Valley of Genius Quotes

“Kevin Kelly: So when I think of the future of Silicon Valley I see it as still being the center of the universe as defined by having the least resistance to new ideas, and that’s just its cultural history of being tolerant of wild ideas. Lee Felsenstein: Silicon Valley is a state of mind in a generalized physical area.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Kevin Kelly: The biggest invention in Silicon Valley was not the transistor but the start-up model, the culture of the entrepreneurial start-up. Marc Porat: It’s the style of thinking and behaving that’s called “being an entrepreneur.” Megan Smith: I grew up in it. It’s extraordinary. An entrepreneurial culture of like, “Hey, how can we solve this?” And really caring about helping each other. Carol Bartz: It really is just this need to change as fast as possible to enable the next great thing. We don’t even have to imagine the next great thing yet. We just have to get the tools to do something and use trial and error until we have the next great thing.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“John Battelle: With the benefit of hindsight, Google’s IPO in 2004 was as important as the Netscape IPO in 1995. Everyone got excited about the internet in the late nineties, but the truth was a very small percentage of the world used it. Google went public after the dot-com crash and reestablished the web as a medium. Web 1.0 was a low-bandwidth, underdeveloped toy. Web 2.0 is a robust broadband medium with three billion people using it for everything from conducting business to communicating with your friends and family.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Sean Parker: Prior to the release of Napster, prior to that pivotal moment, the web was one-way. It was a client-server model, you accessed information that was stored on a server. It was very much this broadcast model where individuals passively consumed what had been published. It wasn’t a two-way street. But the moment Napster launched, you were fully utilizing the capabilities of the internet. Everybody was sharing content. Everybody was downloading content. Everything is interactive. That was the original potential of the internet. Napster was ahead of its time.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Steve Jobs: The people who really create things that change this industry are both the thinker and the doer in one person. The doers are the major thinkers. Did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out about the future? About what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not. Leonardo was the artist—but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy. And combining all those skills together—the art and the science, the thinking and the doing—was what resulted in the exceptional result.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Bob Taylor: In those days there were always, at these computer conferences, panel discussions attacking the idea of interactive computing. The reasons were multitudinous. They'd say, "Well, it's too expensive. Computer time is worth more than human time. It will never work. It's a pipe dream." So, the great majority of the public, including the computing establishment, were not only ignorant and would be opposed to what Doug was trying to do, they were also opposed to the whole idea of interactive computing.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Chris Cean: It's funny. Now everyone talks about Apple, but people don't remember how big and pervasive Atari was. At one point Atari was twenty-seven buildings in six cities. You could almost trace the outline of Silicon Valley by connecting the dots. We used to call Highway 101 "Via Atari" because you'd be driving to meetings up and down 101, and all around you there are cars with Atri parking stickers. It was that first magical wave of Silicon Valley.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Yves Béhar is an industrial designer who specializes in making high-tech beautiful. Béhar moved to San Francisco’s South Park in 1993 but was only discovered by Silicon Valley after Steve Jobs demonstrated—with the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad—what good product design could mean for a company’s bottom line. Béhar’s company, fuseproject, is one of the most important design firms in technology today.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Scott Hassan: I hope that these quantum entanglement systems will allow you to transmit information faster than the speed of light. If it happens, that’s going to allow us to colonize the whole entire galaxy, and other galaxies. If that’s actually, really possible, it’s going to be phenomenal, and that’s being developed right now.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Kevin Kelly: When Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue he complained to the organizers, saying, “Look, Deep Blue had access to this database of every single chess move that was ever done. If I had access to that same database in real time, I could have beat Deep Blue.” So he said, “I want to make a whole new chess league where you can play as a human with access to that database.” And it’s kind of like free martial arts, where you could play anywhere, you could play as a human with access, you could play it as a human alone or you could play just as an AI alone. And he called that combination of the AI and the human, he called that a centaur. That team was a centaur, and in the last four years, the world’s best chess player on the planet is not an AI, it’s not a human, it’s a centaur, it’s a team.