Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher · 9 Jul 2018 · 611pp · 188,732 words
money, but they wanted guarantees that could get it back. Venture capitalists expect failure. They discovered that they could gamble big with maybe ten firms… Marc Porat: Just throw a lot of things into the funnel, attract a lot of smart people, and make them interact in unmanaged ways. Go chaotic on
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for every one of them there are a thousand people who came here with a good idea and burned through their savings without being successful. Marc Porat: People fail in one, but they learn enough so that they succeed in another. And success breeds success. Orkut Büyükkökten: I think all over the
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worldwide. There are internet cafés in Zambia; they have cell phones; they know Google; they know Apple: The Valley has utterly conquered the mind share. Marc Porat: If you say “New York,” people around the world generally know what it is, and now if you say “Palo Alto” they kind of know
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really well received. It got great press. There are a lot of stories like that. Andy Hertzfeld: But the beginning of General Magic is really Marc Porat. He’s a very clever nontechnical person—an impresario businessman who in the thesis he did at Stanford came up with the first use of
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pocket. Megan Smith: And Marc came up with this idea that he called a Personal Intelligent Communicator—a smartphone, basically. The whole idea was there. Marc Porat: Remember something called the Sharp Wizard? It was a screen with some chiclet keys: one of those silly little organizer things, but useful. I took
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was make little models out of plaster. Steve Perlman: He was showing what looked like a little wallet—a block of plastic wrapped in leather. Marc Porat: Everything was going to become very small and in your hand, and intimate and jewelry-like. You’d wear it all the time, and if
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thing I said when I saw his models was, “Well, they’re not realistic.” And he said, “I know—but they will be.” Michael Stern: Marc Porat was an incredible visionary. His Pocket Crystal project at Apple was really a previsioning of everything that we now take for granted
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. Marc Porat: I wrote a book on it, all the things that this thing is supposed to do and why this computing-communication object would change the
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understand you don’t want to work there. Why don’t we just pay you to be a consultant, and you know, just get started?” Marc Porat: Bill loved it. Andy saw it, was impressed that Bill was there. Bill was impressed that Andy was there. They immediately started seeing how to
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iPhone, in a better way than most people have it now. Steve Jarrett: You’ve got to remember, this was before even digital cellular existed. Marc Porat: Many of us had analog cell phones, which were bricks, and some of us carried batteries in a little, tiny briefcase to go with the
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brick. Steve Jarrett: People were just using mobile phones to talk. So, it’s very, very early. Marc Porat: The theory and the strategy, right from the beginning, was to create a global standard. Apple and Microsoft would have the personal computer, IBM and
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had an operating system. Al Alcorn: But it clearly wasn’t going to get supported by management at Apple. It wasn’t going to happen. Marc Porat: It would need a lot of communication networking, including wireless, and it would need something that did not exist, which was a network to run
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make a communicator all by itself, because it wouldn’t be able to establish the communication standards. So it couldn’t be an Apple product. Marc Porat: But it was also clear that politically, it was going to be okay to spin this thing out. John Giannandrea: I think a big part
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spinning General Magic out of Apple was this idea that it was too big even for Apple, right? Apple couldn’t deal with this thing. Marc Porat: So there were two projects established: General Magic on the outside, and Newton on the inside. Andy Hertzfeld: The Newton project was an 8-by
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-11 tablet that was supposed to cost $5,000. Marc Porat: The Newton was a hedge in a big strategy that we had described to Sculley. Andy Hertzfeld: Basically Marc convinced John Sculley to not only
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also to help us convince Sony and Motorola that they should join Apple in trying to create this new standard. We called it “the Alliance.” Marc Porat: Apple, Motorola, Sony: So now we had the three board members as licensees, who were the core of the founding partners. Michael Stern: This is
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Sony, Motorola, and Apple. And that kind of worked, I was surprised. We were off and running. John Giannandrea: It was a ridiculously ambitious company. Marc Porat: People of enormous quality began to come over and see what this crazy team in downtown Palo Alto was doing—and joined. Andy Hertzfeld: We
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, and this company called General Magic kept popping up in it. I was like, Whatever that is, I have got to learn more about it. Marc Porat: General Magic had all the buzz. All the buzz. It was where the pixie dust was. It was where you wanted to work if you
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-in modem. I was like, I want to go with them, where they are making this stuff from scratch. I can be part of it. Marc Porat: He just walked in the door and impressed Bill and Andy and got his first gig to do stuff. General Magic was Broadway, and Andy
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the Silicon Valley kids are inventing together and that’s the community. John Giannandrea: It was fun times. The place was kind of crazy, too. Marc Porat: The culture and the environment was Apple done even more fun. We had meals, we had spontaneous music things going on. We had Bowser running
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start clapping, and they are laughing and cheering, and I am like, I broke a six-thousand-dollar window, and everyone is laughing and cheering? Marc Porat: I said all was forgiven. Do not even worry about it. There were no rules about having fun. There were other sorts of breakthroughs, as
