Voyage to Siliconia
Alice Kahn, East Bay Express
April 26, 2000
Are we sick of them yet? Myopic mavens with fat brains and eight
hundred megahertz of chutzpah who just "incubated" a business into a
multimillion-dollar deal to provide everyone in the world with free
access to a review of every bathroom on earth. Yes, AOL just bought
myjohn.com for a kajillion bucks, and founders Nori Nerd and Gary Geek
are now 24-year-old siliconaires. After buying themselves a Porsche
and a Ferrari and a hilltop in Portola Valley, Nerd and Geek promise
that the money "won't change our lives much."
And you and I, Mr. and Ms. John Q. Ordinaire, read about them and
tsk-tsk. Those damn dotcommies are taking over the world. Then we
begin our day as millions of others do. We go to our computers and
click on Netscape and go to Yahoo! We check our e-mail. We trash our
porno spam. Rather than looking out the window, we may check the
weathercam. Rather than count our blessings, we may check our quotes
to see how much money we've lost today. For fun we might check out the
pandacam and see if little Hua Mei is eating her bamboo at the San
Diego Zoo. Or we may go to register.com and learn that the domain name
myjohn.com has already been taken. So has istink.com and ismell.com.
As for doodie.com it's up and running and, trust me, you don't want to
point your browser there, girlfriend.
Back in the day when being a real commie was the latest college fad,
when we were "the kids," when we chanted little ditties like "The
people united will never be defeated," we didn't see this coming, this
flowering of all things technical. We thought we were in charge. Some
of us thought technology was dehumanizing and other Unabomberish
things. What people forget about the generation of 1968 is that we
came of age when all the arts were in bloom, when rock 'n' roll and
self-deception reached new highs. Now time and an appreciation of
money have beaten many of the illusions out of us. In the years since
1974, when the war in Vietnam ended and Nixon resigned, there were
many times when we realized the "revolution" was over. I'd almost
forgotten about it until New Year's Eve. Remember Y2K? A thousand or
so NASDAQ points up and down ago? Hope you saved your mugs and
T-shirts. If this week was a crash and not a correction, maybe you'll
be able to sell them on eBay. If there's still an eBay, bandwidth
willing.
As the clock struck midnight on December 31, my friend Amaru -- he of
the graying ponytail and never-sell-out integrity -- Amaru, the true
artist, looked at me ashamedly and said, "I care about the stock
market. I have a 401(k)." The next day my friend Jan, the former
Weatherman, called to say she had cast her fate with the masses and
was up $12,000 in just three months. On the NASDAQ, of course, or the
Nas, as I heard Dan Rather call it. As in the "red-hot NASDAQ," not
the Nazarene. And that was Weatherman as in the group that used to
blow up toilets and shout "Power to the people," not as in, It'll be
sunny today with a touch of Greenspan.
A few weeks ago I was standing outside the Monterey Market squeezing
avocados and trying to follow what the men who do the heavy lifting
were saying in Spanish. I heard something like, "Quiero...jada, jada
...AOL. No! Prefiero jada, jada...Yahoo!" Amazon, si, Qualcomm, no.
We're not in Leningrad anymore, Toto.
Just an hour ago I heard this on the radio: "Not doubling your net
worth every sixty days? We can show you how to do it stress-free.
Don't let the technology revolution pass you by..."
Who's not in the stock market? The guy who didn't have chest pain this
week.
I'm driving along and trying to connect the dots. If you're old enough
to remember Huey Newton and the Chicago Seven and Los Siete de la
Raza, then you may remember when you'd be following someone on the
freeway with the bumper sticker: "I'd rather be driving a Mac." If
we're all driving disks, why is 880 south the Land of Perpetual
Gridlock? It's one of the great mysteries of the computer revolution,
along the lines of why is there more paper, not less? If you're old
enough to remember Steve Wozniak and Nolan Bushnell and Jaron Lanier,
you may also remember another mysterious bumper sticker: "Watch
Sunnyvale grow." Make love, not war was already history.
Because a car is not interactive, you get philosophical in a car. You
get emotional. Road rage is just one little byway. You're in this time
machine whizzing through space, and the thoughts fly by as fast as the
landscape.
So I found myself for the first time in many years on 101 south of 92.
Right after I passed through the Legoland of Foster City, it hit me --
here I was at Ground Zero, the NASDAQ Proving Grounds. At this very
moment, I was among the monumental forces that are driving the world
economy. Soon, the names, the logos, the coveted brands of our society
would fly by...Inktomi ...Excite@home...Advanced Micro
Devices...Intel. Soon I'd see the Sunnyvale that grew.