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Kevin Kelly: So just like the way we made artificial flying, we’re going to make new types of thinking that don’t occur in nature. It’s not that it’s going to be humanlike but faster. It’s an alien intelligence—and that turns out to be its chief benefit. The reason why we employ an AI to drive our cars is because they’re not driving it like humans.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Tony Fadell: Tomorrow will get faster and every year after it’s only going to continue to get faster in terms of the amount of change. That means all of these incumbents with these big businesses that have been around for a hundred or two hundred years can be unseated, because technology is the unseating element. Technology is the levelizer.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Tony Fadell: Change is going to be continual, and today is the slowest day society will ever move.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Marc Benioff: “Actualize yourself”—that was Yogananda’s message. And if you look back at the history of Steve—that early trip where he went to India to the ashram of his maharishi. He had this incredible realization that his intuition was his greatest gift and he needed to look at the world from the inside out. Larry Brilliant: You just wouldn’t get a conversation with anybody else the way you would get it with Steve Jobs. You could be talking about politics, you could be talking about space travel, you could be talking about movies or music, technology, spiritual life. He was so smart, and his mind was so agile, and what he could do was he could take the experiences that he had with computers or the experiences that he had with a mystical quest and he could apply them to analyzing today’s news or to political events, or geopolitical events even more so. I never had a conversation with him where I didn’t learn something. Marc Benioff: And here his last message to us was: “Look inside yourself, realize yourself, look to The Autobiography of a Yogi, which is a story of self-realization.” I think that is so powerful. It gives a tremendous insight into who he was but also why he was successful. He was not afraid to take that key journey. Ron Johnson: Steve was clearly a spiritual being. Marc Benioff: He was the guru.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“John Markoff: Still, Steve was emblematic of the Valley, rising to represent how it touched the popular culture. He is the vector for Alan Kay’s insight. Kay was the person who understood that computing was a universal medium, that it wasn’t a calculation tool, and as a universal medium it transformed any medium that it touched. Before computing, there had been paper, there had been music, there had been video, and computing sort of relentlessly transformed each one of them, and Steve was the vector. He was the messenger who sort of implemented Alan’s vision. Steve was the one who shaped those products so that they were usable by mortals and so we could get beyond the original personal computers. And the modern world is different because of that.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“John Markoff: Mona Simpson spoke and told of how she met her brother and about their relationship. It was much closer than I realized. She, too, talked about Steve’s search for beauty. Mona Simpson: I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene: “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Jon Rubinstein: It was a beautiful service. Clearly it had been stage-managed by Steve from beyond the grave. John Markoff: Yo-Yo Ma played first and wonderfully. Andy Hertzfeld: It was really deep, just heartbreakingly beautiful, one of the most emotional pieces of music I’ve ever heard. John Markoff: Afterward he briefly introduced the event and told a short, funny story about how Steve had wanted him to play at his funeral and how he had asked Steve to speak at his. As usual, he noted, “Steve had gotten his way.” Mike Slade: So then Laurene spoke and had written this beautiful speech about Steve that was surprisingly analytical. Ron Johnson: She’s just a very professional, poised, intelligent, articulate person who had a long time to prepare for this. She had a message to convey, and she delivered it very gracefully. Mike Slade: She was like, “Look, if you guys think he was a dick, it’s because he was in pursuit of beauty, and that sort of trumped everything, and most people didn’t really get that about him.” And so almost everything that was dickish—she didn’t use those words—was because he was in pursuit of beauty. I’ve been to lots of funerals where the grieving widow was the grieving widow, and that’s not what she did. So it was wonderful—really brilliant, and I actually learned a lot from it—but it was surprising, right?”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Ron Johnson: He just became a lot leaner, physically. His body was wearing down, but his mind was sharp as ever when I saw him. His spirit was as strong as ever or even strengthening—which is not uncommon near the end. It becomes this unique moment where people start to truly understand better how to think about life and the really important things in life.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Mike Slade: He chose not to have surgery right away and did acupuncture, which was ultimately a fatal decision, although it took seven or eight years. John Couch: Steve overcame so many obstacles that people said were insurmountable obstacles that he probably felt that he could beat his illness on his own as well.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Ron Johnson: Steve’s strength throughout his life was his ability to think differently and to trust his intuition and to follow his convictions. He did that at work, and he did that in his personal life. And that’s how he tackled his illness.