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kept getting more and more anxious. Andy Hertzfeld: At the same time, we found out that our leading benefactor, our father, decided to kill us. Marc Porat: I remember a board meeting where we were laying out all the secrets and all the plans. In that meeting John Sculley was taking copious
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should instead copy Marc’s vision and make something based on Marc’s prototype. It should fit in your pocket at a low price point. Marc Porat: That was really a problem. Why did Apple not just put all their weight behind Magic? Why did they have to hedge their bets? Sculley
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$500. It was supposed to be the size of a notebook and it became the size of a postcard. Obviously, it was an existential threat. Marc Porat: The design center of the Newton was handwriting recognition. Our design center was personal communication. Personally, I thought there should have been enough blue sky
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, meanwhile, wasn’t going to make the same mistake that Sculley did. Instead, they made the opposite mistake. Pursuing perfection, Magic fell several years behind. Marc Porat: AT&T was late; they could not get their network done. Sony was late, they could not get the consumer electronics piece done. We were
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thing that we shipped was the Sony Magic Link. Andy Hertzfeld: And as soon as the Magic Link came out I gave one to Steve. Marc Porat: Because it was inspired by the same kinds of things that the MacOS was inspired by, it was built by the same people, it was
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designed by the same graphic artist. Michael Stern: And then as soon as we shipped we went on the road show for the public offering. Marc Porat: I spent 80 percent of my energy managing the founding partners. We needed to be clear of them, and an IPO would get us enough
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one of the first internet IPOs in the sense that we had a particular price and then we opened way, way above the S1 price. Marc Porat: We were priced at $14, opened at $32, and took in tons of money. So the IPO as an event was very successful. But then
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. John Giannandrea: One of the great Silicon Valley failure modes is “right idea—way too early.” Amy Lindburg: And then the internet started to emerge. Marc Porat: One day, as I recall, someone brought in something called Mosaic, and they said, “This is the future.” I said, “Okay, what is it?” We
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downloaded this thing and people were crowded around the workstation—I think it was a Silicon Graphics Indigo—and we were like, “Look at that!” Marc Porat: We were looking at a really early browser, and there was already awareness inside the team that we had to go internet. We knew that
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everybody knew that it was a dog. I was working on the second product, which was going to be cheaper, faster, have better battery life… Marc Porat: Andy and Bill demoed a Magic machine, which was in a format like an iPhone, and they said, “So this is what we are going
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the company. John Giannandrea: I quit. Part of it was realizing that we had a better product and we weren’t going to ship it. Marc Porat: We were one year away from it. We kind of ran out of gas, we ran out of steam, and ran out of the will
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his first big surge of creativity, Bill kind of checked out. Andy was running engineering for three years. He had just had enough by ’95. Marc Porat: It was a physical fatigue, when you keep something alive for five years on a vision and on just the raw energy of passion to
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gone public saying, We’re doing the next big thing. We’re creating the future here! And then it crashed. It was a train wreck. Marc Porat: Engineers do things because they want millions of people to touch it. That is the ultimate reward for a top-level engineer. And when millions
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today. Kevin Kelly: The biggest invention in Silicon Valley was not the transistor but the start-up model, the culture of the entrepreneurial start-up. Marc Porat: It’s the style of thinking and behaving that’s called “being an entrepreneur.” Megan Smith: I grew up in it. It’s extraordinary. An
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cast a mold, cast the die, for this ever-evolving way of taking up risk, taking on new ideas, funding them, and making things happen. Marc Porat: The elements that made Venice are the elements that made Palo Alto, are the elements that will make Silicon Valley, and it just grows and
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are very arrogant out here that nothing can change unless technology is involved, and technology will drive any business out there to a disruption point. Marc Porat: Technology, that’s what we do here in Silicon Valley. We just push technology until someone figures out what to do with it. Andy Hertzfeld
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city! Silicon Valley is now a city: downtowns that go all night long, restaurants as far as you can see, you can’t park anymore. Marc Porat: Silicon Valley was Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, until it became Palo Alto, and then nobody lived in Menlo Park until they did. And Mountain View
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a new era. We’re getting these billion-dollar corporate statement headquarters now. It’s not just Salesforce. It’s Facebook, Apple, Nvidia—even Google. Marc Porat: Eventually one could see this Silicon Valley thing spreading up to Mill Valley, across to Richmond, down to Oakland and Berkeley, and then down through
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think you’re going to be able to live as long as you want, in the relatively near future. That’s going to be solved. Marc Porat: You take what you see and you extrapolate and you push incrementally on things. Size costs, capacity, functionality, whatever you push, until you push so
