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A Book with Legs Podcast - Episode Summary
Podcast Details Title: A Book with Legs Host: Smead Capital Management Episode Title: Margaret O'Mara - The Code - Part 1 Description: The episode features author Margaret O'Mara discussing her book, *The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America*, which examines the history of Silicon Valley and its impact on American technology and economy.
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Key Themes and Discussions
Introduction to Silicon Valley
- Gilded Age Influence: O'Mara argues that wealth from the Gilded Age fueled the growth of Silicon Valley.
- Historical Context: The conversation traces the history of Silicon Valley's development, focusing on key figures, institutions, and the role of investors.
Insights from Margaret O'Mara
- Background: O'Mara is the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington and has a profound interest in the intersection of technology, politics, and history.
- The Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: O'Mara discusses her motivation to write the book, expressing a desire for a comprehensive history of Silicon Valley that combines human stories with economic narratives.
Key Figures in Silicon Valley's Development
- Burton McMurtry: His experiences in the 1950s illustrate the early tech industry, primarily focused on advanced electronics and defense-related technologies.
- Fred Terman: An influential figure at Stanford who helped shape the university's relationship with industry, promoting innovation and entrepreneurship.
- William Shockley: Co-inventor of the transistor, whose struggles in management led to the formation of Fairchild Semiconductor.
The Role of Government
- Military Funding: The conversation highlights how military contracts and government support significantly influenced the growth of Silicon Valley, particularly during the Cold War.
- Public-Private Partnerships: O'Mara emphasizes the essential role government played in seeding innovations that became the basis for Silicon Valley's success.
Silicon Valley's Evolution
- Shift in Educational Opportunities: The early accessibility to education and entrepreneurial opportunities in technology contrasts sharply with today's more competitive environment.
- Cyclicality of the Tech Industry: The discussion touches on the cyclical nature of the tech sector, where boom times often lead to calls for government support during downturns.
Future Considerations
- Inequities in Tech: O'Mara reflects on the persistent gender and racial disparities in the tech industry, noting it has not changed significantly since its early days.
- Antitrust Concerns: Discussion of the current landscape where tech giants dominate, raising questions about the implications for competition and innovation.
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Conclusion The episode serves as an insightful exploration of the historical context of Silicon Valley, examining how its development has been intricately linked to broader socio-economic forces, including government policy and military funding. O'Mara's expertise provides a nuanced understanding of how past influences shape the current technological landscape and points toward ongoing challenges within the industry.
Call to Action Listeners are encouraged to review the podcast and share their thoughts, as well as to engage with the Smead Capital Management team through recommendations for future book discussions.
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Listening Information
- Podcast Platform: Available on Apple, Spotify, and other platforms.
- Contact: Feedback and book recommendations can be sent to podcast@smeedcap.com.
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This summary captures the essence of the episode while highlighting the key discussions and themes presented by the host and guest.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:02You're listening to A Book With Legs, a podcast presented by Smeed Capital Management. At Smead Capital Management, we advise investors who fear stock market failure. You can learn more at SmeadCap.com or by calling your financial advisor. Welcome to A Book With Legs podcast. I'm Cole Smead. I'm the CEO and a portfolio manager here at Smead Capital Management. At our firm, we are readers and book junkies. It can be said that leaders are readers, and we believe books provide us a great source of information for filtering what is and isn't important for us as investors. Investing is the last great liberal art and the best way to spend a lifetime of learning.
0:40This podcast is for readers, thinkers, business-minded people, and investors who want to grow their knowledge from great authors and their writing. Charlie Munger often talks about using multiple mental models and analysis. Our aim for this podcast is to help listeners test Munger's theory in business, markets, and people. Let's see, I'll just start off the show by just saying, if you enjoy this, I encourage you to give us a review on Apple, Spotify, wherever you're listening to this today. So let's jump into it. Hosting this alongside of me is our chairman and chief investment officer, Bill Smead.
1:11Thanks for joining me, Bill. Great to be here. Love this book. Agree. Is there anything particular that you're looking forward to today with Margaret? Just hearing her perspective on a lot of these things that are just so impactful today, even though they happened decades ago. Agree. I'm excited as well. So we're going to talk about the growth of technology during the 20th century that propelled it really into the 21st century. The ideas, the people, the companies, and the investors that were part of this movement. Margaret O'Meara is joining us to talk about her book, The Code, Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.
1:48Margaret has also published her book, Cities of Knowledge, which she put out in 2005. She is the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington. There she teaches history of technology, industry, the history of capitalism, modern politics, and urban and metropolitan history. She is also a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American History and a past fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education. She has a master's and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Northwestern University.
2:25Margaret, thanks for joining us. This is just going to be a real treat for us. And this doesn't look like you just woke up three years ago and started writing this book, though. Yeah, well, look, it's great. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure. And it's just such a pleasure as an author when you're, you know, sitting there typing away on your own, alone, putting stuff, putting words down on the screen and saying, I wonder if anyone's going to read this and whether they think this is going to make sense. And it's just so gratifying to hear from people, particularly people in the industry.
2:55and people in business to sort of say this resonated. Yeah, I've been thinking about this a long time. I, you know, I realized this is the book that I wished existed in 2000 when I moved to San Francisco for the first time at the height of the dot-com boom. I was not going there to be a dot-com entrepreneur. I was newly married to someone who was working in the industry or starting in the industry. I was actually writing my PhD dissertation in history in San Francisco coffee shops and thinking I'd made some strange life choices because everyone else seemed to be on this amazing rocket ship. And I was like, huh, what am I doing here?
3:32But it all worked out. But I was, you know, I'm someone who, I'm a historian of politics and business and not a historian of technology per se, although I've always been a tech user. And I was just really curious about, you know, what was the secret to this entrepreneurial ecosystem? Not just that it got started, but it kept on going and going and going. And and I also kind of coming at it from thinking about politics and national politics and particularly presidential history. I was like, well, what is the where's the Cold War in all this? Like, I'm surrounded by this, this industry that's flourishing and everyone's like this is a triumph of free markets.
4:12And we're, you know, we're doing all this amazing stuff. And I'm like, but but you guys were this is a big defense area, you know, a few decades ago. Like, how does one connect to the other? And how can we explain that? So I kept on waiting for someone to write that book because I went on my own journey of looking into the history of Silicon Valley. But I was like, you know, there's going to be some journalist who writes a good one volume, soup to nuts, start at the beginning, end at the end story of how we got to now and how we got to the platform era and where these companies and these people and these investors came from and what this culture is like.
