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Mark ZuckBPberg

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SCHOLASTIC INC.
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First edition, January 2012
Designed by Kay Petronio «& Tim Hall
 INTRODUCTION 4

MRRK ZUCKERHERD 108

CONCLUSION 130
MRP 132
TIMELINE 133
BIBLIOGRRPHV 134
INDEX 139
A FEW DEVELOPMENTS OVER THE CENTURIES, like the
printing press, telegraph, radio, and television, have
made titanic-sized changes in the way people share
information. Each new development was a revolution-
ary improvement over the one before it. But perhaps
the biggest technological leap of all has taken place
with the creation of the computer. Computers have
allowed information to be processed, used, and shared
in ways it never had been before.
Like most technology, improvements in computers
came slowly through the years. Then, in the 1970s,
a new generation of computer whiz kids entered the
scene. From that point on, one brilliant programmer
after another has come up with innovative ways to use
computers.
The six men featured in this book have changed
computing forever. Each of them built on the technol-
ogy that was available to him. Each of them created
something new and exciting. Each of them has changed
the way we live today. Bill Gates was instrumental
in bringing computers into the homes and offices of
the general public. The beautifully designed products

U
INTRODUCTION 5

of Steve Jobs have successfully put computers in our

phones. Jeff Bezos has not only changed how we buy
books, but in some cases how we read them, too. Sergey
Brin and Larry Page have made it possible to find the
answer to almost any question in seconds, with just a
few keystrokes. Mark Zuckerberg has changed the way
we socialize and stay connected with our friends.
Computers are part of everyday life for many people.
On any given day, we may use our computers to find
directions to a location, order a book or even a pizza,
research a project and write a paper for school, play
a video game, send messages to our friends (whether
they live next door or on the other side of the globe), or
share photographs and videos with the world.
Today, because of the groundbreaking work of these
men, information of every kind is available at all times.
Never before have so many facts and so much knowl-
edge been at our fingertips. These six men are modern
technology titans.
 I J'-

BILL GATES is a computer programmer and

businessman. He is best known for cofounding
Microsoft, the world’s largest personal-com-
puter software company.

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u mmmm

7
BILL GRTES *-7

GRTES HEETB THE WORLD

William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955. He
was named after his father, William Henry Gates 11. To
avoid confusion, the family called the boy Trey. Today Trey
is better known as Bill Gates. Gates was the second child
in the family, joining his older sister, Kristianne (Kristi).
Gates’s father was a lawyer. His mother, Mary Maxwell
Gates, had been a schoolteacher before her son was born.
Even after Gates’s younger sister, Elizabeth (Libby), was
born, their mother continued to be actively involved in vari-
ous community and business projects.
At the family dinner table, Gates’s parents discussed
the latest business or volunteer efforts in which they were
involved with their children. They encouraged their three
kids to ask questions. The close-knit family spent a lot of
time together and enjoyed working on puzzles and playing
competitive trivia and card games. It was a lot of fun for all
of them, but each member of the Gates family took games
seriously because winning was important to each of them.
As Bill Gates grew up, he was curious about everything.
He read the World Book encyclopedia in alphabetical order
just for fun. He was shy, but he excelled academically at
math and reading. His parents insisted that Gates get out
of his comfort zone by participating in things he was not so
good at, like football and soccer.
B TECH TITfiNS

R CHHLLENGINO KID
Gates had an intense personality and a tendency to chal-
lenge his parents. By the time he was almost out of ele-
mentary school, he often ignored his mother’s wishes that
he clean his bedroom and come to dinner. He was so dis-
agreeable and stubborn that his parents were concerned. It
seemed their son fought them over everything.
Since Gates had become difficult to handle, his par-
ents decided to send him to a professional counselor. He
went to that counselor for about a year. Gates would later
recall that the counselor helped him understand there
was no benefit to fighting with his parents, and that they
were on his side no matter what. After this realization.
Gates was more agreeable and things seemed to smooth
out for the family.
When the time came to attend junior high, Gates’s par-
ents became concerned about him again. They wondered
how he would do at a large public school. He was short and
thin for his age, and he was still very shy. Another of their
concerns was that Bill needed to go to a school that would
satisfy his intelligence and curiosity. They decided to enroll
him at Lakeside, an elite private school.
GRTE5 HEET5 R COHPUTER
Bill Gates entered seventh grade at Lakeside. At first he
didn’t like their strict rules, like wearing a jacket and tie,
calling the teachers “master” and going to chapel every
morning. But soon he found some friends who shared his
interests in business and computer companies.
Then something happened at Lakeside School that
changed his life.
The Mother’s Club had a garage sale. From the pro-
ceeds, they rented a Teletype terminal that was connected
to a computer at the University of Washington. They
also purchased some computer time for the Lakeside stu-
dents to use. At this time, in 1968, Teletype terminals
ID TECH TITANS

were connected by phone lines to a mainframe computer

in another location. The mainframe was a huge computer
powerful enough to run many programs simultaneously.
When the new teletype computer terminal was installed
at Lakeside, there was one big problem. The teachers didn’t
know how to work it or what do with it. They allowed stu-
dents like Gates, who were eager to work with the com-
puter, the freedom to figure it out by using it. Gates took the
manuals home and studied them. Ultimately, he, his friend
Paul Allen, and a few other students became the school’s
computer experts. By the time he was in the eighth grade—
and way ahead in math—he was excused from math class
to work on the computer.
Gates was amazed by what the computer could do. After
working with it for a few months, he wrote his first soft-
ware program. It was a tic-tac-toe game. He was fasci-
nated by the fact that when he programmed software he
would have instant results—the program would either
work perfectly or it would fail. He dreamed that someday
individuals would be able to have computers of their own.
Gates would later say, “I’m sure that one reason I was so
determined to help develop the personal computer is that I
wanted one for myself.”
Gates and his friends quickly used up all the prepaid
time the Lakeside Mother’s Club bought for them, and they
wanted more—a lot more. Gates had to figure out how to
pay for his own computer time. Gates and Allen found a
local company that allowed them to have free computer
time in exchange for finding problems with their computer
software. They worked there mostly at night. Sometimes
after his parents went to bed, Gates would sneak out of
the house and go back to the computer center to use the
computer all night long. Along the way, he learned every-
thing he could about computers and studied every computer
manual he could get his hands on.
12 TECH TITANS

By the time he was in high school, the cost to access a

mainframe computer was $40 per hour. To make money to
pay for computer time, Gates and Allen got jobs as entry-
level software programmers. During the summer. Gates
and Allen were paid about $5,000 each, part of it in cash
and part of it in computer time.
Even though he was still a student. Lakeside asked
Gates, to write a software program that could be used to
schedule students for classes. Since he wrote the program,
he arranged it so he would be one of the few guys in a class
full of girls. But even this edge didn’t seem to help him in
some social situations—the first girl he asked to the prom
turned him down.

GRTES IN CHARGE
Gates and his computer buddies became known as the
Lakeside Programmers Group. Sometimes the group had
arguments. Paul Allen was three years older than Gates,
and the two of them struggled over who would have con-
trol. After one disagreement. Gates left the group. But
Allen soon realized they needed him back, to do the pro-
gramming. Gates agreed to return to the group under one
condition, saying, “Look, if you want me to come back, you
have to let me be in charge. But this is a dangerous thing,
because if you put me in charge this time. Pm going to want
to be in charge forever after.” And from that point on, Gates
was the boss.
Gates and Allen remained friends even after Allen grad-
uated from high school. During the summer of 1972, an
article appeared in Electronics magazine that caught the
attention of sixteen-year-old Gates and nineteen-year-old
Allen. It announced that a new company named Intel had
released the 8008—a microprocessor computer chip (the
command center of a computer). The 8008 was only capa-
ble of a few simple functions. But the teenagers wondered
if they could program the Intel computer chip to do more
than that.
14 TECH TITANS

By this time, Allen was attending college at Washington

State University. Gates rode the bus back and forth across
the state from Seattle to Pullman to visit Allen, and used
the time to write a new software program to run on the
8008 Intel chip. The program was designed to collect data
on the number of cars that drove down a particular street,
and process the information into reports. If successful, it
would be a way to make some money from his programming
skills. Gates and Allen called the program Traf-O-Data.
They got the program to work, and Gates convinced some
employees of the city of Seattle to come to his house so he
could demonstrate it. When the moment arrived to dem-
onstrate Traf-O-Data—the program didn’t run correctly.
Gates ran into the kitchen and insisted that his mom tell
them that the program really did work. Although they
didn’t make a sale that night. Gates and Allen worked out
the programming problems, and eventually made some
money from it.

HRRVRRO BOUND
In 1973 Bill Gates graduated from high school and enrolled
at Harvard University. Gates wasn’t sure what he wanted
to choose for his future career, but considered becoming a
lawyer or a mathematician.
Gates had the tendency to attend classes in which he
BILL GATES 15

was not enrolled, and

skip the classes in which
he was enrolled. This left
him with free time, which
he filled playing poker
with his friends. To make
it interesting for himself
as the end of the semester
approached. Gates would
cram for his finals. He
probably considered it a
challenge to see how high
a grade he could get with a
minimum amount of effort.
At the time, Allen was
working in nearby Boston as a computer programmer.
This allowed the two of them to work together on different
projects. In the spring of 1974, Intel announced the release
of another major computer chip improvement. Their new
microprocessor chip, the 8080, was ten times more power-
ful than the one before it—the chip inside the Traf-O-Data
machine. Gates and Allen understood that this computer
chip would change everything. The 8080 Intel computer
chip was tiny, powerful, and reasonably priced (less than
$200). It was clear to the two young men that this chip
 TECH TITANS

meant it would no longer be necessary to pay an hourly

rate to gain access to a giant mainframe computer. The
massive machines would become outdated. They would be
replaced by a machine that would be smaller, more afford-
able, and more adaptable. They would be replaced by per-
sonal computers. Allen encouraged Gates to join him to
start a company to build computer systems using the 8080
Intel chips. But Gates’s parents wanted him to stay in col-
lege, so he did.
Months later, in January 1975, Gates and Allen were
walking through Harvard Square when they saw the
cover of Popular Electronics. The cover of the magazine
announced a new computer called the Altair 8800 that con-
tained the newest Intel microprocessor chip. It was being
BILL GATES 17

sold as a kit for $397. It was sort of like getting both good
news and bad news. The next generation of computers, per-
sonal computers, was on its way just like they thought. But
they were horrified that someone else was doing what they
wanted to do and feared their chance may be slipping away.
Gates and Allen realized the Altair 8800 did not have
software, so it could not be programmed to do anything.
Personal computers would need software to make them
usable—and Gates knew he could supply it. Gates had
never seen the Altair 8800 or the Intel microprocessor chip
inside it, but he was determined that he could write soft-
ware for it.

HICROSDFT IS HORN
Gates went to work in his Harvard dorm room. He began
with BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction
1B TECH TITANS

Code), a computer programming code that had been in use

since the mid-1960s. As he focused on writing the program-
ming code, Gates rocked back and forth—something he’d
done all of his life while deep in thought. He ignored all
distractions and didn’t see anyone. He lost track of time.
Some days he didn’t eat. He rarely slept and it was only
when exhaustion overtook him that he would crash at his
desk or on the floor. Finally, after five weeks of intense
work, his software code was finished. Gates would later
recall this period of time and say, “the world’s first micro-
computer software company was born. In time we’d name it
‘Microsoft.’”
Gates and Allen knew the moment had come. To succeed
in the computer software business, they had to jump in
at the beginning. If they hesitated, the opportunity would
pass them by. By the spring of 1975, Allen quit his job and
nineteen-year-old Gates told his parents he wanted to take
a leave from Harvard to start a software business. He
promised them he would go back later to get a degree. They
were disappointed that their son wanted to leave college,
but they supported his decision. Gates said, “Getting in on
the first stages of the PC revolution looked like the opportu-
nity of a lifetime, and we seized it.”
Allen and Gates moved with their brand-new business,
Microsoft, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1975. They had
BILL GRTES 19

one goal in mind: “A com-

puter on every desk and
in every home.” As their
company grew, Microsoft
wrote most of the BASIC
programming software
for companies like Apple,
Commodore, and Radio
Shack that sold personal
computers to the public.
During the early years
of Microsoft, Gates was
writing programming
code, hut he also did most
of the sales, finance, and
marketing. He was just harely out of his teenage years, and
was intimidated hy it all. But in spite of that, he worked
out deals with various companies so that each personal
computer they sold would come with Microsoft software.
These companies would pay Microsoft a royalty (percent
of sales) for their software. At first Microsoft wrote differ-
ent software programs to fit the needs of each company’s
machine. Over time, almost every computer sold had vari-
ous Microsoft programs preinstalled.
HiCROSOFT ON THE MOVE
By 1979 Gates and Allen moved Microsoft to a suburb
of Seattle, Washington. The personal computer indus-
try was gaining momentum and Microsoft had grown
by leaps and bounds. By the next year, IBM planned
to create a new line of personal computers and asked
Microsoft to design a new operating system for it. An
operating system controls and directs all the other soft-
ware programs on a computer so they all work together—
sort of like a policeman directing traffic at a busy inter-
section. Microsoft created the Microsoft Disc Operating
System (MS-DOS), which became the operating system
used in many early personal computers.
As more and more com-
puters using MS-DOS
were sold, programmers all
over the country began to
develop software applications
like word processing and
spreadsheets to work with
Microsoft’s operating system.
As these new application
programs became available,
computers were able to do
more things.
BILL GATES 21

Gates constantly looked for ways to improve Microsoft’s

software products. At the time, MS-DOS functioned by
typing text into a blank screen. Bill Gates thought the next
step should be a graphical operating system. He knew that
using picture graphics would be easier for most people than
typing in commands on a screen. Years before, an innovative
computer engineer at the Stanford Research Institute, Doug
Engelbart, invented the “mouse,” which was issued a patent
in 1970. The mouse could be used to point to and choose
an object on a computer screen. In 1983 Microsoft incorpo-
rated the mouse with their new operating system based on
pictures. They announced plans to release a new product
22 TECH TITANS

called Windows. At the same

time, Apple Computer was
also working on a graphical
operating system. Steve Jobs,
Apple’s cofounder, approached
Bill Gates to create the soft-
ware for the Macintosh, their
new computer. Gates worked
with Jobs to create versions of
Microsoft Word and Microsoft
Excel for the Mac.

