
The Code

Three things happening in quick succession in the second half of 1980—the euphoria over Apple, the stunning biotech debut of Genentech, and the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency—marked the start of a new, and even more intense, phase of America’s long fascination with California, a place of new starts, new ideas, and dreams coming
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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.
Margaret O'Mara • The Code
Why did these patterns persist, even as women and minorities made significant inroads into other professional domains? The explanation lies with the characteristic of the Valley VC community that set it apart from other regions, and that made it so good at finding and nurturing one generation of entrepreneurs after another: its personal, tightly
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Berners-Lee and his CERN team created many of the building blocks of the online future. Hypertext markup language, or HTML, provided a common tongue for all the information now riding atop the Internet, both textual and visual. Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) was a platform on which to share the new language. A mailing-address standard (the
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The inventions unveiled by Engelbart were a preview of a world still two and three decades in the future: the mouse, interactive computing, hyperlinks, networked video and audio.
Margaret O'Mara • The Code
Michael Murphy, a Stanford graduate who co-founded the Esalen Institute on the Big Sur coast in 1962.
Margaret O'Mara • The Code
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.
Margaret O'Mara • The Code
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).
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Partnering up in early 1957 with a fellow researcher, Harlan Anderson, Olsen secured $70,000 from Harvard Business School professor Georges Doriot, who had established a tech-focused investment fund he called “venture capital” to support young and untested entrepreneurs. Olsen and Anderson departed MIT and moved into a shuttered textile mill in the
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