4:49And it's going to be like full of human stories and it's going to be interesting. And I'm waiting for it. And I kept on. I'm like, oh, you know what? Actually, I think I'm the one who's supposed to write it. So I did. And that's how we got now. Nice. Margaret, you introduced your readers to Burton McMurtry early in the book. He had a couple of commonalities that run throughout your writing. He was young and he was a Rice University grad. Quote, you learned a lot, unquote, he remembered. Quote, about how to so do things in a practical way, unquote. He was talking about the tech of the 1950s and the GE microwave laboratories.
5:23Teach our listeners what the tech of the 1950s were to McMurtry. The tech of the 1950s is, funnily enough, was not the computer industry, at least not in Silicon Valley or what was going to become Silicon Valley. It was advanced electronics, advanced defense-related electronics. That was the main customer for a lot of these private companies, private sector companies that were out in the valley, both startups and branches of East Coast companies that opened up shop there. And it was, you know, small electronics, increasingly transistorized electronics at a time when vacuum tubes were still powering the mainframe computers and also communication devices like radar, microwave, not the oven, but, you know, microwave communication.
6:06Sure. Turns out those are the building blocks of everything we're doing to make this podcast and everything your listeners are doing to listen to it, right? The smaller, smaller electronics and communication by computer now enabled by the Internet. Stanford accepted half of the applicants in those days. It was easy to get in. You could get a job while you went to school as a married person. Now it's tough to get in and no one gets married for a long time. Talk to us about the wide open opportunities of yesterday down there. Yeah. And this is a really important part of the story, I think, because, you know, we talk a lot about Silicon Valley's meritocracy.
6:45And Silicon Valley, the tech industry likes to talk about it as a meritocracy. Right. And I think sometimes uses that as like, hey, we're not discriminating. You know, we don't care what people's backgrounds are. We're just here for people who have talent and we want to advance them. And, you know, as you observe, like now that that is it's not a kind of white as wide open field as it used to be. But I think that that kind of idea of a meritocracy really does spring from those early days, because if you look back at this first generation, the Burt McMurtries and others, they were almost to a man people who were not coming from wealth.
7:20They were not coming from connections. In fact, they came and ended up in the valley because they didn't have a Ivy League degree or, you know, a dad with connections or kind of a pedigree that would have logically ended up in managerial roles in a Fortune 50 company, which is what you aspired to in the 50s. Right. That's the organization man. It's the peak of American corporate capitalism. That was kind of the mark of success. Yeah. So ending up in some agricultural valley surrounded by apricot trees doing kind of esoteric advanced electronics, that was something that was pretty out there. And so what are they drawn by?
7:57They're drawn by being able to get your master's degree at Stanford for free while you're working full time at Lockheed. You know, these are scholarship kids. They're going to places like Rice because it's tuition free. They're coming up from very little and they're making something entirely new. And I think that escalator of upward mobility that was possible in the early valley. Now, to be clear, these are all all these are men and they're all white. So but I think it shows like what happens when society decides we are going to invest really, really big in in this case, science and engineering.
8:29And where there's this incredible market opportunity and there's this openness to new people coming in with new ideas. Yeah, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco had big activity for war-related purposes for defending the nation. Santa Clara Valley was electronics and instrumentation. What type of products were being developed in Santa Clara Valley? Yeah, so, well, you know, the original homegrown startup, or, well, the one that is most famous and long-lasting and has the biggest success is Hewlett Packard, now HP. And that starts in a, you know, garage in 1939, famously. Again, defense work was really important in its early years.
9:08Wartime contracts really kept HP and other startups like it afloat. But, you know, looking at what HP did in the early years is a good example of the things that the Valley did. It was, again, not computers per se, like the mainframe computing. Both the research and the development and the commercialization of computing was happening mostly on the East Coast, although there was some research going on at Stanford with, you know, artificial intelligence and early, you know, early, very early stage stuff on that. But in terms of the industry, it was electronics. Yeah, it was small scale, basically electronic devices that go in other machines, machines that go in other machines.
9:45So in the first, you know, through the 1980s, the Silicon Valley was a hardware place. It was not a software place. It was a hardware place. And it was a manufacturing region, too. There were a lot of fab plants and assembly lines. There was a really significant manufacturing workforce doing these, again, very specialized. They're not, by and large, not a big commercial market. And where the market exists, it is in very large enterprises or in universities and scientific laboratories. A lot of the book of business, like the majority of the business was government-related and mostly defense-related.
10:21Not just the Pentagon, but also increasingly starting in the late 50s with NASA and the space program, which is, of course, a civilian agency. But why are we going to the moon so the Soviets don't get there first? Like the Cold War is kind of the bigger context where all of this is happening. Yeah, we're going to come back to that theme a lot because I think you did such a good job explaining how often the government was involved. And yet we don't hear that in the dialogue of technology and business today. So MIT's Vannevar Bush was a large figure early on in the tech scene. Obviously, this is emanating out of like the math departments of these great universities.
10:58You know, he founded Raytheon in 1922. He was also close with the federal government because of the atom bomb. Like you pointed out, the war ties. In the average American life, though, would Bush have been known at all? Like we think about technology, rock stars or these bright minds that we see in society today? Well, you know, it's interesting. Like he does, you know, because of his role in the war effort, he does land on the cover of Time magazine as the general of physics because he's playing this really prominent role. But I think that underscores kind of this new entirely new thing that is being built, being built kind of around the Manhattan Project, but not only the Manhattan Project, which is this mass mobilization of scientists and engineers who are, you know, mostly based in universities and government spending on advanced research and advanced computing and things that are all for have a military application.
11:53Right. The first the big computing projects of wartime, including ENIAC, which was the first all digital machine that's developed at the University of Pennsylvania during the later years of the war. They're all there. You know, these are army contracts because they need these computers to better calculate the trajectory of missiles. You know, this isn't all about science for science's sake. But what Bush sees early on is that this actually this model could be something that advances science for science's sake and that has a bigger peacetime civilian economic upside. And so in 1945, he reports to President Roosevelt that's actually submitted to Truman because Roosevelt passes away that is titled Science, the Endless Frontier.
12:41That's making a case for all of this defense related mobilization during the war. We look what we were able to do and look what we'd be able to do if we continued beyond the war, but really applied all of that energy and all those resources to peacetime non-military uses. And this and the other thing that people in charge in Washington are really thinking a lot about and worried about in 1945, 46 and on and on is the Great Depression coming back. Sure. So there's this economic imperative to keep the Keynesian machine going, like keep on juicing the system so it doesn't collapse again. And so there's a real turning point.