But where are the monuments of yesteryear? Where are the statues and
pillars and domes that say: We are the greatest city in the greatest
nation? In fact, where the heck are the cities? When does Menlo Park
end and Palo Alto begin? Where is the way to San Jose? How did
Sunnyvale grow into Santa Clara? The buildings, the vaunted
brick-and-mortar, they appear to be nothing more than big garages.
Since it all started with Stanford grad students William Hewlett and
David Packard tinkering in their garage, perhaps this is appropriate
-- but still, molto billions later, must they still be in garages? Has
a society so powerful and pervasive ever been housed in such flimsy
architecture? If the market really crashes, you can't even jump from
these buildings.
Here is what this valley looked like in 1939 to the great writers of
America as they collectively described it in California: A Guide to
the Golden State, the masterpiece produced by the Federal Writers
Project of the Works Progress Administration: "US 101 cuts now through
the fruit trees that sweep in row on row across SANTA CLARA VALLEY.
The broad plain was so thickly studded with great oaks that to Capt.
George Vancouver in 1792, it looked like a park which had originally
been planted with true old English oak.' Now in the spring the
foothills of its mountain walls -- the Mount Hamilton Range on the
east and the Santa Cruz Mountains on the west -- it looks more like an
expanse of snowdrifts because of the orchards white with blossoms. The
almonds flower first, in late February, and then following them in
succession until early April, the peaches, cherries, pears, apricots,
prunes, and apples. In summer an army of wandering fruit pickers
invades the valley -- an army as large as the host of visitors in
blossom time. The trays of prunes and apricots drying in the hot sun
cover acres...."
This is Silicon Valley, the valley of dreams, the place where the
American dream -- anybody from anywhere can become anything -- has now
reached its apotheosis. How can such big dreams come from such ugly
buildings, row upon row of so-called "tilt-ups," instant
cubicle-opolises? It is a landscape of "campuses," of incubator
garages in industrial-parklike settings. But I don't dare slow down to
stare, because in the rearview a Darth Vader-like $90,000 parody of a
sports car is gaining and threatens to mow me down if I don't
recognize its might.
This beautiful land, this enchanted piece of paradise was once known
as the Valley of Heart's Desire. Sadly, the fruit trees had to go, the
orchards replaced by a bloom of buildings, to fulfill that prophetic
name. Inside these dumpy walls the dreams of young people from all
over the planet might go from idea to code to product to venture
capital to IPO. Then you'll see them on the evening news, drinking
champagne and cheering the closing bell of the first day of trading,
and think to yourself: Oh shit! I forgot to get rich.
As you whiz by, more names hit you: 3Com, Sun MicroSystems, Yahoo!,
Netscape -- it's as if the giant $s are just floating in the air. This
is the reason the United States now controls the world. What started
out as the might that came of NASA Ames and the Stanford Linear
Accelerator, what began with ARPAnet has now turned into guys named
Jerry and David sharing Web sites. We don't need no stinking bombs --
we can teach the world to netsurf. It's a kind of dream come true.
Make Web sites, not war. You gotta love these kids. Instead of killing
the commies and all the other "enemies," we conquered them with our
dotcommie economy revolution.
So I am here in the epicenter of the happening universe. Just a few
months ago I was in Rome looking up at the Pantheon. There was the
name M. AGRIPPA etched in huge stone letters for me to stare at over
my cappuccino across two millennia. Where are the mighty marble
edifices with Jerry Yang and Marc Andreesen and Gene Kleiner carved
beneath the domes? Where is the thirty-foot statue of the Mighty Woz?
The Arch of Jobs? The Grovian Way? The flying chariot of Larry
Ellison? In fact, most people, even people like me who turn on, tune
in, and drop bucks on the products they brought to market, hardly know
their names.
Of course the buildings are flimsy. It's a virtual world. To have
anything monumental would be going against the flow of information. It
would be saying we are here to stay and not moving at the speed of
light. The Jaguar ad from Wired provides the Silicon Valley manifesto:
"Demoralize every other car on the road along with their drivers.
Introducing the new XKR. The 4.0 litre AJ-V8 engine produces 370
horsepower and launches you from 0-60 in just 5.3 seconds. No wonder
others are left feeling a little inadequate."
