From the Publisher
A daring and rollicking romp through the Silicon Valley saga — why it happened there, why it matters, and what is to come.
It is an American icon — the symbol of technological genius and ineffable wealth. It is the home to the Newest New Thing, where the digital age was born and keeps remaking itself. It's also the only place in the world where you can buy eighteen-dollar-a-pound ostrich salami. It is, of course, Silicon Valley.
Now prize-winning Newsweek journalist David A. Kaplan takes us on a riotous romp through the history and culture of the Valley. How did Yahoo get started, what nearly killed Netscape, will Apple survive, who's the most powerful person in Silicon Valley? Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jerry Yang, Larry Ellison, Andy Grove, John Doerr, Jim Clark — the tycoons, the loons, and the hot-air balloons are all here. Based on firsthand accounts and extensive interviews, The Silicon Boys is a portrait of high-tech high jinks and its moneyed lifestyle like no other.
If the Valley were a nation, its economy would rank among the world's twelve largest. Depending on yesterday's stock market close, roughly a quarter-million Siliconillionaires live in the Valley. Here they invented the microchip and video games and Internet commerce. But more important, they created a state of mind that's become part of the American imagination. The Valley has its admirable moments, its venal moments, and, best of all, its absurd ones.
The New York Times
"A Wonderful ride, filled with landmarks, history and histrionics, and the voice of an intelligent, witty guide."
The Chicago Tribune
"A Stunning rarity...A business book that delivers a rollicking good read."
The S.F. Chronicle
"A witty, refreshingly readable account of what's been called 'the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet.' Arguably, it's also the best book to date on the subject."
USAToday
"Anyone looking for a fast-paced, fun history of Silicon Valley should turn to The Silicon Boys and Their Valley of Dreams by Newsweek senior writer David Kaplan. He defty weaves the tortured tale of the valley's rise from a bucolic landscape of apricot groves and horses to the engine of innovation that's reshaping the world. His prologue alone is a must-read."
Publishers Weekly
While Po Bronson's The Nudist on the Late Shift (Forecasts, June 7) delves into the daily life of Silicon Valley's hungry strivers (some of whom succeed), Kaplan takes a broader view and focuses on the men — and the Valley bigshots are almost all men — who have already become legends and made Silicon Valley into the "Valley of the Dollars." As Kaplan sees it, men like workaholic venture capitalist John Doerr, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and Jim Clark (Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon) pay lip service to the Valley ethos of innovation while relentlessly searching for the quickest way to the next buck. In addition to his rough handling of figures accustomed to VIP treatment, he takes a historical perspective, looking back further than the 1970s, when the area earned its name, all the way to the 1930s, when two prized pupils of Fred Terman, a Stanford professor commonly thought of as the "Father of Silicon Valley," started a company. Their names were David Packard and Bill Hewlett. Kaplan, a senior writer for Newsweek, salts his story with tart observations of Valley culture: Where else, he asks, is there a "junior-high curriculum that teaches basic skills in How to be a Millionaire. Every year the first math assignment for seventh-graders is spending one million hypothetical dollars and plotting it on a spreadsheet." Mixing history, reportage and healthy irreverence, Kaplan gently punctures the Valley's most cherished myths about itself, and, in a nod to Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, concludes somewhat wistfully that "the machine has no soul anymore."
Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information
The Standard
C.J. Olson's cherry stand, a ramshackle purveyor of the fat red gems, is all but surrounded by the low-rise strip malls of Sunnyvale, Calif. The stand celebrated its 100th anniversary last month with a bluegrass band, some tasty cherry pie and a pit-spitting contest. Farmer Charlie Olson says orchards growing cherries, apricots and plums in this Santa Clara County town used to spread as far as the eye can see. Now, though, even Olson's trees are on the way out. They're diseased, so he plans to lease the land behind his fruit stand to a developer, who will plow the trees under to make room for luxury apartments for the workers of Silicon Valley.
The verdant pastures that once marked Silicon Valley are all but gone, as David Kaplan reports in The Silicon Boys. "The sun still shone, but nourished fewer and fewer fruit trees," he writes of the seminal days of Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1950s. "The orchards were giving way to paved progress."
In the place of farms, mile after mile of soulless office "parks" and traffic-choked highways have sprouted in the birthplace of what Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr calls the "largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet." High above it all sit the million-dollar hillside homes of the nouveau riche.