OnXES SUILDS H FRMILY

As the years went by, Microsoft grew and flourished under
the leadership of Bill Gates. By 1993 his thoughts turned
toward his personal life. He became engaged to Melinda
French, a young woman who worked at Microsoft. On
January 1, 1994, they married in Hawaii. Sadly, later that
year, Gates’s mother died from cancer. Eventually, Bill and
Melinda Gates went on to have three children: two daugh-
ters (Jennifer and Phoebe) and one son (Rory).
It seems that Bill Gates has always been able to predict
what would happen next in the world of computers. Long
before the Internet became part of our daily lives. Gates
knew the next giant step would be to link computers together
in order to exchange infor-
mation between them. Like
the interstate highway
system, which allows traf-
fic to move easily across
the United States, the
Internet, which in the early
days was sometimes called
the information superhigh-
way, would allow informa-
tion to move easily around
the globe. Early on. Gates
understood that this global
connection of computers
would be more like a marketplace than a highway.
Gates and a few others were the pioneers of the com-
puter industry, but Gates realized the next generation of
whiz kids was on its way up. In his 1995 book. The Road
Ahead, Gates wrote, “I know that as I write this there’s at
least one young person out there who will create a major
new company, convinced that his or her insight into the
communications revolution is the right one.” He was right.
When his book was released, Larry Page and Sergey Brin,
the creators of Google, were twenty-two years old. Mark
Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, was eleven.
24 TECH^tlTflNS

GHTEB OOEB BOCK TO SCHOOL,

FOR R DRY
Even as Bill Gates divided his time between running
Microsoft and his family, he never forgot the promise he’d
made to his parents years earlier. When he wanted to take
a leave of absence from Harvard, his parents worried he
would never graduate. On June 7, 2007, Bill Gates was
back at Harvard. Not to return as a student, but to give the
commencement address and to receive an honorary degree.
He ended his speech on a personal note. Gates looked at
his father and said, “I’ve been waiting more than thirty
years to say this. Dad, I always told you I’d come back and
get my degree.”
Microsoft’s success has made Bill Gates the richest man in
America, with a current worth of approximately $56 billion.
His great wealth prompted Gates to create a charitable
organization called the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
At the end of June 2008, Bill Gates gave up day-to-day
control of Microsoft in order to spend more time working
with the foundation. Today Bill Gates works as hard for his
charity as he once did to create Microsoft.
Gates is focused on improving education in America. The
Gates Foundation funds computers, software, and Internet
connectivity to some public libraries in order to provide
Internet access to their communities. The foundation also
2B TECH TITHNS
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helps students get ready for college and awards many schol-
arships.
Another focus of the Gates Foundation is the fight against
poor health in developing countries around the world. They
work to make vaccines available in these areas—hoping
that someday they will be able to completely eradicate dis-
eases like polio.
Through the years, the Gates Foundation has given away
millions of dollars to charitable causes. In June 2010 Bill
and Melinda Gates took their giving to an even higher level.
They and their friend Warren Buffett announced they had
formed what they called the Giving Pledge. Gates promised
to give away more than half of his money to charity in an
effort to help solve some of society’s problems. The Gates
family believes that because they have been fortunate, they
have a responsibility to use it to help others.
Gates and Buffett hoped they could convince other bil-
lionaires to follow their lead—and many have. As of April
2011, sixty-nine of America’s richest families have pub-
licly made the Giving Pledge to give the majority of their
wealth to charity. Ultimately, these pledges will amount
to hundreds of billions of dollars. The pledge is a moral
commitment, not a legal one. Each family will choose how
much money they will give and to whom they will give it.
Since the interests of each family are different, a variety
BILL GATES 27

of charitable causes will be supported including medical

research, health care, education, disadvantaged children,
homelessness, substance abuse, and ministry.
Bill Gates grew up with a lot of advantages—he had a
loving family, had an excellent education, and was intel-
lectually gifted. One more advantage would influence his
future success—at an early age. Gates had access to a
computer when they were just beginning to be used by the
public. Early on, he dreamed that someday nearly every
office and home would have a personal computer—and
because of Bill Gates, that dream has become a reality.
STEVE JOBS was the cofounder of Apple
Computer. He was the creative force behind
popular products like the Mac computer,
iPhone, iPad, and iPod.

^ j ^ I

1:«’
STEVE JOBS 29

RDDFTED
Joanne Carole Schieble was a pregnant, unmarried college
student. She decided to place her child up for adoption—on
one condition. The adoptive parents must be college gradu-
ates. The right adoptive parents were found—a lawyer and
his wife. On February 24, 1955, Schieble’s son was born
in San Francisco. The adoption agency called the childless
couple to tell them their child had arrived. But when they
heard the baby was a boy, they decided not to take him—
they wanted a girl instead.
Many families were on the waiting list to adopt a baby, so
the agency called the next couple on the list, Paul and Clara
Jobs. They were thrilled at the chance to adopt a newborn
son. But there was a problem. Schieble found out that Clara
had not graduated from college, and Paul had never gradu-
ated from high school. Since she wanted her son’s parents
to be college educated, at first she refused to sign the adop-
tion papers. Finally, she agreed to let Clara and Paul Jobs
adopt the boy—but only after they promised her they would
send him to college. They brought their new son home and
named him Steven Paul Jobs. Two years later, they adopted
a daughter named Patty, who completed their family.
Steve Jobs’s father was a machinist who enjoyed working
on projects in his garage. When Jobs was about five years
3D TECH TITANS

old, his father cleared off a section of his workbench so his

son could have his own space for projects. He gave him
some tools and showed him how to use them. Paul, who had
learned about electronics by working on cars, spent a lot
of time showing Steve how to take things apart and put
them back together. By this time, the Jobs family lived
in Mountain View, California, an area of the state where
many engineers lived (this area would later be known as
Silicon Valley). Paul Jobs taught his son the basics of how
electronics worked.
One day a man named Larry Lang moved into the
neighborhood. Lang worked as an engineer at Hewlett-
Packard (HP), a major company that produced electronic
STEVE JOBS 31

products. He also tinkered on projects in his garage and

left the garage door open, which let the kids in the area
see what he was working on. He allowed young Steve Jobs
to play with a microphone, battery, and speaker he had.
Jobs wanted to learn more. Lang taught him how elec-
tronics were built and how they worked. This knowledge
made a deep impact on Jobs. It allowed him to understand
that electronics were not mysterious, magical things—
they were built by regular people.

BDr\ RfTY IW n QCCS

Jobs was a very smart boy. His mother taught him to

read before he was old enough to attend school. When he
arrived at school, all he wanted to do was read books and
chase butterflies. After the freedoms he’d had at home,
he did not like the structure of school or the authority he
encountered there.
By the time he was in third grade. Jobs still didn’t like
school. His reaction was to cause trouble. Jobs and his
friend Rick Farentino set off explosives in the teacher’s
desk and let snakes loose in the classroom. Next they mas-
terminded a plan. Step one: Approach their fellow students
one by one and innocently ask for the combinations on their
bicycle locks. Step two: Go to the bike rack at school and
32 TECH TITANS

take each lock off of one bicycle and put it on a different

one. Step three: Watch the mayhem. To their delight, it took
until ten o’clock that night to get all the bicycles unlocked
and returned to their rightful owners.
Jobs and Farentino built a reputation at school as trouble-
makers. It became clear to the school administration that
the two boys should never be in the same classroom again.
In fourth grade, they planned to separate them. One brave
teacher, Imogene “Teddy” Hill, offered to take one of the
boys in her advanced class. She happened to get Steve Jobs.
Mrs. Hill watched Jobs closely for about two weeks. Then
one day she approached him with a humongous lollipop in
her hand. She offered the young troublemaker a deal: If he
took home a math workbook, did the work himself, and cor-
rectly answered at least 80 percent of the problems, then
she would give him the lollipop and $5.
Jobs was so motivated by her offer that he took the math
book home to work—and soon earned the candy and the
money. She continued to encourage him with extra proj-
ects like a camera-making kit, with which he made his
own lens and built a camera. He respected Mrs. Hill, and
being in her class made him want to learn. Jobs would
later say, “I’m 100% sure that if it hadn’t been for Mrs.
Hill in the fourth grade and a few others, I absolutely
STEVE JOBS 33

would have ended up in jail.” Academically he made such

progress in her class that the school system suggested he
skip several grades. His parents allowed him to skip fifth
grade, but no more.
Jobs went to Mountain View’s Crittenden Middle School.
Because he skipped the fifth grade, he was younger than
everyone else. The rough-and-tumble school was the scene
of frequent fights. Jobs hated it. One day when Jobs was in
the seventh grade, he told his parents that he would never
go back. His parents knew how determined and stubborn
their son was. They knew he meant what he said, so they
decided to move to the nearby city of Los Altos.
34 TECH TITANS

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Jobs’s interest in electron-

ics continued to grow. His
old neighbor, Larry Lang,
had suggested to
Steve that he become
a member of Hewlett-
Packard’s Explorers Club. The orga-
nization allowed a group of kids to meet in the company
cafeteria where employees would show them the company’s
latest projects. Steve soaked in everything he saw and
heard. It was at HP that he saw a computer close-up for the
first time. He fell in love with it.
About the same time. Jobs became friends with Bill
Fernandez, who shared his interest in electronics. The
garage at the Fernandez house became their hangout. Soon
Fernandez introduced Jobs to one of his friends who lived
down the street. Everyone called him Woz, but his name
was Steve Wozniak. Woz, who was five years older than
they were, was already a gifted programmer and knew
much more about electronics than Jobs or Fernandez did.
Thirteen-year-old Jobs decided to build a frequency coun-
ter (an instrument that measures the number of electronic
STEVE JOBS 35

pulses during a specific period of time.) He realized he didn’t

have the parts he needed, or the money to buy them. But
he knew where he could get them: Hewlett-Packard. He was
not afraid to pursue what he wanted. And he wanted those
parts. He looked in the local phone book and found the tele-
phone number for Bill Hewlett, one of the owners of HP. Jobs
called Hewlett on the phone and told him about his project
and asked him for the parts he needed. Hewlett must have
been impressed with Jobs’s guts and intelligence. He sent
Jobs the parts he wanted—and he gave him a summer job
at HP. This might have been the first time Jobs fearlessly
went after what he wanted, but it wouldn’t be the last.

FULFILLINO THE PROMISE

□ F COLLEGE
After Jobs graduated from high school, he told his parents
the only college he wanted to attend was Reed College in
Portland, Oregon. It was an excellent school, but it was
very expensive. Remembering their promise to his birth
mother that they would send him to college, Paul and
Clara Jobs agreed. They paid his first year’s tuition from
their savings.
Jobs was a college student at Reed for about six months
when he realized he didn’t know what he wanted to do with
3B TECH TITANS

his life. And he didn’t think college would help him figure it
out. Jobs also thought about the fact that he was spending
money his hardworking parents had saved all their lives.
He decided to quit college.
As soon as he made the decision to quit school, he
dropped out of his required classes. But he began to sit in
on classes that interested him—like calligraphy. Since he
was no longer an official student at Reed College, he slept
on the floor of a friend’s dorm room.
At Reed, Jobs turned his attention to Eastern religions.
He didn’t have any money for food, so he collected soda
STEVE JOBS 37

bottles and returned them for the five-cent deposit. Since

he had no money, once a week Jobs walked seven miles to
the Hare Krishna temple for a meal. He became a vegetar-
ian and began spending time working at an apple orchard
called All-One Farm. To some of his friends, it seemed Jobs
was searching for something. One of his college buddies,
Dan Kottke, said, “I think it s clear that Steve always had a
kind of chip on his shoulder. At some deep level, there was
an insecurity that Steve had to go out and prove himself.”

