A pioneer meets a venture capitalist

In September two thousand fifteen, computer pioneer Alan Kay sat at breakfast with Founders Fund leader Peter Thiel at a retreat in British Columbia. Thiel, unfamiliar with Kay's work, demanded of him: Who ARE you?

“Who ARE you?”

Two worlds collide and fail to connect

Kay, who conceived the Dynabook, the modern computer we all use, tried to explain his credentials. But realizing how overblown it would sound to someone unaware of his résumé, he gave up. Two worlds had collided and failed to connect.

“I'm just an old has-been”

A provocative claim about Silicon Valley

Sharon Weinberger wrote an op-ed in The New York Times titled Silicon Valley Was Right From the Start, arguing that the Valley's counterculture image was a sham. Today's bare-knuckled wealth accumulation and military technology embrace simply expose what the industry always was.

“Silicon Valley's values haven't changed, just its customers”

Weinberger's argument: it was always about money

Weinberger claims the hippie talk about free expression and democratization during the nineteen eighties PC revolution and nineteen nineties Internet boom was opportunistic. The shift to military tech represents market adaptation, not philosophical change, she argues.

“less a story of political conversion than of market adaptation”

A different reading of Valley history

Beginning in the late nineteen seventies, a new generation of technologists identifying with the counterculture operated with values that unleashed innovation. That idealism, combined with defense funding, set the stage for the industry's current wealth and transformed American business culture.

Three pivotal computer labs shaped the Valley

John McCarthy's Stanford lab, the Stanford Research Institute hosting Douglas Engelbart's GUI innovations, and Alan Kay's Xerox PARC set the foundation for modern computers. These institutions were hippie havens where researchers worked partly to get draft deferments from the Vietnam War.

The Homebrew Computer Club invented personal computers

A ragtag group of engineers met at the Homebrew Computer Club, hosted by political radical Lee Felsenstein. That group invented the personal computer industry, notably Apple. Money was not the motivating factor for these people, according to tech historian John Markoff.

“Money was not the motivating factor for these people”

Apple fought the image of toys, not weapons

Well into the nineteen eighties and nineties, Apple had to fight the image that their products were toys because they eschewed the macho industrial vibe of previous machines. It took decades for the company to significantly break into the corporate market.

Google's founders thumbed their noses at Wall Street

Google was founded by iconoclasts who thumbed their noses at Wall Street even as their company pursued its IPO. The Valley's shift from defense to consumer products reflected genuine idealism, not mercenary calculation, historian Margaret O'Mara argues.

The Valley's political shift from Reagan to blue

In the presidential elections of nineteen eighty and nineteen eighty-four, the Valley voted decisively for Reagan. But as the Valley increasingly tilted toward the counterculture, that changed, and for many recent cycles those tech-heavy zip codes have been tattooed in deep blue hues.

War Bros represent a hijacking of Valley values

Trump-affiliated War Bros currently getting attention represent only a small cohort of self-interested multibillionaires. They have hijacked the values of the Valley. For the past forty years or so, Silicon Valley typically wanted nothing to do with killing, even though Pentagon money was available.

Thiel didn't know who he was dismissing

Peter Thiel is a beneficiary of Alan Kay's idealism and the ethos of countless hackers and founders who strived for something more lofty than a Valley of Death. Ignoring that history or denying it takes the War Bros off the hook for their pivot toward deadly materiel.