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February 17 - April 6, 2022
The tale of their teamwork is important because we don’t often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.
this idea that innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact.
This insight would become the core concept of the digital age: any piece of content, data, or information—music, text, pictures, numbers, symbols, sounds, video—could be expressed in digital form and manipulated by machines.
“A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,” Einstein once said, “but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”
If there were machines that bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as closely as possible for all practical purposes, we should still have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not real humans. The first is that . . . it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do. Secondly, even though some machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would inevitably fail in others, which would
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More fundamentally, the transistor radio became the first major example of a defining theme of the digital age: technology making devices personal.
Madrigals don’t rely on lead singers and soloists; the polyphonic songs weave multiple voices and melodies together, none of them dominant.
“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”
Spacewar highlighted three aspects of the hacker culture that became themes of the digital age. First, it was created collaboratively. “We were able to build it together, working as a team, which is how we liked to do things,” Russell said. Second, it was free and open-source software. “People asked for copies of the source code, and of course we gave them out.” Of course—that was in a time and place when software yearned to be free. Third, it was based on the belief that computers should be personal and interactive. “It allowed us to get our hands on a computer and make it respond to us in
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authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired, and creativity should be nurtured.
Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product.
“Basic research leads to new knowledge,” Bush wrote. “It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn.”
The war, Bush wrote, had made it “clear beyond all doubt” that basic science—discovering the fundamentals of nuclear physics, lasers, computer science, radar—“is absolutely essential to national security.”
“Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for past ages.”
“Man-Computer Symbiosis,” which Licklider published in 1960. “The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly,” he wrote, “and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”
‘Request for Comments’—no matter whether it really was a request.” It was the perfect phrase to encourage Internet-era collaboration—friendly,
“We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.”
Yes, the Trip Festival’s conjunction of drugs, rock, and technology—acid and a.c. outlets!—was jarring. But it turned out to be, significantly, a quintessential display of the fusion that shaped the personal computer era: technology, counterculture, entrepreneurship, gadgets, music, art, and engineering. From Stewart Brand to Steve Jobs, those ingredients fashioned a wave of Bay Area innovators who were comfortable at the interface of Silicon Valley and Haight-Ashbury.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
“The dystopian society envisioned by George Orwell in the aftermath of World War II, at about the same time the transistor was invented, has completely failed to materialize,” the historians Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson wrote, “in large part because transistorized electronic devices have empowered creative individuals and nimble entrepreneurs far more than Big Brother.”
The Apple II also established a doctrine that would become a religious creed for Steve Jobs: his company’s hardware was tightly integrated with its operating system software. He was a perfectionist who liked to control the user experience end to end. He didn’t want to let you buy an Apple machine and run someone else’s clunky operating system on it, nor buy Apple’s operating system and put it on someone else’s junky hardware.
The essence of the General Public License, Stallman said, is that it gives “everyone permission to run the program, copy the program, modify the program, and distribute modified versions—but not permission to add restrictions of their own.”
“Linux,” which he pronounced, similarly to the way he pronounced his first name, “LEE-nucks.”
“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
there aren’t just two sides to any issue, there’s almost always a range of responses, and ‘it depends’ is almost always the right answer in any big question.”
It’s a mark of our political discourse that one of the significant nonpartisan achievements on behalf of American innovation got turned into a punch line because of something that Gore never quite said—that he “invented” the Internet.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, two of the people who did in fact invent the Internet’s protocols, spoke up on Gore’s behalf. “No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President,”
Andreessen made a rule of favoring startups whose founders focused on running code and customer service rather than charts and presentations.
‘Having a healthy disregard for the impossible.’
That insight, the user is never wrong, led to this idea that we could produce a search engine that was better.”
Build something of value and deliver a service compelling enough that people would just use it.”163
He went to the car to get his checkbook and wrote one made out to Google Inc. for $100,000. “We don’t have a bank account yet,” Brin told him. “Deposit it when you get one,” Bechtolsheim replied. Then he rode off in his Porsche.
the future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate with computers.
Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.
The most successful endeavors in the digital age were those run by leaders who fostered collaboration while also providing a clear vision.
Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design.
“When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off,” Jobs said. Larry Page felt the same: “The best leaders are those with the deepest understanding of the engineering and product design.”