SEEHINO WORK HND

ENLIOHTENHENT
In 1974 nineteen-year-old Steve Jobs made his way back
home to his parents. He looked for a job and answered
an advertisement at Atari (maker of the Pong game). He
had an interview with A1 Alcorn, Atari’s chief engineer.
When he arrived at the interview, Alcorn saw that Jobs

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38 TECH TITANS
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was shabbily dressed and looked to him like a hippie.

When the interview was over, Jobs once again showed
his fearless determination when he refused to leave the
office until Atari hired him. Alcorn saw Jobs’s determi-
nation—and he saw something special about the young
man, despite his appearance. Alcorn hired Jobs to work
the night shift at Atari.
Jobs’s interest in Hinduism deepened. He hadn’t been at
Atari very long when he decided to travel to India to meet
Hindu gurus (teachers) hoping to find spiritual enlighten-
ment. He convinced his friend Dan Kottke to go with him.
At the time. Atari was having problems with their products
in Germany. Alcorn agreed to pay for the trip—if Jobs first
stopped over in Germany to fix their issues. When Jobs got
to Germany, he corrected the problem in two hours, then
continued on his way.
When he arrived in India, Jobs traded his T-shirt and
jeans for traditional Indian clothing. For about a month.
Jobs and Kottke traveled through India on foot. But Jobs
didn’t seem to find what he was looking for. After returning
home, he continued his interest in Eastern religions and
studied meditation and Zen Buddhism. When he arrived
back at Atari to work, he had a shaved head and wore an
Indian robe.
STEVE JOBS 'SW.BWttV
39

THE TWO BTEVEB □□ INTO

BUSINESS
Not long after his return, Jobs saw the cover of Popular
Electronics. It was the issue that featured the Altair 8800
kit that contained the newest Intel microprocessor chip. At
the same time Jobs read this magazine on the West Coast,
Bill Gates was reading it on the East Coast. The same arti-
cle would have a big impact on both their lives.
Jobs, his friend Woz, and other computer enthusiasts in
the area attended a group meeting called the Homebrew
Computer Club. They met to discuss computers and the
latest developments. About a year after the Altair 8800
appeared on the cover of the magazine, Wozniak had
designed a new circuit board for a computer. It was so inno-
vative that Jobs suggested the two of them should go into
business to sell it.
The two of them figured it would cost about $1,000 to
buy the needed materials to build some circuit boards to
sell. They didn’t have that kind of money. And even if they
could get it, they were not sure if they could ever sell enough
circuit boards to make back the $1,000. Finally Jobs told
Wozniak they should do it, because even if they failed they
could always look back and know that they had once had a
company of their own. To get the money for the parts they
4D TECH TITANS

needed, Jobs sold his Volkswagen van and Wozniak sold his
top-of-the-line HP programmable calculator.

SHINY NEW RFFLE

After deciding to start a company, they had to name it.
They thought about all sorts of technical-sounding names,
but nothing seemed right. Finally Jobs suggested Apple—
both because he loved the apple orchard at All-One Farm
and because he was a fan of the Beatles, whose record label
was Apple Records.
It was settled. Apple Computer was officially established
in April 1976.
Their company headquarters was located in the garage of
Jobs’s parents’ home. Wozniak worked on technical issues
like designing and building the computer’s circuit board.
Jobs designed a wooden case for the circuit board. He also
worked on the business side of things like getting parts,
and began selling the finished product. They named their
computer the Apple I.
On Labor Day 1976 Jobs and Wozniak took Apple I to the
personal computer festival in Atlantic City, New Jersey. At
the trade show, the major computer companies had fancy
booths and expensive promotional materials. In sharp con-
trast, the Apple Computer booth had a card table, Steve
STEVE JOBS 41

Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Dan Kottke. Apple I did not get
much attention, but the experience of seeing the compe-
tition taught Jobs a lot. He left there with a clear idea of
what they had to do to make Apple Computer succeed.
Wozniak began work on technical improvements for their
next computer, the Apple II. It would have an operating
system (designed by Bill Gates and Microsoft) that would
load automatically, have color capability, respond faster,
and run more quietly because it didn’t have a cooling fan.
It would also include a keyboard. Meanwhile, Jobs was busy
making sure that the way the computer looked would appeal
to their customers.
42 TECH TITANS

He also knew Apple

Computer needed a public
relations firm to help them
market their product. He
sought out the best in the
business, Regis McKenna.
At first, McKenna was not
interested in taking on a
small, unknown company
like Apple Computer as a
client. But McKenna had
never before met anyone
with Steve Jobs’s deter-
mination. Jobs refused to
take no for an answer. Day after day Jobs called McKenna
to set up a meeting. Finally, McKenna agreed to meet with
him. After they met. Jobs used a tactic that had worked
for him before—he refused to leave McKenna’s office until
McKenna agreed to take them on as a client. Finally,
McKenna agreed to represent Apple Computer.
One of the first things McKenna did was have Rob
Janoff design a company logo. It was an apple with a bite
out of it. The apple would have a color-block design using
six colors in order to highlight the fact that the Apple H
STEVE JOBS 43

Original
■I- n.

was the first color-capable computer to hit the market.

Jobs knew what they needed next: money—and lots of
it. They had to pay for McKenna’s marketing campaign
and the materials they needed to produce the Apple II. He
found an investor named Mark Markkula who supplied the
money in exchange for a partnership in Apple Computer.
All of their hard work paid off in 1977—Apple II was
introduced at the West Coast Computer Faire. The Apple II
was a hit with the crowd. When people saw the capabilities
of this computer, orders started pouring in.
It was about this same time that Jobs’s girlfriend, Chris-
Ann Brennan, announced she was pregnant. Jobs was
44 TECH TITANS

upset and although he

actually was the father
of her child, he denied it.
He refused to have any-
thing to do with Brennan
or the hahy. Jobs’s reaction
was so unexpected that
even his friends could not
understand his behavior.
He had always struggled
with the fact that his birth
mother had given him
up for adoption. He had
recently begun searching
for her. Brennan was at
the All-One Farm when
she gave birth to their
daughter, Lisa Nicole Brennan-Jobs, on May 17, 1978. Jobs
was there when his daughter was born. But for years after
her birth. Jobs refused to help Brennan or financially sup-
port his child. Eventually, Jobs reunited with his daugh-
ter and developed a relationship with her that continued up
until his death.
It was also during this period that Jobs found out who
STEVE JOBS 45

his biological parents were. His mother was Joanne Carole

Schieble. His father was a Syrian man whose name was
Abdulfattah Jandali. He also found out he had a full sister,
named Mona Simpson. Even though Jobs and his sister
were both adults when they met, they developed a close,
loving relationship.

TRKINO R BITE OF SUCCESS

Apple Computer grew and grew with great success. By the
time Steve Jobs was twenty-four years old, he was a mil-
lionaire. The company went public and Apple Computer
 4B TECH TITANS

stock was sold on the stock exchange. Jobs bought a big

house, but he kept it simple and uncluttered. It contained
almost no furniture—only a Tiffany lamp, a chair, a bed,
and a picture of Einstein. Now that Apple Computer was
a public company, the decisions were not made by Jobs and
Wozniak alone, but by a president and board of directors. By
this point, Apple had hundreds of engineers and program-
mers. After being injured in a plane crash, Wozniak decided
to take a leave of absence from Apple and return to college.
But Jobs stayed on at Apple and began work on a new
computer he called the Lisa. The project was likely named
after his daughter, though some say Lisa was an acronym
for “Local Integrated Software Architecture.” Jobs’s ability
to think “out of the box” in creative ways had always been
one of his strengths. Jobs wanted to add many different
innovative features to the Lisa. He pushed the engineers to
make the changes, but his stubborn insistence didn’t go over
very well with others on the design team. They grew more
and more frustrated with Jobs until John Sculley, Apple’s
chief executive officer (CEO) took him off the Lisa project.
After losing command of the Lisa project. Jobs took con-
trol of a small project that was under development. It would
be called the Macintosh (Mac) named after a Macintosh
apple. The Mac would be very different from the Lisa. By

w .I ' ...I .1'.

STEVE JOBS

the time the Lisa was released, Apple had invested so much
time and money into its development that the price of the
computer was about $10,000, so it was purchased mostly
by businesses. The Mac would be developed and sold keep-
ing the needs of the individual user in mind and would cost
about $2,500.
With a small group of talented people working on the
Mac, Jobs was at the top of his game. He motivated the Mac
team to create something “insanely great.” He told them
they were like a band of pirates and even hung a pirate
flag up to prove it. He insisted they could get the Macintosh
ready to ship in less than a year—a seemingly impossible
task. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. Jobs expected his
Mac team of pirates to work long, grueling hours to meet
his goal.
4B TECH TITANS

Jobs had high expectations about what the designers of

the Mac could do. The engineers would show Jobs the soft-
ware code on which they were working. If the code was not
up to Jobs’s standards, he would throw it back at them and
say it wasn’t good enough. His reaction was often harsh,
but it did force the design team to produce work that was
better than they ever thought possible.
Jobs’s abrasive ways meant that many at Apple were not
happy with him—including the management. When the
Macintosh was released in 1984, it was the first personal
computer to use a graphical (symbols and pictures) user
interface and a mouse to navigate. But the sales weren’t as
good as Jobs anticipated they would be. At the time, their
rival, IBM, was selling more personal computers than Apple.

ROTTEN RFFLE
John Sculley, the one running the company along with
the board of directors, fired thirty-year-old Steve Jobs.
Suddenly Jobs was banished from the company he had
cofounded. Jobs said, “What had been the focus of my entire
adult life was gone, and it was devastating.”
For a few months. Jobs didn’t know what to do. He spent
a lot of time alone and traveled around Europe. In time.
Jobs came to see that getting fired from Apple was the
STEVE JOBS 49

best thing that could have

happened. It freed him to
start over—but this time
as a very wealthy man.
He began a new computer
company he named NeXT.
About this time, Jobs
was speaking at Stanford
University, and he spotted
a beautiful young woman
in the audience who
caught his attention. After his presentation, he met her and
found out her name was Laurene Powell. They eventually
married and had three children together.
In 1985 Jobs’s professional life took an unexpected turn
when he found out that George Lucas was interested in
selling the computer section of his company Lucasfilm.
When Lucas worked on the movie Star Wars, he found the
special effects were difficult to accomplish. He wanted to
find a way to do it digitally, so he hired a group of com-
puter graphics experts to work on it. By the time Jobs vis-
ited Lucasfilm, he was amazed by what he saw there. The
animated graphics they were producing were like nothing
else he had ever seen.
5D TECH TITANS

After some negotiation with George Lucas, Jobs bought

the animation department, and called his new company
Pixar. Jobs had never made a movie before, much less an
animated movie. But that didn’t stop him. He wanted to
create movies with high-quality computer graphics. Yet,
Jobs understood the story and the characters in a movie
must also be compelling.
Jobs brought his creative genius and drive for a qual-
ity product to Pixar. He also brought his ability to push
his team to do their best work. His friend John Patrick
Crecine said, “Steve might be capable of reducing someone
to tears, but it’s not because he’s meanspirited; it’s because
he’s absolutely single minded,
almost manic, in his pursuit of
quality and excellence.” Jobs
led Pixar as they revolutionized
the way animated movies are
made today. Toy Story, the first
Pixar-animated full-length fea-
ture, was a smash hit. It was the
beginning of a long line of block-
buster movies.
While Jobs had been busy
establishing his new companies.
STEVE JOBS 51

NeXT and Pixar, Apple Computer very nearly collapsed.

Their competitors were selling more efficient computers
for less and the number of Apple computers sold fell dra-
matically. The leadership at Apple knew they needed to
get Jobs back, so they offered to buy NeXT from Jobs for
more than $400 million, which brought Jobs back into the
Apple family. Then Apple asked Jobs to return as the CEO.
At the same time he was running Pixar, Jobs returned to
the company he cofounded with Steve Wozniak. He chose
to take a salary of only $1 a year—but he was amply com-
pensated with shares of Apple Computer stock, which have
continued to increase in value over time. Also during this
time. Bill Gates’s Microsoft invested $150 million into Apple
Computer. Although the two companies were rivals in a few
areas, Microsoft produced some software for the Mac.