13:26There's a real hinge. There were obviously, you know, Thomas Edison was a very famous person. There were plenty of famous engineers and scientists in American history prior to that. But after, you know, from the 1940s forward, science and engineering as a discipline and the people at the head of it and as a government enterprise just takes on a completely new character and prominence in American life. We're going to come back to the Harry Truman publication because I think there's a really interesting line that you had in your book from that. Let's go back to Bush just as kind of like a thinker.
13:58It's kind of a framework question, if you will. You mentioned that he called for a machine that was known as a Memex to create, quote, trails through the enormous mass of the common record, end quote. Was this really the framework of the HTTP or, you know, hypertextual transfer protocol that we saw in the web? Or was it just something that sounded like it? Yeah, yes and no. I think, you know, it's really interesting, this article that Bush and and he has he has such a funny first name. It's and no one else is named. It has the same. It's Viniever, which took me forever to say that wrong. But no, this is like it rhymes with beaver.
14:38That's how you remember. It's a very odd. He was named after some family friend who was, I think, Dutch, but it was like someone's last name. Like it's a very interesting and strange origin story. And it took me decades to get that right. Right. But he is, you know, he writes this article that's published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1945. And it's all it's kind of interesting because it's it's you know, it's a think piece. It's about how do we manage information, which really was the main you know, this is the purpose of, you know, what's driving the growth of business machines and both analog and digital and and computing is we have so much information.
15:14and how do we do data management around that. And that's certainly what Bush is thinking about as an inventor in the 20s and 30s with his differential analyzer, which is the kind of prototype for many of these large computing projects. But it is, you know, funnily enough, Bush does not, he's so important in these early years, and he kind of misses out, he kind of goes on a different path and does not become as important to either transistorized electronics or even communication by computer and the development of the Internet. So funnily enough, and part of this has to do with kind of the politics of what happens immediately after the war, particularly the case of the McCarthy-era pursuit of and stripping of the security clearance of Robert Oppenheimer, who was a very close, who was a friend of Bush's, but more importantly, Bush sort of saw Oppenheimer as this sort of extraordinary patriot and saw, was just deeply, deeply, deeply, profoundly upset by it.
16:19Bush also did not get along with Edward Teller, who kind of became the ascendant science whisperer, H-bomb whisperer to the presidents. And so he kind of like doesn't sort of, doesn't stay as prominent and is not part of the conversation that kind of continues about, all right, how do we manage information by computer? And how do we network? And how do humans and computers interact with one another? That is something that Bush is not a part of the conversation. And so it's so funny that the Memex essay, which is very important and noted and pointed to, and is really prescient in so many ways. It's talking about structurally, yeah, structurally.
17:01Yeah. But it is more of a kind of this is the sort of interesting hypothesis of this. You know, this is what we could be able to do. And this is necessary. But Fred Terman really became his legacy in so many respects, who was obviously educated by Bush. So kind of briefly, what was the scene of Terman's move east of like, you know, what they called Boston Tech in the 1920s? I mean, this is the 1920s. It's Boston, which was the cradle of technology in America. but what would that have been like for him? Yeah. So Fred Terman grows up as a faculty kid. He's a Palo Alto boy. He's son of a Stanford professor.
17:36Lewis Terman, the creator of the IQ test. That's his big, how we remember Terman. And so the younger Terman, Fred, goes to MIT in the 1920s. He's Vannevar Bush's first graduate student and graduate advisee and forges this close relationship and sees what is this kind of connection, something that's only happening at MIT and really only happening with Bush and in electrical engineering, which is you essentially, you're building companies on the side. You're part of, you know, you're also an entrepreneur as well as professor. Like that was a model that was utterly novel and very rare. And that's what Bush is doing.
18:15He's a co-founder of what becomes Raytheon and thinking about commercializing some of the technology that they're making. In the 1940s, Bush recruits Terman to come back to Massachusetts to work for the duration of the war on electronics research at MIT. And while Terman is there, he sees – has a front row seat to both what's going on during the war but also the planning for what happens – what might happen after. Sure. And right after the war, he comes back to Stanford. He writes this letter that I quote in my book to a colleague saying, look, essentially, I'm paraphrasing, but things are going to change.
18:52The government is going to invest heavily in science, and Stanford should be a part of it. Stanford can kind of stay where it's at, be a very good university on par with Dartmouth. But we actually could do more, and we could become a Harvard. And I think he's kind of dissing Dartmouth there. It's a little unfair. But anyway, it's, you know, this is a very conscious move by Terman, who then, as dean of engineering and later provost with other leaders of Stanford in the starting in the late 40s, continuing into the 1960s, reorganizes the university to become the perfect Cold War university, builds up electronics, builds up physics, creates entire programs that are designed to train people to go into industry to do these very, again, niche, esoteric, super advanced, It's mostly military application stuff.
19:44These products are, you know, Stanford becomes the place that is the only place that has a program in, you know, microwave, for example. The only place is someone like, you know, Byrne McMurtry comes there to do these very specialized things in graduate school because you can't do it anywhere else. So Terman, you mentioned about Terman. He was asked why he never took vacations. and he said because he was having too much fun with his work. Again, it isn't Terman just like the ethos of the legacy that we have in Silicon Valley today, that idea of like, I'm having so much fun at work. I'm just going to do nothing else.
20:21Yes. Yes. I mean, having fun, you know, his fun was, you know, we would call that workaholism, right? Yeah. But very profitable though. Very profitable. And I, you're exactly right. You're so right on this. It's, it's, he is kind of sets the tone for this really intense total immersion focus. And the other like great legacy and the kind of the way he sets the tone is Fred Turman's a people person. Like he's an engineer, but he's a he's a connector of people. So Fred Turman didn't like found a company like Raytheon or Fairchild Semiconductor, but he is behind everything. He's kind of, you know, the very, the very genial guy behind the curtain and before the curtain too, he is connecting people.
21:06So case in point, two of his grad students in the 1930s are Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. They graduate, they go off to, you know, jobs in corporations, which is what you do. Cause that's not, you know, that's what you do. Like that's where the jobs are and it's the great depression and, you know, they're taking whatever they can. And Terman personally kind of persuades them to come back to Palo Alto to start their own company. He says, I'm going to help you out. Well, you know, Stanford, you can have these connections with Stanford. We can, you know, let's do this. You guys are great. I want – and Terman was really keenly interested not in starting companies himself but really seeing companies cluster around Stanford and make Stanford.
