Silicon Valley

"Steve, still pondering, couldn’t shake the idea of a 3M machine. When he later told the founding story of NeXT, he would bedazzle the press with the perfect tale. But it was largely a myth. It went like this. Steve first met Paul Berg, a tall, gregarious biochemist, at a Stanford luncheon in 1984. Paul, fifty-nine and the winner of a Nobel Prize for creating the first recombinant DNA molecule, was teeming with bleeding-edge insights about the creation of life. In late August 1985, Steve and Paul sat for lunch in Palo Alto. Steve began grilling Paul about how researchers used computers—and why they didn’t more often. Specifically, he wanted Paul to explain why biologists weren’t using computers to model DNA experiments. In theory, computers would speed them up exponentially. Over two and a half hours, Paul described to Steve the level of complication involved in conducting biology experiments. With each trial, Paul’s team had to choose different temperatures, enzymes, and other variables and then wait to see what worked via trial and error. The 3M machines capable of handling all of these factors were prohibitively expensive, even for well-funded laboratories. Steve left the lunch in awe. And Paul reciprocated Steve’s respect. He loved the Silicon Valley start-up culture that Steve had helped forge and he insisted that his own Nobel-winning research could only have been possible in the cooperative, entrepreneurial environment of the Bay Area. Steve came away from the meeting feeling confident that he could offer scientists and researchers the product they clearly needed: a more affordable 3M machine. “And gradually,” Steve said, “my spirits started to come back little by little.” This story Steve told about his lunch with Paul was far more elegant than the real story. As Dan’l later recalled, Steve understood the power of being able to say, “I met with Paul Berg, and there was an epiphany.” He knew that name-dropping Nobel Prize winners carried weight."

"Where Ed handled the Pixar team, at Next, Steve would become his own biggest obstacle to keeping great people. He was determined to manage everything, from the exact shades of color used in the logo down to the angle of robots on the factory floor—decisions that often brought him into conflict with his team. As Susan liked to remind him about Silicon Valley talent, “your assets have feet” and could walk out anytime."

"Coach became the Coach when he traded the gridiron for an even more competitive arena, namely the boardrooms and executive suites of Silicon Valley. He was a world-class listener, a hall-of-fame mentor, and the wisest man I’ve ever met. His ambitious, caring, accountable, transparent, profane humanity built the culture at Google—and dozens of other companies—to what it is today."

"For its supporters, the Review offered a breath of fresh air to Stanford’s stifling political correctness. For its detractors, the Review engaged in disingenuous devil’s advocacy, opting for provocation over substance. The Review became famous on campus for its political heterodoxy. Its inaugural editor-in-chief would later become infamous in Silicon Valley for his."

"the timing of PayPal’s IPO wasn’t solely a triumph of Girardian logic. Thiel admitted that rivalry, conflict, and emotion also played a powerful role. “The competitive thing in me was just, you know, if the bankers thought we weren’t ready, then it was more important than ever. It was sort of like a Wall Street versus Silicon Valley thing,” he said of his will to prevail, “and there was a part of my thinking where, emotionally, I felt like the Wall Street banks were especially negative because we were encroaching on their turf.”"

"Though the founders engaged in little explicit talk about “company culture” at the time, PayPal’s culture definitively shaped the approach of a generation of Silicon Valley talent. Today, the outsiders who built PayPal are among the most influential insiders in the world of technology and engineering, their utterances decoded, dissected, and debated. They are both leading and investing in companies, and they receive hundreds of pitches per week from up-and-comers full of ideas, ambition, and energy."

"Thiel points to this pressure as the defining characteristic of his PayPal experience. “If you’re at a fantastically successful company like Microsoft or Google,” he explained, “you will infer that starting a new business is easier than it is. You’ll learn a lot of wrong things. If you’re at the company that failed, you tend to learn the lesson that it’s impossible. At PayPal we were sort of intermediate. We weren’t as successful as some of the great successes of Silicon Valley, but I think people sort of calibrated it and learned the best lesson—that it’s hard, but doable.”"

"The meetings went off without a hitch. Steve did a fantastic job mesmerizing Quattrone and Martin over Pixar’s potential. They could hardly have been more enthusiastic about the vision and strategy. They understood Pixar was not the typical Silicon Valley tech company, and both said they wanted to involve their entertainment specialists in LA. Even the discussion over Pixar’s risks had gone well."

"Bill Gurley, the incredibly smart, wry, contrarian Silicon Valley VC and Texan deal maker, puts it this way: “I can’t make you the smartest or the brightest, but it’s doable to be the most knowledgeable. It’s possible to gather more information than somebody else.”"