PDLIBHINO THE RFFLE

After he had control of Apple once again. Jobs took the com-
pany in a different direction. Jobs had the ability to con-
ceive of the products the public would want, even before
they knew they wanted them. It had always been impor-
tant to him that Apple products work well, but it was also
important to him that the design be simple and beautiful.
John Sculley, the former CEO of Apple—and the one who
52 TECH TITANS

had fired Jobs—said, “He’s a minimalist and constantly

reducing things to their simplest level. It’s not simplistic.
It’s simplified. . . . He simplifies complexity.” Jobs used his
unique gifts to create Apple’s iTunes, iPods, iPhones, and
iPads. Each has been a commercial success. More than
10 billion songs have been downloaded from iTunes; more
than 304 million iPods, 108 million iPhones, and 25 million
iPads have been sold.
In 2004 Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
He had surgery and recovered. About a year after his
bout with cancer. Jobs gave the commencement speech at
Stanford University. Through his remarks that day, he told
STEVE JOBS 53

the audience that the span of each of our lives is limited—

so the time each one has should not be wasted. He recalled
a quote he once heard that cautioned people to live as if
each day was their last. Jobs told the graduates that this
statement had stayed with him through the years and had
caused him to ask himself, “Jf today were the last day of
my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’
And whenever the answer had been ‘No’ for too many days
in a row, I know I need to change something.”
But Jobs’s health issues weren’t over. Four years later, in
2009, Jobs had a liver transplant. Since Jobs felt his health
issues were a personal matter, he did not publicly discuss
the details of this surgery. Then on January 17, 2011, Jobs
sent an email to Apple employees to explain that he would
54 TECH TITANS

take a medical leave of absence to focus on his health, and

requested privacy. Jobs also told them he would continue as
the chief executive officer of Apple and be involved in major
company decisions.
On June 6, 2011, Jobs did what he loved to do—talk
about new innovations from Apple. As James Brown’s song
“I Feel Good” blared, Steve Jobs took the stage at the Apple
Worldwide Developers Conference. He was dressed in his
usual jeans, black mock turtleneck shirt, and sneakers.
Jobs was there to announce Apple’s newest product, iCloud.
He explained how Apple’s iCloud
would sync your music, photos, doc-
uments, and calendar entries to all
of your electronic devices including
your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. And it
would all happen automatically.
Jobs had told the Board of
Directors that if the day came that
he could no longer do his duty as
the CEO of Apple, he would tell
them. That day came on August
24, 2011, when Jobs resigned his
position and named Tim Cook as
his successor.
STEVE JOBS 55

Steve Jobs had been the creative force behind Apple

through the years. He worked to create products that
he would like to use himself. He insisted that each one be
beautifully designed, be simple to use, and work properly.
And he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
On October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs died. Many people pub-
licly honored Jobs and his work following his death. One of
these tributes came from Bill Gates, who had been Jobs’s
colleague, competitor, and friend. Gates said, “The world
rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve
has had, the effects of which will be felt for many genera-
tions to come. For those of us lucky enough to get to work
with him, it’s been an insanely great honor.”
 jiifc,

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JEFF BEZOS is an entrepreneur who

has led the way to buying and selling on
the Internet. He is best known for founding
Amazon.com. w.
JEFF BEZOS 57

R NEW FRTHER
When Jeffrey Preston Bezos (pronounced Bay-zos) was
four, his mother, Jackie Gise, married Mike Bezos, a man
who had come to America from Cuba when he was a teen-
ager. Jackie was only seventeen when her son was born in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, on January 12, 1964. Her mar-
riage to the boy’s father ended after only one year, but Mike
Bezos became a loving father to Jeff soon after. When Jeff
Bezos was five, his sister, Christina, was born. The next
year, his brother, Mark, completed the family.
Bezos was ten years old before he found out the man he
called Dad was not his biological father. Jeff Bezos would
never know his biological father, and he has always consid-
ered Mike Bezos to be his only father.
Jeff Bezos showed signs early on in life that he was
mechanically minded. As a toddler the day came when he
no longer wanted to sleep in his crib. Young Bezos got a
screwdriver and took the crib apart. As Bezos got older,
his need to take things apart and put them back together
meant that he needed more room. So he took over the
family garage as sort of a “science fair central”—the place
where he built models out of odd bits and pieces. As his
younger siblings got old enough to bother him, they would
enter his room without permission. Jeff placed a buzzer on
 TECH TITANS
—

his door that sounded an alarm if they trespassed. Bezos

said, “I was constantly booby-trapping the house with vari-
ous kinds of alarms and some of them were not just audible
sounds, but actually like physical booby-traps.”

BEZDB MEETS H MRINFRRME

Bezos loved to watch Star Trek on television and dreamed
that one day he would become an astronaut. He also loved
technology of all sorts. In 1974 Bezos got an opportunity
few fourth-graders got in those days. Like Bill Gates had
had six years before him, Bezos had access to a mainframe
computer. (At this point in time. Gates was a student at
Harvard and was trying to decide whether or not he should
start a business.) The same thing happened at both of
their schools. The teachers didn’t know what to do with
the computer, and they turned it over to the brightest stu-
dents to figure it out. Bezos and some other kids learned
how to program the computer by studying a stack of manu-
als. When they found out the computer was already pro-
grammed to play a Star Trek game, they didn’t go much
further with the programming. But it was his experience
with the mainframe that began his love of computers that
continues today.
Another thing Bezos loved was the summers he spent
JEFF BEZOS 59

with his grandparents Mattie and Lawrence Preston Gise.

At the time of these summer visits, his grandfather ran a
twenty-five-thousand-acre ranch in Cotulla, Texas. Each
summer, Bezos helped his grandfather repair everything
from windmills to huge machinery.
Bezos also spent time traveling around the country with
his grandparents. They were part of a group of people who
caravanned in their Airstream recreational vehicle (RV)
along with hundreds of other members of the Caravan
Club. Bezos had always been great at math. So as he trav-
eled along, he spent a lot of time working out statistical
problems like the gas mileage for their vehicle.
The summer he was ten years old, Bezos and his grand-
parents were on one of their road trips. His grandmother
smoked—a lot. He had heard a statistic somewhere that
suggested that every puff of a cigarette took time off of the
smoker s life. Bezos crunched the numbers. Then he stuck
his head through the haze of secondhand smoke into the
front seat to share his latest calculation. He expected to be
complimented on his math skills as he announced to his
grandmother, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine
years off your life!”
He didn’t get the reaction he anticipated. His grand-
mother cried.
BD TECH TITANS

His grandfather pulled their vehicle off of the road. He

got out of the car and walked around to open the car door.
As he got out of the car, Bezos didn’t know what to expect.
Would he be punished? Finally, his grandfather said, “Jeff,
one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than
clever.” Bezos never forgot that day.
As Bezos grew up, he loved to read and he loved school.
He worked hard on his studies and considered himself to
be sort of a nerd. He rarely got into trouble, but did get his
library privileges taken away one day at school for laugh-
ing too loudly. All through his life, Bezos has had a joyous,
distinctive laugh that was once described as “a streak of
exclamation points.” By the time he was in high school, the
Bezos family had moved to Miami, Florida. He grew more
and more interested in computers.
When he was in the eleventh grade,
Bezos owned one of Steve Jobs’s
computers—the Apple H Plus. He
was the valedictorian and the class
president by the time he graduated
from Palmetto High School.

CHRNCiNC CDURSE
After high school, Bezos chose to attend Princeton
University, where he
planned to pursue a
degree in physics. But
once he took some classes
in the field, he realized
other students were much
more suited for studying
physics than he was. So
he changed his mind and
started working toward
a degree in computer
science. Since Bezos had always had an interest in space
exploration, he became the president of Students for the
Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS). Bezos hoped
someday he might get the chance to go into space himself.
Bezos graduated summa cum laude (with highest
honors) from Princeton in 1986 with degrees in electrical
engineering and computer science. He got a job at Fitel, a
Wall Street firm, where he worked studying trends. His job
was sort of a mixture of computers and finance. In 1988 he
left Fitel to go to work at Bankers Trust Company. Bezos
became a vice president there and led the development of
computer systems that helped manage more than $250
billion in assets. Next, he went to D.E. Shaw & Co., an

^4

V,.
B2 TECH TITANS

investment organization, where

he became senior vice presi-
dent. It was while he worked at
Shaw that he met and fell in love
with MacKenzie Tuttle, also a
Princeton graduate. They mar-
ried in 1992.

SEIZE THE DRY

By this time, about seventeen
years had passed since Bill Gates
and Microsoft had set the goal of putting a personal computer
in every home and office. The Internet was just beginning
to be widely used by computer users. (The original Internet
was called ARPANET—Advanced Research Projects Agency
Network—and had been developed and used by the defense
department. The government eventually allowed the public
to access what is now known as the Internet.) Bezos was fas-
cinated by the Internet. As he was working in his office in
a high-rise building in Manhattan one day in May 1994, he
saw an incredible statistic. The Internet usage was growing
at a rate of 2,300 percent a year.
For thirty-year-old Bezos it was a wake-up call. He
wondered about what business opportunities this might
JEFF BEZOS B3

create. He began to think about different sorts of products

that could be sold on the Internet. He did some research
on successful mail-order companies. Bezos considered
if it would be possible to sell books on the Internet. It
seemed like a good idea. There were too many books in
print to list them in any sort of paper catalog. But on the
Internet there was a limitless amount of space, giving
you the possibility to be able to sell any book that had
ever been printed.
Bezos wanted to learn more about the book industry. As
it happened, the American Booksellers Association (ABA)
convention was in Los Angeles, so he flew to California.
He walked around and talked to publishers. He was
delighted to find out that book wholesalers already had
databases of their books that were organized and could be
listed online easily.
He thought his idea of selling books on the Internet would
work. When he returned home to New York, Bezos took the
idea to his boss, D. E. Shaw. But Shaw had no interest in
pursuing the idea.
Bezos considered leaving his job to give it a try. But
then again, should he leave a great job over an idea that
might not work? He discussed it with his wife who told
him she would support his decision either way. Bezos told
B4 TECH TITHNS

his boss he was quitting. Shaw cautioned him to wait

and think about it for another forty-eight hours before
he made a final decision. Bezos thought it over carefully,
and knew he had to try. He said, “It was like the wild,
wild West, a new frontier. And I knew that if I didn’t try
this, I would regret it. And that would be inescapable.”
Bezos needed people to invest money into his company
before he could begin. Some people told him his idea would
never work. When he called his parents to tell them his
plan to sell books online, his father had never even heard
of the Internet. Even though Jackie and Mike Bezos didn’t
really understand what their son planned to do, they loved
and trusted him enough to invest $300,000 of their money
into his dream. Bezos knew that most start-up companies
like his failed, so he warned his parents and other inves-
tors that there was a 70 percent chance they would lose
their money, and cautioned them not to invest it unless they
could afford to lose it.
He and his wife made the decision to leave New York and
move to the Seattle, Washington. If they were located in
the Northwest, they could be close to Ingram, a major book
warehouse. Another factor was that they would have access
to the many skilled computer programmers who lived in
the area.
JEFF BEZOS B5

FLDRTING DOWN THE RMHZDN

On July 4, 1994, Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos flew to his
parents’ home. They went there first in order to pick up
a 1988 Chevy Blazer his father gave them. MacKenzie
drove toward Seattle while her husband worked on writ-
ing a business plan. He thought about calling the com-
pany Abracadabra, but the word seemed too long. When he
talked to his lawyer on the phone, Bezos told him he was
going to shorten the company name to Cadabra. His lawyer
misunderstood him and thought he said cadaver. If his own
lawyer didn’t understand the name the first time he heard
it, Bezos knew it wasn’t the right choice. Bezos decided to
change the name to Amazon, to honor one of the longest
rivers in the world.
In Bellevue, Washington, Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos
rented a two-bedroom house and planned to work out of
the garage. Bezos bought some doors from Home Depot for
less than $60 each to use as desks, and ran extension cords
from the house for power. The first person he hired was
Shel Kaphan, a gifted computer programmer who set up a
system that would be easy to use. By June 1995, the web-
site was ready for a test run. Three hundred people tested
the website and it worked perfectly.
On July 16, 1995, Amazon.com opened for business on
 --

66 TECH TITANS

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the Internet. In anticipation they had rigged up a bell to

ring each time they received a book order. When the first
order came in on the first day, the bell rang out. Then as
orders started coming in faster, the bell rang over and over
again. After the first few days, they had to disconnect the
bell—it was ringing too often. Bezos knew within the first
few days that Amazon was going to grow to be bigger than
he first thought.
Within thirty days, Amazon.com had received book
orders from all fifty states and forty-five foreign coun-
tries. By September they had sales of $20,000 a week.
Bezos hired more people. During the day they worked at
JEFF BEZOS B7

their company tasks. Then

at night, everyone worked
together to ship books that
had been ordered. Amazon
quickly outgrew the garage.
Amazon.com was so suc-
cessful that it went public in
1997. The value of stock went
up, and since Bezos had lots
of shares of stock—he was
suddenly a millionaire. Jeff
and MacKenzie Bezos built a
big home on Lake Washington, near the home of Bill Gates.
Bezos constantly looked for ways to improve the
Amazon.com site and their customers’ satisfaction. He
introduced some improvements to the site like customer
feedback, the one-click purchase button, purchase sug-
gestions, order verification, and credit card encryption for
safer transactions. They built warehouses in Delaware to
ship orders faster to the East Coast, and one in Nevada to
ship orders faster to the West Coast.
Next Bezos set his sights to sell more than just books,
announcing that Amazon would sell anything that a cus-
tomer might want to buy online. He had built the “Earth’s
BB TECH TITANS

biggest bookstore” and he planned to turn it into the “Earth’s

biggest anything store.” He succeeded with that, too.

