Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

by Laszlo Bock

This ostentation aversion is as much a reflection of the historic engineering culture of Silicon Valley as anything special about Google. New York Times journalist David Streitfeld traces it back to the “founding” of Silicon Valley in 1957,159 when Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Eugene Kleiner, and five others started Fairchild Semiconductor and developed a way to mass-produce silicon transistors.160 Streitfeld describes it as a “new kind of company … one that was all about openness and risk. The rigid hierarchy of the East was eliminated. So was the conspicuous consumption.” “The money doesn’t seem real,” Noyce would later tell his father. “It’s just a way of keeping score.” 161 The ethos in the Valley has long been “Work hard, but don’t show off.”