Americana Quotes

“The lack of much outside investment allowed Gates and Allen to hold the vast majority of their company’s stock through the mideighties. Jobs, while his net worth had climbed into a significant fortune with Apple’s rise, didn’t own enough to control his destiny and was fired. It was a cruel irony: For all his counterculture spirit and brilliance, he suffered the mercenary’s fate, left with money but no kingdom. Gates, however, remained reluctant to go public even ten years after Microsoft’s founding. Eventually, due to the number of Microsoft employees who owned shares, and U.S. securities laws obligating any company with more than 500 shareholders to be registered, which Microsoft expected to soon pass, Gates agreed to list his shares. But as a final symbol of resistance, he did try to fly coach during the IPO roadshow—one last ode to parsimony—until his underwriters insisted otherwise.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“At a subsequent Homebrew meeting where Wozniak showed his creation, everyone seemed impressed, including Wozniak’s friend Steve Jobs. Around that time, Jobs was given a freelance project at Atari, having altered the terms of his employment. Atari’s founder had tasked Jobs with designing a single-player version of Pong, in which the ball could be simply hit against a wall back to the player. Jobs called on Wozniak, who was working at Hewlett-Packard, to help. Over the course of less than a week, Jobs and Wozniak delivered a single-player version of Pong. Jobs was in a rush. He needed to go back to a commune in Oregon, where the apple-picking season was about to begin.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“But the start-up was the land of mercenaries, young men whose spirits ran counter to traditional corporate culture but who were vastly capitalistic in their personal financial ambitions and their sacrifices. As risky as start-ups were, given that most failed, these employees had little notion or expectation of stability. In addition, start-ups often paid less than comparable corporate jobs but required more hours. To offset the low compensation and lack of job security, start-ups offered equity in the form of stock options. And if the stock options paid off, the newly rich early employee often became difficult to manage. The dynamics were more similar to joining a pirate ship than the Royal Navy.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“But Silicon Valley was filling up newspapers with dozens of pages of employment ads. One Atari ad in 1974 read simply, “Have Fun, Make Money.” The day the ad ran, an unkempt eighteen-year-old who had grown up in nearby Cupertino showed up at the front desk of the game maker. He refused to leave without a job. The receptionist relayed the message to a senior engineer and asked whether she should call the cops. Instead the engineer, Al Alcorn, engaged with the “hippie-looking kid,” learning that he was a dropout from the literary Reed College with no formal engineering background but deep enthusiasm for technology. Despite the negatives, Alcorn hired Steve Jobs as a technician at $5 an hour. Atari’s unconventional hiring practices didn’t dissuade Sequoia Capital from making an investment. Neither did Atari’s manufacturing floor: “You go on the factory tour and the marijuana in the air would knock you to your knees—where they were manufacturing the product!” Sequoia’s Don Valentine would note later. Japanese quality control it wasn’t. Still, the venture capitalist took the big picture view to his board duties, suggesting that prudishness would have been futile: “What would I say, get a higher brand of marijuana?” This too was a fundamental shift, the counterculture of San Francisco and Berkeley permeating south.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“But Silicon Valley was filling up newspapers with dozens of pages of employment ads. One Atari ad in 1974 read simply, “Have Fun, Make Money.” The day the ad ran, an unkempt eighteen-year-old who had grown up in nearby Cupertino showed up at the front desk of the game maker. He refused to leave without a job. The receptionist relayed the message to a senior engineer and asked whether she should call the cops. Instead the engineer, Al Alcorn, engaged with the “hippie-looking kid,” learning that he was a dropout from the literary Reed College with no formal engineering background but deep enthusiasm for technology. Despite the negatives, Alcorn hired Steve Jobs as a technician at $5 an hour. Atari’s unconventional hiring practices didn’t dissuade Sequoia Capital from making an investment. Neither did Atari’s manufacturing floor: “You go on the factory tour and the marijuana in the air would knock you to your knees—where they were manufacturing the product!” Sequoia’s Don Valentine would note later. Japanese quality control it wasn’t. Still, the venture capitalist took the big picture view to his board duties, suggesting that prudishness would have been futile: “What would I say, get a higher brand of marijuana?” This too was a fundamental shift, the counterculture of San Francisco and Berkeley permeating south. The”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“As most new businesses fail, saying start-ups have a very high rate of failure is by itself not particularly revelatory. But a start-up is not a small business. A start-up is designed from the beginning to either become very big or completely fail—the modern-day equivalent of an uncertain, cross-ocean voyage to the New World as opposed to, say, a predictable, moderately profitable seventeenth-century trading voyage from London to Amsterdam. Stakeholders in a start-up are more interested in increasing the potential magnitude of a spectacular outcome than in bettering the probability of modest returns. Thus, the financial ecosystem’s willingness to accept a high risk of capital loss made venture capital accessible to outliers and eccentrics.