Super Pumped _ The Battle for Uber - Mike Isaac Page 0,17
Street, and not Big Tech. Slashing interest rates to save the banks would have profound effects on technologists and entrepreneurs—particularly on a fifty-mile stretch of Route 101 in Northern California.
In a way, the carnage of the dot-com bust had done the Valley more good than ill.
The bust separated the dot-com poseurs from the actual valuable companies. Led by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg, a new generation of entrepreneurs seemed to understand intuitively how to harness the true power of the internet, and turn it into a profitable business.
There were three important ingredients that fueled the new generation of entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg and Page. First, By 2008, more than 75 percent of American households owned computers, and unlike the 1990s and early 2000s, this mass population had access to broadband; more than half of American adults in 2008 purchased a high-speed internet connection for the home. As more and more people connected online, demand for new, internet-enabled services grew by the day.
Second, the hurdles for entrepreneurs who wanted to launch a company were lowering quickly. Amazon Web Services, or AWS, changed the startup game entirely. Amazon started AWS in 2002 as an engineering side project; it would grow to become one of its most successful innovations in Amazon history.
Amazon Web Services powers cloud computing services for coders and entrepreneurs who can’t afford to build their own infrastructure or server farms on their own. If a startup is a house, AWS is the electric company, the foundation and the plumbing combined. It keeps the business up and running while the company founders can spend their time focusing on more important things like, say, getting people to come to their house in the first place.
Crucially, AWS was relatively inexpensive. For the first time in computing history, any single programmer with a startup idea and a bit of cash could quickly build a company without having to plow tons of money into infrastructure—they could farm that part out to Amazon, and focus on building the app itself.
But the third and most important ingredient was released just two months after Travis Kalanick sold his startup. It would change the face of computing—and how the world would come to interact with devices—more than anyone could have ever anticipated.
At the end of 2006, two men walked a sunny sidewalk in Palo Alto and talked about the future.
In his signature black turtleneck and faded blue Levi’s, Steve Jobs couldn’t go anywhere in Silicon Valley without being swarmed by fans. His accomplishments were well known by then; after giving the world the Macintosh, he helped found Pixar, the beloved animation studio. Later he would develop the iPod and iTunes store, a combination that revolutionized the way the world listened to music through digital media. Jobs’s legacy was already cemented thrice over.
Biographers were already beginning to sketch that legacy in their heads. Jobs had been diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer, quickly growing gaunt as the sickness attacked his system.
Beside him was John Doerr, the Intel engineer turned venture capitalist. Doerr, too, was a titan of industry. Doerr was an unassuming man, slight of frame, with wire-rimmed glasses resting atop his pointed nose. He looked like he would be more at home in a laboratory fabricating silicon chips—something he once did back at Intel in the ’70s—than zooming around the Valley hosting dinners for Barack Obama.
As a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the storied Menlo Park venture firm, Doerr made an early investment in Netscape, a company that eventually became the world’s first consumer internet browser. Doerr was early to spot the potential of Amazon, back when Jeff Bezos’s operation was selling books in a run-down warehouse in Seattle. And perhaps most famously, in 1999 Doerr invested $12 million in Google, then just a search engine run by a couple of engineers in a garage. Five years later, when Google sold its shares on the public stock markets, that investment was worth more than $3 billion, a return of more than 240 times Doerr’s original investment.
But that morning, they were just two friends walking down the sidewalk in Northern California, on the way to their kids’ soccer game.
As they chatted about life, family, and the industry, Jobs stopped for a moment and reached into his pocket, pulling out something Doerr had never seen before. It was the first iPhone.
“John, this thing nearly killed our company,” Jobs said to Doerr, who stared at the boxy, glass-faced device with wonder. Jobs never showed him new products