Authors: Eric Weiner
Stanford didn’t have a lot going for it, but it had land. Lots of land. In 1951, Terman used some of that excess land to establish the Stanford Industrial Park (now the Stanford Research Park). At the time, it was a tremendously controversial decision. An industrial park? That wasn’t what universities did, certainly not a university with Ivy League aspirations.
The project was a bit like Darwin’s “fools’ experiments.” Terman
didn’t know exactly what he was doing, but he knew he was doing something different, and that’s what mattered. In a practical move that would no doubt delight the Scots, the industrial park was designed so that, if the enterprise failed, it could be converted into a high school.
It didn’t fail. Terman had the right idea at the right time. There was nothing else like it, and in the most unlikely of places, on Palo Alto’s Page Mill Road, with horses grazing nearby. An Apollonian version of the industrial park. The park’s first residents were the Varian brothers, sons of immigrants from Iceland and one of the Valley’s early success stories.
Later, Terman established the Stanford Research Institute, which was tasked with “pursuing science for practical purposes [which] might not be fully compatible internally with the traditional role of the university.” Terman created a sort of anti-university
within
a university. Clever. Very Scottish. Terman also established the Honors Cooperative Program, which enabled engineers and scientists to pursue advanced degrees at Stanford while still working full-time.
By now, the Cold War was in full frigidness, and Terman, unlike many of his counterparts on the East Coast, wasn’t averse to accepting money from Uncle Sam, the mother of all early adopters. This profligate defense spending—mixing, ironically, with the counterculture movement that would soon sweep through the San Francisco Bay Area—midwifed Silicon Valley.
Fred Terman had something else going for him: the chip. Not the microchip (that was still years away) but the one on his shoulder. Stanford, as I said, was not the topflight university it is today. The region—and Stanford University in particular—had long been the subject of East Coast derision. When, in 1891, railroad baron and US senator Leland Stanford established the university, in honor of his son who’d died just before college age, the East Coast establishment wasn’t exactly impressed. “There is about as much need for a new university in California as for an asylum for decayed sea captains in Switzerland,” sniffed the
New York Mail and Express.
Comments like that, which continued well into the twentieth century, no doubt irked Terman, but nothing irritated him more than to see
a student move East after graduating. He envisioned Stanford as a magnet, the kind of place people fled to, not from. Today, the power of the chip, squarely planted on an ambitious shoulder, still animates Silicon Valley. One venture capitalist told me that when trying to decide whether to fund a start-up, he looks for the chip on the CEO’s shoulder. The bigger the chip, the better.
Places can have chips, too. It dawns on me that most of the places of genius I’ve visited fit that bill: Athens outgunned by Sparta, Florence outgunned by Milan and outfunded by Venice. This was their motivation, part of it anyway, to strive for greatness. Edinburgh, likewise, desperately wanted to prove it was every bit as good as London or Paris; Calcutta every bit as good as the West. It’s not only that underdogs try harder but also that they see better, thanks to their being outsiders.
Terman, despite his many accomplishments, and his legacy as “father of Silicon Valley,” is not easy to get to know. One former Stanford student remembers him as “a kindly looking, somewhat rumpled man with glasses [who] always walked with a purpose, carrying files of paper. He never ambled.” Others found him “harsh and humorless.” Who was the real Fred Terman?
I head to the Silicon Valley Archives in hopes of finding out. I walk into a majestic room, brimming with wooden cabinets and history. A librarian hands me a large cardboard box, one of dozens of large boxes, for Fred Terman was, among other things, a prolific correspondent. This particular box contains letters from Terman’s days at the Harvard Radio Research Laboratory. He had reluctantly left California to run the laboratory during World War II. Working secretly, with a budget bigger than for all of Stanford, the lab was tasked with finding ways to jam enemy radar. Terman and his team came up with an ingenious solution: deploying chaff, billions of tiny pieces of metal, which confused German and Japanese radar. It’s credited with saving eight hundred Allied bomber aircraft and their crews.