You can see how a young man with a rocket and a "pre-IPO" idea in his
pocket can relate. It's a step up from the Romans. It's not about
conquering or killing -- it's about winning. About leaving others
feeling "a little inadequate," not throwing them to the lions. Better
demoralized than dead, no? But just in case he's in a killing mood,
you change lanes and let the little twit fly by. Besides, he's so busy
talking to his VC on his cell phone he doesn't even know he's going
85.
The brass rings from the high-tech merry-go-round are scattered
everywhere. The Bay Area is looking more and more like the '50s. New
houses. Pastel colors. Emeryville is booming. On Sunday Berkeley open
houses are surrounded by Lexus SUV-driving eager over-bidders. Even
Oakland is finally picking up some spare change. Mighty AskJeeves is
soon to be a major tenant at Oakland City Center. A banner across a
deserted street near Oakland City Hall reads, "Welcome CyberGold." An
authentic French creperie just opened across from the rescue mission
on Washington Street in the heart of the bail bonds district.
A couple has just applied for a permit to build a 28,958-square-foot
house in frigging Fremont! Says the Oakland Tribune's Web site: "The
house would be on Sabercat Court, part of the gated Sabercat Ranch
Estates which overlooks Interstate 680 between the Washington
Boulevard and Auto Mall Parkway exits." Hey, it may not have the same
cachet as 50th and Park but think of the optimism of sinking 10 mil
into something near a freeway in Fremont. Why not? What goes up will
not come down, right? The NASDAQ is never going to crash. This is a
New Economy.
An old Pete Townsend song comes on the radio, "Feeling Mobile." I
think it's a commercial for cell phones, but no, it's a real song: "I
don't care about pollution/ I'm an air-conditioned gypsy/ That's my
solution..." A few minutes later I hear, "Get on board, on the love
train, love train/ Tell all the folks in China and Russia too...." Now
I'm sure it's an IBM ad. Are you ready? Rock 'n' roll equals
advertisement.
What to make of this Valley of Heart's Desire where money blossoms as
apricots once did? Palo Alto with its newfound wealth piled on top of
its old-for-California money has taken on a Beverly Hills vibe -- the
richest little small town on earth -- as Silicon Valley has replaced
Hollywood as the place that defines California, America, Fantasyland.
University Avenue (which, last time I visited, was a place of closing
stores and opening franchises) now has a kind of glamour. There's even
a Spago nearby complete with a gang of Latino valet parkers ready to
skid off in your new XKR.
Outside a taqueria on University a gang of four young men is seated.
Each is slim, blond, blue-eyed, and wears permanent-pressed blue
cotton-blend pants, a professionally laundered shirt, and a thin belt
across his tiny waist. The nerds may be glued to their cubicles, but
the salesmen are circling their prey. They look past each other and
parallel-talk into their Nokias. None of them are touching their
veggie burritos. One is saying loudly, seemingly into the air, "Look
at it this way, you met the thirty-million-dollar man. And he's gonna
fund your deal." Another becomes so agitated he gets up from the table
and with his look-ma-no-hands ear clip dangling, he stands up on the
curbside planter and shouts something into his invisible mouthpiece.
It reminds me of one of my favorite e-mail jokes:
Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs are in a high-powered business
meeting. During the serious tense discussion, a beeping noise suddenly
comes from where Bill is sitting. Bill says, "Oh, that's my beeper.
Gentlemen, excuse me, I need to take this call." So Bill lifts his
wristwatch to his ear and begins talking into the end of his tie.
After completing the call, he notices the others staring and explains,
"Oh, this is my new emergency communications system. I have an
earpiece built into my watch and a microphone sewn into the end of my
tie. That way I can take a call anywhere." The others nod, and the
meeting continues. Five minutes later, Andy starts beeping and he
says, "Excuse me gentlemen, this must be an important call." So Andy
taps his earlobe and begins talking into thin air. When he completes
his call, he notices the others staring at him and explains, "I also
have an emergency communication system. But my earpiece is actually
implanted in my earlobe, and the microphone is actually embedded in
this fake tooth." The others nod, and the meeting continues. Five
minutes later, the discussion is again interrupted when Steve emits a
thunderous fart. He looks up at the others staring at him and says,
"Somebody get me a piece of paper. I'm receiving a fax."
The ear-clipped guys are going places. I've been here before. I
remember turning off 101 on Holly Street to visit Phyllis in the house
where she grew up high on a hill in San Carlos. Had the whole hilltop.
Spectacular view. Sold it for $350,000 when she moved away in the
early '80s. Ouch.
