Transcript
Introduction
"Thomas Watson began his life at age 40 after Dayton, Ohio nearly ruined him. In Dayton, Watson experienced fantastic success and near destruction. All of it had to happen for IBM to exist at all and for Watson to take his place among history's great business figures."
All right. So that's an excerpt from the book that I read this week, and the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson, Sr. and the Making of IBM and it was written by Kevin Maney. Before I jump into the book, let me just tell you where I found this book. I was actually listening to Marc Andreessen talk. He's the one that invented the Mosaic browser, which turned into the company Netscape. But he's also rather well known because he's the co-founder of the venture capital firm a16z, and he was talking, and I was taking notes on some of the stuff he was saying.