When Senior Editor Tekla S. Perry started in this magazine’s New York office in 1979, she was issued the standard tools of the trade: notebooks, purple-colored pencils for making edits and corrections on page proofs, a push-button telephone wired into a WATS line for unlimited long distance calling, and an IBM Selectric typewriter, “the latest and greatest technology, from my perspective,” she recalled recently.

And she put that typewriter through its paces. “In this period she was doing deep and outstanding reporting on major Silicon Valley startups, outposts, and institutions, most notably Xerox PARC,” says Editorial Director for Content Development Glenn Zorpette, who began his career at IEEE Spectrum five years later. “She did some of this reporting and writing with Paul Wallich, another staffer in the 1980s. Together they produced stories that hold up to this day as invaluable records of a pivotal moment in Silicon Valley history.”

Indeed, the October 1985 feature story about Xerox PARC, which she cowrote with Wallich in 1985, ranks as Perry’s favorite article.

“While now it’s widely known that PARC invented history-making technology and blew its commercialization—there have been entire books written about that—Paul Wallich and I were the first to really dig into what had happened at PARC,” she says. “A few of the key researchers had left and were open to talking, and some people who were still there had hit the point of being frustrated enough to tell their stories. So we interviewed a huge number of them, virtually all in person and at length. Think about who we met! Alan Kay, Larry Tesler, Alvy Ray Smith, Bob Metcalfe, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke, Richard Shoup, Bert Sutherland, Charles Simonyi, Lynn Conway, and many others.”

“I know without a doubt that my path and those of my younger women colleagues have been smoothed enormously by the very fact that Tekla came before us and showed us the way.” –Jean Kumagai

After more than seven years of reporting trips to Silicon Valley, Perry relocated there permanently as Spectrum’s first “field editor.”

Over the course of more than four decades, Perry became known for her profiles of Valley visionaries and IEEE Medal of Honor recipients, most recently Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. She established working relationships—and, in some cases, friendships—with some of the most important people in Northern California tech, including Kay and Smith, Steve Wozniak (Apple), Al Alcorn and Nolan Bushnell (Atari), Andy Grove (Intel), Judy Estrin (Bridge, Cisco, Packet Design), and John Hennessy (chairperson of Alphabet and former president of Stanford).

Just as her interview subjects were regarded as pioneers in their fields, Perry herself ranks as a pioneer for women tech journalists. As the first woman editor hired at Spectrum and one of a precious few women journalists reporting on technology at the time, she blazed a trail that others have followed, including several current Spectrum staff members.

“Tekla had already been at Spectrum for 20 years when I joined the staff,” Executive Editor Jean Kumagai told me. “I know without a doubt that my path and those of my younger women colleagues have been smoothed enormously by the very fact that Tekla came before us and showed us the way.”

Perry is retiring this month after 45 years of service to IEEE and its members. We’re sad to see her go and I know many readers are, too—from personal experience. I met an IEEE Life Member for breakfast a few weeks ago. I asked him, as an avid Spectrum reader since 1964, what he liked most about it. He began talking about Perry’s stories, and how she inspired him through the years. The connections forged between reader and writer are rare in this age of blurbage and spew, but the way Perry connected readers to their peers was, well, peerless. Just like Perry herself.

This article appears in the August 2024 print issue.

No sit-ins on company dime: Yesterday, Google fired 28 of its workers after employees held sit-ins to protest the company's contracts with the Israeli government. The employees were part of a group called "No Tech for Apartheid," which protests the provision of cloud computing—called Project Nimbus—to the Israeli government.

"Physically impeding other employees' work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior," said a company spokesman in a statement.

It's interesting watching tech companies decide they have no tolerance for this type of employee heckler's veto. Anti-Israel activism—which has for years involved protesting Project Nimbus, to the point that Israel even wrote a provision about employee activism into the contract it has with Google—has long been an undercurrent at the tech company. But just a few years ago, when companies wanted to be at the vanguard of wokeness, they treated such activism differently than they're treating it today.

Back in 2018, thousands of Google employees protested Project Maven, a contract with the Pentagon that would have used the company's AI technology to assess drone surveillance footage. Google higher-ups acquiesced to the activists' demands, saying they would not renew the contract and developing a set of AI guiding principles that landed squarely in the middle of the road. "While we are not developing AI for use in weapons," CEO Sundar Pichai wrote at the time, "we will continue our work with governments and the military in many other areas." After all, "these collaborations are important and we'll actively look for more ways to augment the critical work of these organizations and keep service members and civilians safe."

