a little song, “I did all the work and he got all the credit.” The story of innovation in the Valley is a team story. Sometimes when you focus too much on the person in the spotlight, it blinds you to all the people who are just outside the spotlight that made it possible for that person to be there.

If you look at some of these people, you can say they should be in the spotlight. You look at Bob Taylor. He convinced the Defense Department to start the Arpanet, which eventually morphs into the internet, and runs the lab at Xerox PARC XRX, -0.67%  and brings to life pretty much everything that today we associate with the personal computer.

Or Mike Markkula. We have heard so much about the two Steves in the garage. I thought, why is it that Apple ended up so successful, the youngest company ever into the Fortune 500, when there were dozens of these little companies that looked a whole lot like Apple running around in dozens of garages in the Valley and all over the United States? The answer when I started boiling things away was Mike Markkula [who also was one of Apple’s first angel investors].

Sandra Kurtzig was the first woman to take a software company public [Ask Computer Systems], a software entrepreneur at a time when software was so unknown that people thought she was selling lingerie.

Q.: Why did the period that is covered in the book, which spans the 1970s, lead to all the major developments and created all these industries at the same time?

A.: That was the sort of animating question of the book: How did this region go from this obscure place with this one technology at its heart [semiconductors] to the birthplace of five major industries and huge consumer markets?

The anti-Vietnam-War sentiment among these highly skilled technical graduates had very practical consequences. The logical place for a graphics expert in 1969 to work would be the Department of Defense or a military subcontractor, and suddenly you had these people saying no thanks, I don’t want to be affiliated with those places. Instead they started to work at places like Atari and PARC, and that brought a really expansive world view to tech.

Q.: What has the response been to your book from people in Silicon Valley?

A.: Both contemporaries of people I write about and then the current generation of entrepreneurs have told me how much they like the book.

That is really gratifying because one of the things that Steve Jobs talked about in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford, he talked about when he was fired from Apple in 1985 how one of the first things he did was to call David Packard [co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Co.] and [Intel co-founder] Bob Noyce, and he apologized for failing to pass the baton. He has this image of this relay race, from generation and generation in the Valley. Jobs passed the baton forward, even though not many people realize it. [Mark] Zuckerberg, [the co-founder and CEO of Facebook Inc. FB, +1.39% ] for example considered him a very important mentor.

In my ideal world, this book can serve as a baton, kind of helping people see what happened before, this is how it worked, how it didn’t work and these kind of broader questions you have to be asking and the tough decisions you have to make.

One thing that comes through is that it wasn’t always easy, that sometimes it was a white-knuckled time of despair. I remember Andy Grove [Intel’s first CEO] telling me that when he went to Intel, the Simon and Garfunkel song “Fakin It” was very popular on the radio. He thought that song was aimed at him: he wasn’t sure that [the major success at] Fairchild hadn’t been a fluke and he wasn’t sure they were going to make it at Intel.

Telling these stories through individuals, you get to see what it was like on the inside, what they went through.

Now read: Artificial intelligence in 2018: Still more hype than reality, AI is nothing to be scared of yet


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