[r0m4n0]

> I left Apple with Marc Porat and Andy Hertzfeld to co-found General Magic and help to invent the personal communicator.

It’s always wild to me how many of the people that are the beginnings of these large prodigy companies and the connection to other powerful rich people. You look up some of these people and see the relationships and it’s wild. Like the name Porat rang a bell so I look up Marc and oh? That’s Ruth Porat’s brother. The ex CFO of Morgan Stanley and current CIO and president of Google. Is it truly talent that drives these leaders to the top of these organizations or is it connections to other crazy powerful people? Maybe both.

Sometimes I feel like I’m over here building cool stuff with talent galore but nothing ever gets what it needs financially. It’d be nice to know these types of people I suppose

[buran77]

You can be a superstar and still not succeed alone, without other superstars around you. They are so successful because they know each other. And survivorship bias guarantees that all those who didn't make it are unknown, or not mentioned.

This is the role of successful companies like this, just like top universities. They help create the connection between people with huge potential (or money), superstars, and amplify it.

Remember those pictures will all the famous 20th century geniuses in one place. They each got to reach the peak by building a new step on top of someone else's previous step, and so on. Eventually they all climbed the same ladder together. They were like a talent packed sports team dominating the sports for many seasons. It's not a coincidence they're in the same picture.

[bobbiechen]

The Fifth Solvay Conference

From back row to front, reading left to right: Auguste Piccard, Émile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de Donder, Erwin Schrödinger, Jules-Émile Verschaffelt, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Howard Fowler, Léon Brillouin, Peter Debye, Martin Knudsen, William Lawrence Bragg, Hendrik Anthony Kramers, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr, Irving Langmuir, Max Planck, Marie Skłodowska Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Paul Langevin, Charles-Eugène Guye, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Willans Richardson.

https://mymodernmet.com/the-solvay-conference-photo/

[andruby]

It's an impressive photo, but they were already famous when they gathered together

[sh34r]

How many companies in Silicon Valley can trace their history back to eight postdocs who absolutely despised William Shockley (for good reason)? They didn’t climb the same ladder, so much as run away from the same bear, using the same emergency exit.

Spite and necessity are much more common motivators for greatness than team synergy. People will do the wildest things because they share a mutual enemy. Just look at the drone innovation that’s happened in Ukraine.

On the other hand, annoying sports analogies are a fantastic recipe for mediocrity.

Great scientists and engineers seldom work alone, but their paths to the top were usually rather unique, and all too often, full of tragedy.

[0xCE0]

The General Magic movie/document (2018) is amazing and underrated. Always getting teardrops while watching it (watched it ~3 times). A true old-school startup story. And the soundtrack is also beautiful.

[piyiotisk]

I totally agree. I watched it 3 times as well. One in London with a panel of the general magic employees. It was an amazing experience

[0xCE0]

Oh wow, that must have been magical. Have you seen "Halt and Catch Fire"? These two masterpieces are my top 2 watchings. Both so amazing but generally unknown/underrated.

[rav3ndust]

I've somehow missed The General Magic (something I'm about to fix!), but Halt and Catch Fire was certainly great, enjoyed it very much

[piyiotisk]

Yeah in London, I was sitting next to Tony Fadell. I couldn’t believe it!

I didn’t know about this show. Thanks for the recommendation I’ll check it out.

Is it based on a true story?

[wanderingstan]

Not based on a true story, but anyone familiar with computing history will see how real-world events were turned into plot lines; e.g. Compaq’s reverse engineering of IBMs sdk, the competition between directory-based index of Yahoo and algorithms of Google.

[dev_chhatbar]

I agree with you! I love that they're both extremely underrated. I remember buying the Documentary and watching it immediately. The fact that they're not well known, gives I guess our side of world our own sorta "special something" to watch/enjoy.

[Forgeties79]

I love h&cf but it’s important for people who are curious about it to know that it is definitely an overdramatized AMC piece akin to mad men. It’s basically mad men but PCs lol.