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? Well, that’s not going to happen, which is going to mess up everything. Fusion power is going to mess up a number of things. Marc Porat: And there’s a discontinuity or more calamity and disruption, and then unintended consequences follow, which then produces another period of push and then, and
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. Charlie Ayers: Silicon Valley is an energy and a focus and a vibration that consumes you and takes you over, if you allow it to. Marc Porat: So the IQ points come here, and IQ points are sort of radioactive in a sense that if you press them hard enough, they create
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Wired magazine’s distinctive look: riotous neon colors splashed across a cacophonous layout. It was meant to evoke the coming digital century—and it did. Marc Porat coined the term “information economy” in 1976 while a graduate student at Stanford. He was subsequently recruited by Apple’s Advanced Technology Group to think
The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara · 8 Jul 2019
thesis): Marc Uri Porat and Michael Rogers Rubin, The Information Economy, U.S. Department of Commerce, Office of Telecommunications (1977). On General Magic, the company Marc Porat founded and many of whose employees went on to play seminal roles in the development of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android, see Sarah
The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World
by Aaron Hurst · 31 Aug 2013 · 209pp · 63,649 words
, David B. McGinty, Denise McMahan, Jeff Nedler, Mark Newall, Frances Nguyen, Joy Nuga, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, McVal Osborne, Kelli Peterson, Eric Phillips-Horst, Armin Pialek, Marc Porat, Damon Shelby Porter, Julian Posada, Camille Preston, Tom and Kathy Raffa, Eric Ries, Fabio Rosati, Jeff Russell, Mark Russell, Alexandra Santiago, Frank Santoni, David Sasson
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people were deciding to leave their jobs and work for themselves. It was during this time that I came across a summary of my uncle Marc Porat’s work from when he was a doctoral student in economics at Stanford. In his 1977 thesis, he coined the term “Information Economy,” and he
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.D. dissertation that is not only read by others, but also radically impacts that field of study. One such dissertation was written by my uncle, Marc Porat, while studying economics at Stanford in 1977. In his nine-volume dissertation, The Information Economy: Definition and Measurement, he coined the term “Information Economy,” arguing
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obvious. You need to understand which segment of the adoption curve is next and then meet their needs and remove their barriers. Sadly, my uncle, Marc Porat, was at the center of one of the greatest cautionary tales about ignoring the social science of innovation. The first iPhone was released on June
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the first real iPhone was first developed 17 years earlier, and while Steve Jobs was off working on other ventures. In 1990, then-Apple executive Marc Porat convinced John Scully that the next generation of computing would require a partnership of computers, communications, and consumer electronics. John gave it the green light
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
by John Markoff · 1 Jan 2005 · 394pp · 108,215 words
entire community, ranging from the professors at SAIL to Palo Alto High School students. One of the first to join was a young Israeli named Marc Porat, whose father had been a refugee from the Nazis and had come to Stanford to get his Ph.D. Although his father had arranged for
The Rise of the Network Society
by Manuel Castells · 31 Aug 1996 · 843pp · 223,858 words
of productive capacity frees labor from direct material production for the benefit of information-processing activities, as it was suggested in the pioneering work of Marc Porat?14 Table 2.1 Productivity rate: growth rates of output per worker (average annual percentage change by period) Source: Historical Statistics of the United States
Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
by Tony Fadell · 2 May 2022 · 411pp · 119,022 words
. Everybody knows about the second time. The time we succeeded. Few people know about the first. In 1989, an Apple employee and intellectual visionary named Marc Porat drew this: Fig. 1.0.1 Marc’s 1989 sketch of the Pocket Crystal in his big red notebook. On the next page he wrote
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when it’s not being used. It should offer the comfort of a touchstone, the tactile satisfaction of a seashell, the enchantment of a crystal.” Marc Porat/Spellbound Productions II The Pocket Crystal was a beautiful touchscreen mobile computer that combined a cell phone and fax machine, that let you play games
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knew the code, knew we could make it work. But by that point General Magic was sinking fast. No revenue, no customers, lots of panic. Marc Porat had made many promises to many people and they were all coming up empty. After months of struggling to squeeze an OS out of General
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
by Alan Cooper · 24 Feb 2004 · 193pp · 98,671 words
startup company General Magic is revealing. The author innocently touches on the root cause of the product's lack of success when she says that Marc Porat, the president, "launched his engineering team to design the device of their dreams." There is no irony in her statement. It seems perfectly natural for
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General Magic had in mind was, and still is, extremely desirable. There is no doubt that its technology was superb. There is no doubt that Marc Porat's ability to establish strategic partnerships and make business deals was second to none. There is no doubt that the company was well sired and
Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything
by Steven Levy · 2 Feb 1994 · 244pp · 66,599 words
's vice president of sales and marketing. Even the communications director has a pedigree-she's John Sculley's former publicist. General Magic began when Marc Porat, a former Stanford MBA working at Apple, came up with a product idea called Pocket Crystal-a personal communications device that would not only combine
Running Money
by Andy Kessler · 4 Jun 2007 · 323pp · 92,135 words
. Not overnight—it probably took three or four months to get all the shares through Goldman Sachs. I think we were buying the shares of Marc Porat, one of the founders. As other investors starting hearing about 98 Running Money General Magic’s new service, the stock started trading close to $2