21:54This was all part of the, you know, even before the war, kind of part of the plan to make it more of an innovation community. And so they do that. And they have a very close relationship. Dave Packard later serves on the Stanford Board of Trustees. He's really, really closely connected to the institution throughout his life. and there's you know these personal connections the personal connections that are still still fuel the networks of tech right people work together from one company to the next they know each other they went to school together i mean that is part of the magic of silicon valley it's also it's achilles heel quite frankly because what happens is that you tend to stick with the people you know because that's the way it's worked and and it makes it you become more and more reluctant to kind of move out of those circles to take a gamble on someone new.
22:50Margaret, you said something a minute or two ago, I think it's very important for people below 55 to understand. Everyone in the United States got tested for IQ. I can remember I got into my own file because I was working in the office at the high school when I was a senior, and I got in my own file to see what my IQ number was. The elimination of using IQ tests, I believe, furthered the need for college educations as an underwriter's laboratory for employers. And so when you said that, I just thought, wow, I hadn't thought about that for a long time, how powerful that has become. So let's jump.
23:29I'm going to continue on with the report to Harry Truman titled Science, the Endless Frontier. likened the pioneer spirit of America to the new frontiers of science. The West was very rowdy and dangerous. Van Evers' vision could be seen as spot on. We've seen what it has provided in access. We can also see how dangerous it is, too. After all, Cole and I went to a college named after Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, who were killed with a pioneering spirit, and many Western towns were not safe. So, first of all, how important has his vision for the National Research Foundation, or what we now know as the National Science Foundation, been?
24:05It's been really important because what it did is it created this new stream of funding that went to universities that was transformative. It kind of created this. And NSF was like the first of, you know, one of several streams of funding, kind of money flowing into universities that essentially made them, you know, parastatal entities, you know, agents of the government policy, whether they knew it or not. But what it was, what the NSF does, did and does is it funds basic research, meaning research that has no commercial application foreseeable at the time. It is pushing the envelope of what is possible.
24:47It is about possibility. And in that way, as, you know, kind of, you know, going into the unknown and importantly, kind of creating a, I, you know, the metaphor I like to use for universities, if it's working the way it should, is that the university is like a sandbox. You have a nice kind of wooden box, old-fashioned sandbox, nice wooden box that kind of keeps everything contained. And you pour a bunch of sand in. And then the kids get to go in there and make sandcastles and pour sand on each other's heads and, you know, mess up and play around. but are in this contained space, again, contained from market pressures, quarterly earnings, kind of the demand to, oh, what are you going to do with that?
25:30And also to learn, to learn by doing. I mean, the great, the value of the higher education complex as it develops during the Cold War is not simply, oh, this is a place where tech is being, you have tech that can be commercialized. That's part of it. The bigger story, and this is actually, I think, this is most of the Stanford story, is not about the things. It's about the people. It's the Hewlett's and the Packards and it's the Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It's about Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo. It's about, you know, and going on and on and on. There's just all of the production of people.
26:07And again, the networks that are created in these institutions become absolutely critical to the innovation economy. You talk about Terman's will to procure government contracts to compete with Harvard. Now, government contracts are looked at with disdain at places like Google. Are we just a downturn in tech away from government contracts getting worshipped again? I don't know. You know, I think it depends. It's so interesting. Yeah, there's this real kind of distaste that develops, particularly, you know, over the years for government support. And we can talk more about kind of the politics behind that.
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26:46But I think one thing that is useful to remember is that no matter how big and well-capitalized Google's research operations or Facebook's or any of these big companies, and they have billion-dollar investments being made in R &D, it's still just a fraction of the amount of money that the U.S. spends in its agencies like the NSF on basic research. or the Department of Energy or other kind of grant-making agencies that support this kind of research, or NASA or DARPA at the Pentagon, it's still just many orders of magnitude larger. And I think that what happens, I mean, the way the U.S. government has grown its economy since the beginning, and I'm talking Jefferson and Hamilton beginning, has been through partnership with private industry.
27:39So it's been creating incentives for private industry to behave a certain way, to develop certain products by giving subsidies, land grants to railroads or subsidies for infrastructure construction. Or more recently, let's look at just in the last year,$50 billion for semiconductor fabrication. That's very much a public-private partnership. I mean, you have private entities. So that is a really – that is absolutely critical to understanding this whole story. We can talk – you know, talking about government coming in from the very beginning, you know, in the 50s. This was not – they built giant federal research institutes in the middle of the orchards of Silicon Valley.
28:24No, what they did is money flowed into Stanford. Money flowed into private companies like Sylvania, where Bert McMurtry worked, or Litton or Hewlett-Packard or even Fairchild Semiconductor, which is kind of the original venture-backed startup, in the form of the government's a customer. It's buying their stuff. and that is how it you know this type of economic development grows it's a really important distinction because it's it's kind of a both and and sometimes we like to you know fall on the side of oh it was the public sector no it's the private sector and everyone has a little fist fight about it and actually the way it reminds me i mean you think a palantir that is palantir to a t the government was there at the beginning and then people flow in behind the government yeah so Yeah, absolutely.
29:13We covered the railroads through a Jay Gould book that you just referenced in terms of the railroads. You talk about the geographical layout of tech in the 50s was between Philadelphia, New York, and Boston along the Northeast Corridor. Explain the companies there to our listeners. Yeah. So, you know, if we were here kind of putting bets down on – if we were sitting here in 1945 and making bets on what's going to be the capital of high-tech America. Sure. You probably would have. My money would have been on Philadelphia because and so let's let's take Philly. So Philly is where the first the ENIAC, the first all digital machine is is developed in the Moore School of Engineering, kind of the first computing, the first computer science school before computer science even existed.
29:58It is the the creators of that spin off and commercialize as the UNIVAC, which is kind of the original commercial mainframe. And for a few years there, like, Univac was used as a proxy for computer in the way that Kleenex is used for facial tissue, right? It's a Univac. It's a really, really important company. It was – but here's the thing. These guys, they spin off. Penn does not do a single thing to help them financially. And actually made it pretty difficult. They kind of had a they left Penn because of a squabble about patents and it's a long, complicated story and fights among scientists.