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Silicon Valley is a culture, a people, a point of view. But if the place had to be represented by just one person, it would have to be Steve Jobs. He was a native son who twice plunged into the wilderness. The first foray was in 1974, to India. The nineteen-year-old Jobs did not find the holy man he was seeking, Neem Karoli Baba, a living saint known to his followers as Maharaj-ji, but the trip stirred something within him. On his return to the Valley Jobs kick-started the personal computer industry. The Apple II and the Macintosh were breakthrough products, but the Mac, at least initially, did not sell. Exiled from the company he cofounded, Jobs was a wash-up at the age of thirty. A dozen years later he was asked to come back and save the company from near-certain oblivion. Astonishingly, he did save the company—by moving beyond the computer-on-every-desk paradigm that he had established some three decades before with the Apple II. The iPhone ushered in an age of anywhere-anytime mobile computing. Thus the man who started the personal computer era also ended it. Jobs’s premature death three years later permanently enshrined him in the Valley’s firmament. His life was the stuff of myth—myths that Jobs often encouraged. But Jobs had no magical powers, no superhuman ability to see the future. The truth is both mundane and extraordinary: By sheer determination and cleverness, Jobs became the very man that he went looking for as a lad—the guru, the seer, the wizard. He died at home, in Palo Alto, on October 5, 2011.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Steven Johnson: What I find so beautiful about Twitter is that it’s literally like the serendipity of the front page of the newspaper, times one hundred. So when people sit there and say, “Oh we’re killing serendipity because Google has ruined all that. Now you just go to the web and search for what you want and you get it,” I look at those people and think, Have you never used Twitter? Literally every time I hit Refresh there is an interesting hint of a take about something. And more often than not, a link to something longer that opens my mind in some way. Twitter is a serendipity engine.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Nick Bilton: Twitter today is one person talking to a lot of people—not a conversation. And I don’t think that we as human beings were designed to enable 320 million people to have a conversation together.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Ev Williams: Success at this magnitude is fucking hard—and unlikely—no matter how great the idea. Because it’s not just an idea—it’s dozens of ideas and hundreds of decisions. The myth is that ideas are stumbled onto fully baked. In reality, they have to be developed.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Ev Williams: Twitter didn’t find immediate product-market fit. Why did it then grow? Because we changed it! And—little-known fact—after that fateful South by Southwest, growth stalled again. And then we changed it more.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Andy Grignon: And then all of a sudden Facebook and Twitter come online and the phone started to tickle the part of our brain that wants constant stimulus. All of a sudden you’re standing in line at Safeway and you tweet to this global audience of people. You can be constantly engaged. Guy Bar-Nahum: Then something amazing happened. The social-mobile web of our time—the web that was about conversations—was born. This has absolutely changed the world. Andy Grignon: It was the perfect marriage of services. I would never have predicted any of it. Not a single person did.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“bender is going to cook up. Guy Bar-Nahum: And then Google came along and said, “We’re doing Android.” So what’s the difference? Android was going to allow people to download third-party apps. Steve Wozniak: The first iPhone did not have the App Store. Guy Bar-Nahum: Steve panicked, and literally all of a sudden everything clicks through his head and he realizes that he was like a mile behind Google! Steve Wozniak: Openness is so important, and the App Store is a type of openness. It wasn’t the original idea of the iPhone. Steve had to be convinced of it. Guy Bar-Nahum: And so he went to Forstall and told him, “Hey, Forstall, we have to open up an ecosystem,” and that’s where Forstall shined the second time, after making the iPhone UI. He told him, “I was working on it the whole time.” So Forstall had actually ignored Steve’s verbatim order and he worked on it in the basement and made it happen. You have to have balls of steel to do something like that. Guy Bar-Nahum: And then because of Google, Apple was pushed into putting apps on the iPhone. And then apps became the way people touched the web.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Guy Bar-Nahum: I told my team, “Look, guys, look at Nokia. They’re laughing at us. They’re saying, ‘That’s not even a phone, that’s a piece of crap,’ but they don’t know what just happened to them.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Eddy Cue: It was the only event I took my wife and kids to because, as I told them, “In your lifetime, this might be the biggest thing ever.” Because you could feel it. You just knew this was huge. The iPhone was the culmination of everything for Steve.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley

“Matt Rogers: Apple is a unique place. Apple is tens of thousands of people and they work on five products. And those products are awesome. And every engineer, every designer, every product manager, knows that everything must be awesome. When you set a schedule, you don’t miss a schedule. There are thousands of people depending on it.”
― Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley