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.

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 tr

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.

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.

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

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 ne

He regularly invited top computer scientists to his office to explain emerging trends in hardware and software. He had three home computers. He was typing a future bestseller, Earth in the Balance, on an early laptop. He went to computer-industry conferences, wrote articles for Scientific American, and fluently spoke the language of VLSI and AI, RA

Michael Murphy, a Stanford graduate who co-founded the Esalen Institute on the Big Sur coast in 1962.

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.