I remember driving down to Palo Alto in 1969 to see Char and Lenny in
the cottage on Middlefield Road where I ate spaghetti and drank red
wine that was labeled Cheap Red Wine and had no vintage and we talked
into the night about Frantz Fanon and The Wretched of the Earth. This
is way, way back before noodles were pasta, back when we thought VC
meant Viet Cong, not venture capitalists. This was when Lenny thought
he'd never get a job as an engineer.
This place was like Dullsville, man. Eichler ranch houses? Could we
have dreamed there would be museum shows about Eichlers?
We thought then that Berkeley was the center of the universe. The
place with ideas and values that would transform the world. The
revolution was coming -- we just didn't know which one. Berkeley was
where it was at. Palo Alto was -- ugh -- suburban. People scrambled
car decals to spell out Snodfart. We were just a paradigm shift and a
mouse click away from obscurity. We had attitude. They got stock
options. Oh well.
One of the friends on the weekend visit list was Rooshabh Varaiya. We
met when he was a graduate student in electrical engineering at
Berkeley. He was the friend who taught me that there was some great
popular cultural spirit out there, and it was mass communicating to a
new global one-world. I began to glimpse the holy trinity -- Coke and
Levi's and Mickey Mouse. I saw that Elvis and Marlon Brando and other
rebels had affected Rooshabh in distant Bombay just as they affected
me and my friends coming up in the USA.
Rooshabh loved to party, had a magnificent smile, and would invite one
and all to his student digs at the top of Hearst Street for feasts of
killer curries, too many intoxicants, and lots of outrageous jokes. He
moved to Palo Alto in the early '70s, and the party continued for a
while but we lost touch in the exhaustion of raising kids and working.
From time to time I would see the toll that working for Hewlett
Packard and Tandem Computer took on my friend. But today when I go to
visit him in his new office at Cisco Systems, I see an elder statesman
of the computer revolution. He's more relaxed than in his younger
years but still in it to win. He's paid his dues, but they haven't
wrung the Elvis out of him. You can see he still carries the scars of
a Berkeley indoctrination when he refers to the place where he plays
golf as a "working-class country club." From each according to his
handicap, to each according to his birdie?
On the day I go visit him in the bowels of the Cisco Systems campus, I
have read on the front page of the Wall Street Journal that Cisco is
the second largest company in the world. The world. As in: after
Gates, it's theirs. Two weeks later, Cisco passed the declawed
Microsoft as the world's largest, but this past week, in the NASDAQ
carnage, corny old General Electric came out on top.
Here's how big Cisco is. If I make a mistake and type "Cicso" as I
have just done, Microsoft Word gives me the squiggly line as if to
say, You better spell this name right, it's a made company. (If I type
"3Commies," I don't get the squiggles.) I also read that Cisco started
11 years ago with 44 employees and now has 27,000. Cisco receives
20,000 job applications a month on its Web site. I resist the
temptation to find out what Cisco stock was worth in 1994 when
Rooshabh came here.
I followed the e-mailed directions to the campus, which took me past
the huge hangars and humongous satellites of Moffett Field (where the
Feds could communicate with Mars if they hadn't lost that little
billion-dollar thingamabob.) I drive into a UC-sized orchard of gray
and teal buildings. There are buildings A through P. After realizing
the alphabet (unlike corporate growth) was finite, Cisco went to
numbers. There is nothing comparable to the Temple of Venus here, but
there are immaculate lawns, flowering plums, sculpted beds of
daffodils, and -- to signal an entrance -- large rocks and fountains.
To signal a big entrance, the waters may dance.
Rooshabh greets me as a friend and not a journalist (usually a big
mistake with a writer). I realize I have to protect his frankness and
great wit from a certain exposure. It is clear from the articles I
have been reading in the Wall Street Journal, the Chronicle, and
online at places like Redherring.com that if Cisco isn't the greatest
company in the world, they certainly have one of the best PR
departments. Oh, did I mention that Cisco makes the routers that move
almost all the traffic on the Internet? Routers are kind of hardware
with software, which Rooshabh describes as "highly abstract logical
ways to route things through Internet protocols." Miss that? Just
remember that eighty percent of the Internet depends on Cisco.
Rooshabh meets me in the lobby of his building. We buzz our way past
the electronic eye into row upon row of cubicles until we come to his
office. It's a modest, almost military, standard-issue windowless
space with desk, computer, little conference table, and a bunch of
stuff still in bubble wrap. "They've moved me so many times, I decided
not to unpack yet," he says, flashing me the Elvis grin, complete with
slightly flared right nostril. The thick black hair is thinner now and
graying at the temples. The colorful body shirts and hip-hugger
bellbottoms are replaced by an elegant Italian suit because today he
was entertaining foreign clients, but I know he still has a mean
"Houn' Dog" in him. He explains with some pride the great corporate
democracy that has been Hewlett Packard's legacy to the Silicon
Valley: "Cisco decided that anyone who gets an office doesn't get a
window." This goes for even the mighty who bear the laurels of CEO and
CFO. Rooshabh says that it was the downfall of Fairchild Semiconductor
to be caught up in that "East Coast mahogany desk business culture."
Perhaps if Fairchild had treated its people better, the legendary
Fairchildren would not have gone off and founded this new Rome.
In the Berkeley version of history, William Schockley was a famous mad
racist who wanted to sell Nobel laureate sperm to engineer better
babies. But Schockley was also the Nobel winner who invented the
transistor and started Shockley Semiconductor. In the Bible according
to Silicon Valley, Schockley begot Fairchild, which begot Intel and 38
other companies. Defection is an honored Silicon Valley tradition.
Since it merged with AOL, Netscape has lost so many employees that
some call them "Netscapees." That's why successful companies like
Cisco have worked hard to retain talented employees. While the vice
presidents slave away in their dark offices, it is the young men and
women in jeans and T-shirts who are sitting in their cubicles, staring
into the Window's green glare, sipping their water bottles as
brilliant sunshine pours over their partitions. Maybe some modern
Tennyson is keying, "The Splendor falls on cubicle walls..."
I am trying to figure out what it is Rooshabh does without asking
questions that will show my complete ignorance of how the world works,
of all things technical, and my lack of memory for all the things I
should have learned about him over the years. I sense that he is
somewhere between an engineer and a businessman, that he understands
and helps develop complex products. Because he's such a social
creature, I'm sure he could sell anything to anybody. He describes the
Cisco sales force with the kind of language and enthusiasm once
reserved for Caesar's armies. Terms like sharks and blood are bandied
about.
His business card identifies him as "Director, IOS Technology &
Engineering Operations," which is the group that combines audio,
video, and data lines into one. The card itself is a piece of work. In
addition to the usual phone and fax and e-mail and Web site info, it
repeats everything in Japanese. It is branded with the distinctive
Cisco bridge logo and embossed with a triangle that says it is a
registered ISO 9001, as if a company this big needs the good Internet
seal of approval. The bridge refers to Cisco's origins in the
mid-'80s, connecting the Ethernet to other budding internets.
Cisco is a reminder that the Internet is not just chat rooms and
online shopping and pandacams. At Cisco they practice what they
preach. According to the most recent annual report, "By employing our
own Internet Solutions, Cisco has maintained its agility and
competitive advantage. All of the company's business operations --
from supply chain management to employee communications -- are
Internet-based. Today, eighty percent of our orders and more than
eighty percent of our customer inquiries are transacted over the Web."
It's on the company intranet that employees share such tales of woe as
the "The Nine-Million-Dollar Kitchen." This is the heartwrenching
story of the guy who sold his shares of a company for thirty thousand
dollars to finance a kitchen remodel in 1993. Cisco acquired the
company, and at today's price, the stock would be worth $9 mil. Well,
you can't win 'em all, buddy -- you got the double oven.
When I finally give up and ask Rooshabh what he does, he reaches into
the bubble-wrapped stuff and pulls out a framed patent he took out in
1981 for a prototype hard disk drive. Later he unwraps a board with
chips on it that was invented by a company he briefly headed. He likes
hardware almost as much as he likes what it can do. He wants to show
me the "boxes," the routers, the real thing. We drive some distance to
see the lab where they test things. In we go to another gray and teal
monument to a few good years. Inside, he buzzes us past more
electronic security and with much fanfare throws open the lab door.
There is a cavernous room entirely empty except for all the green and
red and silver spaghetti wires dangling from the walls and the
ceilings. "Where is it?" he laughs. "It was here three months ago."
Time for cocktails. We head to the house Rooshabh bought on a valley
hillside in 1976, when he was working for Tandem Computer. It came
with a photo of what it looked like in 1965 when it was still
surrounded by orchards. Unlike the young ones, Rooshabh has seen hard
times in this valley. He went through several recessions, including
the crash of '87 when stocks were halved like ripe apricots. Then
another recession in the early '90s, when everything was moving to
Texas and the World Wide Web was just a twinkle in Al Gore's eye.