"For its supporters, the Review offered a breath of fresh air to Stanford’s stifling political correctness. For its detractors, the Review engaged in disingenuous devil’s advocacy, opting for provocation over substance. The Review became famous on campus for its political heterodoxy. Its inaugural editor-in-chief would later become infamous in Silicon Valley for his."

"the timing of PayPal’s IPO wasn’t solely a triumph of Girardian logic. Thiel admitted that rivalry, conflict, and emotion also played a powerful role. “The competitive thing in me was just, you know, if the bankers thought we weren’t ready, then it was more important than ever. It was sort of like a Wall Street versus Silicon Valley thing,” he said of his will to prevail, “and there was a part of my thinking where, emotionally, I felt like the Wall Street banks were especially negative because we were encroaching on their turf.”"

"Though the founders engaged in little explicit talk about “company culture” at the time, PayPal’s culture definitively shaped the approach of a generation of Silicon Valley talent. Today, the outsiders who built PayPal are among the most influential insiders in the world of technology and engineering, their utterances decoded, dissected, and debated. They are both leading and investing in companies, and they receive hundreds of pitches per week from up-and-comers full of ideas, ambition, and energy."

"Thiel points to this pressure as the defining characteristic of his PayPal experience. “If you’re at a fantastically successful company like Microsoft or Google,” he explained, “you will infer that starting a new business is easier than it is. You’ll learn a lot of wrong things. If you’re at the company that failed, you tend to learn the lesson that it’s impossible. At PayPal we were sort of intermediate. We weren’t as successful as some of the great successes of Silicon Valley, but I think people sort of calibrated it and learned the best lesson—that it’s hard, but doable.”"

"I came to this view as a Canadian who has spent almost equal amounts of time living in the United States and China. To me, these two countries are thrilling, maddening, and, most of all, deeply bizarre. Canada is tidy. I sometimes find myself relaxing as soon as I cross into its borders. Drive around America and China, on the other hand, and you’ll see people and places that are utterly deranged. That’s not a reproach. These two countries are messy in part because they are both engines for global change. Europeans have a sense of optimism only about the past, stuck in their mausoleum economy because they are too sniffy to embrace American or Chinese practices. And the rest of the world is either too mature or too young to match the impact of these two superpowers. It is Americans and Chinese—Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, Wall Street, and Beijing—that will determine what people everywhere will think and what they will buy."

"Lawyers enable some of the success of Silicon Valley. You can’t build companies worth trillions without legal protections. But lawyers are also part of the reason that the Bay Area and much of the country are starved of housing and mass transit. The United States used to be, like China, an engineering state. But in the 1960s, the priorities of elite lawyers took a sharp turn. As Americans grew alarmed by the unpleasant by-products of growth—environmental destruction, excessive highway construction, corporate interests above public interests—the focus of lawyers turned to litigation and regulation. The mission became to stop as many things as possible."

"Construction, capitalism, and control. These elements are sometimes in tension. After China’s digital platforms grew powerful and profitable, the Communist Party reined them in (the focus of my sixth chapter). It found a lot to dislike among tech tycoons and their business models. Companies and people were engaging in transactions—buying goods, borrowing money, contracting for services—without mediation by the state. And digital platforms created billionaires who could not resist flaunting their wealth or wisdom, much as their Silicon Valley counterparts do. Subsequently, the Communist Party smashed many of their businesses before they had begun to wield real power. The state wants to have the ultimate say in controlling economic relations throughout society."

"They were still more interested in individual inventors rather than understanding it as a community of engineering practice. The obsession with invention has clouded Silicon Valley’s ability to appreciate China’s actual strength. Rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I believe we should view them as milestones in the training of better scientists and manufacturers. Viewing technology as people and process knowledge isn’t only more accurate; it also empowers our sense of agency to control the technologies we are producing."

"The American imagination has been too focused on the creation of tooling and blueprints. [Andy Grove, the legendary former CEO of Intel](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor369), said it best in 2010: that the United States needs to focus less on “the mythical moment of creation” and more on the “scaling up” of products. Grove saw Silicon Valley transition from doing both invention and production to specializing only in the former. And he understood quite well that technology ecosystems would rust if the research and development no longer had a learning loop from the production process."

