Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age

Great book!!

Leslie Berlin is a wonderful historian – her first book, The Man Behind the Microchip – was a biography of Robert Noyce the co-founder of Fairchild and Intel. She managed to weave a narrative describing the technology, history, context and personal life of Noyce.To me that book was the gold standard of biography of a technologist.In Troublemakers Berlin attempts to do something much more ambitious – tell the story of seven technologists while simultaneously attempting to describe the seven years when 5 new industries were born in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, while the biographies are superb the interwoven narrative failed (for me at least.) Here’s the good and bad of the book.The Mike Markkula story was worth the price of the book by itself. Markkula wrote the business plan and first funding check to Apple. He was the first board chairman, VP of Marketing and second president. He hired and staffed the key executive positions that got the Apple II built and out the door. Yet Markkula got erased from history as Andy Cunningham and the Apple PR machine turned Steve Jobs into a brand and the Walter Issacson hagiography permanently enshrined him as the founder/president/CEO of Apple.The story of Bob Swanson, the founder of Genentech was equally revealing. For decades, the venture firm Kleiner Perkins took credit for being the first money into Genentech and Brook Byers was the life science partner who led the deal. What Berlin unearths is that Swanson had originally been an associate at Kleiner, but got fired by the two partners. Eventually Tom Perkins gave Swanson the funding to start his company. Brook Byers, (who Berlin notes had been one of Swanson’s roommates,) came much later to the deal.Finally, the story of Neils Reimer who founded the Stanford Office of Technology Licensing while fascinating, lacks the punch of the other narratives. There are lots of allusions to bureaucratic battles but because the names never get mentioned I’ll venture to guess it may be because the author still works at Stanford.Quibbles aside, the seven narratives add substantively to separating out the PR spin of the valleys history from the facts.Now for the bad news. Interleaving the seven narratives into brief snippets really hurt the book. Just as I started to get into a story about one of the protagonists, it switched to another. This might have worked if there were just a few, but trying to keep track of seven parallel narratives made this feel like reading a Russian novel.Content-wise A+, stylistically a B- still definitely worth having on your shelf.

Leslie Berlin has written an absolutely riveting history of the early days and the pioneers of Silicon Valley. As someone who worked for Intel (1984-2007) and Autodesk (2009-2016) I always love reading about the early days of Silicon Valley. This tome required an incredible amount of research, was stirytekling are best, included stunning statistics and best of all, hilarious backstories. Cannot recommend this book highly enough. Anyone who has an iPhone or Droid, uses Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter or any software -- you need to read this to get a better appreciation fr how it all unfolded. Kudos! Please write a sequel!

I really enjoyed this read, particularly the second half of the book. When I finished it, I found myself wanting the author to have written the next 30 years of history deeper into 90s and 2000s. As a non-native San Franciscan and tech worker, I really appreciated the deep history presented as it helped me clearly connect my current work and cultural team behaviors to my company's predecessors. Highly recommended for a solid understanding of Silicon Valley from the 60s to the late 80s.

A very interesting read. It is written more like a page turner novel than what you might expect. Great insight into the transformative period of Silicon Valley. Well worth the time if you have an interest in the early days of the internet and computers and computer programs and the rewards and risks by the Troublemakers.