Given the ups and downs he has seen, doesn't he take an attitude
toward the twentysomethings with their instant gazillions and their
stock options and their IPOs? No, he admires them. "These kids are
utterly fearless."
But that is nothing compared to his obvious pride in his own kids. Now
that I know how hard it is to raise the little buggers, I tend to
judge parents by their kids. The Varaiyas are a charming family to be
around. Son Shane and daughter Rachel go to a public high school and
describe life in an academic pressure cooker where everyone's parents
are on duty 24/7, pushing them to study hard and be a success. Or
else. It's a you-are-what-you-drive world. Plenty of kids arrive at
school in $60,000 vehicles. Shane has suffered his father's cruelty:
an '88 Honda. But he appears none the worse for it. He wants to be an
artist and has the temperament. He tells stories as well as his dad
and has already been a major rebel. He loves coming to Berkeley.
Wishes his school were as diverse as Berkeley High. His sister, with
her American mother's face and her father's black velvet hair and
luscious dark eyes, is so drop-dead gorgeous I try not to stare. She
is also thoughtful and seems to understand that she is in a place and
time of extraordinary circumstances. Whether she knows she is in the
center of the universe, I can't tell.
They want to know the usual things kids of this age want to know: Were
our parents hippies? I actually looked into my old album to find a
photo of Rooshabh, which I was going to bring to amuse them. But when
I saw the group of us spread out on the lawn at Live Oak Park in 1974
-- me in the center nursing my new baby, and my longhaired bearded
husband looking dead-on like Charley Manson -- I decided the joke
would be on us.
We are having dinner in Saratoga Village at The Plumed Horse. The menu
is filled with luxurious foods like ostrich and foie gras and lobster.
Not exactly a teenage hangout, but at the next table a three-year-old
is being spoon-fed a taste of caviar. Shane asks, "What's foie gras?"
and when told makes a yuck face and goes for the salad. This is about
as decadent as Silicon Valley gets. After all, it's not Rome -- it's a
family-oriented series of suburbs filled with good schools, uncynical
people, churches, and fly-by-night architecture. It is casual,
relaxed, and incredibly hardworking. To find a hooker or a porno shop,
you'd have to drive to Hayward or the far corners of San Jose or boot
up the iMac. And even though some names are legendary -- Groves, Yang,
Jobs, Kleiner, Perkins, etc. -- they would probably not be recognized
by most people even if they were the very guys in wrinkle-free pleated
front khakis and polo shirts at the next table.
Oddly, one person who does get recognized is my old friend Karl Sonkin
whom I meet for lunch on another actual voyage to the virtual valley.
When we walk into the Lion and Compass, an old (like since the '80s)
valley business lunch place, heads turn and people whisper, "There's
Karl Sonkin, the reporter from KRON TV." The Lion and Compass was
started by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, and it's a cut above his
other dining venture, Chuck E. Cheese. But talk about dated -- there
are (quel horror!) phone jacks in the walls. The latest stock prices
are flashed above the tables. I hope they've started supplying air
sickness bags.
Karl's been in the valley for eleven years. For every instant
millionaire here, there's someone who just works hard for a living.
Karl is in the latter category. It would probably surprise all those
who recognize him to realize that by valley standards he lives an
incredibly modest life. To begin with, he doesn't own property. Gone
with an old relationship. Yet his rental house near the freeway in
Menlo Park does not come cheap; he's probably the only person in the
valley rooting for a downturn. His '94 Toyota is easy to find when he
searches the BMW lot that is the restaurant's parking area.
And yet, he's happy to be here. Has no regrets. Loves living here. The
weather. The casual dress. He describes times he's interviewed some of
the very billionaires whose names strike awe in those who are counting
and found himself in his on-air suit and tie looking so much flashier
than the icon. He reinforces what the Varaiya kids have told me: the
car is the only street clue to the wealth. "There really aren't any
fancy stores here. Everyone shops at Gap or Banana Republic. I can do
that."
Most of the money is in the house, he explains. He takes me for ride
to a house in Los Altos Hills that's on the market for twenty million.
But it just isn't all that different from any other new
on-the-golf-course executive tract house except many more rooms, more
marble wet bars, more sunken tubs, much more precious land, and a big
circular driveway and multiple garages to park the beloved machines.
No need for envy. A few years ago Karl got what he wanted. He went to
China and with much persistence was able to become the single father
of a girl who had been abandoned. She goes to one of the finest public
schools in the world and has that kind of dream room that girls longed
for in the '50s -- with a white canopy bed and all the books and toys
a child needs and a loving maternal daddy. Although he uses
state-of-the-chip equipment at work, Karl's house is pretty low-tech.