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“At the same time, many of the pioneering venture capitalists were not moneymen but graduates of the semiconductor industry. One of the eight men who had formed Fairchild Semiconductor, Eugene Kleiner, would found the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 1972, not coincidentally the year after the Intel IPO. In the same year, Don Valentine, a former Fairchild sales executive, founded Sequoia Capital. Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia would become as intrinsic to Silicon Valley as the entrepreneurs themselves—the equivalent of the grand Hollywood studios, with the entrepreneurs analogous to actors, directors, and producers. Over the next forty-five years, several of America’s most valuable corporations, including three of the top four, would be funded early on by Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia or both. This birth of venture capital—a rebirth, really—was a return to the most American of roots, older than its founders’ democracy. The organizers of the Virginia Company had called upon “adventurers” to risk capital. A few years later, the Merchant Adventurers in London coffeehouses had agreed to finance the voyage of a large molasses ship known as the Mayflower. Three hundred fifty years later, an improved concept of venture capital was being applied to the next era of American discovery.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“In July 1969 hundreds of millions of people on Earth huddled around television screens to witness a new world come within reach, a pinnacle of human achievement. When Christopher Columbus or Vasco da Gama set off on their respective voyages to explore new worlds, there were likely no more than a few dozen spectators waving them farewell. But the moon landing was a collective journey, made awe inspiring with live images from outer space transmitted through television, putting much of humanity in a collective trance. It was so momentous that the entire first section of the New York Times was dedicated to the smallest details and broadest implications of this most highly anticipated event of the space age. At the time, people expected the moon to be settled, at the very least in some minimal way, in the not-too-distant future. Optimistic speculations suggested that shuttle services for passengers were just a decade away.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“In July 1969 hundreds of millions of people on Earth huddled around television screens to witness a new world come within reach, a pinnacle of human achievement. When Christopher Columbus or Vasco da Gama set off on their respective voyages to explore new worlds, there were likely no more than a few dozen spectators waving them farewell. But the moon landing was a collective journey, made awe inspiring with live images from outer space transmitted through television, putting much of humanity in a collective trance. It was so momentous that the entire first section of the New York Times was dedicated to the smallest details and broadest implications of this most highly anticipated event of the space age. At the time, people expected the moon to be settled, at the very least in some minimal way, in the not-too-distant future. Optimistic speculations suggested that shuttle services for passengers were just a decade away. This”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“With the limited float and the public investor’s insatiable demand for anything electronic, Langone’s company priced the shares at $16.50 per share—a full 118 times EDS’s earnings at the time. Perot emerged at the end of the offering with a net worth close to $200 million on paper. Fortune declared him “the fastest richest Texan ever.” Within two years, his paper net worth would top $1.5 billion, making him technology’s first billionaire.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“Equally confounding, in 1968, a year marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and the peak of American casualties in Vietnam, with over ten thousand deaths that year—“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?” was a chant making the rounds at rallies—the U.S. stock market seemed an untroubled oasis, climbing to new highs.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“The company even drew unlikely customers. From rural Arkansas, operating just five comically cheap-looking stores—a rounding error compared with the largest retailers—Sam Walton made his way to an IBM conference for retailers. While he shied away from investing anything in any emotional aspect of retailing, delivering the lowest prices meant mastering logistics and information. To one speaker at the conference, Abe Marks, modern retailing meant knowing exactly “how much merchandise is in the store? What’s selling and what’s not? What is to be ordered, marked down or replaced? . . . The more you turn your inventory, the less capital is required.” Altering his first impression, Marks found that Walton’s simpleton comportment masked his genius as a retailer, eventually calling him the “best utilizer of information that there’s ever been.” A little over two decades later, Sam Walton would become the richest man in America; he would attribute his competitive advantage to his investment in computing systems in his early days. The small-town merchant who expected that knowing his customers’ names or sponsoring the local Little League team would give him some enduring advantage simply didn’t understand the sport. American consumers, technocrats at heart, rewarded efficiency as reflected by the prices on the shelves, not the quaint sentiments of a friendly proprietor. To gain this efficiency, information systems were seen as vital.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“WITH THE ADVENT of the computer and the dawn of the space race, the sixties brought futuristic visions of life to the mainstream consciousness. The Soviet satellite Sputnik had led to the formation of NASA to oversee America’s space program. In prime time on ABC, Americans could tune in to catch the animated cartoon The Jetsons, about a space-age family who lived with their housekeeping robot, Rosie, and dog, Astro. A couple of years later, Desilu, I Love Lucy’s production company, premiered Star Trek on CBS. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey had a near-omniscient computer named Hal manipulating its astronauts. By the midsixties, the concepts of artificial intelligence and self-driving cars were no longer in the realm of magic or science fiction—they were seen as the logical, inevitable outcome of the American trajectory.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“The Soviet satellite Sputnik had led to the formation of NASA to oversee America’s space program. In prime time on ABC, Americans could tune in to catch the animated cartoon The Jetsons, about a space-age family who lived with their housekeeping robot, Rosie, and dog, Astro. A couple of years later, Desilu, I Love Lucy’s production company, premiered Star Trek on CBS. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey had a near-omniscient computer named Hal manipulating its astronauts. By the midsixties, the concepts of artificial intelligence and self-driving cars were no longer in the realm of magic or science fiction—they were seen as the logical, inevitable outcome of the American trajectory.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“One of the most expensive projects underwritten in the era was a computing system known as SAGE, which stood for Semi-Autonomous Ground Environment. Once a radar station picked up an enemy aircraft entering American airspace, SAGE would calculate the incoming flight path based on speed, altitude, and direction and determine which fighter jets should be dispatched to intercept the threat. Other times SAGE might advise that a surface-to-air missile be fired instead. The computers, which were the size of buildings, needed to make recommendations that generals would follow. SAGE went beyond harnessing computing power; it also introduced networking. Through telephone connections, SAGE divided the country into geographic sectors, with a facility in each sector pulling in information from ground radar, naval vessels, and surveillance aircraft. Each facility’s computer was networked with the other facilities’ computers to transmit and receive data as to which combat facilities should be deployed in the event of an attack. Getting the contract to build computing centers for SAGE accounted for fully half of IBM’s computing revenues until the late fifties, subsidizing the transition from the days of punch cards to the new era of computing.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“In 1954 two brothers, Dick and Maurice McDonald, operated a single drive-in that seemed to be the model of simplicity and efficient execution. Unlike other drive-ins of the era, McDonald’s had three base items: hamburger, French fries, and drinks. It had no seating. The hamburgers were priced at 15 cents, an extra 4 cents for cheese. Fries cost 10 cents, a milkshake 20 cents.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“But Sanders did have one bit of intellectual property, an asset that would carry him forward yet again: a fried chicken recipe that he had perfected over the years in his restaurant. Initially, fried chicken had been an ancillary item on the menu, a means of using leftover chicken. However, customers on long drives didn’t want to wait the time it took to pan-fry the chicken. Another cooking method, immersing chicken through a wire basket in oil, was fast but didn’t meet Sanders’s exacting standards. It took an accidental experimentation with a pressure cooker to give Sanders his old restaurant’s special item: Kentucky Fried Chicken.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“In June 1956, the final contours of a nearly $33 billion highway bill reached President Eisenhower’s desk for his signature. Even Eisenhower couldn’t resist superlatives, calling the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways the “greatest public works program in the history of the world.” The 41,000 miles of fast, smooth, and federally funded interstate highways were designed to connect all the major cities in America with populations of over fifty thousand.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“While rebuilding using insurance proceeds and a bank loan, an epiphany struck: “You can sleep a man only once in twenty-four hours, but you can feed him three times.” He added a restaurant. A decade and a half later, a simple announcement from Washington DC would unravel his life’s work.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“In 1955, to introduce its readers to the rise of the league, Life ran a pictorial with the title “Savagery on Sunday.” The brief story had an unnamed quarterback lamenting that “the game is getting rougher every year. It’s war rather than sport.” But there was more to the game than simple brutality. The evolution of the pro passing game, along with player specialization, added a degree of strategic complexity to the game, with coaches resembling generals as they patrolled the sidelines. Given these factors, football made for great television, with the game often better seen at home than from within a stadium. Needless to say, Americans were sold on all counts.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“By the end of the Eisenhower presidency, television had become inseparable from national politics and presidential campaigns. The average American household had owned a television set for less than ten years when, in 1960, Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Nixon faced off in the first-ever televised presidential debate. While the polio-afflicted FDR could not walk and Eisenhower was a less-than-charismatic speaker in public, the new visual medium granted no allowances. Starting with the debate, presidential elections were now a form of performance art in which every grimace, eye roll, and hand gesture counted toward the outcome—democracy subject to the rolling cameras of capitalism’s next big thing. •”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“To CBS boss Bill Paley, who had come of age building his radio network to rival NBC, the simple formula to keep up was to transfer his radio stars to TV. The transition worked for America’s most famous newscaster, Edward R. Murrow, who had become famous for broadcasting from London during the Battle of Britain. But two far bigger stars would emerge in a different genre. In the late forties, Lucille Ball had been a star of a CBS radio program known as My Favorite Husband, a situation comedy that chronicled the domestic life and squabbles of an all-American couple.