Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985-2000 Read online

  A Master of Analog Critiques a Digital Salon.

  Mountain View, California, 1990.

  At the first Adobe Photoshop Invitational, the (unidentified) assistant to painter David Hockney, graphic designer Min Wang (center), and Adobe Creative director and founder of the invitational, Russell Brown (right), listened to Hockney critiquing his own work and the work created by other invitational attendees with the brand-new Adobe Photoshop software.

  Howl.

  San Francisco, California, 1988.

  An Adobe Systems employee screams with joyful release during a toast to their spectacular year. Their year-end party was staged in a massive building on a pier in San Francisco and reportedly cost a million dollars. As Silicon Valley growth and success soared through the 1980s, holiday parties came to rival Las Vegas stage productions.

  “At the time I left, Apple was the number-one-selling personal computer in the world. We were, by the way, the most profitable computer company in the world, because IBM was losing money, HP was making almost no money from computers, Dell barely existed at that point, Compaq was failing.”

  —John Sculley, former Apple Computer CEO, who grew the company after Steve Jobs left from $800 million to $8 billion in yearly revenue before he left in 1993

  John Sculley Masters His Shyness to Meet the Press.

  Fremont, California, 1990.

  At the factory in Fremont, Apple CEO John Sculley charms the press. He overcame severe shyness and a stutter to eventually become CEO of Pepsi and was then convinced by Steve Jobs to join Apple in 1983. After forcing Steve out, John grew Apple from $800 million to $8 billion a year in revenue. Despite this significant achievement, he was often dismissed in the Valley as the man who fired Steve and, unfairly, as a technology lightweight without a vision. In fact, he worked hard to find and encourage the best ideas inside the company, such as the Knowledge Navigator, which in 1987 anticipated many aspects of today’s internet, software agents, and the potential of tablet and voice-command technology. At the height of his power, in February 1993, he was seated next to First Lady Hillary Clinton at President Bill Clinton’s first State of the Union address. John knew then that despite outward appearances, Apple was tilting toward chaos, unable to rewrite its operating system and innovate against the threat of Microsoft. Once tech companies have successful cash cows such as the Mac, it becomes inherently more difficult to innovate because it often means killing the cash cow. Apple’s Macintosh was profitable, but its market share was dropping fast due to the growth of Windows. Meanwhile a small team at Apple were exploring a handheld computing device. John’s solution to provide a new revenue stream alongside the Macintosh was to green-light this rebel unit to develop the world’s first personal digital assistant, or PDA. The Newton, as it was called, would be a new type of product for a market that did not yet exist. It was an ambitious gamble.

  Steve Capps Playing the Jaminator.

  San Carlos, California, 1993.

  Steve Capps, a modest, unsung hero in the Valley, is codesigner of the Macintosh Finder and helped develop much of the graphical user interface upon which all interface innovation over the past few decades is based. In this image, he’s playing the Jaminator, a digital guitar he invented that lets you play your favorite guitar solos to various hit rock songs, while working at home on the Newton software. Working twenty-hour days was what led Steve to start working from home, where I would sometimes arrive to find him asleep on a mattress on his front porch in the blazing morning sun. He said he wanted the Newton to be so intuitive that his mother could use it. Capps would later quit Apple to work for its sworn “frenemy,” Microsoft.

  The Newton War Room at Apple Computer.

  Cupertino, California, 1993.

  Apple programmer Sarah Clark kept her newborn baby with her at work, almost never leaving the building for two years as the team rushed to finish the software. She pulled curtains over her office so colleagues knew when it was naptime or if she was breast-feeding. Her dedication was typical of Apple employees, and management was generally grateful. Flexible hours and other worker-friendly modifications were adopted, and John Sculley showed leadership by appointing women to positions of power, unusual in Silicon Valley at that time. What’s not often considered is that whoever writes the code determines how the machine will behave and interact with the user. What if someone other than a twentysomething white-male geek wrote the code? A different worldview would likely change the priorities of the code writer, and that would likely change the nature of the technology that is so profoundly shaping our behavior and culture.

  Woz.

  San Francisco, California, 1991.

  Apple Computer cofounder Steve Wozniak (middle) and John Sculley, CEO (right), looking at an early Nintendo Game Boy before taking the stage at an Apple product announcement. Many at Apple were intrigued to learn that contrary to Wall Street’s hyper-short-term thinking and the typical American business plan, Nintendo had conceived a hundred-year business model for itself.

  A New Tool for New Thinking.

  Cupertino, California, 1992.

  Donna Auguste, a senior engineering manager at Apple Computer, coordinated the development of the Newton personal digital assistant, working as part of legendary computer scientist and Apple VP Larry Tesler’s team. She received her undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley, and her master’s from Carnegie Mellon before working her way up through Silicon Valley and being hired by John Sculley. She came with a patient, supportive management style that was a balm to a group working in almost constant crisis. It’s tough enough to bring out a new product with one new technology. Yet Steve Jobs attempted to combine and develop multiple new and existing technologies into one new product at NeXT, and not far away the Apple Newton team was striving to do the same thing. Aside from developing new hardware and software, they also had to create a product identity and brand that would cross over several product categories. Apple at that time made only personal computers; the team now needed to learn everything about the consumer electronics market in which the Newton would be sold.