A fifteen-year-old Panasonic TV. An eight-year-old VCR. An Apple Mac
Performa that he mainly uses to log on to the Web site of Adoptive
Parents of Chinese Children. He knows his daughter is lucky when he
reads about the experiences of Chinese kids in rural Alabama. In
Silicon Valley an Asian child is in the majority at many schools.
I beg, as every outsider inevitably does, for Karl to show me the real
valley, the landmarks, the hangouts. He's literally done over 2,000
stories about this place as a daily reporter. Ask him his favorite
story, and it's not the time he interviewed the head of Excite or
attended the party at Yahoo!. It was the time he interviewed the cop
who did a backward Heimlich maneuver on a kid who was choking on a
gumball. He saved the kid's life but got the gumball right in the eye.
We try to find a landmark. That phone book cover place, the background
for the network reporter doing a remote from Silicon Valley, the place
the Japanese will have their snapshot taken when they come. Karl's
favorite is the one site that can't be photographed, something he
identifies as the "Blue Cube." Adjacent to Moffett Field, it's the
place from which Lockheed runs military satellites. "It's a top-secret
place that everybody in the whole world knows about, but if you go out
and do a story they tell you: Don't focus your camera on it.'" How
about the Orchard Museum that is being built in Sunnyvale, on a plot
of land maintained as the "last orchard." Is that Valley or what? We
drive through a trailer park in San Jose. "This is it," he says with
gusto. "This is where the real people live. Vast numbers of people
live in trailer parks." He almost bought a double-wide himself.
If the computer has moved us into cyberspace, why do all the people
Karl calls the IPO wannabes keep coming here to live? Karl's short
answer: Nobody gets funded through e-mail.
We visit the charming old OJ Olson's farm store on the site of the
last working apricot orchard. The property has just been sold to a
housing developer who will build fancy-schmancy homes and reopen the
refurbished store as a Disneyland version of the once real deal.
Do I want to see Starbucks where the twentysomethings hang out in
their quasi-punk attire? No, plenty of that in Berkeley and everywhere
else. We talk about finding the garage at 367 Addison where Hewlett
and Packard got their start. Or looking for the original Orchard
Supply Hardware in San Jose. We drive past the now-decapitated El Palo
Alto, the great tree that guided the padres. We cruise Castro Street,
heart of the cute new old town of Mountain View. It's filled with
wonderful restaurants, but at 2 p.m., as if the bell has rung, almost
every place has emptied out as people go back to work. This is the
home of the three-cappuccino lunch. Finally, Karl tells me to go to
Fry's Electronics. That's the valley. That's it.
So I do. I take the bridgeless way from Berkeley, skipping the Bay
Bridge -- remember the first time you heard someone refer to the drive
from the South Bay to the City as a "reverse commute"? Skipping the
San Mateo Bridge, which is, like the 405 in LA, a possible rush hour
anytime from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. And skipping the Dumbarton, that path
along a bog with a Sun MicroSystems campus at each end. If the Santa
Clara Valley once referred to the orchards between "the Mount Hamilton
Range on the east and the Santa Cruz Mountains on the west," then
Silicon Valley refers to the ooze of housing and commercial buildings
spreading anywhere south from San Carlos or southwest from Hayward to
Gilroy. So worldwide is the valley's web that there's a Web site
listing all the Siliconia imitators from Silicon Fen in Ireland to the
Billy-can Alley in Australia to Media Del Rey in LA. Even the Berkeley
landscape is pockmarked with outposts of the Silicon Underground. Po
Bronson, in his economic thriller, The Nudist on the Late Shift and
Other True Tales of the Silicon Valley, describes one such
entrepreneurial cell in the basement of the Bancroft Hotel.
As you drive down 580, you can feel that point just past Union City
when the money begins to bloom. It hasn't penetrated downtown Hayward;
the closed-up stores still have that depressing look of the Bush
Administration. One shop even bears the sign of its last tenant: The
Arthur Murray Dance Studio. Was it just ten years ago I thought my
kids would never have jobs? Who could imagine that just on the other
side of downsizing and buyouts and early retirement lay headhunters
and signing bonuses and four percent unemployment? Who could guess
that the slackers and hackers would end up working seventy hours a
week, many of them making more money on their first job than most of
us make after a lifetime of what we used to call wage slavery? In
Fremont, in the green hills before Mission Peak on a spring day after
much rain, there is no doubt that I've arrived. Again I get that '50s
feeling, although the new houses are much grander, the golf courses
greener. The thrift shops of Hayward disappear, and the joggers pop
up. Suddenly the body shop is not a place to get your twisted metal
set right, but where you get your legs waxed. Here is the bay's
easternmost -- of the valley, that is -- outpost of Fry's, an
electronics store filled with the wonders of the technology
revolution. It is huge. It is vast. It is as big as opportunity and
full of possibility as America. I decline the shopping cart. How many
motherboards and Palm Pilots and Trinitrons will I be carting out
anyway?