It has some brilliant writing and the acting is off the charts (whoever handled casting is unbelievable), but man it can definitely make you roll your eyes occasionally lol

[ghaff]

Rarely. I actually expected it to go in a somewhat different direction. But as somewhat who was at COMDEX and in the industry in general during that period, it felt pretty true.

[Forgeties79]

It’s really a lot of the interpersonal drama. It’s not like that stuff that didn’t happen, but AMC does have a tendency to soap it up

[wnc3141]

Access to capital/other's talent and/or access to your market (users) is the primary competitive advantage among those talented enough to design and build a product.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's very localised and Californian. There were really two big tech scenes - one around MIT and Mass, and one around CalTech/Stanford and adjacent areas - with some also-rans in other areas that were mostly gov mil/aerospace spinoffs.

The Mass scene sort of fizzled in the 90s for various reasons - not dead, but not dominant - and the centre of gravity moved to the West Coast.

So if you were born in CA and studied there - and Atkinson did both - your odds of hitching your wagon to a success story were higher than if you were born in Montana or Dublin.

This is sold as a major efficiency of US capitalism, but in fact it's a major inefficiency because it's a severe physical and cultural constraint on opportunity. It's not that other places lack talented people, it's that the networks are highly localised, the culture is very standardised - far less creative than it used to be, and still pretends to be - and diverse ideas and talent are wasted on an industrial scale.

[nostrademons]

FWIW CalTech is in southern California and far away (both geographically and socially) from Stanford. Its strengths also tend to be primarily in physics, rocketry, and astronomy, rather than in CS - its primary ties are with JPL and NASA. The Bay Area tech scene is anchored by Stanford and UC Berkeley, though most Stanford alums would probably say it's just Stanford.

[aassddffasdf]

He probably meant Berkeley.

[ghaff]

There's probably a book in there. The CA axis was probably Stanford/Berkeley with Caltech relatively small and in another part of the state and probably much more theoretical in focus.

Don't really buy Levy's thesis of the migration from east to west and Stallman as "the last hacker" hasn't aged well.

But Boston/Cambridge (really Massachusetts generally) did sort of empty out of a lot of tech for a time as minicomputer companies declined and Silicon Valley became the scene. I actually decided not to go that direction because, at the time in the nineties, it would have been a relative cost of living downgrade.

[criddell]

You said it yourself - universities are the major hubs that bring talented driven people together and provide access to some of the greatest teachers and researchers and other resources. MIT and Stanford are special, somehow, in this regard.

You see this as inefficient and maybe you’re right. I think about how little it has cost to run these schools compared to the wealth (financial, cultural, technological) they spin off and to me it looks very efficient.

[majormajor]

> This is sold as a major efficiency of US capitalism, but in fact it's a major inefficiency because it's a severe physical and cultural constraint on opportunity.

I don't think social relationships and their geography are a particular characteristic of capitalism - let alone US-specific capitalism.

They - and the resulting hub/centralization effects - predate it by millennia. There is no shortage of historical cities or state that became major hubs for certain industries or research. How much of the effort in those places is "wasted" seems hard to quantify in an objective way, but again, the pattern of low-hanging fruit being more available to the first wave and then a lot of smart, hard-working people in the future generations working more around the edges is not capitalism-exclusive.

[dumdedum123]

Huh? Caltech/Stanford? These are two different tech scenes.

[cellu]

It’s purely luck driving success. The book _thinking fast and slow_ illustrates it quite eloquently. Real geniuses are rare and even then they do not necessary become successful

[vl]

Thinking Fast and Slow is in the center of Replication Crisis. Basically large parts of it were written based on research that later was found out to be fabricated.

[dumdedum123]

This is correct. Thanks for pointing it out. Even Daniel Kahneman admitted it.

[newsuser]

I'm curious, could you plz share the source for the last claim? In my field - distant from the book - it's quite respected.