  A Cry for Help at Apple Tech Support.

  Austin, Texas, 1996.

  Although the Macintosh was designed to be easy to use, as it evolved it became more complex and unwieldy. Users were frustrated and angry and took it out on tech support employees. At the Apple center in Austin, one employee vented his frustration at Apple’s own buggy QuickDraw software with a graphic floor display.

  Preparations for the Demonstration Are Not Going Well.

  Las Vegas, Nevada, 1993.

  While preparing a demonstration of the Newton personal digital assistant for the national press in Las Vegas, the device crashed, causing event organizer Michael Witlin to hit the floor in exasperation and PR specialist Tricia Chan to call Steve Capps for help. While the formal demonstration went ahead for the press without the actual working product, Tricia and Steve gave a successful private demonstration in an adjacent room to reporters from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, whom they knew would be more forgiving if the demo failed again. The two papers published favorable stories, as did most of the other press, as the overall reaction was positive despite the crashed software. The Newton promised to organize names, addresses, calendars, and notes and would also provide infrared beaming, fax, and e-mail capability years ahead of any other device. It also used an advanced form of handwriting-recognition software based on natural gestures. Apple had worked on this recognition software for years, but could not solve the tricky challenge. Then, by chance, one night in 1987 in Moscow, in the final years of the Cold War, an Apple board member answered a frantic knock at his hotel door. A Russian engineer nervously handed him a disk and walked away. The disk contained the handwriting-recognition software Apple desperately needed and was quickly incorporated into the Newton. Even with this covert help, the recognition software would still need years of development, years Apple did not appear to have.
/>   Sleep When You’re Dead.

  Silicon Valley, California.

  While Silicon Valley offered many rewards, the pervasive expectation from the companies (and from colleagues) was that everyone would work until he or she dropped. It could get competitive. A manager at Apple often challenged people to work all night and then to run with him at 6:00 a.m. Then he ran meetings all day and went out with clients at night—in both a macho display and a lesson about what sheer willpower can accomplish. Today we know that sleep deprivation leads to significant increases in errors and a loss of productivity. Martin Gannholm, Apple Computer, San Carlos, California, 1993.

  Burt Cummings, Apple Computer, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1992.

  Steve Capps, Apple Computer, Cupertino, California, 1991.

  Keith Yamashita, Apple Computer, Cupertino, California, 1991.

  Reese Jones, Farallon Computing, Berkeley, California, 1980.

  John Warnock, Adobe Systems, Mountain View, California, 1988.

  Michael Hawley, NeXT Computer, Santa Cruz, California, 1987.

  Brook Byers, Kleiner Perkins, Aspen, Colorado, 1995.

  A Million Lines of Code.

  Cupertino, California, 1992.

  Programmer Peter Alley rests during the big push leading up to the announcement of the Apple Newton by John Sculley at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. Only thirty programmers were writing a million lines of code with a deadline of one year, and nothing was quite working yet. Then John Sculley brought in Gaston Bastiaens from Phillips to rush the Newton to market under pressure from an impatient board. A decision was made to switch the Newton to a newer, faster chip, thus requiring all-new code. Management gave the team new marching orders: they had one more year to rewrite the entire million lines of code. A short time later, a young programmer named Ko Isono went home, loaded a pistol, and shot himself in the heart.

  Braintank.

  Cupertino, California, 1992.

  Apple product marketing manager Michael Tchao leads his comrades in a subdued marketing meeting in the top-secret room they named the Braintank. Ko Isono’s tragic death was devastating to the entire team but after a brief, bitter pause for reflection over the year-end holidays, the team came together in a forceful show of unity, determined to finish the job. Steve Capps, Tchao, and other team members worked straight through the holiday break, making significant technical progress that boosted morale. They also hid a dedication to Ko inside the Newton code only insiders could see.

  An Infant at Apple.

  Cupertino, California, 1993.

  As the Newton team worked even more hours, including almost every weekend, they began to bring their families into the Apple offices, so they could see them during daylight hours.

  Imagine If You Will.

  Hannover, Germany, 1993.

  Backstage before a press briefing, Newton team members Michael Tchao, Nazila Alasti, and Susan Schuman discover that all eight of the prototype Newtons they brought to demonstrate are dead. They can hear the hundreds of German journalists, who’ve been quaffing free beer while waiting over an hour to see the promising new product, as they drunkenly chant, “New-ton, New-ton.” Tchao soon took the stage and began his speech describing the nonfunctioning Newton prototype he was holding by pointing at the screen behind him and suggesting, “Imagine if you will . . .” Shortly after the Newton introduction, Tchao left Apple for a successful career at Nike. Years later Steve Jobs asked him to come back to Apple to run the marketing for the iPad and oversee its launch, closing the circle with the Newton and vindicating all the blood and sweat and effort.

