The Code

These entrepreneurs weren’t necessarily doing it in Silicon Valley, nor were they doing it in “the next Silicon Valley.” They were doing it everywhere, in places that had a different rhythm, were more affordable, more diverse in outlook and experience.

Want to build an app for the iPhone? All you needed were some sharp coding skills, a good laptop, and a little cash each month for some AWS server space. Support services of all kinds could be outsourced to hourly contractors who went from gig to gig (and a whole new wave of software-powered start-ups had emerged to facilitate this matchmaking). Fo

1972, Xerox PARC’s Alan Kay had mocked up a prototype of a mobile companion for young children that he called the “Dynabook.”

In the new digs, he adopted Steve Jobs’s famous habit of holding “walk and talk” meetings, taking a prospective employee or business partner on a short ramble behind Facebook’s building, up a steep and winding path through the eucalyptus trees to a hill that loomed above.

His job title—Vice President for User Growth—spoke volumes about where Facebook’s priorities lay. “There is so much accidental tourism in great things in life,” Palihapitiya later reflected, and he had hopped on the tour bus at exactly the right time.

Stock-rich eBay was tempting, but Winamp had buzz. Plus, the company’s offices were in a hip neighborhood of San Francisco, thus avoiding a grinding commute to eBay’s bland precincts forty miles down the freeway in San Jose.

On top, she added her own distinctive techno-futurist gloss—Tofflerism with a stock-picker’s sensibility. It cost over $600 a year to subscribe to Release 1.0, and 1,500 of the tech industry’s most powerful read its every elliptical word.

It took him 60 meetings and considerable powers of persuasion to raise his first $1 million from 22 investors—“anyone who knew anything about the book business did not invest,” Bezos remembered—but by the summer of 1995, Amazon .com was open for business.

“Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful,” Bezos once said.