last three years. What did we need with an artist? We didn’t know. But we had long ago learned not to question Tim’s decisions.
He was a visionary, a wunderkind, the whole reason each one of us was at that company in the first place. What Gates was to personal computers, Jobs was to smartphones, or Musk was to electric cars, Tim Scott was to AI; or would be, very soon. We idolized him, we feared him, but even those who could not keep up and had to be let go respected him. And there were many of the latter. Scott Robotics was not just a business. It was a mission, a first-to-market blitzkrieg in a war to mold the future of humanity, and Tim was not so much a CEO as a battlefield commander, charging from the front, our very own Alexander the Great. His gangling physique, rock-star cheekbones, and goofy giggle failed to mask his iron determination, a determination he demanded from each of us in turn. Twenty-hour days were so common they were barely worth remarking on. The postdocs fresh out of Stanford who were his usual hires felt empowered, rather than exploited, by the insane work ethic. (On which subject, his interview technique was legendary. You were ushered into his cubicle, where he would be working on emails, and waited patiently for him to say—without looking up—“Go.” That was your cue to pitch why you wanted to work at his company. Assuming you passed, next came what was known as The Timbreaker. Sometimes it was a computational question: “How many square feet of pizza are eaten in the US each year?” More often it was philosophical: “What’s the worst thing about humanity?”—or practical: “Why are manhole covers round?” But mostly, it was to do with code. Such as: “How would you program an artificial politician?” And the answer you were required to give was not just theoretical: Tim expected you to come up with actual lines of working code, one after another, without the use of pen and paper, let alone a computer. If you did well, it was signaled by a single word, delivered in the direction of the emails he was still working on: “Cool.” If he said quietly, “That’s pretty lame,” you were out.)
His impatience—which was also legendary—was somehow another aspect of his charisma: proof that the mission was time-critical, that every second was precious. He even peed quickly, one employee reported after standing next to him at the urinals. (The employee, meanwhile, was afflicted with pee-shyness.) His speech was even faster—curt, precise, bombarding you with instructions or, occasionally, invective. Senior managers, or those who very badly wanted to be senior managers, were often noted to have picked up a trace of the same clipped London accent, so different from the languid, questioning inflections of Northern California. It was as if he were a force field that buckled those around him. If Tim looked you in the eye and said, “I need you to go to Mumbai tonight,” you felt exhilarated, because you alone had been given a chance to prove yourself. If Tim said, “I’m taking over your assignment,” you were crushed.
It was sometimes cultish. Not for nothing were we known in Silicon Valley as the Scottbots. The mission could be refined, but it could not be challenged. The leader might have his foibles, but he could not be wrong. At costume parties—paradoxically, Tim loved costume parties—where most people went as characters from Star Wars or The Matrix, he went as the Sun King, complete with buckled shoes, frock coat, outsized wig, and crown.
His background was another part of the legend. The impoverished childhood; the bullying that made him leave school at eleven to self-educate. The growing interest in chatbots, just at the time when people were starting to interact with e-commerce sites on their smartphones. The creation of Otto, a customer-service bot that, instead of being robotically polite and frustratingly obtuse, was efficient, smart, geeky, and cool—not unlike Tim himself, as many commentators remarked. Otto didn’t always spell correctly or use capital letters. He peppered his responses with emojis and witty allusions to nerd culture—quotes from South Park, catchphrases from sci-fi films. When you encountered Otto, you were convinced you’d just been put through to some wizard-level teen genius who would fix your problem for the sheer thrill of it. No one was surprised when Google bought Otto for sixty million dollars.