The Origins of Silicon Valley's Garage Myth that (2018) | Hacker News Reader

The Origins of Silicon Valley's Garage Myth that (2018)

fastcompany.com

43 points2-718-281-82821 comments

"As the story goes, Walt Disney, Google, and Amazon were founded in suburban California garages."

huh? i thought amazon started as an online bookseller in seattle originally conceived by a young nyc quant fund employee who decided to strike out on their own and try to ride the commercialized consumer internet wave?

but sure, point stands. high technology is often a sum of the total intellectual output of a society, as opposed to just that of those who succeed at commercializing it.

It's kinda true in the case of Bezos except that the rented garage in question was apparently in Bellevue WA.

Something else in the story that is a real stretch was the bit about Fiorina and the "nearly irrelevant office-supply manufacturer" (HP). I mean HP was struggling and they sold a lot of printer ink but they were a major enterprise IT supplier.

Totally mind boggling to describe the company that owned/owns the intellectual property assets of both Compaq and Digital Equipment Corporation as an "office-supply manufacturer"

Even if intended as humorous hyperbole, it's just tone-deaf writing that exposes the writer/editor as people not worth not worth any serious consideration.

I think they meant Apple. You could also add HP to the list and a slew of others like Abobe.

The whole story is weird like that.

Fiorina really wrecked HP. California dodged a bullet when they didn't make her governor.

HP printers were admired when she started, hated when she left.

A friend once owned Mike Markula's old home. He claimed that is where the Apple garage was. He sold the house for $1M, which was high for the time. The owners then razed the house (and the garage) to build something bigger. But, then came the dot com crash and new owners went bankrupt. So, the alleged "Apple Garage" became an empty lot.

Dunno, if this is where the real Apple garage was; maybe he embellished?

The Apple garage was Jobs' parents' garage in Cupertino. It's where the Apple 1 was assembled, and perhaps designed.

FWIW (not much!) I used to live across the street from the HP garage before HP bought the house. There is a historical marker outside the fence. I was always amused by the tourists who would come visit (or tourism in the Valley in general -- there's absolutely nothing to see!).

(or tourism in the Valley in general -- there's absolutely nothing to see!).

What!

There loads to see, and do!

You can look at the bizarre spectacle, the motorhomes of the homeless, parked across from a restaurant serving $500 plates of Japanese beef!

Or a homeless guy sleeping on the steps of a Maclaren dealer.

Or you can walk in The Standford Hills, marvelling at how, using existing real estate pricing, they are worth trillions upon trillions.

And you can just walk around Palo Alto, noting how 70% of commercial property is completely vacant, and wonder what comes next!

Actually, it's a nice place, but just weird in its extremes...

HP owns it now eh? I recall there was a state-looking historical marker plaque. It looked like a toolshed or a very small "garage" shed tucked in the back. I may have seen it once or twice walking around the neighborhood.

When I worked at Stanford, it was somewhat amusing to see international tourists take pictures of mundane elements: lamps, the sidewalk, or a random tree. The flowers in the Oval, I could understand, but at least take pictures of the sculptures and Memorial Church.

Now, I live across the street from where people line-up at 9 am for BBQ like it's for an iPhone 30.

> help update the nearly irrelevant office-supply manufacturer

Excuse me? HP was the leading computer platform for the Oracle database at the time. They might indeed have made a lot of money from printers & supplies, but they also had a big hardware business that became Agilent.

In about 1987, I visited HP in Wokingham, England for 3Com to talk about an email deal, and in ~1994 in Fort Collins, CO for OpenView.

It IS true that Fiorina wrecked a great company. They were always great people to work with, whatever else they were.

>>> but they also had a big hardware business that became Agilent.

They spun-off the hardware testing business as Agilent. The servers, networking and storage business stayed with HP until 2015 when the split happened. After the split, the servers, networking and storage business is HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) and the consumer hardware business is HP Inc.

Getting the timeline right: Fiorina didn't initiate the spinoff of Agilent, but she carried it out.

She took the sexier but less profitable part (the computers) and tried to juice it up with stupid mergers (EDS and Compaq), and of course those TV commercials, which impressed no one. And then followed a couple of terrible CEOs who completed the destruction she'd started.

The Compaq merger was one of the most bitter proxy battles in history; they actually rented out Flint Center, a massive concert venue, to have the meeting.

===============

Agilent was established in 1999 as a spin-off from Hewlett-Packard. [1]

Although the decision to spin off the company's analytical instruments division pre-dated her arrival, one of her first major responsibilities as chief executive was overseeing the separation of the unit into the stand-alone Agilent Technologies. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agilent_Technologies

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carly_Fiorina#Hewlett-Packard_...

I like how the HP garage is still a liminal space — the car still had the trappings of the carriage, and was not yet domesticated, as it became by the time of the Apple garage.

>> "...the open management style of Hewlett-Packard has percolated throughout the Apple ethos and within its office life."

Remarkable to think back to when Apple was considered open, given where it ended up.

Its not that surprising. Wozniak was very open and he loved sharing. It was on his insistence that the Apple II had so many extension slots and an easy and cheap way develop cards. Jobs argued against that and wanted only 2 cards.

While the Apple II was making lots of money for Apple and Woz and his team improved over time, eventually with the Apple II GS, they wanted to have backward compatibility, cheap price. Woz basically believed that there was no reason to break backward compatibility.

During that time Jobs ruined the Apple III, then failed with the LISA, then failed with the Macintosh and then was fired.

Sadly Woz had an accident and overall simply didn't want to lead Apple and have an push open engineering driven mindset for the company. He had been pushed to the side for a while despite his team basically leading the cash-cow. So he left.

So without either of them Apple basically just went along with trying to compete with the Mac against the PC and got owned.

Then Jobs came back and obviously did much better the second time around, but he went hard core on the closes mindset, and there was no Woz to push against that.

So, some of them aren't mythical? What a weird title for the story.

The definition of myth is a widely held or false belief. Read the article and it doesn't debunk the started in a garage story. All except Amazon, unsure if it was started in a garage but if it was it wasn't in the Valley but in Seattle.

I've visited those garages mentioned and as a founder it was inspirational. But today at least for SaaS its probably better in the early days if everyone works from home until there's some revenue.

The story I have heard about early Amazon was that everyone put together a desk from a door and sawhorses. Hmm, this also mentions that a garage was one of their locations:

https://glog.glennf.com/blog/2011/10/16/the_true_story_of_th...

It's not really wrong but myth carries a strong something that isn't true suggestion. Something like mythos would probably be a better word.

The fun 2001 movie "Antitrust" had a bit of the garage lore in it as well. For those of you that have seen the movie, you'll remember.

The "garage myth" isn't a bad one. I believe it's quite inspirational.

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