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“For an entire class of people to once again be involved in the political process, to directly vote on taxes and financing matters, was a level of participatory democracy at which Alexis de Tocqueville would have marveled: “To have a hand in the government of society, and to talk about it,” wrote Tocqueville in his Democracy in America in 1835, “is the most important business and so to speak, the only pleasure an American knows.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“Similarly, suburbia unified taste. In The Organization Man, a wide-ranging analysis of suburban household behavior, William H. Whyte pointed to “inconspicuous consumption” as a central precept of acceptable behavior in the middle-class cul-de-sac. While material comforts and luxuries were to be energetically pursued as a part of the good life, it was a part of an observed social contract to not stand out too much relative to one’s neighbors. It was a delicate balancing act between showing that one had a little more taste or money versus maintaining the “strong impulse toward egalitarianism.” And when a family’s capacity for consumption significantly outpaced their neighbors’, they upgraded suburbs. What might have been seen as an obscene or vulgar show of upward mobility in one neighborhood might be normal in the next development over.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“Having four walls of one’s own, a patch of grass in the back, a grill for hot dogs, and the ability to see the sky didn’t seem that bad. And what was this culture the critics were so fond of? Most Americans went to the movies, not poetry readings. Couldn’t a few of these theaters be built out here too? And didn’t a baseball game on the radio sound just as good anywhere?”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“The effect was that an entire generation of new families was being formed within driving distance of a city, but without being a part of one. The suburban ethos and the impending baby boom coincided in spirit and function. The profile of these towns took the shape of male commuters, housewives at home, and communities entirely centered on raising children, family factories of a sort. The patterns of life, family, and commuting—the bland and conforming sameness of it all—alarmed social and cultural critics as it became apparent that the energies and aspirations of young families, the renewable source of people, were going to be drained from the American city.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“In 1947 Levitt & Sons, led by Bill, gambled on 1,200 flat, less-than-verdant acres of farmland set in the center of the island. Set about thirty miles from the Empire State Building, beyond the dense boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, stood this parcel of land, seemingly a world apart from the vibrant, dense urban street life filled with trolleys, vendors, and pedestrians. Levitt viewed this prospective transition in evangelical terms: “You marvel at the rebirth of man, man with his own piece of the good earth, his own share of light and air and sunshine.” To this reborn man, Levitt planned to sell single-family, detached houses in the suburbs.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“American industry was going to not only supply the war in Europe but also engage in the then-to-date largest peacetime buildup of the American arsenal, an effort surpassing Roosevelt’s cousin Teddy’s initiative in the first decade of the century. About nine hundred planes had been built annually for the military in the United States from 1936 to 1939. In 1940 production jumped to over six thousand. Even this would be a mere fraction of what was to come.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“THERE WAS ONE MAN in the movie business immune to the usual pressures of dealing with actors, directors, set design, and union contractors. He created stars who never aged, never complained, never walked off the job, and never demanded salaries. By 1937 Walt Disney was already a dominant parallel force to the studio system, “the Horatio Alger hero of Cinema.” He did need distribution, but his company’s work had such a strong draw at the box office that the distribution arms needed Disney more than the other way around. He controlled the biggest star in the world, Mickey Mouse, who had debuted in a short seven-minute cartoon Steamboat Willie in 1928. Even better, Mickey was a commercial phenomenon away from the box office.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

“The studios then fed their pictures first and exclusively to theaters they owned in competitive markets like New York, Chicago, and Boston. A caste system among theaters developed in which first-run pictures went to certain chains and second-run pictures—reruns, essentially—went to another tier of chains. In dealing with independent theater owners, distributors used the leverage of stars and major pictures to bundle their slate of minor pictures—for a theater owner to get the big blockbusters, he had to agree to show the harder-to-market films. The studio system’s purpose at every step was to smooth out the economics of an unpredictable business. The outcome was a functioning cartel.”
― Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism