Founders
Episode 157 #157 The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Founders

Episode 157: #157 The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Founders

Episode 157

#157 The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

David Senra is the host of Founders, where he studies history's greatest entrepreneurs. This is what he learned from reading The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson.

What I learned from reading The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson.

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[0:29] This is the story of those pioneers hackers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Who they were, how their minds worked, and what made them so creative. 

[8:41] She developed a somewhat outsize opinion of her talents as a genius. In her [Ada Lovelace] letter to Babbage, she wrote, “Do not reckon me conceited but I believe I have the power of going just as far as I like in such pursuits.” 

[14:10] The reality is that Ada’s contribution was both profound and inspirational. More than any other person of her era, she was able to glimpse a future in which machines would become partners of the human imagination. 

[16:37] Alan Turing was slow to learn that indistinct line that separated initiative from disobedience.

[20:15] If a mentally superhuman race ever develops its members will resemble John Von Neumann. 

[23:40] His [William Shockley] tenacity was ferocious. In any situation, he simply had to have his way. 

[28:38] Bob Noyce described his excitement more vividly: “The concept hit me like the atom bomb. It was simply astonishing. Just the whole concept. It was one of those ideas that just jolts you out of the rut, gets you thinking in a different way. 

[29:06] Some leaders are able to be willful and demanding while still inspiring loyalty. They celebrate audaciousness in a way that makes them charismatic Steve Jobs,  for example; his personal manifesto dressed in the guise of a TV ad, began, “Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in square holes.” Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos has the same ability to inspire. The knack is to get people to follow you, even to places that they may not think they can go, by motivating them to share your sense of mission

[38:26] As Grove wrote in his memoir, Swimming Across, “By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazi’s final solution, the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint. 

[39:10] Grove had a blunt, no-bullshit style. It was the same approach Steve jobs would later use: brutal honesty, clear focus, and a demanding drive for excellence. 

[39:40] Grove’s mantra was “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” 

[40:24]  Engineering the game was easy. Growing the company without money was hard

[42:40] Vannevar Bush was a man of strong opinions, which he expressed and applied with vigor, yet he stood in all of the mysteries of nature, had a warm tolerance for human frailty, and was open-minded to change 

[47:17] Gate was also a rebel with little respect for authority. He did not believe in being deferential. 

[47:51] Jobs later said he learned some important lessons at Atari, the most profound being the need to keep interfaces friendly and intuitive. Instructions should be insanely simple: “Insert quarters, avoid Klingons.” Devices should not need manuals. That simplicity rubbed off on him and made him a very focused product person. 

[48:47]  Steve Jobs’ interesting way to think about a new market: My vision was to create the first fully packaged computer. We were no longer aiming for the handful of hobbyists who liked to assemble their own computers, who knew how to buy transformers and keyboards. For every one of them, there were a thousand people who would want the machine to be ready to run

Innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. [57:21]

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#157 The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Introduction

“The computer and the Internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few people know who created them. They were not conjured up in a garage by a solo inventor, suitable to be singled out on a magazine cover or put into a pantheon with Edison, Bell, or Morse. Instead, most of the innovations of the digital age were done collaboratively. There were a lot of fascinating people involved, some ingenious and a few even geniuses. This is the story of those pioneers, hackers, inventors and entrepreneurs, who they were, how their minds worked and what made them so creative. The collaboration that created the digital age was not just among peers, but also between generations. Ideas were handed off from one cohort of innovators to the next.”

“I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and the sciences. They believed that beauty mattered. ‘I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,’ Steve Jobs told me when I embarked on his biography. Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences. And I decided that, that's what I wanted to do.’ The people who are comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human machine symbiosis that is the core of the story. Like many aspects of the digital age, this idea that innovation resides where arts and scientists connect is not new.”

“Leonardo Da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact. When Einstein was stymied while working out general relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres. When it comes to computers, there is one other historical figure not well known, who embodied the combination of the arts and sciences. Like her famous father, she understood the romance of poetry. Unlike him, she also saw the romance of math and machinery, and that is where our story begins."

That was an excerpt from the introduction of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, and it was written by Walter Isaacson. So let me tell you -- before I jump into the book, let me tell you how I found this book. So a few weeks ago, I read the book Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos. The vast majority of that book is just written directly by Jeff Bezos, right? But the introduction is written by Walter Isaacson. It's a fairly long introduction, and he's comparing and contrasting Jeff Bezos with other historical figures.

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