The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson

“You buy these little bags of microchips with your pocket money and you’d realize you could make the core of a computer.”5 Not only that, but you could understand the core of the computer because you had progressed from simple switches to transistors to microchips and knew how each worked.

Innovation emerges in places with the right primordial soup, which was true of the Bay Area but not of Oxfordshire in the 1970s. His step-by-step

“Half-formed ideas, they float around. They come from different places, and the mind has got this wonderful way of somehow just shoveling them around until one day they fit. They may fit not so well, and then we go for a bike ride or something, and it’s better.”12

They formed a partnership often seen in innovative teams: the visionary product designer paired with the diligent project manager.

Andreessen knew one of the secrets of digital-age entrepreneurs: he fanatically heeded user feedback and spent time on Internet newsgroups soaking up suggestions and complaints. Then he persistently released updated versions.