RN EMPTY BnnH BRG

In 2001 Bezos turned his attention back to books—but in
a very different way. He said, “I’ve actually asked myself,
‘Why do I love these physical objects? Why do I love the
i

smell of glue and ink?’ The answer is that I associate I

that smell with all those worlds I have been transported
to. What we love is the words and ideas.” He developed a
device that would change how books could be read in the
JEFF BEZOS 69

future. He introduced an electronic reading device he called

the Kindle. He chose the name because he thought it evoked
the feeling of the ignition of knowledge.
Explaining how the Kindle would work, Bezos said, “The
vision is that you should be able to get any book—not just
any book in print, but any book that’s ever been in print—
on this device in less than a minute.” Apple Computer’s
Steve Jobs predicted the Kindle would fail because he
thought that people didn’t read much anymore. (In 2010
Jobs introduced the Apple iPad, which can be used as an
e-reader.)
The Kindle was a success. As the years went by, con-
sumers grew more and more accustomed to e-readers. By
mid-2010 Amazon had sold
2.38 billion e-books—more
e-book copies than hardcover
copies of books. Bezos believes
books will go away eventually.
He said, “the physical book
really has had a 500-year run.
It’s probably the most success-
ful technology ever. . . . But no
technology, not even one as ele-
gant as the book, lasts forever.”
70 TECH TITANS

INFINITY RND BEYOND

Bezos and his wife have four children. His success with
Amazon.com has made him a billionaire many times
over. Yet he has never forgotten his love of space. Now he
can seriously pursue his passion for the final frontier. He
founded a company named Blue Origin, which has space
tourism as its goal. The company logo is two turtles stand-
ing on the earth reaching for the stars. Underneath are the
Latin words gradatim ferociter, the company motto that
means “step by step, ferociously.”
He plans to reach the goal of space tourism, but he wants
to move slowly to ensure safety. Bezos hired a small team of
gifted people who have a passion for space and built a huge
research and development facility in Kent, Washington—
about twenty minutes south of Seattle. He also bought

= Bezas's land
in Culberson:
County, Texas
JEFF BEZOS 71

165,000 acres in west Texas,

in Culberson County, to use
for a launch complex.
For the first few years as
their work began, little was
known about Blue Origin.
As they made some informa-
tion available to the public,
they announced their project’s
name would be New Shepard.
The name pays homage
to NASA astronaut Alan
Shepard, the first American to fly a suborbital mission,
which took place on May 5, 1961. (Shepard later walked
and hit golf balls on the moon.) When it is completed. Blue
Origin’s New Shepard will be a rocket-propelled craft that
can fly people into suborbital space—for a price.
The team is working to develop systems that will ulti-
mately be used in New Shepard. The first test craft,
Goddard, was ready to launch on November 13, 2006.
Friends and family of the Blue Origin staff gathered to
watch. Goddard looked like a giant gumdrop with legs
that went straight up and staight down during its success-
ful flight. Blue Origin plans to build and launch additional
72 TECH TITANS

test vehicles during this research and development phase.

In the last few years, NASA began working with inde-
pendent companies to promote space exploration. In 2009
it was announced that five companies would receive funds
from NASA. Blue Origin received $3.7 million to assist
their development of space transportation systems that
could be used in the future. In 2011, NASA announced
that Blue Origin would receive another $22 million.
Work at Blue Origin continues. On May 6, 2011, another
test flight was successful. But on August 24, 2011, an
unmanned test flight crashed. Although it was a set-back
for Blue Origin, they are already working on the next devel-
opment vehicle. When the project is finished. New Shepard
will have a crew capsule (CC) where the astronauts and
paying customers and equipment will ride. It will also have
a propulsion module (PM). From the west Texas launch
site. New Shepard will take off straight up, accelerate for
about two and a half minutes, then shut off the rocket
engines and coast into space. It will reach the suborbital
level where travelers can see Earth’s atmosphere and expe-
rience zero gravity for a few brief moments. After the CC
and PM separate, each piece will land back on Earth sepa-
rately—to be used again.
New Shepard will take people to the edge of space and
JEFF BEZOS 73

safely bring them down again. Jeff Bezos can’t wait to take
the trip himself. Even though his thoughts are often filled
with his boyhood dream of space travel, Bezos has his feet
firmly planted on the ground. On May 30, 2010, he was
the commencement speaker at Princeton University. Bezos
shared with them the story of the day when he was ten,
when his smoking statistic made his grandmother cry. He
told them about the lesson his grandfather taught him that
day. Speaking to some of the world’s brightest young minds,
Bezos reminded the graduates that “Cleverness is a gift,
kindness is a choice.”
Jeff Bezos saw the Internet as an opportunity that would
allow him to do what had
never been done before. He
envisioned a bookstore that
was not bound by shelf space.
Bezos looked for a way to sell
books online, and succeeded. AMAZON,COM’S
.fKI'F BKZOS
IvCOM MERCK KS
CHANCIWi THK
Then he looked for a way to WAY
IHE WOHI.D .SHOI'.S

sell anything online, and suc-

ceeded. Now he is looking for a
way to take people into space—
and with his track record, suc- Bezos is named Time
magazine’s Person'bf
cess can’t be far away.
"t the Vear in 1999.”'"“^
I SERGEY BRIN is a computer scientist
I and businessman. He is best known for
I
I being one of the cofounders of Google.

■■'uRi?:
SERGEV BRIN 75

MOTHER RUBSin
In the 1970s many people in the Soviet Union held preju-
dices regarding Jewish people. This made it difficult, but
not impossible, for Jewish people to get a higher education.
Michael and Eugenia Brin were fortunate—they both were
able to receive university degrees. Originally, Michael Brin
wanted to study astronomy, but the government excluded
Jews from the field. He changed to the study of mathemat-
ics and graduated with honors and went on to earn a doc-
torate degree.
Their son, Sergey Mikhailovich Brin, was born on August
21, 1973, in Moscow, Russia. At the time, they lived in
a 350-square-foot apartment, along with Michael Brin’s
mother. During the summer of 1977, Michael Brin attended
a mathematical conference in Poland. He was exposed to
people from the United States for the first time and had
the chance to hear about life in the West. He came home
and announced to his wife and mother that they could no
longer stay in their own country—that they must leave. But
Eugenia Brin wasn’t sure they should leave. After all, they
had good jobs, and they had their young son to consider. In
the end, it was concern for their child that made her decide
to go. The Brins didn’t want their son to face the same sort of
discrimination they had faced. They decided to leave Russia
not only for their own future but for their son’s future.
7B TECH TITANS

Because of strict governmental control, the Brins under-

stood it could be dangerous for them to apply for a visa to
leave the country. But they were determined to try. As soon
as the family applied for the exit visa in September 1978,
Michael Brin was fired from his job. For money, he began
translating technical books into English. Eugenia Brin told
her coworkers she was leaving her position because she
got a different job. In May 1979 their visas were approved.
They were fortunate to get out when they did because soon
after, very few Russians were allowed to leave the country.

fSCOVERINO RHERICn
The Brin family arrived in America on October 25.
Michael Brin got a job teaching math at the University of
Maryland. Eugenia Brin worked first at a consulting firm,
then as a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Space
Flight Center. Even though they had very little money, the
Brins decided to enroll their son in a private school, the
Paint Branch Montessori School. A Montessori education
promotes a method of learning that allows each child to
learn at his or her own individual pace by choosing from
a variety of appropriate learning activities. When six-
year-old Sergey Brin began school, he didn’t know much
English and had a thick Russian accent. That first year
was difficult for him, but then he made the adjustment to
SERGEV BRIN 77

his new country and language. He always had a mischie-

vous twinkle in his eyes and his father joked, “Sergey was
a good boy, when he was asleep.”
Brin got his first computer, a Commodore 64, when he
was nine years old. He had always been good with numbers,
but by the time he was in middle school, it was clear he was
a math prodigy. His school brought in a special teacher for
him and a few other advanced students. Education was a
priority in the Brin family—not only for Sergey, but also for
his younger brother, Sam, who was born in 1987.
During the summer of 1990, Brin’s father took his
family, along with a group of high school math students,
to the Soviet Union for an exchange program. It was a
chance for the Brins to see the family they left behind and
their home country once again. Sergey Brin saw for him-
self the bleak situation
as the Soviet Union
■1

was falling apart. He •

understood as never
ft
before the life he had
been spared because
his parents left their
home. He thanked his
father for moving them
out of Russia.
78 TECH TITANS

WHIZ KID
Brin attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt,
Maryland. When he graduated high school in three years,
he had already earned one year’s worth of college cred-
its. He went to college at the University of Maryland at
College Park. During the summers, he worked program-
ming algorithms (step-by-step mathematical procedures
to solve problems) for places such as the University of
Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, and
the University of Maryland Systems Designs and Analysis
Group. In 1993 he graduated at the age of nineteen with
honors and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and com-
puter science.
Brin decided to go to graduate school at Stanford,
located in Palo Alto, California. Since he would be on his
own at school, before leaving for the West Coast, he decided
he should learn to cook. Along
the way he learned to prepare a
dish he called Chernobyl Chili,
which he cooked in the micro-
wave for forty-five minutes.
Brin realized the individual
attention he’d gotten at the
University of Maryland had
equipped him well for Stanford.
SERGEV BRIN 79

He felt he was better prepared than his classmates who

came from MIT and Harvard. Brin had a quick wit and
an air of self-confidence about him. At Stanford he would
walk into his professors’ offices without knocking. One of
his advisers said of him, “He was a brash young man. But
he was so smart, it just oozed out of him.”
Brin took advantage of the beautiful California weather
and took classes in sailing, swimming, and scuba diving.
When his father asked him if he was taking any advanced
courses, in his usual clever manner he answered that he
was taking advanced swimming. Brin also loved gymnas-
tics and even tried the flying trapeze at circus school in
nearby San Francisco. He preferred to work on difficult
mathematical projects more than take regular classes, and
he published dozens of technical papers.
In 1995 Brin published the first of many technical papers
and he was almost finished with his studies for a master’s
degree. That spring he was one of the grad students who
gave tours of the campus and nearby San Francisco to stu-
dents who were considering attending Stanford.
It was on one of these tours that Sergey Brin met Larry
Page for the first time. Neither one liked the other. Neither
one could have imagined that they would one day be best
friends. Neither one could have imagined that—together—
they would change the way the world finds information.
LARRY PAGE is a computer scientist and
businessman. He is best known for being
one of the cofounders of Google.

'.'.-fc
LRRRV PRGE 81

R COMPUTER FRMILY
Lawrence (Larry) Edward Page was born into a computer-
loving family on March 26, 1973. His father, Carl Page,
was one of the first people to enter the new field of com-
puter science and earn a Ph.D. Larry’s mother, Gloria Page,
had a master’s degree in computer science and worked as a
database consultant. Even his brother, Carl Jr., who is nine
years older than Larry, was into computers. (Years later,
his brother sold his company eGroups.com to Yahoo! for
$432 million.)
Because of the Pages’ work, the family had all sorts of
electronics. Even as a young boy, Larry Page was free to
play with the equipment in their home in East Lansing,
Michigan. He loved everything about electronic gadgets
and he knew he wanted to invent things. When Carl Jr.
came home from college, he brought his little brother left-
over electronic devices from his computer lab classes. Young
Page learned about electronics by tinkering with the parts.
He got his first computer in 1978. It was an Exidy
Sorcerer, a popular brand in Europe. It was huge and
expensive. To make it work, Carl Jr. had to write the oper-
ating system. One of the first things six-year-old Larry
Page did on the computer was type the words from the
book Frog and Toad Together into a word processing
B2 TECH TITANS

program. In elementary school Page did his homework

assignments on the computer and handed in printed
copies to his teachers.
As he grew up, Page sometimes played the saxophone
and considered Nikola Tesla (who invented the alternating
electric current) his hero. He especially loved to read com-
puter magazines like Popular Science. He wanted to know
how things worked—not only how the electronics worked
but the mechanical parts, too. He was interested in tech-
nology, but he was also interested in social issues like poli-
tics. During middle school. Page’s Cub Scout leader remem-
bered him as “an independent thinker.” By the time he was
twelve. Page knew he would someday start a company.
LRRRV PRGE B3

FOLLOWING
FOOTSTEPS
After he graduated from
high school, Page attended
the University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, like his par-
ents and brother had before
him. While he was in col-
lege, he decided to create a
printer that would produce
big images, so he built the electronic and mechanical parts
to drive it and built the printer out of legos. Page also spent
a lot of time thinking about transportation issues and sus-
tainable energy. He even tried to convince the University of
Michigan that it should build a monorail to stretch the two
miles between central and north campus. But they wouldn’t
do it.
One summer during college he attended a summer
institute called LeaderShape. This program, which still
exists, was designed to encourage its participants to
become powerful leaders by motivating them to create
powerful visions, build successful teams, and implement
action plans. The lessons Page learned at LeaderShape
would stay with him forever.
B4
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TECH TITANS
n’ 'H .■■ iiwwiii gwaig?t^'TiS!atjaa<tB»wiwaw»w«aM«M»ai»aatias>M»Ha«w*«!iw»iw^^

In 1995 Page graduated with a bachelor’s degree in engi-

neering from the University of Michigan. To get a mas-
ter’s degree, twenty-two-year-old Larry Page considered
Stanford University. He traveled to Palo Alto, California, to
take a tour of the Stanford campus.
It was there that he met Sergey Brin for the first time.