30:43But anyway, Penn was not on the entrepreneurial go team like Fred Terman was. It was kind of the antithesis of that. And so they end up in this rickety office in this old 19th century building trying to build these computers. They had no venture capital, no private – they couldn't get any private funding kind of – Venture capital, the first high-tech VC firm had been created in 1946 in Boston, ARD, American Research and Development. and I'll talk about Boston in a sec, but their point was to invest in the Boston economy. They weren't going to put money in portfolio companies in Philly. So long story short, Univac, kind of they struggle along, barely are keeping it together.
31:33And then they're acquired by Remington Rand, a much larger electronics firm, a few years on. And then, you know, the Univac, then they're able to really go to town, but they aren't able to stay in startup mode and to grow. And so that, you know, no startup ecosystem grew in Philly. There just really wasn't a there there. And up in Boston, that was really the capital of tech. And to be clear, like Boston was the main action all the way through the, you know, arguably through the 80s. It was, you know, much bigger companies, much more on the radar screen, more money. Silicon Valley, as it grows, really benefits from having a very close symbiotic relationship with Boston in terms of people and ideas and things going back and forth between the two.
32:18They're really close ties between MIT and Stanford and different researchers. So it's important to acknowledge that. Like no region is kind of growing up in isolation, obviously, then or now. But Boston is the 800-pound gorilla, MIT, Harvard. I mean, all the guys who are designing the federal science complex, Bush is only one of them. Those are all Harvard and MIT people, by and large. They're just dominating the entire thing. Sure. And you point a really good job of explaining that Bush's work was radio technology versus, as you pointed out, Santa Clara got into the microwave business, which was a big business.
32:53But so I'm going to say something that's controversial. so I'll say this as correctly as I can. In the mid-1950s, you mentioned in your story that the New York Times said to its readers, quote, modern science is a young man's business, end quote. Okay, so here's my controversial question. Has this changed in the last 70 years at all? Oh, it's changed less than you would expect. Okay, and what do you mean by that? Because I agree with you because I just want to know what your thoughts are. Yeah, and I think part of that kind of the rhetoric of it's a young man's business. That's one dimension of why.
33:29So if we look at the numbers, you know, that this is something that the big companies have been held to, you know, embarrassed. Well, maybe not too embarrassed, but they've, you know, this has been something that's been a subject of conversation in the industry a lot in the last several years, which is the numbers are the gender imbalance, particularly when you get into engineering divisions and especially kind of at the top of these in these key technical roles, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly male, and almost all kind of white and South and East Asian men. And so there's a real kind of underrepresentation.
34:06And when you look at, you know, dial back to say, you know, what was the state of the judiciary and the legal profession or the medical profession back in the 50s when the New York Times is making that pronouncement about electronics. Yeah, those were young men's games or those were men's games too, right? But now we look at the demographics of medicine and law and it's much more balanced in terms of gender and tech hasn't changed. And I think there's a lot of, one of the reasons I think it's hard to get your head around it is it's not like there's one single thing. Oh yeah, it's a multi-factor model.
34:36It's a multi-factor, which is just totally frustrating because it's like, you know, well, there's this and there's that and there's this and there's that. And you're like, well, how am I supposed to fix it? I think that what's, you know, what's really important though is to kind of identify the fact that this is not something that's just because, you know, women aren't that interested. There has been a very sort of deliberate kind of cultural construction of the industry and a culture that has been really much more easy for men and young men. I think the young is super, super important modifier there.
35:05We don't emphasize that enough. The way that the industry works is it really is designed to best serve people who are pretty young, really energetic, don't have a lot of obligations to other people, like people they have to, you know, children they have to take care of or elders they have to take care of or people they have to send money home to in another country. Like that's what it rewards and that's what you get. The ageism might be as big of a factor as well because to your point, the Wall Street Journal had a study where they looked at, it was computer science majors versus humanities degrees.
35:42And they found that the computer science person makes way more money by the age of 40, but the humanities end up making more money over their career. And it's because your value in the marketplace is greatly reduced after 40 because you tend to have kids and tend to have other priorities. Well, and Margaret, you're in Seattle, right? So I worked in Seattle for 40 years. And what did Amazon bring in? 50 ,000 people into Seattle and 80 % of them were male. Almost all of them were white and Asian males. And what happened to the civic discourse in the city of Seattle in the process, right? Seattle was always known as a place where people wouldn't talk to each other because it had a heavy Scandinavian roots.
36:24And then you throw in all these coders who haven't talked to anybody for about five years. Yeah. Yeah. And they're working all the time. So they don't have time to forge community ties and, and kind of feel belonging in the place that they've come to. I think that's a real, problem. It's a problem in Seattle. It's a problem in the Bay Area. You know, this kind of transience and also just full immersion and work where your world is your tech campus, right? It gives you your free food of all three meals. You can have every meal. You can take your dog. You can get your laundry done. You can get all these things.
36:59And this is maybe a pre-COVID status quo. Now it's different that people are, but also you can work from home now. So there's sort of this isolation and you don't have to come into contact with other people who aren't doing what you do. And I think you guys are exactly right. It is a dimension of why we are all in our little silos that it makes it much more difficult to have an encounter with someone who's just living a different kind of life. Let's see. So I love this because we see these today and you don't think of them as being so unique, But the research park bet that Terman and J.E. Wallace Sterling made was a novel concept.
37:40It was a novel bet on business tied to a university. It was like a prehistoric incubator is how I think about it. We now see these at universities all across America. Could this have been found on any other campus in America when they were seeking to do that? Yeah. No. And that's the thing, you know. This was a research park that was so successful. It inspired so many others. And just as on the corporate side, like Bell Labs in the 1940s, moving from New York City out to the New Jersey suburbs, kind of set in motion this corporate research park. And so a lot of places, including a lot of universities or a lot of cities and regions with universities in them, kind of built research parks as a result and said, you know, build a research park and they will come.
38:25Huh. No, no. No. So what Stanford did, this is such a great, this was something I, this kind of got me into this whole story actually was when I was working on my dissertation that became my first book, which was very much about why is high tech in the suburbs and what did the Cold War have to do with it? It was kind of, I didn't really, my starting point wasn't actually the tech industry per se. It was more about the suburbanization of America in the fifties and understanding suburbanization of jobs and that economic geography. But Stanford had this really unique circumstance in that its founding grant, so you might remember that it was founded by a railroad baron, Leland Stanford, and his wife.