Give an inch, take a mile: Now, employees are understandably emboldened. "I refuse to build technology that empowers genocide," one Googler shouted last month during a tech conference keynote speech given by Barak Regev, head of Google Israel. The employee was promptly fired for "interfering with an official company-sponsored event."

Employees who apply to work for Google should probably be aware that the company has a long history of military contracts, both American and foreign. "The Federal Procurement Data System shows the Coast Guard bought licenses to Google Earth in 2005; the Army did the same in 2007," reported Wired. Not to mention: "The Pentagon had a sympathetic ear at the top. In 2016, Eric Schmidt, formerly Google's CEO and then Alphabet's executive chair, became chair of the department's Defense Innovation Advisory Board, which promoted tech industry collaboration with the agency."

"This is a huge escalation and a change in how Google has responded to worker criticisms," said one employee who protested yesterday. But the actual types of contracts Google goes after has not changed; it's merely that the company pivoted from soft on activism to much tougher, as it seemingly realized inmates cannot—and should not—run the asylum. Or, in this case, occupy the offices of Google Cloud's CEO during the workday.

Seating the jury: In Manhattan, former President Donald Trump's trial is proceeding more quickly and smoothly than expected, with seven out of 12 total jurors already picked.

The case against Trump concerns the falsifying of business records related to hush money payments he doled out following a sexual tryst with porn star Stormy Daniels. He's being brought up on 34 felony counts and could face a total of four years in prison if convicted. Given what a polarizing figure Trump is, there were concerns about how jury selection would go, but it appears to be proceeding rather smoothly.

The jurors so far include "a man originally from Ireland who will serve as foreman, an oncology nurse, a grandfather originally from Puerto Rico, a middle-school teacher from Harlem, two lawyers and a software engineer for Disney," reported The New York Times. Picking a truly fair and impartial jury, that's representative of New York as a whole, is a near-impossible task; it remains to be seen whether anyone will pull the wool over the eyes of those selecting them or become improperly enchanted by the media spotlight. (More detail on those who were not picked, and more on the questions jurors have been asked.)

Scenes from New York: New excuse just dropped for why state legislators can't put together a budget on time.

QUICK HITS

• NPR's new CEO appears to hate tech and the people who make it, arguing in support of the idea that "the rise of tech empires threatens society," wrote Pirate Wires' Sanjana Friedman. (Not to mention, she was apparently very triggered by Hereticon, the best social event of the year.)
• What comes next for Israel?
• Everything you ever wanted to know about the forgotten moral panic over beepers.
• As the International Space Station gets retired, are we entering the era of the private space station?
• Europoor discourse is raging on Twitter:

There's a European upper middle-class cope which basically says "yes, America might look richer, but there's no work-life balance, culture, or accessible healthcare." What I've learnt moving here is that, no, for genuinely comparable professionals, America is just much richer.

— Ryan Bourne (@MrRBourne) April 17, 2024

• "When the government of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his country's opposition signed an agreement in October to work toward free and fair elections this year, it was seen as a glimmer of hope after years of authoritarian rule and economic free fall," reported The New York Times. The U.S. lifted oil sanctions, hoping for the best. Now, merely six months later, "the Maduro government has made several moves that have dimmed the chances of legitimate elections, and a frustrated Biden administration on Wednesday announced that it was letting the sanctions relief expire."
• A better debate format is possible:

I would enjoy a debate between him and Trump where the moderators just teed them up, shame-free, to tell the most fanciful bullshit stories about themselves and their families. https://t.co/9QO20RsKBk

— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) April 17, 2024

• The libertarian take on Cruel Intentions we didn't know we needed.

The post Google Fires 28 appeared first on Reason.com.

I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1977 — 45 years ago. I was 24 years old and had accepted a Stanford fellowship paying $2,575 for the academic year. My on-campus apartment rent was $175 per month and a year later I’d buy my first Palo Alto house for $57,000 (sold 21 years later for $990,000). It was an exciting time to be living and working in Silicon Valley. And it still is. We’re right now in a period of economic confusion and reflection when many of the loudest voices have little to no sense of history. Well my old brain is crammed with history and I’m here to tell you that the current situation — despite the news coverage — is no big deal. This, too, shall pass.

But what about the layoffs at Meta and Twitter? Elon is crazy! WTF???

On February 25, 1981, Apple Computer CEO Mike Scott fired 40 percent of the company’s engineering staff at a time when sales were doubling month-over-month and the company had no budgets because there was no way they could spend money fast enough to need budgets. Scott, who left Apple, himself, two months later, said he fired all those engineers and support staff because he feared four year-old Apple was becoming “complacent.” People were gone by the end of the day, when Scott held a companywide beer bust.