THE HEETINO
On a spring day in 1995, Page was assigned to a group led
by Brin, who was to show them the campus and city sights.
For about two days, they walked around together—and
they disagreed about everything.
Page thought Brin was obnoxious and argumentative.
Brin thought Page was obnoxious and argumentative.
In spite of his tour guide. Page ultimately decided to
attend Stanford. He was a long way from Michigan, and
would later recall, “At first, it was pretty scary. I kept com-
plaining to my friends that I was going to get sent home on
the bus. It didn’t quite happen that way, however.”
Page and Brin had gotten off to a rocky start in the
spring, but each of them enjoyed the intellectual challenge
of the other. Each time they talked they got to know each
other better, and they found they had a lot in common. They
had similar interests in research. They both liked to have
LRRRV PRGE 85

intellectual debates that would challenge their opponent’s

views. They had both attended Montessori schools. Each
of their families valued education and independent learn-
ing. And although Brin was Jewish and Page’s mother was
Jewish, neither of their families was religious.
By the fall of 1995, they were good friends who spent a lot
of time together—so much time that around Stanford they
were known as LarryandSergey. They even started work-
ing together on a project. Since they shared similar inter-
ests in the Internet—Page studied the links to pages on the
Web, while Brin studied data mining (finding information
BB TECH TITANS

from different sources and analyzing it for practical uses).

Along with other grad students, they worked in the brand-
new William Gates Computer Science building, built with
money donated by Microsoft’s Bill Gates. They settled into
their work in their third-floor office and put in many long
hours.
Only a few months after Page got to Stanford, his father
had trouble breathing and went to the hospital. Carl Page
had had polio when he was young, and his medical history
complicated his condition. He died two months later, leav-
ing his son completely devastated. Even though he was sad-
dened by the loss. Page continued his work.

THE SERRCH BEGINS

At this point in time, when a person typed a keyword into
a search engine, thousands of web pages turned up. Some
web pages were relevant but many only contained a random
mention of the word. The search results were in no sort of
order at all. When a user was looking for specific informa-
tion, these searches were not very helpful.
Page started looking at the links that were found on web
pages. He thought links were in some ways similar to cita-
tions a writer used in a research paper. He wanted to study
web links in a systematic way.
LRRRV PRGE 87

Then twenty-three-year-old Page had a dream—a vivid

dream. He woke up thinking about his dream and grabbed
a pen and pad to make notes on his thoughts. “When I sud-
denly woke up, I was thinking: What if we could download
the whole Web, and just keep the links . . . and I grabbed
a pen and started writing.” The more he thought about the
idea, the more he liked it. He went to talk to his adviser,
Terry Winograd, about it. Page told him he thought he could
download the entire Web in a couple of weeks. Although
Winograd knew it would take much longer than that, he
said nothing and just nodded at Page.
BB TECH TITANS

In March 1996 Page began searching web links using a

“spider,” which is a program that automatically searches
through Internet web pages (called web crawling). Page
started his spider on his own home page at Stanford. The
web pages gathered by the spider were then indexed. As
Page studied the results, he realized the number of links to
a web page was a factor in determining the relevance of a
search word. He also realized that some links to a web page
were more important than others. (For example, a link to
a NASA website from the U.S. government would be more
valuable than a link to NASA from a teenager who logs on
to look at cool images from space.)
Brin had been considering ideas for his thesis project,
and he decided to join Page. He said, “I talked to lots of
research groups and this was the most exciting project,
both because it tackled the web, which represents human
knowledge, and because I liked Larry.”

GENTLEMEN,5THRTYOUR
ENGINES
The goal of the project was to create a better search engine
than those already in use on the Internet. They needed an
algorithm that would allow them to rank the importance of
web pages, which Brin provided. Brin and Page developed
LRRRV PRGE 89

PageRank, naming it after Page. The method used to figure

out the rank of each site is complex. It used many different
techniques to determine the importance of each web page,
including things like the font size, how close together the
words are, what other documents say about the page, and
how good the links are.
With PageRank, they could order websites according to
their relevancy to the keyword. The results were amazing.
When PageRank was used, the most relevant or important
websites were at the top of the list and the least relevant
or important were at the bottom. As they worked on the
project, Brin and Page realized the results they got from
PageRank were better than the results they could get from
AltaVista or Excite, the popular search engines in use at
the time.
Page and Brin made changes and improvements to the
web ranking program and renamed it BackRub. Their pro-
gram worked by creating a massive index of all the web-
sites they could find—and this massive index took up lots
of space on computer hard drives. Since the number of
websites available on the Internet grew every day, they
needed more and more computers in order to contain the
fast-growing index. They got computers from everywhere
and anywhere. Pages dorm room was turned into a huge
90 TECH TITANS

computer complex. Brin’s room became the office and pro-

gramming center. By 1996, they had turned BackRub into
a search engine. As soon as it was available, the students,
faculty, and the administration at Stanford began using it.
The news about this efficient search engine quickly spread
by word of mouth. Soon the massive system used nearly
half of all of Stanford’s Internet network capabilities—and
they would occasionally crash the system. Fortunately,
the Stanford administration didn’t hassle them about the
resources they used.

Google Search I'm Feeling Lucky

LRRRV PRGE 91

RNY OTHER NRHE

By 1997, Page and Brin decided they needed to rename
BackRub, and considered lots of possibilities. They finally
settled on Google. The name comes from the mathemati-
cal term googol, for a one followed by one hundred zeros.
It seemed to them a good match to represent the limitless
amount of information on the Internet.
Brin designed the Google home page. Most search engine
home pages were busy-looking with lots of text and links.
Brin’s design was the exact opposite. The Google home
page would be simple and uncluttered. It had a white back-
ground and used basic colors. Early on, Brin knew Google
was something special, saying, “I am sometimes something
of a lazy person, so when I end up spending a lot of time
using something myself—as I did with Google in the earli-
est of days, I knew it was a big deal.”

ENDLESS GROWTH
Their need for more and more computers continued to
grow. Page and Brin borrowed computers from anyone
who would lend them—and if an owner never asked for one
back, they kept it. They didn’t have much money, so they
bought parts and built their own machines. They maxed
out three credit cards buying hard disks. They made cases
92 TECH TITANS

out of Legos to hold all their hard drives.

In March 1998 Page and Brin had a meeting with an
AltaVista representative, and offered to sell their superior
search engine, Google, to them. AltaVista did not want to
huy it. Neither did Excite or Yahoo!. They did get some valu-
able advice from one of these meetings. Yahoo! s cofounder
David File told the guys they should take a leave of absence
from their Ph.D. studies at Stanford and start their own
search engine company.
At first they didn’t know what to do. Neither one was
comfortable with the idea of leaving their doctoral studies.
When Brin’s parents found out he was taking a leave from
his doctoral program they were upset. The deciding factor
LRRRV PRGE 93

was that Stanford University told them that if they tried

to start a company and it failed, they could return to the
Ph.D. program.
Now that they had decided to go into business, they
needed a lot of money and started looking for some inves-
tors. In August 1998 they met with Andy Bechtolsheim,
cofounder of Sun Microsystems, one of the greats of Silicon
Valley. Page and Brin explained their search engine to
him. Bechtolsheim liked what he heard and said, “This is
the single best idea I have heard in years. I want to be part
of this.” Bechtolsheim took out his checkbook and wrote a
check to Google Inc. for $100,000. Page and Brin celebrated
by eating at Burger King.

OOOOLE !S BORN
But Google Inc. didn’t exist officially, so the two held on to
the check for a few weeks while they went through the pro-
cess of incorporating their new company. On September 7,
1998, Google Inc. officially came into existence with Page
as its CEO. They sought out additional investors in their
family and friends and ultimately raised $1 million to start
their company. One of their investors was Jeff Bezos of
Amazon.com, who put in $250,000.
The next step was to move their computers and equipment
94 TECH TITANS

out of Stanford to a place of their own. Susan Wojcicki, a

friend of Brin’s, had a house in Menlo Park, California, and
needed help making her house payment. She rented out the
garage of her house to them for $1,700 a month. She first
thought the guys would be there while she was at work, but
as it turned out they were there 24/7, working, raiding the
refrigerator, and sitting in the hot tub.
Even during the testing phase Google was handling about
one hundred thousand queries a day. Google was gaining in
popularity as more and more people used the site. They had
to hire eight people to handle the workload. By early 1999,
Google outgrew Wojcicki’s garage, so they moved into some
offices in Palo Alto. Everything was going well. From the
LRRRV PRGE 95

beginning, their mission was to organize information and

make it both accessible and useful to users.

ONE OF 0 KIND
Early on, Page and Brin determined that they didn’t want
Google to be a conventional company—they wanted to be
unique. Every Friday they held a TGIF celebration where
all the employees got together, and Page and Brin would
inform them about everything that had happened that
week. Other search engine companies wanted to keep users
on their sites as long as possible, but Google was just the
opposite. Google wanted their users to come to their site,
get the desired information, and move away from their site
as soon as possible. They decided on a list of ten things they
always wanted to keep in mind:
1. Focus on the user: They determined their first concern
would be the user—they made sure the home page was
easy to use and loaded web pages instantly.
2. Do one thing really well: They focused their attention on
creating an accurate search engine.
3. Fast is better: They determined they would deliver the
answers to users’ questions in the shortest time possible.
4. Democracy on the Web: They would use ranking meth-
ods based on links for millions of users to evaluate the
96 TECH TITANS

importance of a web page.

5. You don’t have to be at your desk to get your questions
answered: They wanted users to have access to their
search engine from mobile phones and other portable
devices.
6. You can make money without doing evil: They would
make money by offering their search capabilities to other
companies and by selling advertising. They also commit-
ted that they would not accept pop-up ads that covered
the results and that the advertising would be relevant to
users’ searches and clearly marked as advertising.
7. More information is out there: They committed them-
selves to continually look for ways to gain access to more
and more of the world’s information.
8. Global access to information: They wanted to make
information available all over the world and in every lan-
guage.
9. Serious without a suit: They wanted the Google work-
place to be casual—a place where bright, creative people
would work hard and have fun.
10. Being great isn’t enough: They determined to set high,
sometimes unattainable goals, in order to stretch them-
selves to find innovative ways to make Google better.
LRRRV PRGE 97

HHKINO HONEY
Page and Brin had figured out how to make a successful
search engine. But they were not making any money. Page
said, “We always kind of figured that if we did a good job
of providing the right information for everybody in the
world, all the time, that would be an important thing to
do.” But eventually a company must make money to stay
in business.
Ultimately, they figured out how to make money on
Google through advertising. Because Google was a search
engine with keywords typed in by the user, they were
able to match product advertisements to those keywords.
The advertising would be linked to the user’s interest. For
example, a user who searched for “baseball” might be inter-
ested in sports-related products, so he or she might see ads
for sports clothing or sports drinks. These innovative ideas
came from Google’s first (and current) marketing man-
ager, Susan Wojcicki, the woman in whose garage Google
began. Wojcicki is now a senior vice president who oversees
advertising on Google. Another way they made a profit was
that companies like Yahoo! (which had previously rejected
the offer to buy Google) hired them to become their default
search engine.
Page and Brin were in their twenties and running the
98 TECH TITANS

entire company. By June 1999, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner

Perkins had invested $25 million into Google. In August
Page and Brin moved their offices to Mountain View,
California. Their investors thought it would benefit them if
they had an experienced executive to help them, in a way to
give them some adult supervision. In order to get a better
idea of what it took to run a successful tech company, they
met with several successful men, including Steve Jobs and
Jeff Bezos. Page and Brin wanted Steve Jobs to be the CEO
of Google, but by that time Jobs was happy to be back at
Apple. On August 6, 2001, Dr. Eric Schmidt took over as
LflRRV PAGE 99

the Google CEO. Schmidt came to Google with lots of expe-

rience both in the world of technology and in business. He
had been on the research staff at the Computer Science Lab
of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and had been
in management at two different computer companies—CEO
of Novell and chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems.
With Schmidt as Google’s CEO, Larry Page became the
president of products, and Sergey Brin became the presi-
dent of technology.
Schmidt, Page, and Brin worked closely together as the
number of users and employees grew and grew. By the end
of 2000, they had indexed 1.3 billion web pages, which if
printed out would have been about seventy miles high. And
they anticipated the amount would double each year. Even
as their business was growing, both Page and Brin main-
tained their motto of “Don’t be evil” and had the desire to
do the best they could for their users.

In March of 2004 they moved into their new offices in

Mountain View called the Googleplex. Later that year,
in August, Google became a public company. Since they
wanted their complex to have a campus atmosphere, they
share offices. Page and Brin still share an office together.
100 TECH TITANS

with several flat-screen computer monitors lining the walls.

