Stars: ★★★★★ (Study This Book)
My five stars comes with one caveat: it is certainly worth the read if you are interested in this subject. The book is incredible, but it is also a time investment; so if you have no interest in Silicon Valley or its history, this is one you should skip. As an employee of Meta (aka Facebook), one the current Big Five, I was fascinated by the history of my job sector.
Premise
Margaret O’Mara begins in the 1950’s and walks systematically through the decades detailing the story of how Silicon Valley became the center of American technology and phrase that meant much more than a plot of land in the San Francisco Bay Area. She provides character sketches but also sets those characters in the larger story, explaining how a company like Microsoft and Apple seemed like risky ventures early on and dead in the water at different points. She describes the machinations of the stock market and how it impacted capital and entrepreneurship through the decades, and she places Silicon Valley (the place) in the long term competition to be the center of American technology, alongside Boston, Seattle, and Texas.
Loved
- The Introduction of Unknown Founders
It takes about 150 pages to reach currently monumental characters like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but those first 150 are crucial to understanding the celebrity CEOs. The Traitorous Eight in some ways that set up the revolving door that characterizes so much of tech employment currently. The complicated relationship with government contracts but apathy toward politics is anathema to today’s environment but shows how history brought us to this point.
On a fun personal note, I loved reading about how Stanford was flexible enough to restructure the entire university and how pivotal it became to the history the American tech community, even compared to MIT. Afa and I have a friendly rivalry about whether Georgetown or Stanford is the better school, and while I will always be a loyal Hoya, I have a greater understand of why he thinks so highly of Stanford.
- The Context for My Current Job
I am a financial investigator for Meta, the umbrella company that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and a multitude of smaller platforms. I love listening to Employee Q&As, especially when Mark Zuckerburg leads them. I had a much wider aperture in the sessions I attended after reading this book. It was fascinating to listen to the executives of my company discuss the tension between the long term investments they want to make in the metaverse and the short term expectations of shareholders, expenses, and stock prices.
In the fall of 2022, there is currently a lot of heartburn among employees about the relatively low stock prices, especially since stock options continue to be part of our compensation packages. Setting aside the general sense of entitlement in current tech workers in Silicon Valley, this book gave me a much longer view of those stocks options. Maybe they go the way of Netscape and become practically worthless, in which case, there was no actual loss to me. Or maybe, the hit the moon. This book made that particular gamble much more real. - The Nostalgia
As I got to the back half of the book, I loved reading about technology that I had once amazed me and has now become obsolete. As a freshman in high school, we had a project to do on Romeo and Juliet, and a requirement was that we had at least one internet source. I had to ask her how to find information on the internet, and she told me that she mostly used Yahoo! but that there was a new option called “Google” that I could try out as well. We had images on each of those slides so it required four floppy disks to get from our home computers to the school computers. I remember the days of logging onto screaming dial up, and how magical the iPhone seemed when it first came out. Reading about the people and the companies behind each of these marvelous inventions reminded me of the ways in which our lives are so deeply entwined. - The Weather
I lost count of how many times O’Mara mentioned the weather of the Bay Area, especially for engineers who moved from Boston and didn’t want to return to the harsh winters there. I lived in the San Francisco Bay area for almost six years, and the weather was perfect 95% of the time (Forest fires made for some terrible air quality during the other ones.) The temperature rarely went below 50 or above 90. The cool, rainy days were as beautiful as the sunny ones, and there was a constant breeze through our house in San Pablo. I laughingly rolled my eyes when Californians would complain about the weather, thinking “You don’t know what bad weather is.” It makes complete sense to me why people from the East Coast would get here and decide that the weather was just too perfect to leave.
Didn’t Love
It was hard to love some of the characters throughout the book, especially the ones who have been lionized today. Of course, humans are complicated but capitalism does not necessarily bring out the best in people. The stories of investors refusing to invest in a company that went into direct competition with Microsoft remind me of the similar stories about not funding companies if Facebook could simply recreate the ideas on their own platform. Ruthlessness is very much a part of Silicon Valley culture, and that was hard to read about at times.
Lessons Learned
- Thinking of the next generation of products is vital to the survival of a tech company. It’s not just a good idea, and the book is full of examples of companies that were so good at their current product that they didn’t see the need to venture into the next big thing. Most of those companies, IBM excluded for exceptional reasons, ended up shutting down in a matter of years.
- This is not a book I would have picked up from the library on my own. I’m grateful to the recommendation from my brother during the presentation of his award-winning paper about multinational tech corporations. It was a good reminder that book recommendations are often surprisingly apt.