SILICON FLOPS
SKINNER, DAVID
SILICON FLOPS Not Everyone Can Be Bill Gates By David Skinner Everyone's a sucker for a free baseball cap. Or a coffee mug. Which is why Silicon Valley salesmen aren't famous schmoozers: They...
...Danny Hillis, "the legendary designer of computer architecture," "is building a monument-sized mechanical clock that, if it is erected and started according to schedule on January 1, 2001," will count time through the year 12,000...
...And writing about these have-nots, chronicling their lives, carries its own romantic temptation—where the failure to become a multimillionaire stands as proof of nobility...
...In the author's note for The First $20 Million, Bronson plays on the existence of "NOT gates...
...The busy world of high tech has a likable absence of cynicism, and Bronson describes it, in general, without suspicion...
...My mom says instead of going to Hollywood to become an actress, I've come to Silicon Valley to be a...
...The forces over which the individual has no control in Bombardiers—capitalism's perversity, evil corporations, the American government's absurd bond issues—become in The First $20 Million the kind of force against which a good guy has a chance...
...This curious fact and dozens more like it fill Po Bronson's new, non-fiction The Nudist on the Late Shift and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley...
...And in his The Nudist on the Late Shift, he demonstrates his continuing love—a little tempered, perhaps— for American business...
...Con men and dirty dealers hover on the edges of this coming-of-age story about Silicon Valley, but they never interfere with Bronson's affection for the people of northern California's computer enclave...
...And even if The Nudist on the Late Shift and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley is occasionally guilty of false worship, its best stories and sharp vignettes are at least worth a free corporate baseball cap...
...And there, in the midst of all the headhunters, software sellers, programmers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and so on who make up Silicon Valley, sits the "cubicle guy," who buys, refurbishes, and sells used office cubicles...
...Make no mistake: Just because the people profiled in The Nudist on the Late Shift are diminutive doesn't mean they are without a mythic stature of their own...
...All the others are minor programmers, venture capitalists, salesmen, promoters, drifters blown into town over the weekend, and immigrants looking for a share of American gold to take back to India or Indiana or wherever...
...But it isn't glamor that they come to Silicon Valley for...
...well, whatever grandiose term we might call it," says Julie, a saleswoman with the terrible job of calling around for new contacts...
...That marks a surprising turn for Bron-son...
...And as ridiculous as this superachiever ethos sounds, Bron-son's enthusiasm is nevertheless contagious, at times leaving the reader with an incredible itch to drop everything and catch the next flight to San Jose...
...But Bronson succeeds in turning these not-Gates into emblems of a particular place and time, Silicon Valley in the late 1990s...
...Or Michael Zil-ly, who fails to find funding for his startup and falls in with a notorious swindler...
...Bronson says he wrote his book to remind the world of the "other pilgrims" who do not succeed...
...The entire plot turns on one programmer's successful effort to break an actual infinite computer loop, a trick that is worth millions...
...almost anything with a corporate logo will do...
...Which is why Silicon Valley salesmen aren't famous schmoozers: They don't need to paint the town red with their clients...
...The most significant difference between the two novels is that the hero of the first novel cannot beat life's peculiar logic traps, while the hero of the second novel can...
...And only a couple of his subjects can be considered very successful (Sabeer Bhatia, the founder of Hotmail, for instance) or very influential (George Gilder gets a chapter to himself...
...In The First $20 Million, characters struggle against "infinite loops," a term that refers to computer errors the computer doesn't register and so cannot adjust for...
...But at the center of both books is a seemingly inescapable trap...
...His first novel, 1995's Bombardiers, was a deft satire of the bond-selling business and its often nonsensical system of risks and rewards...
...Bronson's second novel, 1997's The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, was a less interesting tale of a team of idealistic Silicon Valley go-getters...
...it's rather some inarticulate urge to be recognized as a person remaking the world, a serious person of death-denying commitment to the challenge of bringing great products to market...
...But, as far as literature about the computer industry goes, The Nudist on the Late Shift represents a tentative victory for the situation comedy over the mythical lore surrounding Bill Gates and other industry titans...
...In Bombardiers, the King of Mortgages, Sid Geeder, needs to keep meeting the increasingly insane quotas his boss sets for him so he can retire and cash in his company stock...
...Infinite loops also refer to various pranks (some harmless, some not so) the novel's computer programmers play on the uninitiated to demonstrate their superiority...
...But they're also, of course, the "not Gates," those people in the computer world who never managed to succeed the way Bill Gates did...
...it's the opposite of a saga: a collection of short stories about a variety of engaging characters...
...The whole book has the feel of studied incompleteness...
...By the book's end, one has gotten far more than a whiff of the little-guy sentimentality that is this book's main attraction and main conceit...
...And the only apparent cause of difference between the brilliant but tortured bond salesman of Bombardiers and the flexible and crafty hero of The First $20 Million is the magic Bronson finds in Silicon Valley...
...higher than anyone else's) that there is no way he can do it...
...Bronson is thus one of those people who, with the stock-market boom, seem to have been mugged by a happy reality...
...but the company sets his quotas so high (far David Skinner is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The savvy but desperate Steve Sellers and John Hanke, for example, who get the shaft when Snap, currently the fastest-growing search engine on the Internet, decides to go with a competitor's design for online games...
...Silicon Valley, you see, gives Po Bronson the chance to be on the side of the small heroes standing along against the system— and to go to a place where people are making a whole lot of money...
...Or Thierry Levy, a French entrepreneur who is stuck imagining the day when he can upgrade his diet from pasta that costs $1.59 to his favorite brand, which costs $2.59...
...Like "AND gates" and "OR gates," "NOT gates" are fundamental logical transistors on which silicon computer chips are based...
...Businesses come and go so quickly that he's just raking in the cash...
...Bronson's account of Silicon Valley is not so much a series of stories as a series of snapshots...
Vol. 4 • August 1999 • No. 45
