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The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley Hardcover – July 20, 2021

by Michael S. Malone (Author)

4.5 80 ratings

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The only contemporary history of the birth of Silicon Valley, from the reporter who had a ringside seat to it all.

Over the past five decades, the tech industry has grown into one of the most important sectors of the global economy. Silicon Valley―replete with sprawling office parks, sky-high rents, and countless self-made millionaires―is home to many of its key players. But the origins of Silicon Valley and the tech sector are much humbler. At a time when tech companies’ influence continues to grow, The Big Score chronicles how they began.

One of the first reporters on the tech industry beat at the San Jose Mercury-News, Michael S. Malone recounts the feverish efforts of young technologists and entrepreneurs to build something that would change the world―and score them a big payday. Starting with the birth of Hewlett-Packard in the 1930s, Malone illustrates how decades of technological innovation laid the foundation for the meteoric rise of the Valley in the 1970s. Drawing on exclusive, unvarnished interviews, Malone punctuates this history with incisive profiles of tech’s early luminaries―including Nobelist William Shockley and Apple’s Steve Jobs―when they were struggling entrepreneurs working 18-hour days in their garages. And he plunges us into the darker side of the Valley, where espionage, drugs, hellish working conditions, and shocking betrayals shaped the paths for winners and losers in a booming industry.

A decades-long story with individual sacrifice, ingenuity, and big money at its core, The Big Score recounts the history of today’s most dynamic sector through its upstart beginnings.

Print length

488 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Stripe Press
Publication date

July 20, 2021
Dimensions

6.25 x 1.5 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

1953953166
ISBN-13

978-1953953162
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From the Publisher

computer engineering, computer science, silicon valley, tech innovation, tech start up, history

Praise for The Big Score


Captures the can do maker-spirit of the early tech industry "The Big Score covers the people and companies that shaped many aspects of early Silicon Valley—people from humble beginnings who took huge risks to accomplish great things while dealing with their own fallibility. This book captures the can do maker-spirit of the early tech industry and gives us a unique view into a key moment in time." —Elad Gil, author of High Growth Handbook	A fascinating time capsule chronicling the origins of an industry "This is a captivating contemporary history of the pre-internet computer industry. Now, 36 years later, it is a fascinating time capsule chronicling the origins of an industry. Malone's refreshingly honest new foreword, describing retrospectively what he did and didn't get right, is by itself worth the cost of admission." —Len Shustek, founding chairman, Computer History Museum	The story of Silicon Valley and the digital transformation “The story of Silicon Valley and the digital transformation underway in every facet of our lives can be told from a thousand different vantage points. Read this book to learn that the essential element in the story may not, in fact, be silicon, but rather the people who made it.” —Dan'l Lewin, president and CEO of the Computer History Museum	A calling card for countless young entrepreneurs with a background in tech "Mike Malone’s epic depiction of Silicon Valley, The Big Score, was a calling card for me and countless other young entrepreneurs with a background in tech. Malone’s stories captured the essence of Valley culture and the many outsized personalities who helped create this mecca of tech. Years later, this book is still relevant and offers insights into the Valley and its ongoing place in the world." —Jeff Skoll, first president of eBay


The only contemporary history of Silicon Valley, from the reporter who had a ringside seat to it all "Later historians would use the internet, and all of the newly created tech history archives, to build their narratives, but I was there. I know how the air smelled when half the Valley was still covered in blooming fruit trees. I can remember Bob Noyce’s baritone voice and what it was like to shake David Packard’s enormous hand, to see little Steve Jobs on my elementary school playground and to play the first Atari game machine at Andy Capp’s pub. I watched Fred Terman arrive for his last board meeting at HP and had a drunken lunch with Don Hoefler, the man who named it 'Silicon Valley.'"	An indelible portrait of the high-agency spirit of early tech "[Founders'] tough climb from hardscrabble beginnings to personal and financial independence had made them tough and sometimes ruthless; their Midwestern, blue-collar values gave them deep empathy for their employees; and their roots in the Great Depression had made them profoundly practical and thrifty. Even when Bill Hewlett was one of the richest men in America, he used to challenge his senior managers to see who could assemble the latest HP product the fastest."	An unprecedented look at the makers and thinkers who built Silicon Valley "Unlike those who run Silicon Valley today, the Valley’s founders didn’t have small armies of publicists, speechwriters, and lobbyists around them to control access and to craft the right public image. And they didn’t have to be circumspect in what they said and did, because few of them had to worry about shareholders or stock prices." Malone captures the unadulterated spirit of luminaries like Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, and Charlie Sporck in profiles interspersed throughout the book—resurfacing their contributions to the electronics revolution and connecting their achievements to the sweeping influence of Silicon Valley today.