Kaplan takes readers on a dishy tour inside the lives of the rich and famous in Valley hamlets like Woodside, where the well-heeled throw half-million-dollar fundraisers for the local elementary school. The grand prize one year was a Riviera sailing trip for 10 aboard Larry Ellison's gleaming 192-foot yacht Sakura.
Unfortunately, Kaplan also rehashes the well-trod history of the Valley – sourced from interviews with usual suspects Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Jim Clark and other good old boys – and offers an overdose of background pulled from the decade's most famous high-tech books. At times Silicon Boys reads like a book report dumbed down to the eighth-grade reading level of Kaplan's employer, Newsweek, rather than a yarn with a true narrative thread.
We march once again through the founding of high-tech blue bloods like Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Apple, Oracle, Netscape, Microsoft – wait, which state are we in? – Yahoo and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. It's worth buying the book just for the insidery Kleiner Perkins chapter, with its list of the lucky recipients, in 1996, of a 70 percent return on investment in Kleiner Perkins' $328 million VIII fund. Unfortunately, the author's rhetorical excesses undermine his prose, as in sentences like "Electric current couldn't pass through a semiconductor because its surface was like a Roach Motel; electrons could check in but they couldn't check out," and "In the law of the jungle, the weasels make out as well as the tigers."
If you're new to the Valley and need a quick-and-dirty primer, read The Silicon Boys. If you've been around the block, check out Po Bronson's The Nudist on the Late Shift, or else wait a few months for entries by Michael Lewis and John Heilemann.
– Mickey Butts
Other New Titles of Interest
Net Profit: How to Invest and Compete in the Real World of Internet Business by Peter S. Cohan (Jossey-Bass, $28) Cohan divides the Internet business into nine market segments that, better than any previous book on the subject, map the true landscape of the Internet Economy. At the same time, he attempts to cut through the hype and deliver a framework that both investors and entrepreneurs can use to predict the success or failure of Net business models.
Information Design, edited by Robert Johnson (MIT Press, $35) A collection of essays on what Clement Mok calls "the design of understanding."
Kirkus Reviews
Computer screens will never look the same after users read this journey to the heart of cyberspace, where silicon combines with testosterone to produce preposterous wealth. Silicon Valley looks a lot like Oz in Newsweek senior writer Kaplan's historical survey of the ways and means of the idiosyncratic and paranoid zillionaires who gather in the sunny California. Garage pioneers and pubescent geeks have changed the planet in a single generation by dint of talent, ego, and great timing. Kaplan succinctly tells the whole story. Starting before Mr. Hewlett met Mr. Packard and before the protean Homebrew Club first gathered at Stanford, taking us up through the salient points of Uncle Sam's complaints against Microsoft and to the remarkable market bubbles of Netscape and Yahoo!, his bright text explains why many millions of mice now skitter across many millions of mousepads. The tales of the important innovations, start-ups, IPOs, and mergers ("mergers" in the sense that a herring merges with a shark) are neatly recounted. The tekkies and gearheads do their things with solid-state physics and elemental electronics, but it's about disintegrated people as much as integrated circuits. The character sketches and the business shenanigans of the computer-age pioneers is prime social history. The characters include, of course, Jobs and Wozniak, the late, wacky William Schockley (who went to Munich for staff, thinking "German engineers might be more amenable to a tyrant"), playboy Larry Ellison, super money guy John Doerr and, perforce, Mr. Gates, as well as a score of other technoids, visionaries, venture capitalists, and assorted cocks of the computer walk. It's about changing the world; it's notabout money, they say. Be assured: it's about money. (Still, the inhabitants walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Microsoft, fearing some evil). A clever book, entertaining and informative for novice and propellerhead alike.
What People Are Saying
Amy DiTullio
He discovered vegetarianism, meditation, and Eastern religion; then picked apples in ther commune...and then headed off to India, barefoot, to find spiritualism...."This is hardly what you would expect from the man who cofounded the first company to make personal computers, but it's the true tale of Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple Computer, Inc. He and the other quirky characters of Silicon Valley are the focus of Newsweek senior writer David Kaplan's The Silicon Boys And Their Valley Of Dreams—a history of the place with "the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet."
—Amy DiTullio, Brill's Content
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