Ashlee VanceNYT Best Seller | Reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek

On Steve Jobs, Gates, Musk and Silicon Valley with the great John Markoff #podcast #siliconvalley

27 Feb 2025 · 1 min

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1:02

In this opening monologue of the podcast, John Markoff recounts his childhood in Palo Alto before the region was known as Silicon Valley. He describes playing near the Hewlett family home, delivering newspapers to the future residences of Steve Jobs and Larry Page, and reflects on the irony that those future tech leaders would later revolutionize news delivery. Markoff explains that he left Palo Alto in 1967 to pursue college and graduate studies in the Northwest, and returned a decade later in 1977, just as Silicon Valley was emerging, to abandon an academic career path and become a newspaper reporter—the childhood dream he had always held.

Chapters

You know, I grew up in Palo Alto before there was a Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was named in 1971 by Don Hofler. So I grew up, I literally played in the Hewlett family household when I was in elementary school. They lived, the Hewlett family lived about 6 blocks away from my house. The more sort of ironic thing that I like to bring up is I delivered newspapers to the future homes of both Steve Jobs and Larry Page. The irony is that those are the guys I would argue needed more than any two people on the face of the earth to change the way news is delivered. So I was their paperboy. I was their proto-pre-paperboy. You know, I left in '67 to go to the Northwest where I was for a decade in college and graduate school, and then I came back in '77 and this thing called Silicon Valley had emerged. I had come back because I'd given up on my idea of being an academic and wanted to try to become a reporter, a newspaper reporter. That's what I wanted to be when I grew up.