I open one letter, yellowing and faded but still clearly legible. The war was raging, and Terman was overseeing a staff of 850, yet he found time to write to one C. K. Chang, a physics student at Stanford. “We should
some day carry through those very long overdue plans to write up the work on heterodyne detection in the form of a paper,” he begins, all engineering-like, before getting a bit more personal. “I feel rather badly about this. . . . You did an excellent piece of work here and should receive the credit which is coming to you.” Other letters reveal a persistent streak, especially when it comes to Stanford’s efforts to best the East Coast schools.
As I dig through Terman’s correspondence, I find myself thinking of Sheila in Florence and the letter from Galileo that she had stumbled upon; I now see what she means about the excitement you get from happening upon a letter, especially an ordinary one. It feels thrilling and vaguely dangerous, as if you were eavesdropping across the centuries.
I dig deeper into the box and find a newspaper clipping from April 1944, headlined “U.S. Plans to Train Foreign Engineers,” and a handwritten note attached from Stanford president Donald Tresidder: “Do you know about this? Are we interested? What should we do, if so?” Terman’s response is missing, but I’m sure it was assertive, followed up by action.
Toward the end of his life, Fred Terman wrote that he had no regrets: “If I had my life to live over again, I would play the same record.” He died at age eighty-two in his campus home. Hundreds showed up at the Stanford Memorial Church to pay their respects. Delivering the eulogy, the university’s president, Donald Kennedy, said that the most remarkable thing about Terman was his “capacity to think about the future.” Not only to think about it, but to engineer it.
That all this was happening in California is no coincidence. The state was—and to an extent still is—a place one flees to, a refuge for jilted lovers, bankrupt businessmen, lost souls. As William Foster, of Stratus Computer, put it, “If you fail in Silicon Valley, your family won’t know and your neighbors won’t care.”
California had another advantage. There wasn’t much here. The state was “born modern,” as historians like to say. It was settled late and therefore leapfrogged over the more established East Coast. Without a deeply entrenched culture on the ground, new arrivals simply made it up as they went along. It was a do-it-yourself adventure from the get-go.
Silicon Valley is the ultimate manifestation of the American flavor of genius, “not just thinking new thoughts and creating new things, but finding a use for them, and then using them to make a buck,” writes historian Darrin McMahon.
If America possesses any resource in spades, it is optimism, and optimism, a certain amount anyway, is a prerequisite for genius. Despite the image of the brooding genius, creative scientists tend to be more optimistic than their less creative peers. One study found that optimistic employees are more creative than pessimistic ones. And you don’t get any more optimistic than Silicon Valley.
“Brutally optimistic” is how one local put it. Anywhere else in the country, he explains, your new idea is met with an avalanche of reasons why it won’t work; in Silicon Valley, it’s met with a challenge.
Why don’t you do it? What are you waiting for?
Brutal.
Like a Pixar movie or a Mozart symphony, all successful people and places operate on two levels simultaneously. There is the mythology of their success, and then there are the real reasons for it. Yes, there is some overlap, but only some. Silicon Valley is no exception to this rule; its mythology is as well polished as an Apple product launch.
The Silicon Valley myth goes something like this. Let’s say we’re talking about the development of a new app, one that enables users to access the creative genius of past greats with the simple tap of a finger. In our mythological Silicon Valley, the idea arises, fully formed, perfect in every aspect, in the mind of a sullen twenty-three-year-old wearing blue jeans and lounging on a beanbag chair. Said beanbag chair is located in an “incubator,” a house occupied by other similarly sullen and brilliant twenty-three-year-olds. Coffee is involved.
The cadre of young geniuses immediately recognizes the brilliance of this new idea and huddle to brainstorm. Within minutes, they all agree on a name, Einstyn, and promptly celebrate. India Pale Ale is involved.
Our young genius then takes a meeting with a venture capitalist (also blue-jean clad, but accompanied by a neatly pressed dress shirt) who immediately recognizes the brilliance of Einstyn and writes a large check.
The venture capitalist, some thirty years older than our young genius, offers to impart his hard-earned wisdom. The young genius declines. He’s going to do this his way, he says, follow his inner GPS. The venture capitalist nods approvingly. A launch party is held, attended by fit young people wearing jeans and expressions of smug superiority.