39:03It opens in the 1890s, and they established a university on their property, on a horse farm that they had purchased that was about close to 9 ,000 acres. And the university's full name of Stanford is Leland Stanford Junior University. It's named after their son who died as a teenager, really tragically. And this was sort of the university was a tribute to their son and a way to educate the children of California in his memory. So they were, one of the provisions of that founding grant was that the farm, as they call it, and they still call it today, the Stanford campus, the 9 ,000 acres, could not be broken up or sold by the university because that was something that had been very, you know, precious to their son and to them.
39:46And so they wanted to keep that intact. So the university actually for the first 50, 60 years of its existence, this was a huge albatross around Stanford's neck. They had all of this darn land and there wasn't much economic upside to it. They leased it out for grazing. There wasn't, you know, it's, there's only so much you could do. And so, and then the war, the war happens, the post-war growth happens, and Terman and Wally Sterling, a historian who was the president of Stanford at the time, and other administrators, did something that was kind of rebellious, because at the time, the way to maximize profit of the land was to develop it into subdivisions, right?
40:31That's what everyone was doing. It was suburbanization. And they said, no, we are going to create a research park, and we're going to create this place for industry that's right next to campus. And if you, and kind of the value proposition was, if you move in here, then you get to, you know, special access to Stanford faculty and students, and we have this cooperative program, and it's all, you know, this really productive model. And so they do that. It's incredibly successful. The guy who's in charge of developing it later reflected that had we known anything about economic development, we never would have done it the way we did it, because the rule then was to build really, really cheap and just do what you could.
41:07And what they did instead was build kind of really class A stuff that was, and create all these rules that you can't have, you have to have this much green space and you have to have, your building has to be this unobtrusive. And that turned out to be really, really smart, right? That people really wanted to come in and they got some really great tenants. But it wasn't a real estate prop. The tenants came there, not just because they had a nice building. They came there because the place is booming. There was a shortage of office space. And Stanford, the connection to Stanford and having access to people and ideas and labs and students was a real attraction.
41:48And, you know, why does this research park become so successful? It's really a reflection of the broader success washing over the region and that the region is cultivating during this period. And so, And Stanford was incredibly entrepreneurial, right? It was willing to let its faculty work 20 % time at a startup. It was willing to, you know, essentially send faculty over to work in startups for months and months on end. And it had this really open and porous relationship with industry that almost no other university had. And a lot of, you know, a public university like Berkeley or my university, University of Washington, actually couldn't do because they're the state university.
42:31Like they have an obligation to, I don't know, do the basics, not to, you know, help out Lockheed with their latest product. And that was something Stanford was unique in. And I think a lot of other would-be Silicon Valleys missed that part of the story. And I think they're now kind of gradually catching up on it's not about real estate only. It's about a lot of other stuff. But it took a while. Stanford could put in a golf course. Yeah. Let's see. So, Terman, you know, obviously you mentioned Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard as Terman's kind of early prodigies, if you will. So one of the things that I really liked as a detail you added, and I think this is a great wrinkle because this, again, this is a legacy benefit for Silicon Valley, is they handed out stock as a way to incentivize their employees, which I thought was a great – I looked at that as like that's a great nugget and golden kernel of truth that you had there in your book.
43:21But so Dave Packard is so interesting because he is this person that really understands what government's role was with HP's business, with defense and spending, and yet at the same time he's almost a paradox because he watched LBJ's Great Society, which we did – I don't know if you've read Amity Schley's book, Great Society. Great book. We did a podcast with her. But he knew that there was a line in the sand where government was great for getting things off the ground, but government couldn't be everything. How do you look at his love-hate relationship between the government spending and LBJ's Great Society?
43:57Yeah. Yeah, I think it's just – Packard is such an interesting and such an important figure. And I just, you know, I wish I wish I'd ever had a chance to meet him. He just agree. Just this incredible, you know, political entrepreneur. I mean, it's really interesting because I think that the nuances that you observe there are really important. Like he was he was definitely a small government conservative. Sure. And he was no fan of the Kennedy and Johnson's, you know, Great Society programs at all. He would like, you know, go around the Rotary Club lunches in Palo Alto all through the 60s, like giving these speeches, just like venting.
44:37It was actually kind of funny because all these speeches are in the HP archives. And I'm like, that must have been just he was just stewing about stuff and he just needed an outlet. So he's like, I'm just going to go to talk to the Rotary Club. I know a person like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Like you're talking to him. Yeah, exactly. Like you have, you know, you've got plenty to do, right? But this is something you just need to have. And but he also and I think this is a really important distinction because it's something that's kind of been lost in this. You know, what's referred to as sort of techno libertarianism like this, you know, we don't need, you know, government, every all government is dysfunctional and bad.
45:14And he actually was like, no, government plays this really important role. Do I do I like having to deal with the Pentagon's procurement paperwork? No, it's terrible. I hate it. But we have you know, this is very important. And I think he was, you know, he was a patriot. He was a he had this very deep sense of public service. I think it's something that the early generation of the Valley had that was very reflective of their life experience. These are greatest generation, Korea generation people. Many of them were veterans. Particularly the older generation of them had, you know, either served or like Packard, you know, Hewlett went and served in the war, enlisted.
45:56And Packard stayed and ran the company because it was a defense contractor. So that was his contribution. But they really had this deep, deep understanding of, you know, this is something you may not always love it, but you need to do it. And there also is a really critical role that the government plays in seeding, kind of creating the launch pad for the rocket ship. This is the research, the development, the higher ed, the doing things that companies that have to worry about quarterly earnings and balance sheets that they really can't do. And I think that's important. Let's stay on that libertarian because I had this later in our notes, but I want to ask this because this is such – I mean, Margaret, this is such an awesome thread that you hit on.
46:37I mean, like you hit on certain like three or four chords in this book that I just can't get my mind off of. No one else is talking about it. So tech executives in the 1970s and even now look at themselves as primarily libertarian free market capitalists. This view, however, wasn't going to change anything in Washington. It seems in boom times they have this idealistic view. And then in bad times, they all go hat in hand and beg for government help. Jobs never commented on how the government largesse had given Silicon Valley so much opportunity. Is this a fair assessment? Yeah. And I think, you know, this cognitive dissonance, I think it's, you know, in a way it just, I think they really believe it.
47:21And I think this is part of the, you know, part of the magic of this whole story is that the government did so much to build the industry, but did it in a way that made the people in the industry feel like they did it on their own. And that actually is part of the secret. But it is frustrating. You know, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is a great example. Well, I was just going to, let's pivot to that. So you're right. I mean, this was so, like we're reading your book and it's just like, oh my gosh, Margaret just hit the ball out of the park like three times in a row. So, okay, so track with me.