About the author

Michael S. Malone has covered Silicon Valley and tech for over 30 years. His articles and editorials have appeared in the San Jose Mercury-News, Wall Street Journal, Economist, Fortune, and New York Times. He has written or co-authored more than 25 award-winning books, including Bill and Dave and The Intel Trinity, and co-produced The New Heroes, an Emmy-nominated miniseries on social entrepreneurs. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

innovation, books, new ideas, technology

About the publisher

Stripe Press publishes books about economic and technological advancement. Stripe partners with hundreds of thousands of the world’s most innovative businesses—organizations that will shape the world of tomorrow. These businesses are the result of many different inputs. Perhaps the most important ingredient is "ideas." Stripe Press highlights ideas that we think can be broadly useful. Some books contain entirely new material, some are collections of existing work reimagined, and others are republications of previous works that have remained relevant over time or have renewed relevance today.

Related titles by Stripe Press:

The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop
An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson
The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard W. Hamming
Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal

Editorial Reviews

Review

"As Silicon Valley began its long march to global dominance, one writer was there to record it all--from the tiniest etchings on silicon wafers to the galaxy sized egos that built Apple, Intel, Google and others--and that writer, Mike Malone, turned it into a saga for the ages. He’s been called Silicon Valley’s Boswell, but I think Cecille B. DeMille captures Malone’s epic storytelling power."
―Rich Karlgaard, former Forbes publisher

"The Big Score is the definitive chronicle of Silicon Valley’s origins, vividly brought to life by native son Mike Malone. The relentless cycles of invention and reinvention that have defined Silicon Valley for over a century suggest that little is permanent, yet the lessons of its genesis are timeless. In laying bare this dramatic history, Mike helps us understand why Silicon Valley ultimately transcended its geography and inspired the best and brightest to defy the limits of human ingenuity, wherever they are."
―Kim Polese, chairman, CrowdSmart

"Mike Malone is the gold standard for telling Silicon Valley’s history. He has witnessed the evolution of the Valley from fruit groves to office parks and has cataloged the world’s dependency on the Valley’s innovative technology. Experience the growth of Silicon Valley through the eyes of a pioneer, friend, reporter, and mentor to so many of us early Valley entrepreneurs."
―Sandy Kurtzig, founder, CEO, and chairman of the ASK Group

"Mike Malone’s epic depiction of Silicon Valley was a calling card for me and countless other young entrepreneurs with a background in tech. Malone’s stories captured the essence of Valley culture and the many outsized personalities who helped create this mecca of tech. Years later, this book is still relevant and offers insights into the Valley and its ongoing place in the world."
―Jeff Skoll, first president of eBay

“Since 1985, when The Big Score was originally published, the dominant and seemingly enduring companies it documented have mostly fallen by the wayside, and the overall technological landscape is wildly different. And so, while The Big Score continues to exist as an encyclopedic and highly entertaining record of Silicon Valley’s origins, it also provides a glimpse of what’s to come. Nothing ever changes in Silicon Valley, it implicitly testifies, and nothing ever stays the same.”
―Reid Hoffman, partner at Greylock and co-author of Blitzscaling

"From its discussion of the Valley's deep roots in the semiconductor industry, to the rise of start-ups, venture capital, and the emergence of new models of management, The Big Score documents the beginnings of a technological transformation. When the book was first published, the microprocessor was kickstaring the computer industry. Today, our greatest innovators continue to build on the work of these early pioneers."
―John Hennessy, president emeritus of Stanford University and chairman, Alphabet Inc.

"This is a captivating contemporary history of the pre-internet computer industry. Now, 36 years later, it is a fascinating time capsule chronicling the roots of an explosion that is about to occur. Malone's refreshingly honest new foreword, describing retrospectively what he did and didn't get right, is by itself worth the price of admission."
―Len Shustek, founding chairman, Computer History Museum

"The Big Score covers the people and companies that shaped many aspects of early Silicon Valley--people from humble beginnings who took huge risks to accomplish great things while dealing with their own fallibility. This book captures the can-do maker-spirit of the early tech industry and gives us a unique view into a key moment in time."
―Elad Gil, author of High Growth Handbook

"The story of Silicon Valley and the digital transformation underway in every facet of our lives can be told from a thousand different vantage points. Read this book to learn that the essential element in the story may not, in fact, be silicon, but rather the people who made it."
―Dan'l Lewin, president and CEO, Computer History Museum

"What’s remarkable about The Big Score? It’s truly the first, and by far the best, panoramic history of the Valley’s founding. But more than that, it shows the emergence of Mike Malone as the conscience of Silicon Valley, something the Valley needs now more than ever."
―Ed Clendaniel, editorial page editor, San Jose Mercury-News

