The Drunk Employee Who Exposed Silicon Valley's Biggest Secret

After writing this book about Bob Noyce, which was all about this one guy and all about this one really famous guy, I was very interested because I had seen how much the people around him made his success happen. I was very, very interested in writing about the people who aren't in the spotlight. I remember once I was at an event that a venture capital firm had put on, and there was someone there who was sort of like the number two to a very famous founder. And at some point, he had a little bit too much to drink, and he was singing this little song that when I did all the work, he got all the credit over and over. He was just singing this song. And I thought a lot about that because of course that's overly simplistic, but I do think, and I've used this analogy before, that, you know, the way we talk about founders, successful ones, is the way that we talk about a pitcher who's thrown a perfect game, where if you're at the game, you see that the first baseman like steps on the bag, getting at exactly the right time, and the catcher, like, made the perfect sort of signs for the call and the— for the pitch. And the, the person in the outfield's like, oh my God, you know, and catches these incredible balls. But the only thing that goes into the books is that the pitcher threw a perfect game. And so I was very interested in the rest of the team. I wrote about Apple in Troublemakers, but I wrote about Mike Markkula, not Jobs or Wozniak. I wrote about Atari, but I wrote about the engineer, um, Al Alcorn, rather than about Nolan Bushnell, who was the really famous founder. And I think it enabled us to get a different read on these companies and these experiences that in no way diminished what the more famous people did, but kind of rounded out what it takes to succeed.