I am not a fan of big stores. I get nauseated in Costco around the
time the smell of the free sausages kicks in. Costco is almost
totalitarian next to Fry's. It limits the choices when the new age of
wonders is all about choices, the inalienable right to buy bags of the
latest stuff. You remember those stories about the Russians who wept
when they saw their first American supermarket? Well, they'd piss in
their pants at Fry's. In fact, I almost did myself until I found the
ladies' room -- several acres of audio and video and multimedia later.
There is a cafe in the middle of the damn store! There are people
sitting at the cafe drinking and reading and writing what? -- code? --
on their Palm Pilots with their big carts filled with new stuff parked
next to them.
I begin to think of all the things I need. Of course I need nothing; I
have too much already. (You can see the Berkloid thinking kicking in
here.) In fact, I have more than I want. I still have my 1982 color TV
and my 1984 VCR. I have my beloved Mac Classic just like the one in
the museum case at the airport display of the great cultural rtifacts
of the 20th century. But I also have this 1996 PC clone that I
actually use although I know I should be upgrading. By valley
standards, I am somewhere between a late adopter and a total idiot,
but at my job, as a nurse, I am called a "computer whiz" because I
know where to find things on the Internet and can do a few other
stupid computer tricks.
I could use a new CD player because the tape deck is broken on my Sony
shelf system. The CD deck will only play certain CDs and only when
warmed up and if I beg. I'd been doing some research on CD players and
found an ominous description of one system: "Not as loud as the Aiwa
but still good enough to annoy your parents." I checked Fry's on the
Internet before I came here, and while their Web site is "under
construction," there were plenty of hilarious mock sites making fun of
Fry's by the geeknocenti who are frequent buyers. My favorite is the
one with the Fry's employee application, with choices like "Some
grammar school."
When I ask the salesman a few questions about the CD players, he seems
as befuddled as I am. I feel I am paining him so I move on. I would
make a choice but I don't understand any of the features. I don't know
how to compare the watts and the woofers, and I just really want a
machine where you stick in the disc and music comes out.
Okay, I could use a TV. But again, so many features and all I want is
an ON switch.
Oh, but look here's that new TiVO thing that records all your favorite
shows and plays them when you want them and didn't I just pass their
headquarters yesterday and who's kidding whom? I'm not going to be
able to figure this out. And besides, I don't have cable and can only
get three channels and I hate all the shows. And I really hate Who
Wants to Be a Millionaire, which was number one through five of the
top-rated shows, and we wonder why everyone in the world is on the
freeway heading to Silicon Valley?
Okay, okay, my computer is ancient. Look at all these wonderful new
ones. But I'm just figuring out half the features on my old-timer. I
find myself passing through an aisle of ordinary household appliances
-- coffee machines, blow dryers, microwaves -- things that didn't
exist in the '50s but are probably about to be obsolete. There's
something called a "Smart Vacuum Cleaner." I briefly picture myself
lying on the couch sipping a martini and listening to downloaded Dean
Martin songs while a smart vacuum cleaner races around the place.
"Hey, R2D2, you missed a spot."
And here's where I cut out. Out of the 21st century. Out of the New
Economy. Out of the valley of dreams and geeks and dolls and dollars
and straight to that shabbier University Avenue in Berkeley. I enter
the stone-and-mortar retro charm of Al Lasher's Electronics and pick
up a new set of rabbit ears. I've missed cable and satellite and
digital -- why quit now?
Silicon Valley is filled with wonders, with mysteries, with gadgets I
don't need and people I don't know and barely understand. It is the
center of the earth, and Berkeley is a bedroom community with lots of
what the real estate agents call "latte factor," a pleasant little
backwater of wine and food snobs who still want to fight over whether
it's correct to recycle plastic. 'Tis a gift to be simple.
It's obvious that the celebrated citizens of Silicon Valley are
different from you and me, Scott. They have more money because they
want it.
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