The Secret History of Silicon Valley

What Hacker News said

Strong rec skmurphy · 2008-11 · on “Steve Blank Nov-20 Lunch @ SV Computer History Museum "Secret History of Silicon Valley"”

Harry Truman once observed "the only surprises are the history you don't know." This is an eye opening perspective on some history "hidden in plain sight" of the origins of Silicon Valley. Video of a version of this talk given at Google is available here [this video] The most interesting aspect of the talk for me was a vision of "systems fighting systems" in an accelerated co-evolution.

Strong rec nikcub · 2011-04 · on “Starting Up Silicon Valley Style”

I just watched his entire presentation, which was better than his blog posts: [this video] absolutely brilliant and a must see. Steve's blog is great, but he also has a good presentation style thick with interesting content.

Recommends LocalMan · 2011-06 · on “Ask HN: What documentaries are worth watching?”

Steve Blank on the Secret History of Silicon Valley: [this video] History of electronic warfare -- very surprising, recently declassified stuff. Plus the history of Silicon Valley itself, from a pro-valley perspective.

Recommends chubot · 2015-01 · on “Silicon Valley History”

Great talk about Silicon Valley history: [this video] I watched this talk a long time ago, but I just noticed the name is Steve Blank, the "customer development" guy, and I have one of his books. That's pretty cool. [LINK]

Recommends dredmorbius · 2016-07 · on “Why California is so expensive: It’s not just the weather, it’s the regulation”

Frederick Terman: [LINK] There's an excellent video on him around, I'll see if I can't turn that up. Here: "The Secret History of Silicon Valley", tech talk at Google: [this video] Briefly: UC Berkely and Stanford, each of which had (and have) excellent engineering deparments. Other colleges, universities, junior colleges, and public schools were from the 1950s through 1970s excellent. Most have been faltering since the 1980s. Moffet Airfield. Already established by WWI and home to airship activity. World War II. An immense industrial capacity built up, many defense industries, and a nascent technology cluster. Amazing weather. There's little else in the US, or anywhere in the world, which can co

Cites stcredzero · 2009-05 · on “Steve Blank: Gravity Will be Turned Off”

Ironically, according to Steve, the people who developed the above are responsible for Silicon Valley. [this video]

Cites stcredzero · 2009-12 · on “How the United States Lost the Naval War of 2015”

There would be records of the radar track in the computers of the Aegis cruisers in the task force. There may well be evidence of the launch captured by satellites. ELINT is very powerful, and the US intelligence agencies have been at this game since before WWII. Their sneakiness boggles the mind! They were using signals bounced off of the moon to spy on Soviet equipment, and disguised the whole thing as radio astronomy! [this video] If you are going to go up against the US defense establishment, you'd better be damned sure you know what you're doing. If I were the US, facing such an asymmetric threat, I'd keep most of my carrier groups around for the short term as a boondoggle, then come up with

Cites Ras_ · 2011-05 · on “It’s Silicon Valley or the Israeli Army for This Young Entrepreneur”

"Military service holds a vaulted position in Israeli’s entrepreneurial culture. Many start up founders attribute their success to those post-adolescent years spent following orders and memorizing technical manuals in specialized army units." Unfortunately this only seems to work in Israel. From a Scandinavian perspective, and personal experience in the Finnish Defence Forces, our conscription and entrepreneurship seem to have nothing to do with each other. Our service does provide connections, but they don't readily turn into businesses. Perhaps because there is nothing like the current threats around Israel. Thus there is less procurement etc. Finland's and Israel's aerospace/weapons indus