"In a Silicon Valley culture captured by book titles such as *Only* *the Paranoid Survive,* Fadell began to worry about the sustainability of these sales. “You hear these heavy, stomping footsteps of the mobile phone industry. *Boom!*” he later told an interviewer. “And it’s the feature phones at that time. They are adding cameras, they are adding color displays. And they are seeing the success of the iPod and going, ‘That’s just music. We have some storage. We can load music onto our phone, and we can do what the iPod does, plus more.’ *Boom!*… *Boom!*”"

"Almost a year earlier, when dot-com stocks began their dizzying ascent, a group of young Japanese had formed the Bit Valley Association, an attempt to create a community of tech-minded entrepreneurs to interact with, help and inspire each other. Their model was Silicon Valley in California. Every month, the group held a networking event, where analysts, bankers, investors, salesmen and traders turned up, each eager for tips on hot internet stocks. On this occasion, the gathering was held at Velfarre disco in Roppongi, ‘the district that never sleeps’.[2](private://read/01jg9b8njt7zc5haz30afb9n29/#pro_2)"

"In early October 2011, the Japanese restaurant “Keizuki,” which has been operating in the Silicon Valley on the West Coast of the USA, was about to close. That day, the restaurant was bustling with customers wanting to have their last meal at Keizuki, but by 9 PM, there was a little respite. It was then that I received a request to “write an article about Jobs.”"

"After being taken care of at Kansai for two years, I moved to “Mutsu” in San Mateo, about a 30-minute drive south from San Francisco. Today, San Mateo is home to many sushi bars, izakayas, and ramen shops, making it one of the largest concentrations of Japanese restaurants around Silicon Valley, but back then, there were only Mutsu and one other restaurant."

"However, memories from the 1980s with the two founders of Apple are minimal. From the late 80s to the early 90s, Apple was in a slump and far from the center of attention. Other Silicon Valley companies centered around semiconductors were also struggling under the attack of Japanese forces. Hence, the opportunities for Apple or Silicon Valley to be extensively covered by the U.S. media were much less than compared to now. No one imagined that Apple would later significantly transform the IT industry and people’s lives, or that Steve himself would become a darling of the times."

"Generally, in the restaurant business, or perhaps anywhere, there’s a tendency to gauge a customer’s financial standing based on their appearance. However, in the mid-1990s Silicon Valley, with the emergence of IPO magnates, even people who looked slightly untidy on the outside turned out to be very wealthy. Even if their meal totaled only $20 to $30, and they seemed to scrutinize the bill, they could actually be millionaires. Around this time, one thing frequently discussed with staff was “Don’t judge customers by their appearance or what they order on that day.” If they are satisfied with the food and service, they might introduce the restaurant to friends or acquaintances, or become regulars by hosting exclusive parties later. We had such experiences many times."

"In Silicon Valley, the IPO of the internet company Netscape Communications in 1995 ignited the internet and initial public offering (IPO) boom. A series of billionaires emerged, and real estate prices soared. However, when we were looking for a store in the early 1990s, it was, in retrospect, just before “the dawn.” There were still many vacant shops along the streets with signs that read “Vacant” and “Tenants Wanted.” “We want a place about the same size or slightly smaller than our current store.” Initially, the two of us had such conversations. Ideally, the location would be not too far from University Avenue in Palo Alto, where our restaurant Sushi-ya is located, so that regular customers could visit."

"Greg’s girlfriend worked at Apple and had a few encounters with her boss, Steve. Perhaps feeling as if Steve’s gaze was saying “Why are you guys here?” they eventually began visiting the store on Fridays when Steve was less likely to appear. Greg at one point said, “I’m having more business trips to Seattle.” Amazon has a subsidiary in Silicon Valley responsible for research and development. They were making the Kindle there, but he often also visited the Seattle area where the headquarters are located."

"Steve Jobs liked sitting in the “number 1” seat at his favorite sushi counter and looking around the store. At one point, when asked why he did that, he said, “From here, when I look at the other guests, I can tell how the economy is doing.” There was an article in the American economic paper The Wall Street Journal about “Katsuzuki being the barometer of Silicon Valley’s economy,” but Steve seemed to have realized this earlier than the article. We also watched the changing tides of Japan and the U.S. from there."

"The size of the restaurant also presented dilemmas. Keigetsu was started with the desire to provide detailed services that had not existed in Silicon Valley until then, and the staff consisted of 12 people, which was quite a crew. After actually running it, it became clear that in California, a store of this size is economically the most troublesome. The business was structurally problematic because it bore the same obligations for employee insurance and employment conditions as large companies, while revenues were meager. Despite many struggles, profits did not easily rise."

"The Reason for 26 Years From opening “Sushiya” in 1985 to closing “Katsuzuki” in 2011, we ran a Japanese restaurant in Silicon Valley for about a quarter of a century. It might be a cliché, but it was full of ups and downs. At times it was enjoyable, at other times it was hard, but every day we ran with all our might. Through this process, we realized many things and acquired many skills. Finally, I would like to reflect on what we learned."

"Benko, the dropout from Innsbruck, accumulates wealth like a Silicon Valley magnate. Or like one of those hedge fund owners from the USA who earn billions of dollars in good years – and whom Benko styles his life after. Why not? Benko's business ideas promised him and his investors very decent returns for the coming years as well."