Cataclysmic change is par for the course in both startup culture and high tech. If there is going to be a next wave the previous wave has to die. Above is a chart I found from 2015 that shows the Silicon Valley economy starting in 1976. If we were to update this chart there would be a more recent boom, post social media, that I would label Artificial Intelligence, not to be confused with the late-1980s Artificial Intelligence bust that we’ve all forgotten about.

That original AI debacle is significant because it was caused by over-enthusiasm. The idea of AI made perfect sense in 1987 — the exact same sense it makes today — but nobody really understood how much computing power would be required to make those dreams come true. If AI was impractical in 1987 but is practical today thanks to Moore’s Law, how bad was our aim, exactly?

Our aim was pathetic and fortunes were lost on that pathos.

Let’s do the math. The original AI funding boom began in the late 1980s. Implicit in the VC model at the time was it taking no more than two Moore’s Law cycles from initiating the wave to launching real products. If VCs were funding companies in 1987, they expected big things from one or more of those startups by 1990. Moore’s Law said the cost of computing drops by 50 percent every 18 months so that implies that VCs in 1987 and the founders who were pitching to those VCs thought that AI would be technically practical by 1990 at which point a basic unit of computing power that cost one 1987 dollar would cost 25 cents in 1990.

IF AI is indeed economically practical today (some people still aren’t convinced that it is) mid-2021 marked 23 complete Moore’s Law cycles, meaning the computing power that cost $1 in 1987 had been reduced to $0.00000006.

Venture capitalists who bet several hundred million 1987 dollars that AI would have some chance of being economically practical at $0.25, were wrong by 48 million X.

It’s easy to look back, make these calculations, and feel smug, but that’s not even close to my point. My point is that the very VCs who lost all that money are generally zillionaires today. They kept betting on what was, for the most part, a growing tech economy.

The most important part of being a successful venture capitalist in the last 40 years has been maintaining some dry powder for future investments and staying in the game.

I could easily argue that AI in 1987 looks very similar to the metaverse in 2021. Meta (formerly Facebook) is losing $10 billion per year betting on its metaverse strategy. Recent layoffs suggest that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reevaluating his expected timeline for success.

How long can Zuckerberg afford to continue dumping billions into metaverse development? Given Meta’s corporate structure giving Zuckerberg personal voting control of the company, that question comes down to how long Meta will have enough excess cashflow to cover the costs. IF Meta is cutting its burn rate in half with these layoffs (a good argument I think) Zuckerberg can continue spending at this rate… forever. This assumes Meta continues to make lots of money with current products, but it also identifies Zuck as probably the only person in the history of tech who could make this bet pay off IF the meta verse actually becomes the next big thing.

It will be interesting to see what happens with Meta. Zuck might just run out of energy or — more likely — some competing next big thing may come along to distract him. I’m not sure it really matters much.

What does matter is that in high tech change is the norm, flux is nearly constant, and what we are seeing in the current weakness is probably change that should have happened years ago but for all the cheap money.

Silicon Valley relies on startups for ideas and growth. Startups require cheap office space and engineers looking for work. Boom and bust is not a bad thing for Silicon Valley it’s how Silicon Valley evolves.

This too shall pass.

Last week there was a press release you might easily have missed. A Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) called OrangeDAO is cooperating with a small seed venture fund called Press Start Capital to establish the OrangeDAO X Press Start Cap Fellowship Program for new Web3 entrepreneurs. Successful applicants get $25,000 each plus 10 weeks of structured mentorship plus continued access to the more than 1200-member OrangeDAO network. In exchange, OrangeDAO and Press Start get to invest in the resulting companies, if any, produced by the class. 

Big deal, it’s Y Combinator Junior, right?

Wrong. It’s Y Combinator on steroids.  

This second-generation YC has been released in the wild where it will replicate and grow unconstrained. Expect to see more deals like this one.

A Distributed Autonomous Organization is a financial partnership that leverages blockchain technology to help multiple users make decisions as a single entity. There are many DAOs around and hardly anybody understands them or knows what they are good for. Mainly they have seemed to be involved in the NFT market. But OrangeDAO is different. It has 1200+ members and every one of those members is a graduate of the Y Combinator startup accelerator. They are verified Y Combinator company founders, so they’ve all had similar entrepreneurial experiences and see business much the same way as a result. OrangeDAO seems to have big plans and to make those plans happen in August the DAO, itself, raised $80 million in venture capital, with their first use of that capital being these Fellowships.

I think this will change forever venture capital and the world economy.

It represents a new stage in the evolution of venture capital. In many senses it is the democratization of VC.