Our young genius rents office space in Palo Alto, next to a Tesla dealership, and not far from that holy of holies, Steve Jobs’s old house. Within months, Einstyn is launched. It is met with . . . silence. Nobody seems to get it, leading our young genius to conclude that other people are idiots. Einstyn’s burn rate, meanwhile, rivals that of an F-16 during takeoff. Soon, the venture capitalist pulls the plug on the enterprise. Our young genius, broke and out of work, is immediately hailed a hero, for, as we all know, Silicon Valley embraces failure.
A month later, back in the very same beanbag chair, our technokind comes up with another brilliant, fully formed idea: a GPS tracking device that enables people to find missing socks. He is calling it Scks. The venture capitalist loves it (loves it!) and writes another check, this one even larger than before.
It’s a nice story, as pleasing to behold as the latest iProduct. Let’s unscrew the back panel, though, and take a look inside. First of all, nothing good ever came from a beanbag chair. Nothing. I am speaking from personal experience. I sense the genius tale is problematic in other ways, too, though I’m not sure exactly how. Unlike our technokind, I am willing to admit when I need help. In an irony that would make a Janusian Scotsman smile, I turn to the Man with No Cell Phone.
Chuck Darrah, anthropologist and Silicon Valley native, arrives at the coffee shop in Mountain View in shorts and sandals and, true to his word, with no cell phone. “I don’t want people to be able to reach me that easily,” he says, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, which, now that I think about it, it is.
In every other way, Chuck is about as Silicon Valley as you can get. He was born at Stanford Hospital, back when the region was best known as the prune capital of the United States. It produced orchards and dried fruits and not much else. For young Chuck, life in the Valley of Heart’s
Delight, as it was known, was idyllic. Everything was a bit better than elsewhere. The fruit tasted better, the air was fresher. The walnuts were the size of grapefruits. “It was a very gentle place to grow up,” he says, and I see by the look in his eyes he has left me, transported to another time, a better time. Eden before the microchip.
Chuck admits he never saw it coming. “One day, someone approached me and said, ‘There’s this new thing called silicon,’ and I’m, like, ‘What’s silicon? That sounds like the stupidest gimmick in the world.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, we’re making chips for calculators,’ and I’m like, ‘What are you talking about, dude?’ So, no, I didn’t see it coming at all.” Now, though, Chuck is the Margaret Mead of Silicon Valley, hacking through the overgrowth of US 101, studying the natives and their strange ways. He finds it endlessly fascinating.
We order coffee and find a table outside. We can do this because it is California and the weather today is perfect, just as it is every day. The light is almost Athenian in its brilliance, and I’m tempted to suggest, again, that climate might explain Silicon Valley. But I stop myself. It is never the weather, at least not only the weather.
The secret to Silicon Valley’s success, he says, is not that it was the best but simply that it was the first. “First-starter advantage,” it’s called, and it explains a lot, not only about the Valley but all innovations. Consider your laptop keyboard. The top left letters spell QWERTY. Why? Is that the most efficient way of arranging the keys? Hardly. In fact, it is purposefully
inefficient.
The early typewriters jammed frequently, so designers arranged the keys in a way that would slow the typist and minimize the risk of jamming. Improved typewriters were no longer prone to jamming, but the QWERTY keyboard had already caught on. Typists got used to it and worked around the constraints it imposed. Typing schools taught it. So it stuck, even though it was not the “best” arrangement, just as the VHS video format bested Betamax, a clearly superior technology. Likewise, the Pilgrims settled in Massachusetts Bay and not Virginia, as they intended, simply because they got lost.
The point is, the “best” technology or idea doesn’t always prevail. Sometimes chance and the law of unintended consequences win out.
More important is what happens
after
these forces have had their say. We adjust to the inefficient keyboard and our fingers fly. VHS works fine, until it is supplanted by DVDs and now streaming video. The Pilgrims endure the brutal New England winters and eventually thrive. It’s the same way with places of genius. They may not be perfect or beautiful, but they challenge us in certain ways, and when we respond to these challenges in a bold and creative way, the foundation for a golden age is laid. But for that to happen, you have to get there first. This explains the Silicon Valley philosophy: better to get an imperfect product to market today than a perfect one tomorrow. As Steve Jobs once observed, when the lightbulb was invented, no one complained it was too dim.