47:55Here we are. I'm sitting there. I'm on Twitter. There's actually really good information on Twitter. I look at it as a PR service and also like a financial news information service. So I'm out on Twitter and watching elite, ultra-wealthy tech executives come in and scream for the government to do something when their entire careers they said the government did nothing for them makes no sense. It's hypocrisy. It's total hypocrisy. It's kind of shameless, yeah. But look, I think that they, you know, the argument that they're making is, hey, we have done so much for the world with the products we've made, you know, have transformed so many things.
48:38And fair point. Like, what are we doing to, you know, how do we make our way through our days? Our days would look a lot different if we didn't have all this tech. But there's this and there also, I think, is this really kind of defensive and this conviction among some in the Valley that the government's just out to get them. And but that's the last like libertarian. Yeah. You know, Margaret, your book does such a great job of showing the cyclicality of the tech industry. And that's now what Silicon Valley is going to deal in is think of all the free money funding these guys and the cyclicality is coming in regardless.
49:17So Stanford alum and former president Herbert Hoover turned the Hoover Institute into one of the conservative think tanks. Quote, the purpose of this institution must be its research and publications to demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx, unquote. Boy, are we a long way from that at Stanford right now. This didn't go over well with academia in the 1950s either. How do you look at Stanford University from a bastion of capitalistic conservatism with Leland Stanford, Hoover and Packard to where it is today? I think of thinkers like Neil Ferguson and still holding that mantle high, but I don't think that of the Stanford campus.
49:50Yeah, well, it's really interesting because there's the Hoover Institution and there's Stanford. And actually, Dave Packard's part of this story, too, because he was the chair of the Board of Trustees in 1959 at the moment when the Hoover Institution was given its quasi-independence status within Stanford. That was very much motivated by this, by Hoover's and his allies and friends and supporters, feeling that there was not enough ideological independence and that there was not enough sort of supportive conservatism. I think basically they wanted to be able to really define, kind of more clearly define themselves apart from the broader university.
50:33And so, you know, that tension has been has been present for a long time there. You know, as a side note, the Hoover archives, which are a pleasure to work in history, they're so well run and so beautiful. But if you study Marxism or anything about the left or communism, it is it has the bounteous trove. It's the best place to study that because they they they they amassed all the information on what the other side was doing. So, you know, I have all these colleagues who study Soviet history and Marxism and radical movements. And they're like, yeah, I'm going to the Hoover archives to do my research.
51:11So it's a it's a great service to to scholarship. But, you know, I think that there's there's a sort of this interesting role that, you know, one of the other things that the Hoover Institution is remains connected to. And if you look at the fellows in the Hoover Institution, there's a lot of very illustrious national security figures who are in a way it's kind of an echo of what the Valley was in terms of its industry, where the defense industry was so important really through the end of the 1980s, through the entire Cold War. Lockheed, now Lockheed Martin, but Lockheed's Missiles and Space Division in Sunnyvale, which moves into its facility in the mid-50s, thanks to Fred Terman's personal, like, you gotta come, you gotta come, you know, and being attracted by Stanford.
52:01That was the biggest employer, numerical employer, until the end of the 80s in the Valley. And no one knows that. Like, just tens of thousands of people worked there. But it was all top secret stuff, so you can't go talk about it to a reporter. Sticking in that same Hoover Institute time period, at the time, Route 128 in Boston was, quote, America's technology highway, unquote. These were businesses coming out of continued military spending that were feeding from the trough of MIT and Harvard engineers. That wasn't enough, though. How important was the silicon transistor to the Santa Clara Valley?
52:33And can you teach us about William Shockley, speaking of IQ tests? Yeah. Oh, gosh. William Shockley was a Nobel Prize winner, was co-inventor of the transistor at Bell Labs, 1947, so on the East Coast. But Bill Shockley was also a Palo Alto boy like Fred Terman. He was originally from Palo Alto. And so after the transistor's invention, when he is, Shockley is, and one of the things, funnily enough, there's a little bit of an antitrust story in here too. So AT &T, Bell Labs, it kind of, the deal it made with the federal government starting in 1914 when it got the telephone monopoly was, okay, we're going to let you be my Bell and provide telephone service, but you can't get into anything else.
53:19Like that's the one thing you got to do. You got to stay in your lane. And AT &T being a, you know, being a for-profit company was like always trying to get in the lane of computing constantly. And so with the one of the the the transistor and its other inventions, you know, they really wanted to commercialize that. And that was there was a sort of logic of literal literal logic of putting it in computing. And the Department of Justice slapped it with a consent decree saying, no, you have to license everything that comes out of Bell Labs for free or for cheap. And the transistor was a free free licensing.
53:54So Shockley actually is like, I'm going to leave Bell Labs. I'm going to start my own company. He was actually going to make germanium semiconductors because that was then the thought to be the kind of this is what you need to use to make these things, to fabricate these things. And and moves out and and comes to Palo Alto in part because his his mom was ill. And but also because Fred Terman gets on the phone and was like, you got to come, you got to come, you got to come. I mean, Terman is like he's everywhere. He just pops up. It's like Forrest Gump. And he shows up. Tellingly, no one who works with Shockley at Bell Labs wants to come with him because it turns out he's really bad to work with and work for.
54:36But he recruits a team of amazing young men from elsewhere, including eight guys who are all to a person, coming from modest backgrounds. They, you know, they come out on kind of a, oh, I get to work for a Nobel Prize winning co-inventure of the transistor? Yes, sir, I will do that. They show up. Shockley Semiconductor sets up shop in Mountain View in 1956. And within months, the whole team realizes that Shockley is just, he's terrible to work for. He's kind of a tyrant and does like, yes, he does kind of pop IQ tests and things and is constantly just, you know, really difficult. And also is really doesn't agree.
55:19His team doesn't agree with what he's doing in terms of fabrication. They realize that silicon semiconductors are the way to go. Silicon is the right material to use and to do it in this particular way is the best way to do it. And so because of those disagreements, these eight guys do what no one else. This is a very weird, deeply weird thing to do in the mid 50s. And this is going back to Burton McMurtry, who we talked to in the beginnings, who said to me, I remember when I'm interviewing him. He's like, you've got to realize that if in the 1950s you go and start up a company, it means that you're strange and can't work for anyone else.