  Calculated Risk.

  Northern California, 1993.

  Apple Newton software engineers defy orders (and gravity) to not risk their lives until the product was done. Their boss, software engineering manager Donna Auguste, was not amused, but understood their need to blow off steam after years of intense work.

  Fanboys.

  Boston, Massachusetts, 1993.

  Apple diehards waited hours for doors to open upon the launch of the much-anticipated Newton. Apple had missed multiple deadlines with manufacturing partner Sharp, which had rushed four thousand units still running beta software to Boston in time for the launch. The Newton team was frantically gluing parts on by hand until the doors opened. In a bittersweet coda, John Sculley was there to preside over the event and support the Newton team, even though he’d already been forced to resign as CEO, ironically ousted in a boardroom coup, like Steve. His bid to bolster Apple with the groundbreaking Newton ultimately failed as sales never matched expectations. However, it did pave the way for the wildly successful PalmPilot. Later, Steve Jobs would kill the struggling Newton upon his return to Apple, but many of Newton’s core ideas live on today in the iPhone and iPad.

  “More jobs and wealth were created than at any time in human history.”

  —L. John Doerr, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, reflecting on the digital revolution and its legacy

  John Doerr and Partners Discuss the Future of the Internet.

  Palo Alto, California, 1994.

  John Doerr making a point during one of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s famous Monday-morning meetings where they reviewed potential companies they might invest in. Entrepreneurs would make their presentations quickly and hope for the best. Kleiner Perkins was already funding several early internet companies such as Macromedia, which introduced Flash, an important web development tool. They were about to help launch Netscape, which started a gold rush on dot-coms. Kleiner Perkins remains a premier venture capital firm with a storied legacy. Doerr and the company helped fund and found an astounding string of successful entrepreneurs and companies such as Lotus, Sun Microsystems, AOL, Intuit, @Home, Amazon.com, Netscape, Google, and Zynga, among many others. Doerr estimates ventures he backed created two hundred thousand jobs. Partners today include former vice president Al Gore, General Colin Powell, William Randolph Hearst III, and Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems. Kleiner Perkins built a valuable keiretsu of growing companies that could share talent and resources, increasing their chances of success.

  The Elevator Pitch.

  Palo Alto, California, 1997.

  At a special event for entrepreneurs hosted by the top venture capital firms, Joe Schoendorf, from Accel Partners, reacts to an entrepreneur’s idea for a start-up.

  Searching for Diamonds.

  San Francisco, California, 1991.

  During a computer industry conference, the partners from Kleiner Perkins break away from the event to huddle in a nearby hotel suite. They had to sort through myriad opportunities and decide which start-ups to throw their weight behind. Floyd Kvamme and Regis McKenna.

  Italian entrepreneur and CEO of NetFRAME Enzo Torresi and Jim Lally.

  Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla.

  Lally lays out documents for review.

  Can You Hear Me Now?

  San Francisco, California, 1991.

  Kleiner Perkins partners Brook Byers (left) and John Doerr (right) with Credit Suisse CEO Frank Quattrone at a computer industry conference, happy to be using their brand-new Motorola flip-style cell phones. Quattrone helped bring dozens of tech companies public, including Cisco and Amazon.

  The Power Table.

  Palo Alto, California, 1995.

  A Kleiner Perkins dinner honored “name” partner Brook Byers (center), with a lot of good-natured roasting. Along with his colleagues in the room, he was (and remains) one of the most successful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. Brook led the company’s investments in biotech, health care, and medical technology. The venerable public relations innovator Regis McKenna (left) mentored the young Steve Jobs as he was starting Apple, introducing him to McKenna’s extremely polished PR practices.

  Investors.

  San Francisco, California, 1991.

  At a tech conference in a San Francisco hotel, a bit north and a world away from the grungy engineer start-ups of Silicon Valley, venture capitalists ar
e making deals. The digital revolution could not have happened without experienced investors taking tremendous risks on the ideas and talents of young entrepreneurs. In 1975, the total outside investment in Silicon Valley was only in the low millions. By the time of this photograph, it was approaching $10 billion and rising. By 2000, it peaked at a staggering $111 billion.

  Calling the Play.

  Aspen, Colorado, 1995.

  Kleiner Perkins partners Brook Byers (top) and Joseph Lacob (below) play a game of touch football with the kids at their annual company gathering. Company partners, institutional investors, select entrepreneurs, and their families travel to Colorado for Kleiner Perkins’s annual Aspen Summit to review the prior year, set strategy for the future, and relax in the surrounding Rockies.

  The Young Mogul before the Merger.

  Aspen, Colorado, 1995.

  AOL CEO Steve Case checks his e-mail during a break at the Aspen Summit, five years before the ill-fated AOL/Time Warner merger. AOL was an internet pioneer, bringing millions online in the late 1980s with e-mail and other services, and Kleiner Perkins was an early believer and investor.