About the Author

Michael S. Malone has covered Silicon Valley and tech for over 30 years. His articles and editorials have appeared in the San Jose Mercury-News, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Fortune, and the New York Times. He has written or coauthored more than 25 award-winning books, including Bill and Dave and The Intel Trinity, and co-produced The New Heroes, an Emmy-nominated miniseries on social entrepreneurs. He lives in California.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Stripe Press; Second edition (July 20, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 488 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1953953166
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1953953162
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1.5 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #341,205 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #74 in Computing Industry History
- #242 in Computers & Technology Industry
- #4,987 in U.S. State & Local History

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4.5 80 ratings

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MM

stripe press books are fantastic

Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2023

Verified Purchase

this one is no exception. the book is interesting for largely pre internet telling of electronics industry, for those who forget the valley was once a hardware place. the physical volume is great.

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Loveman

Great book; too bad no Audio Book; I put a picture of the Silicon Valley Family Tree

Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2021

Verified Purchase

I read this book when it originally came out. I am very happy that it has a Kindle edition.

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G.C.

The Big Score by Michael Malone

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 20, 2023

Verified Purchase

The author of The Big Score is a lifetime inhabitant of Silicon Valley, Michael Malone. Malone went to school with Steve Jobs and spent his entire working life as a journalist covering technology companies of the area. His own career sounds like a veritable history of technology sector business reporting. Malone had written and or edited for the San Jose Mercury News, Fast Company, Upside, Forbes (ASAP), The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Wired magazine. Now he co-hosts a weekly podcast on the goings on in Silicon Valley. The book was originally published in 1985 and has been finished prior to the launch of the Apple Macintosh. At the the time of writing, Malone had been an early to mid-career journalist.

Silicon Valley time capsule

His book is time capsule of how Silicon Valley would have likely seen itself. The people portrayed in it lack the kind of artifice that pioneering PR people like Pam Edstrom would later drum into a young Bill Gates with media interview training and briefing books. Companies have since gone a step further and seldom engage with the media at all; instead putting out news by blog post or staged video production a la Apple under Steve Jobs and Tim Cook.

When we come to understand modern-day Silicon Valley five decades into the future, we won't have the same level of intellectual honesty that we have in The Big Score because the artefacts and interviews will be so vanilla.

The book had become a largely forgotten business history book. Michael Malone revisited much of the history of covered in the book with a slightly longer term perspective in his 2002 work The Valley of Hearts Delight, which covered the history of the area from the 1960s to the dot com era. While The Big Score might have been forgotten, it was resurrected when Stripe through its publishing arm put it out again in 2021. They did this because while the book was forgotten by the general public, it has been read in libraries by university students and in their own collections by people like me who followed the technology sector.

Getting things wrong

In the introduction to the book, late career Malone freely admits the three things that he got wrong in The Big Score:

* The impact of the internet. While it didn't reach public consciousness until I was in college; as a high schooler in 1969 Michael Malone had got a chance to try the ARPAnet during a class visit to Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Secondly, the San Jose Mercury News had been using email and bulletin boards as part of their business process and offering since the 1980s. Yet Malone's past familiarity gave him little idea of what was likely to lie ahead. His elevated access as a journalist to the great and the good of the technology sector didn't help either; in fact Bill Gates made a similar error to Malone in the first edition of his book The Road Ahead. Gates worked very quickly with the publishers to get out a second edition that corrected his mistake. But I think Malone's inability to see and his intellectual honesty about that is instructive for all of us
* While he had the chance to meet Doug Engelbart, Malone wrongly assumed that Engelbart was an eccentric inventor trying to get people to pay him his dues for technology that got bypassed. So, Engelbart doesn't feature in The Big Score at all, despite The Mother of All Demos
* Intel's Andy Grove, who Malone now considers to be the most important business man in the history of Silicon Valley doesn't get a prominent role in the book. That's not so bad ad Andy Grove managed to write a lot in his own right, notably Only The Paranoid Survive

The Big Score on excess, greed and ethics

Malone's The Big Score like Robert X Cringely's later work Accidental Empires wastes no time in showing Silicon Valley's underbelly. At the time of writing there was a large amount of industrial espionage happening between hardware companies, many start-ups were being developed by greedy experienced executives and top performing workers were burning out by trying to keep up self medicating with drugs and stimulants and alcohol to take the edge off. Something you still see today with engineers using Adderall to help them focus.

In this respect The Big Score is very different from other works that cover this era such as Chip War, Fire In The Valley and Where Wizards Stay Up Late.

The Big Score by Michael Malone tells the tale of Silicon Valley before the Apple Macintosh and the large media companies of Yahoo!, Excite, Alphabet or Meta et al.