55:54It's just not something that people aspire to do. Don't the big network companies have the same kind of monopoly that AT &T did that the government got in the way of? Isn't that really? Well, yeah, that's not an official agreement, but using Google, it's kind of a wink and a nod. Yeah. You can have search. We're fine with that. AWS has 80 % market share. You can go through the list. You know, what happened to the government in the process? Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a really, you know, that's a that's a critical, critical question. I mean, I you know, look, all the the Sherman Act is still enforced.
56:27Like all these things are all the regulatory mechanisms are still around that were around in the early part of the 20th century. It's just in the last 40 years, there's been a sort of conscious choice by both Republican and Democratic administrations, to be clear. that to kind of the way to fuel the private sector is to be a little more lenient or a little less aggressive on pursuing antitrust cases and allow more mergers and acquisitions and consolidation. And that's, you know, so that has been a driver of what we've seen across a lot of industries, including tech. It has been a lot of M &A activity and the result of, you know, resulting in a few players.
57:06Now, the other thing going on in tech is in the case of search and social media and cloud there, you know, in a way there's by definition, big companies win in those markets because the bigger you are, the bigger you are. But this is, you know, the argument that regulators and some lawmakers are making is that these are too big and there needs to be more, they need to be broken up to put some more oxygen in the, in the atmosphere. Like, like, like Lena, for example. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think the case of AT &T is a, is a, is a pretty powerful example of, you know yeah what if you hadn't been able to license the transistor like would you have a silicon semiconductor industry gordon moore himself like later reflected like we would not have been able to do what we did had that had that measure not been in place so that's a you know important important dimension of it back to shockley as we all now know that the traitorous eight started her child semiconductor the money for this venture couldn't come from a venture capital fund because there was no such category yet you do such a good job of pointing out that But the funding came from the old world, not the new world.
58:07Teach us about Hayden and Stone's analyst, Arthur Rock, as he found the capital to launch Fairchild. Yeah, I love this story because this is, again, underscores kind of these were outsiders that no one had connections. I mean, the traders say basically Arthur Rock, this junior, junior investment banker in New York City, ends up in the picture because one of the eight guys who are trying to find outside financing for this new company that they're going to start calls like a college roommate's dad who's in an investment bank. And the dad's like, you know, you can hear the sigh. Right. And he kind of sends that down to the most junior guy in the office.
58:50Like, can you just take a look at this? And that junior guy was Arthur Rock, who was like brand new, had just kind of come off a job working in the, you know, Eisenhower campaign. It was like, you know, pretty, pretty fresh. And he's like, OK, let me see what I can do. And so he ends up finding a backer who is Sherman Fairchild, who's the head of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, which is an existing company. And that's how Fairchild Semiconductors is essentially the semiconductor division of a larger company, although it's independently operated. And then the other kicker is that why does Sherman Fairchild have some money to invest in this venture?
59:32Because he's an heir to an IBM fortune. His father was a key person in one of the companies that eventually becomes IBM. And so IBM's money, old money, and East Coast money is backing this new economy company. And this is not the only old money story, I think. And this is true to this day. Like, who are the limited partners? Who are the LPs in venture funds? From the very beginning, the first Silicon Valley-based VCs, those guys didn't have money. I mean, they had very little. And so they are playing. They've got other people's money. And the other people are not only California landowners, but also the Rockefellers, the Whitney's, the old old money.
1:00:21Like Gilded Age money is actually the money that fuels the growth of Silicon Valley. So Sputnik takes off in October of 57, forcing America's hand to greatly ramp up spending. There's nothing like giving an American's a good sense of fear to go get something done. The military industrial complex, as we know it today, went into overdrive. So you point out how the Apollo rocket program and the Minutemen Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program had driven the cost of chips down from$1 ,000 to$25 per chip. But the government wanted to cut taxes, too, during this era while delivering all these like great big moonshots.
1:00:58Right. So Robert McNamara is running the Department of Defense. He wanted to run it like a business. That didn't that didn't really help Santa Clara Valley, though. It didn't help the the established contractors so that, you know, it's interesting. What happens is that, yeah, the whole contracting system is getting reordered at the moment that the integrated circuit is, again, co-invented, invented it simultaneously in a few places, one of which being Fairchild Semiconductor with Bob Noyce is the inventor, co-inventor. Right at that technological inflection point, Bob McNamara is like, we got to have a more efficient Pentagon.
1:01:42And so the people who were kind of first in line for getting prime contracts, suddenly there were no more prime contracts. And so the field is kind of thrown open to new companies that weren't already players. And there was also a new need for this very specialized thing, high-powered, very small, very light electronics. And that's what the integrated circuit was, the microchip. So cramming transistors on a chip more and more every year. And that is – so the Apollo program becomes a major customer for Fairchild and other Silicon Valley semiconductor makers, which, by the way, their transistorized electronics are not only being manufactured in the Valley.
1:02:27There's Texas. There's a lot of places that have transistor. So we don't want to just privilege these guys. But what they are doing in terms of the advanced electronics in the market, you know, the particular products that they're making are not for transistor radios. They are for their advanced scientific devices. And so the Apollo guidance system needs one of those. And that's what they buy up. So that really drives down the price and enables them to scale up production so it can become a viable commercial product. We hope you've enjoyed our discussion with Margaret O'Mara on her book, The Code.
1:02:59We love this book and couldn't get into one podcast. so for the first time we've broken it into two episodes this is part one of the discussion and part two will follow in the next podcast episode i want to thank bill and margaret for this awesome part of the discussion if you enjoyed our conversation go give us a review on apple spotify or wherever you listen to a book with legs podcast if you have a great book that you'd like to recommend email podcast at smeedcap.com that's podcast at smeedcap.com you can also connect with us with your favorite books on Twitter. Our handle is at SmeadCap. Thank you for joining us for a Book With Legs podcast.
1:03:36We look forward to the next episode. Thank you for listening to A Book With Legs, a podcast brought to you by Smead Capital Management. The material provided in this podcast is for informational use only and should not be construed as investment advice. You can learn more about Smead Capital Management and its products at SmeadCap.com or by calling your financial advisor. You
From the publisher
Part 1
“Gilded age money is actually the money that fuels the growth of Silicon Valley.”
Author Margaret O’Mara joins Cole and Bill to discuss her book, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. O’Mara’s work tracks the history of the people who built Silicon Valley and the explosion of big tech in America. The conversation covers the institutions that provided the framework for innovation, the background of the pioneers, and the investors that supported this district.
