Inside the Mindset of Silicon Valley's Tech Innovators
Home to many of the world’s most influential technology companies as well as thousands of promising startups, Silicon Valley is the launchpad for multiple generations of entrepreneurial talent. But there are skilled, capable founders, and then there are the true visionaries—those lightning-in-a-bottle geniuses whose products and services change the world. What separates the best from the rest?
Fred Terman knew genius when he saw it. Widely regarded as the father of Silicon Valley, Terman in 1925 joined Stanford University’s engineering faculty, where his students redefined the notion of precociousness. Chief among them, William Hewlett and David Packard went on to launch their eponymous IT firm in a Palo Alto, Calif., garage two miles northeast of campus; brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian later founded Varian Associates and invented the klystron tube, a high-frequency amplifier for generating microwaves.
Terman was an early investor in both companies—two of the first Silicon Valley firms to go public—and sat on their boards, as well as those of electronics manufacturers Ampex and Watkins-Johnson, other startups at the vanguard of the Bay Area’s technology culture.
Terman, who died in 1982, was uncannily adept at identifying next-level brilliance. It was a skill he learned from the master: his father, Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman, who developed America’s first widely used IQ test, now known as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, and pioneered the longitudinal study of gifted children with his multivolume Genetic Studies of Genius. The younger Terman, whose contributions to Silicon Valley’s evolution cannot be overstated, spent his career nurturing the brilliance his father’s research sought to quantify, helping to usher in a new age of business. But recognizing entrepreneurial innovation is one thing; understanding its essence—its myriad complexities and abstractions—is another.
“Engineers are artists. These are people with visions that no one else sees or hears, and the ‘How did you do that?!’ Michelangelo replies, ‘It was there. I just had to remove the stone around it.’ That’s exactly the story of founders—Steve Jobs, Elon Musk—take your pick.”