While the counterculture did play a substantial role in the PC revolution, much of early Silicon Valley was about trying to accumulate wealth and while the successful are lionised for a while; most people did middling to ok at best. There was a work culture of hard working and hard drinking which meant that marriages didn't last. The first barrier that Silicon Valley broke through was one of class, if you were bright and successful enough, class didn't matter.

Robert X. Cringely in his later book Accidental Empires talked about how Bob Noyce (a key player at Shockley Labs, Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel) was rejected from joining a local country club despite his business success. Class still existed, but not within these companies to the same extent. Michael Malone in The Big Score conveys how the culture clash over class between its workers and those who funded it, ripped apart Silicon Valley and created an explosion of semiconductor companies that dominated from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s and beyond.

While Silicon Valley provided a greater egalitarian opportunity for the corporate man who worked there, women are seldom mentioned.

While much is said about the egalitarian nature of David Packard, William Hewlett and Bob Noyce, they still had the social conservatism of Leave It To Beaver. Malone eulogised Hewlett and Packard in his later award winning business history Bill and Dave. The Big Score portrays them with a clearer eye. But Bill and Dave came out later on when Silicon Valley was starting to lose its moral compass. H-P under Carly Fiorina had ruptured the H-P way and was an indicator of what was to come.

Silicon Valley soap opera

Malone's description in The Big Score of the break away of talent from Shockley Labs and Fairchild Semiconductor is accurate. But the story itself is engaging in the same way that the family drama of the soap operas that my Mam used to follow.

Stripe Press

Stripe Press have given The Big Score a much needed needed design refresh. They typography makes it easy to read and the book is immensely well read. The hardback cover, binding and paper are high quality for a book of this nature. It is the kind of book that will be an heirloom that can be handed on down to the next generation. If not for the value, for the historical knowledge. Beyond the self penned introduction at the front, the contents of the book itself were left alone.

Recommendation?

If you are student of Silicon Valley history or have read Malone's other books The Big Score is a great complementary read. The republishing of the book by Stripe Press is timely given the fads of the metaverse and NFTs that have swept through the technology sector recently.

However if you wanted one book to start you off on your Silicon Valley journey, I wouldn't recommend it. I would suggest that you read the following books before getting to The Big Score. Its not because these books are better, but that they provide a better initial entry point into the world of Silicon Valley and its history. Malone's book was written relatively early one and other books can provide a better basic knowledge framework because of The Big Score's age:

* Accidental Empires by Robert X Cringely was something so different to what I’d been used to. I’d worked in industry, but hadn’t experienced anything like this. There are similarly great books to read like Fire In The Valleyand Where Wizards Stay Up Late - but they aren't as entertaining to read as Accidental Empires and pull their punches in order to be seen as 'serious' business books
* Architects Of The Web by Robert H. Reid. He wrote up the profiles of many of the pioneer web companies including Netscape, Real Networks, Marimba, Yahoo! and Silicon Graphics. It’s helpful to revisit the future the way it was envisaged during the late 1990s and see how the future has changed.
* Bill and Dave by Michael Malone tells the story of Silicon Valley pioneers Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Nowadays people think of them as just a brand of laptops or printers. But Hewlett Packard was much more. They pioneered the Silicon Valley start-up, their successor businesses Agilient, HPE and HP. Bill and Dave’s biggest impact was in Silicon Valley culture and law. They built the company in a garage and started the egalitarian culture with The HP Way.
* Chip War by Chris Miller. Miller is a think tank wonk and history professor who tells the story of the semiconductor industry specifically through its relationship with the military industrial complex and its relationship with national security. Chip War deservedly was recommended as one of the FT's business book's of the year 2022.
* Dogfight by Fred Vogelstein. Fred Vogelstein is an experienced journalist who most notably covered the technology sector for Wired magazine. If your familiarity with the tech industry starts with Google and Apple. Dogfight is a great entry point.
* The New, New Thing by Michael Lewis. Pretty much every book that Lewis writes will compare unfavourably to his first book Liar’s Poker, but that book doesn’t mean that The New, New Thing shouldn’t be read. The book profiles Jim Clark, who founded Netscape and Silicon Graphics and aimed at the time to turn the healthcare industry with a new project. Lewis is capturing Clark when he is past his prime from a creative point of view. What Lewis does capture is the optimism and hubris in Silicon Valley that it can change anything.
* What The Dormouse Said by John Markoff. John Markoff is one of the titans of reporting on the business of technology alongside Steve Lohr and Walt Mossberg. In this book Markoff draws a line between the counterculture of the 1960s and the personal computing revolution through to Web 2.0

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