And Their Valley Of Dreams
California was born on gold 150 years ago. Now Silicon Valley, California, USA, is the Wild West of the late 20th century and early 21st centuries. It is a vein of gold: anyone can reach down into it, get lucky and get rich. The new frontier is cyberspace and the new gold is silicon.
Mix together obsessed engineers, marketeers, venture capitalists and even a lawyer or two with nobody in charge except rampant capitalism and you get 'The Silicon Boys'. Here are the stories of 'The Woz', Bill Gates and others who set up companies worth billions of dollars that became household names: Apple, Microsoft, Intel and Oracle. They behaved like cowboys, running roughshod over anyone who stood in their way.
Meet the venture capitalists who adopted the philosophy that you can only lose your money once, but you can also borrow again to make a return of 1000 times your investment. Discover the mistake that cost IBM $100 million and got Bill Gates started. And how did Oracle start in 1977 with just $2000 to be worth $35 billion today? What of the many who didn't make it?
'The Silicon Boys' is a daring and revealing exploration of the real Silicon Valley, and those who made it.