It’s no surprise that OrangeDAO comes from Y Combinator alumni. YC, itself, disrupted the VC model and this Fellowship continues that disruption.

It’s turning what was a disruption into an ecosystem.

Think about the VC model. The original Silicon Valley VC wasn’t even from Silicon Valley — it was Sherman Fairchild from Fairchild Camera in Baltimore, who came to Mountain View to invest in Shockley Semiconductor in 1954. 

This was the Tycoon-as-VC model, which was soon replaced by the Professional VC model where dumb institutional money was invested by VCs (generally lawyers or former CFOs) who didn’t really understand what they were investing in. But there were enough opportunities that they could “spray and pray” and succeed on the simple odds. Tim Draper’s grandpa and Arthur Rock typified this generation. Few people realize that Rock invested only $75K in Apple… ever.

Eventually there rose in Silicon Valley a technocracy with a new class of VCs who DID more or less understand their investments. Don Valentine and Tom Perkins led this charge and ultimately hired associates and partners who looked just like them, which describes every person today working on Sand Hill Road.

Typical of this glory age of VC, there were dumb institutional investors, technical or semi-technical professional VCs, and an emerging class of entrepreneurs who needed progressively LESS money as technical markets blossomed and third-party services became available.

At this point there emerged the YC/Techstars, Angel investing, and eventually crowdfunding models. YC brought with it two revolutionary ideas: 1) you didn’t have to have a VC friend to get a chance to pitch your idea, and; 2) there was a VC role for educating entrepreneurs. 

Prior to YC (and to this day in most places) VCs like to keep their entrepreneurs ignorant, so they can be more easily controlled. YC worked to subvert that control.

Angel investing was something parallel to YC — experienced (generally self-taught — the hard way) entrepreneurs playing VC together over dinner for smaller deals. Remember The Band-of-Angels had Gordon Moore at those dinners. But total deal sizes were limited because it wasn’t professional — not full-time work for anyone.

Crowdfunding was also parallel and totally wacky because it was truly democratic: nobody knows anything. In crowdfunding EVERYONE is stupid. Neither the investors, managers, nor entrepreneurs know what they are doing, which is why crowdfunding hasn’t been a big success to date.

I had an Indian friend who worked at Intel  and lived in Roseville in a neighborhood filled with Indian engineers who worked at Intel and lived in Roseville. The average first-generation Indian engineer in California keeps in his/her checking account $100,000 “just in case.” My friend used to argue that he could walk around the block with a good pitch deck and get seed funding for his next venture by the time he made it back to his own doorstep. It was a brilliant observation.

These OrangeDAO Fellowships are like that Indian neighborhood in Roseville. The DAO members all have similar backgrounds, similar values, and similar risk tolerances. THERE ARE MORE OF THEM, so they can do bigger deals. And — here’s the important bit — THEY ARE ALL YC-EDUCATED and connected globally through the blockchain.  They not only know many of the same things, they have a sense of where this knowledge comes from and why it is useful. That’s Paul Graham’s legacy at YC.

But this is a second-through-Nth-generation movement, at the very center of which is not just education, but FURTHER education — the very concept that education, itself, is a legacy to be nurtured and extended. Think land-grant American universities of the 19th century, In the YC-based DAO we have people who want the next generation of entrepreneurs to be even better-educated. It’s not some egalitarian goal, either: they see it as key to success for the whole thing.

Smart people with good ideas will self-identify, be funded at a subsistence level to allow them to develop those ideas and prove their worth, then they can participate on a truly level playing field for the first time. 

YC and Techstars and their copycat cousins did this too, BUT NEVER AT SCALE.

Gone is the Tycoon, gone is the professional VC who doesn’t understand his tech, gone soon will be the angels (subsumed into the DAO model), and gone for the most part are the asshole VCs whom entrepreneurs grow to hate (not all of them, but a lot).

Done correctly, this model is essentially Meritocratic VC. If the idea is good, the market is ready, and the people know what they are doing, the capital will be there. Everything has the prospect of being better under this evolved system, or at least that’s the way I see it. And it all comes down to the centrality of education combined with scale. 

Now here is the $100 TRILlION question: can this Middle Class VC model be exported to Topeka and Timbuktu?

I think it can be.

The problem with all the Silicon Glens and Silicon Prairies, and Silicon Forests and Silicon Gulags that failed repeatedly over the last 30 years is they were copying the wrong parts of the successful model. They didn’t have the people and the institutional knowledge of Silicon Valley and Sand Hill Road, but this OrangeDAO DOES. 

It’s a containerized copy of successful Silicon Valley culture that carries with it all dependencies, even money.                         .