A History of Silicon Valley Quotes

“There was really no compelling reason for a software company to open business in the Silicon Valley. After all, Microsoft was based in Seattle, and Apple’s computers supported many fewer third-party developers than Microsoft. IBM, still the largest hardware, software and consulting company in the world, was based far away. The reason that a new industry boomed in Silicon Valley was, ultimately, that there was a lot of talent and money around.”
― Arun Rao, A History of Silicon Valley: The Greatest Creation of Wealth in the History of the Planet

“In dealing with his frustrations of an unpredictable environment typical of the startup world, Kaplan wrote that an entrepreneur is “faced with an endless stream of arbitrary challenges that bear down on you with the relentlessness of an automatic pitching machine. The trick is to know when to swing and when to duck.” [29]”
― Arun Rao, A History of Silicon Valley: The Greatest Creation of Wealth in the History of the Planet

“In a sense, Silicon Valley was born out of Shockley's betrayal of Bell Labs' ethics.”
― Arun Rao, A History of Silicon Valley: The Greatest Creation of Wealth in the History of the Planet

“In 1958 AT&T, the owner of Bell Labs, was served with an antitrust court order that forbade it to ever enter the computer business and that forced it to license any non-telephone inventions to the whole world. This odd ruling turned Unix into a worldwide phenomenon, as it spread from one corner of the computer world to the other.”
― Arun Rao, A History of Silicon Valley: The Greatest Creation of Wealth in the History of the Planet

“The US government served as both a munificent venture capitalist that did not expect a return (not even co-ownership) yet acted as an inexpensive testbed. In 1965 Hewlett-Packard employed about 9,000 people, Fairchild had 10,000, and Lockheed’s Missile Division had 28,000 employees. The defense industry was still dominant.”
― Arun Rao, A History of Silicon Valley: The Greatest Creation of Wealth in the History of the Planet