The Silicon Boys
(And Their Valley of Dreams)
By David A. Kaplan
William Morrow & Co.
Reviewed by Daniel Akst
San Jose Mercury, 1999
Humans must be hardwired somehow to see the world in lapsarian terms. Once
upon a time, the thinking goes, we lived in a halcyon age, when people were
innocent and free and frolicked carelessly in the golden sunlight. But then
we lost our innocence and found ourselves condemned to labor in a cesspool
of cynicism and greed that very much resembles the world today. In the
Bible, this fall from grace is associated with knowledge, but everywhere
else it seems to have to do with money.
For a long time now, commentators have taken this view of California, and
who can blame them? On clear days, away from the worst of the sprawl, the
place is so gorgeous it's almost impossible to avoid a sense of paradise
lost. In 50 years people will no doubt hark back to the 1990s as a golden
age.
Newsweek writer David A. Kaplan applies his own muddled version of this
lapsarian theology to the stretch of California between San Francisco and
San Jose in his new book The Silicon Boys (And Their Valley of Dreams),
which delivers the astonishing news that the Valley's entrepreneurs,
engineers, venture capitalists and ancillary personalities want badly to
make money. Worse yet, Kaplan has unearthed evidence that when these men
(and they are almost all men) succeed in amassing great wealth, they tend to
buy fancy houses, cars and boats. They fill their cellars with expensive
wine, and whenever possible, date beautiful women. Can you imagine?
Actually, Kaplan's thesis is only stated clearly at the end of the book,
when he laments that Silicon Valley, once shiny and new and full of
innovative promise, "has no soul anymore," and nowadays cares only
about
filthy lucre. But elsewhere in the book he suggests that it has always been
thus. Elsewhere still he tells us that, for many people, money didn't matter
at all.
It's all very confusing. Kaplan repeatedly sneers at entrepreneurial pieties
about "wealth creation" and "changing the world," indicting
the high and
mighty as money-obsessed vulgarians. Yet he quotes Steve Jobs, in a kind of
weepy elegy for what was, saying, "I never really cared that much about the
money." Oracle billionnaire Larry Ellison underscores the point by telling
him: "After a certain threshold, cash doesn't mean anything other than in
points--a way to keep score."
Sensible enough, but not very consistent with the notion that money is all
that matters. Elsewhere, Kaplan writes that many early Silicon Valley
entrepreneuers got rich "because they wanted to build something their
current employers weren't interested in. Or because they wanted a better toy
to play games on." And elsewhere still: "Natural selection isn't what
motivates Silicon Valley. It's the German concept of Schadenfreude--glee in
the misfortune of others."
This confusion, and the easy superiority the author seems to feel entitled
to, seriously mar an otherwise interesting and thorough account of the
Valley's astonishing rise to economic and even cultural pre-eminence. It's a
shame. Kaplan is a smart guy, and his book bristles with vivid anecdotes and
energetic reportage. He's especially good on the venture capitalists and the
rise of Yahoo!, and he makes a strong case that Microsoft's business
practices have been illegally anti-competitive, although he doesn't think we
can do much about it.
Kaplan is equally good at ancient history. He gives a nice account of what
might be called the transistorized origins of the modern Valley, the
Traitorous Eight who broke away from their looney mentor William Shockley,
the founding of Fairchild, and the descent, from there, of the modern
industry that has made the Valley what it is today.
But in Kaplan's view, what it is today is basically a reptilian Sodom, to
borrow William Styron's term for the old Times Square. He can't stand the
place; it makes his skin crawl. He thinks the major players are driven,
hard-nosed sons of guns and egomaniacs who will stop at nothing to succeed.
He's right, of course, but it's hard to believe you have to spend much time
in the Valley to figure that out. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt and
Morgan were never in the running for Miss Congeniality, and Brecht was
probably as bad or worse. In art as in commerce, it often seems, monomania
is more important than scruples.
People even tell Kaplan this. "Predictable people-behavior is not an
attribute of intense, passionate, mercurial entrepreneurs," says Todd
Rulon-Miller, who survived working for both Jim Clark and Steve Jobs.
Venture capitalist Mike Moritz adds: "You (ital) have (end ital) to be a
lunatic to start a company."
That the grand personalities of Silicon Valley were or were not motivated
more by money than dreams of revolution or glory or even sex matters little.
The fact is, these guys did change the world, just as much as Freud did and
maybe more. It will simply never be the same. Near the end of Kaplan's book,
Moritz expresses doubt about whether any good comes of the Valley's main
industry, and Kaplan quotes him approvingly. "What are we investing
in?"
Moritz asks rhetorically. "Companies that enable people to work harder and
longer--anyplace, anytime. You can be reached on a ski lift, on a beach, or
on a plane. Why is that good for people's lives?"
In the newspaper business, we say that news is what happens to an editor.
Away from the Valley, and maybe a notch or two below Moritz' lofty plateau,
things look a little different. After years of doubt, it now seems that the
information revolution is having a major impact on productivity throughout
the economy, and not just by putting pagers on everyone. Aside from people
like me, who can live in a rural area and still make a living thanks to a PC
and an Internet connection, the information age is probably making us all
wealthier, and for better or worse affluence is at the base of most gains in
longevity and security. To say "so what?" at the very dawn of the
information age, even as the personal computer and the Internet are already
revolutionizing our economy, altering relations between workers and
managers, changing how we learn, shop and even socialize, is akin to
standing amid the grimy belts and pulleys of the early Industrial Revolution
and scoffing about sound and fury leading to nothing more than cheaper
shirts and shoes.
The Silicon Boys has other shortcomings. The book is strangely prurient at
times, and obsessed with the details of rich men's houses and yachts. The
author tries to keep his puritanical face straight, but most of these tales
of moguls having sex by the roadside and buying ever-bigger boats are told
with a breathless and fascinated leer, which makes us wonder if being a rich
jerk is really so much worse than charmlessly retailing stories about other
people's private lives.
When he isn't being censorious, Kaplan is trying to be funny, but he is
better at the former than the latter. "Every fifty years or so," he
writes,
elbow poised at our ribs, "a great discovery or invention comes along (and
that's not including baseball's designated hitter rule)."
For whatever reason--Internet stock mania? the alignment of the
planets?--this is the season for books about
Kaplan's, new books are out or about to appear from Po Bronson, Michael
Lewis and John Heilemann. For my money, the benchmark in this field is
Robert X. Cringely's delicious and insightful Accidental Empires, which is
also much broader in scope. Kaplan's book isn't bad, but he's no Cringely,
which is a shame, because Accidental Empires first appeared in 1992. In this
business, that's about as long ago as
Daniel Akst writes frequently about business and technology. He is the
author of St. Burl's Obituary, a novel.