In the Googleplex, the atmosphere is relaxed. Google
doesn’t care what their employees wear, as long as they
wear something. Google provides their employees with lots
of perks, including three free meals a day served in sev-
eral different cafes, massages, yoga class, and the freedom
to play pool, play volleyball, swim in the lap pool, or play
roller hockey. Today TGIF meetings are done by videocon-
ference, which go out to remote locations and are recorded
so that employees in other time zones can watch later.
Part of their casual attitude can be seen in the Google
LRRRV PRGE 1D1

doodle. This is the name given to the Google logo when it

celebrates a person, holiday, or event. The doodles do not
change every day, but in the United States more than
three hundred doodles have appeared through the years.
The doodles have become an important part of the Google
home page. An archive of Google doodles can be seen at
www.google.com/logos.
Every Google employee is supposed to work on the 70-20-
10 principle. 70 percent of their time is to go to the primary
work of search and advertising, 20 percent to related ideas
connected to the main work, and 10 percent to work on new,
outside-the-box ideas. Page
and Brin believe the best
ideas are born out of the
10 percent outside-the-box
time—like Paul Buchheit s
development of Gmail.
In 2004 Page and Brin
were selected by Barbara
Walters as two of the ten
most fascinating people
of the year. During the
interview she asked them
if having parents who
1D2 TECH TITfiNS

were college professors was a major factor behind their suc-

cess. Instead of this being the most important thing, they
both credited their education in Montessori schools, which
trained them to be self-motivated and gave them the free-
dom to do things their own way.

THE NEXT PROJECT

It seems the creative ideas coming from Google never end.
They keep about one hundred new projects under devel-
opment at one time—most of them are kept secret. Page
says they usually try ten things that don’t work before
they find one thing that does work. Through the years,
they have developed many
innovative products, includ-
ing Google Toolbar, Google
News, Google News Archive,
Google Scholar, Google Maps,
Google Earth, Google Street
View, Google Docs, Google
Translate, Art Project, and
Picasa.
By 2007 both Google guys
were ready to settle down. In
May, Sergey Brin married
LRRRV PRGE 1D3

Anne Wojcicki on a private island in the Bahamas. Anne is

Susan Wojcicki’s sister and owner of her own biotech com-
pany that provides genetic information to individuals. The
bride and groom swam to a sandbar, where they exchanged
vows while wearing swimsuits.
In December 2007 Larry Page married Lucy Southworth
on a private island in the Caribbean. Lucy was a doctoral
student at Stanford working on a biomedical informat-
ics degree. Two years later, both Page and Brin became
fathers—each having a son.
The Google guys got a perk in 2007 that none of the
other Silicon Valley titans had ever had: a prime parking
spot for their company jets. Only a few miles from their
1D4 TECH TITANS

headquarters in Mountain View, California, is Moffett

Field, an airport run by NASA. It is not usually open to
private aircraft. In exchange for $1.3 million a year. Page
and Brin have permission to park their customized wide-
body Boeing 767-200 jet, as well as their other jets at the
Field. This agreement not only makes it convenient for the
Google executives to travel, but the money helps defray
NASA’s costs. Another perk for NASA is that they have
permission to put instruments and researchers on some
Google jet flights to gather scientific information like
studying meteor showers. In 2008 a German-built fighter
jet was added to the fleet.

eOYB TO MEN
By the end of 2010, the time had come to make some
changes in the executive structure of Google—the Google
boys no longer needed adult supervision. Page, Brin, and
Schmidt worked out the details of the change together.
Page would become the CEO. Brin would work on new prod-
ucts. Schmidt would have an advisory role as the executive
chairman.
Today Google gets hundreds of millions of queries each
day from users all over the world. It is one of the largest
computer systems in the world with hundreds of thousands
LflRRV PRGE 1D5

of servers that store indexed websites. Google is available

in 130 languages, including Klingon (the fictional language
from Star Trek). They have 20,000 employees and offices
in cities all over the world. In 2010 Google reported they
brought in 29.3 billion dollars. After expenses, they made a
profit of 8.5 billion dollars.
In their late thirties. Page and Brin have set their sights
and their profits on using technology in a variety of areas.
They are working on projects that include artificial intel-
ligence and a car that can drive itself. They also want to
reduce automotive carbon emissions and make cars safer.
On the East Coast, they have invested in wind farms to
produce electricity.
 TECH TITANS

Somehow, Page and Brin have kept sight of what is most

important. In 2009 Larry Page was the commencement
speaker at the University of Michigan, from which he, his
parents, and his brother graduated. He wore his father’s
academic hood and held his father’s diploma. He recalled
a trip he and his wife took to India. In spite of the work
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing to eradicate
polio, polio still exists there. In India Page and his wife saw
a young boy with a limp leg from polio. Page was moved by
the sight because his father had died from complications of
polio. Page, one of the world’s wealthiest men, reminded the
LRRRV PRGE 107

graduates, “Just like me, your families brought you here,

and you brought them here. Please keep them close and
remember: they are what really matters in life.”
Page and Brin were asked how it felt to have great
wealth. Page said, “If we were motivated by money, we
would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up
on a beach.”
Brin said, “From my parents, I certainly learned to be
frugal and to be happy without very many things. It’s inter-
esting—I still find myself not wanting to leave anything on
the plate uneaten. I still look at prices. I try to force myself
to do this less, not to be so frugal. But I was raised being
happy with not so much.”
Page and Brin’s friendship is as strong as ever and each
of them feels fortunate to have the other. Together they
have made Google a huge success. In some ways, success
hasn’t changed them at all. They still wear T-shirts, jeans,
and sneakers to work and still sometimes celebrate mile-
stones by going to Burger King.
 4^. yf rr“ ■ ,■
.; ' 'I ,, :

MARK ZUCKERBERG is a computer

programmer and businessman. He is best
known for creating Facebook.

' ,,1.', „ .,
k i,i. C i!i... % I..
MRRK ZUCKERBERG 109

□ UEBTIONB. DUEBTIONS^
mmm '" I raw rara wra» jji

PUESTiONS
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg asked a lot of questions when he
was a child. His father said, “For Mark, if he asked for
something, yes by itself would work, but no required much
more. If you were going to say no to him, you had better be
prepared with a strong argument backed by facts, expe-
riences, logic, reasons. We envisioned him becoming a
lawyer one day, with a near 100% success rate of convinc-
ing juries.”
But being a lawyer would not be part of Zuckerberg s
future.
Mark Zuckerberg was born on
May 14, 1984, to Karen and Ed
Zuckerberg. They lived in Dobbs
Ferry, New York, with Mark’s three
sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle.
His father is a dentist. His mother
is a psychiatrist but has always
helped out in her husband’s dental
office. Ed Zuckerberg computerized
his dental practice the year after
their son was born.
One year during their winter
11D TECH TITfiNS

break from school,

the Zuckerberg sib-
lings decided to film
a Star Wars parody
they called Star Wars
Sill-ogy. Each morning
they had production
meetings. Mark played
Luke Skywalker, and
his two-year-old sister walked around in a garbage can
to play R2-D2. A few years later, Zuckerberg chose a Star
Wars theme for his bar mitzvah.
Zuckerberg had been around high-tech toys and com-
puters all his life. The family had an early personal com-
puter—an Atari 800 that came with a disk that could be
programmed. Zuckerberg’s father taught him the Atari
BASIC programming, and then turned it over to him to
work on. Zuckerberg got a book about programming and
mostly taught himself how to do it.

PRODIGY
Mark Zuckerberg received his own computer when he was
in the sixth grade. About this time, Zuckerberg’s parents
hired David Newman, a software developer, to tutor him in
MRRK ZUCKERBERG 111

computers. Newman quickly realized his young pupil was a

computer genius. Next Zuckerberg enrolled in a graduate-
level computer course at a local college. When his father
took him to the first class, the teacher thought the boy was
there to accompany his dad. Ed Zuckerberg explained that
it was his young son who was the student.
By twelve, he was programming his computer, a
Quantex 486DX that ran Windows 3.1. One of his projects
was to create a network at the Zuckerberg home, which he
called ZuckNet. He designed a program that would allow
the family to send messages to one another from any com-
puter in the house. It was also used to let his father know
when his patients arrived at the dental office, located in
the basement of their home. This was only the beginning
of his projects.
He wrote programming for computer games—sometimes
incorporating some art drawn by his friends. One game
he designed was a version of Monopoly set in his middle
school. Another was a game of Risk, which Zuckerberg
explained was “centered around the ancient Roman
Empire. You played against Julius Caesar. He was good,
and I was never able to win.” Zuckerberg was a good stu-
dent at Ardsley High School, and especially excelled
in math and science. But Ardsley did not have enough
112 TECH TITANS

high-level computer science and math courses, so he trans-

ferred to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, a
hoarding school for high school students. Zuckerberg was
drawn not only to Exeter’s math and scince classes but
also to its excellent Latin program.
When Zuckerberg arrived at Exeter, he received the
Photo Address Book, which contained the photos, names,
and addresses of students and faculty. The students called
this book the facebook. This book helped him get to know
his fellow students. It didn’t take long for Zuckerberg to get
settled into his new life at Exeter. He kept a busy schedule
MRRK ZUCKERBERG 113

and was the captain of their fencing team, while keeping

up a demanding academic schedule. He was a gifted stu-
dent who could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and
ancient Greek.

BYNRPBE
During his senior year, Zuckerberg and his buddies were
sitting around discussing what they would choose as their
topics for their independent projects. Zuckerberg was listen-
ing to a playlist of music on his computer, when suddenly
it played the last song and it stopped. Zuckerberg thought
his computer should know what he wanted to listen to next.
In response to that moment, he
and his friend Adam DAngelo
designed a program that would
consider the listener s musical
taste, figure out the pattern
of which songs you usually lis-
tened to around one another,
and then choose a playlist that
would match your preferences.
He called the program Synapse.
Zuckerberg posted a free ver-
sion of it on the Internet.
114 TECH TITANS

Synapse was a hit. Not long after it was released,

major companies including Microsoft and America Online
approached the boys. Some companies offered to buy
Synapse from them at first for one million dollars, then
two million. Zuckerberg and DAngelo decided not to sell it.
Zuckerberg said, “I don’t really like putting a price tag on
the stuff I do. That’s just. . . not the point.”
By the time they went to college a few months later, they
changed their minds and decided they should have sold
Synapse after all. But by then the big companies no longer
wanted to buy it. Zuckerberg realized they had been naive

iinitit ttftittittt
MRRK ZUCKERBERG 115

about Synapse. He learned

that in the future he would
need legal advice when it came
to the products he developed.
Zuckerberg arrived at
Harvard in the fall of 2002.
He chose to begin working
toward a double major, one in
psychology and one in com-
puter science. He joined Alpha
Epsilon Pi, a Jewish frater-
nity. It was at one of their
fraternity parties a year later
that Zuckerberg met his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, while
standing in line for the bathroom. Chan described him as
“this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there.”
Zuckerberg admits that like a little kid, he gets bored
easily, but computers were always exciting. Together these
two realities gave Zuckerberg lots of ideas. While in col-
lege, he constantly created cool new computer programs. He
would work on a program for hours. When it was done, he
would show it to his friends, then move on to the next idea.
One program he created came from the idea that Harvard
students would be interested to see which other students
11B TECH TITANS

were enrolled in their classes. He designed a program to

make it possible and called it CourseMatch.

FRCEMRSH FRENZY
During the last week of October 2003, his sophomore year, a
friend gave him the idea for a program he called Facemash.
Zuckerberg hacked into Harvard sites and retrieved photos
of female students, then wrote an algorithm to run the pro-
gram. When Facemash was ready, it would pull up photos
of two girls side by side, and ask users to vote on which girl
was the “hottest.” He told a few friends about the site, and
they told a few friends, and they told a few friends. Within
four hours, more than 450 people visited the site and about
22,000 votes were placed. The guys at Harvard enjoyed
making their “hottest” choices. The girls at Harvard were
not happy about being judged on their looks. And Harvard’s
administration was unhappy with all of it. They disabled
Zuckerberg’s Internet connection.
Zuckerberg was brought in to the Administrative Board
to discuss his actions. When it was over, he had not been
suspended but was placed on probation. When the univer-
sity newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, asked Zuckerberg
about creating Facemash, he told them the part that inter-
ested him most was the programming that made it function.
 Sometimes Zuckerberg and his friends (who called him
Zuck) would get together at Pinocchio’s, the local pizza
joint, to talk about technology trends. He recalled how their
conversations usually went: “We’d say, 'Isn’t it obvious that
everyone was going to be on the Internet? Isn’t it, like, inev-
itable that there would be a huge social network of people?’
It was something that we expected to happen.”
About this time, senior students Divya Narendra and
twins Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss asked
Zuckerberg to help them with a website they were working
 1 -•■SI »

118 TECH TITANS

on, which they called Harvard Connection (later called

ConnectU). Zuckerberg was known as a programming
prodigy, while the other three were not computer program-
mers. Zuckerberg informally worked on their project for a
little while with no pay, then abandoned it altogether.
Instead, he began working on his next project—the one
that would make him famous.
In late January 2004 Zuckerberg began writing a pro-
gramming code. He was so immersed in his work that he
didn’t sleep. He didn’t eat. He didn’t talk to his friends. Just
like Bill Gates had done in his Harvard dorm room almost
exactly twenty-nine years before.
MARK ZUCKERBERG 119

THE FHCEBODK
It took him about a week to finish the program for the website
he called thefacebook.com. The color blue used on the logo
was Zuckerberg’s choice. He is color-blind to red and green,
so the color blue is the one he can
see the best. Zuckerberg would later ^
recall that he almost didn’t launch
the program, saying, “If I hadn’t
Im
launched it that day, I was about to
just can it and go on to the next thing
I was about to do.”
The site opened on February
4, 2004. Zuckerberg invited a few
friends, and they invited a few friends,
and they invited a few friends. With
Facemash Zuckerberg had used photos
without permission—but with the-
facebook.com, users themselves would
put up their own photos and personal
information. Zuckerberg told his friend
Eduardo Saverin, an economics major,
about it. Saverin saw the possibilities
and invested $1,000 toward start-up
costs of the project. His friend Dustin
12D TECH TITANS

Moskovitz helped with technical issues, and Chris Hughes

became the spokesperson for thefacebook.com team. It was
an instant success. In four days, there were more than 650
users at Harvard. After three weeks, Zuckerberg expanded
it to include other large universities.
Only a few months after the launch of thefacebook.com,
Zuckerberg moved operations to Silicon Valley. Moskovitz
went to California with Zuckerberg, and Saverin went to
New York in order to sell advertising. The house where they
lived in Los Altos—which they called Casa Facebook—
looked like a huge dorm room full of desks, computers.
MRRK ZUCKERBERG 121

and food, with a wall spattered with green paintball shots.

Also living in the house were Andrew McCollum and Sean
Parker, the cofounder of Napster. Through the summer,
they worked hard and played hard. Perhaps they played a
little too hard since Zuckerberg got a complaint letter from
the landlord asking them not to throw furniture into the
pool, climb on the roof, or talk outside after ten P.M.

COURT CnSE
On September 2, 2004, Divya Narendra, Cameron
Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss filed a lawsuit claiming
Zuckerberg stole the source code, business model, and origi-
nal idea from ConnectU. Suddenly Zuckerberg was faced
with defending himself against their claim. He denied
stealing anything from them. They were in a standoff.
In reality, the idea for a social network did not come
from either side. Zuckerberg was influenced by the “face-
book” Photo Address Book from his high school, Exeter.
And Friendster, a social network on the Internet, was
already being widely used. Only five days after Zuckerberg
launched thefacebook.com, on February 9, 2004, an article
appeared about it in the Harvard Crimson. In it Kevin
Davis, director of residential computing, said that Harvard
had been working toward creating a facebook of their own.
122 TECH TITANS

and they intended to complete it by the end of the spring

semester. Zuckerberg was quoted in the same article saying,
“Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal facebook
within Harvard. I think it’s kind of silly that it would take
the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do
it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.”
Zuckerberg maintained that thefacebook.com and
ConnectU were totally different—theirs focused on dating,
his on networking. The legal fees to fight the lawsuit would
cost $20,000 a month. Ultimately, the lawsuit was set-
tled for $65 million in a combination of cash and stocks.

Mark Zuckerberg , g
Wall Info fB Live Photos Boxes Video ^

Mark Zuckerberg Being named as TIME Person of the Year is a real honor

■
and recognition of how our littie team is building something that hundreds of
millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected. Tm
happy to be a part of that.

V H| Person of the Year 2010 - TIME

wvw.time.com
f wSH For connectirjg more than half s blBson people and mapping the soda!
relations among them; for creating e new system of e>:char>ging
information; and for charging how we alt live our lives, Mark EBbt...

^ 15 December 2010 at 12:50 ' View feedback (48,393) * Share

Mark Zuckerberg Had a good chat yesterday with John Battelle and Ttm
O'Reilly at the Web 2.0 Summit.
)rld a more Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Mark Zuckerberg^ "A
f "■ ^ Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg"

Mark Zuckerberg (Faceboc^), Ttm O'Reilh (0‘Reitiy Media,

Inc.), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing), ''A
MRRK ZUCKERBERG 123

(After this original settlement, the Winklevoss twins took

Zuckerberg back to court, claiming they were misled. In the
spring of 2011, a court of appeals ruled in the case. The
judge rejected the claim of the Winklevoss twins, and said
the time had come for litigation on the issue to be finished.)
By December 2004 thefacebook.com was being used at
hundreds of American college campuses and had nearly
one million users. By the next year, it was in high schools
and schools in foreign countries. In May 2005, they also
raised $12.7 million through an investor. In August 2005
Zuckerberg officially changed the name from thefacebook.
com to just Facebook. Their mission was to give people the
ability to share and make the world more connected.
Facebook was a huge hit. Once again major companies
approached Zuckerberg to buy his company. Yahoo! offered
to buy Facebook for $1 billion. Zuckerberg’s longtime girl-
friend, Priscilla Chan, who is in medical school, remem-
bered this period of time being stressful for him. No doubt
he took into consideration his previous experience when
he chose not to sell Synapse for a lot of money when he
could have.
In the end, Zuckerberg decided not to sell Facebook. He
felt that anyone could make a lot of money, but not everyone
could have a social network. Zuckerberg said, “It’s not about
124 TECH TITANS

the price. This is my baby, and I want to keep running it, I

want to keep growing it.”

RNOTHER ONE LEHVEB

HRRVRRD
By 2004, Zuckerberg decided to leave Harvard to devote
himself full time to his company—like Bill Gates had done
twenty-nine years before. Within the next year, he sought
out smart, young engineers and computer programmers
who were just out of college to work at Facebook. By the
close of 2005, Facebook had 5.5 million users.
Like Google, Facebook
provides its employees
with perks, like three
meals a day and snacks
for free—along with
dry cleaning. And like
Google, their profits come
from advertising. Sheryl
Sandberg, who previ-
ously worked at Google, is
the current chief operat-
ing officer who oversees
advertising. In some ways.
MRRK ZUCKERBERG 125

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Facebook can tailor advertising even more specifically than

Google can, because users’ profiles clearly state their inter-
ests. If a user “likes” an advertisement it is like a personal
endorsement. To have a friend recommend a product is the
best way to market any product—and that is exactly what
users do on Facebook. So along with more and more users
each day, Facebook also gathers more and more money from
companies who advertise their products.
As the popularity of Facebook took off, the site hit 100
million users in 2008. They had a toga party to celebrate
the milestone. By December 2009 Facebook had 350 million
12B TECH TITANS

users. The company grew so fast that each time they moved
into new offices, they quickly outgrew the space and had to
move again. Facehook plans to move in the near future to
Menlo Park, hut their current location, which Zuckerherg
calls the Bunker, has high ceilings, concrete floors, and big
windows. The halls have RipStiks (similar to skateboards)
lined up for anyone who wants to ride them. Zuckerherg
does not have an office—and no one else does either. It is
just an open space filled with lots of office furniture. There
is a conference room called the Aquarium in the middle
of the workspace, which has glass walls on three sides so
everyone can see in. Instead of taking Facehook public,
Zuckerherg has kept it as a private company with control
over it himself. Facehook has more than two thousand
employees and has offices all over the world.

FRHE, FORTUNE^ RND CHHRITY

Zuckerherg has become as famous as Facehook, but he
doesn’t like it when the focus is all about him. In 2010 he
was chosen as Time magazine’s Person of the Year. When
Zuckerherg told his father that he would be featured on the
cover of Time magazine, he added that it must have been a
slow year.
Being in the public eye isn’t always easy for Zuckerherg,
MRRK ZUCKERBERG 127

known for wearing jeans,

sneakers, T-shirts, and
hoodies. Some people
feel that it’s hard to
have a conversation with
him. Lev Grossman, the
reporter who wrote the
Person of the Year cover
story for Time magazine,
wrote that Zuckerberg
“approaches conversation
as a way of exchanging
data as rapidly and effi-
ciently as possible . . .
and if he has no data to transmit, he abruptly falls silent.”
Yet, he has a calm way about him, a warm smile, and an
easy laugh. His friends know Zuck to be a sympathetic lis-
tener to their problems. Zuckerberg’s mother says being
raised with three sisters taught him to have a sensitive side.
Also in 2010, Vanity Fair magazine chose Mark
Zuckerberg as number one on their list of the one hundred
most influential people (number two was Steve Jobs; number
three was Larry Page and Sergey Brin; number five was Jeff
Bezos). They wrote, “This year Vanity Fair anoints Zuck as
12B TECH TITANS

our new Caesar. He rules from the imperial capital of Palo

Alto, California, the Rome of our nascent millennium.” It
seems Zuckerherg has come full circle—when he created his
version of Risk when he was a kid, he played against Julius
Caesar hut couldn’t heat him. Now, according to Vanity Fair,
Zuckerherg has finally triumphed over Caesar.
Today Facebook has been embraced by people of all ages,
from teens to grandparents. As of July 2011, Facebook
had 750 million users. About 33 percent of all Americans
have a Facebook account, 70 percent of its users live out-
side the United States. One out of every thirteen people in
the entire world has a Facebook account. Each day around
700,000 new people join its membership.
Even though Zuckerherg is currently worth more than
$13.5 billion, he lives modestly. He does not own a TV, and
the car he drives is an Acura. For years he rented a house
near the Facebook office. In May 2011 Zuckerherg bought
his first home. Even though he paid $7 million for the five-
thousand-square-foot house, it is a modest choice for a man
with so much wealth.
Even though Zuckerherg is not extravagant in the way
he lives, he is extravagant in the way he gives. After hear-
ing the school system in Newark, New Jersey, was having
problems, Zuckerherg announced he would donate assets
MRRK ZUCKERBERG 129

worth $100 million to them. Mark Zuckerberg, the young-

est of the tech titans, has joined Bill Gates, one of the
oldest of the titans, in the Giving Pledge—a commitment
to give away much of his wealth to charity during his
lifetime or after his death. Zuckerberg said, “People wait
until late in their career to give back. But why wait when
there is so much to be done?”
13D TECH TITANS

WHEN BILL GATES WAS A TEEN, he dreamed that someday

there would be a computer on every desk and in every
home. His dream has nearly come true. According to
Gartner, Inc., an information research company, there are
currently more than one billion personal computers world-
wide. They estimate that by 2014 the number of PCs will
be two billion.
These modern tech titans—Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff
Bezos, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg—
each began their career by being interested in comput-
ers. Each of them brought their own individual skills and
innovations to the world of computing. Each of them has
changed the way we communicate and live our lives.
Today the next generation of tech titans is sitting in
classrooms all over the world. Who knows, maybe the next
great idea—the next huge jump in human communication—
is stirring in someone’s imagination right now.
CONCLUSION 131
132 TECH TITANS

MICROSOFT
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SBatiB, Wfl

FRCEBOOK
MBHIO Park,

GOOGLE —
Mountain View, Cfl

APPLE
CupBPtino, Cfl
TIMELINE 133

TIMELINE

1975: Microsoft foundBd

1976: RpplE ComputBPS BstablishBd

1981: Microsoft introduces personal computBr

1995: Rmazon opens for business

1996: Page and Brin create Backrub search engine

1997 Backrub renamed Google

1998: Google Inc. comes into existence; iMac unveiled

2001: Rpple releases IPod; Microsoft launches Xbox

2003: Zuckerberg launches Facemash

2004: TheFacebook.com opens

2007: Rmazon's Kindle released

2008: Facebook gets 1DD million users; Google

Chrome launches

2010: Rpple introduces the iPad

2012: Rpples iPhone 5 schedules release

134 TECH TITfiNS

5DDK5
Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead. New York, New York:
Penguin, 1995.
Imbimbo, Anthony. Steve Jobs: The Brilliant Mind
Behind Apple. Pleasantville, New York: Gareth Stevens
Publishing, 2009.
Sherman, Josepha. Jeff Bezos: King of Amazon. Brookfield,
Conneticut: Twenty-First Century Books, 2001.
Vise, David, and Mark Malseed. The Google Story. New
York, New York: Delacorte Press, 2005.
Young, Jeffrey S., and William L. Simon. iCon. Hoboken,
New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2005.

^3 Ij I CZ
W% I P msm SS

“A Conversation with Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos.” Charlie

Rose Show, February 19, 2007. http://www.charlierose.
com/view/interview/8784.
Allison, David. “Transcript of a Video History Interview
with Mr. William “Bill” Gates.” Bill Gates Interview,
Winner of the 1993 Price Waterhouse Leadership Award
for Lifetime Achievement, Computerworld Smithsonian
Awards. National Museum of American History,
Smithsonian Institute, 1993.
BIBLIDGRRPHV 135

Gates, Bill. 2011 Annual Letter from Bill Gates, 2011.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annual-letter/2011/
Documents/2011-annual-letter.pdf.
Gates, Bill, and Melinda Gates. Pledge letters, 2010. http://
givingpiedge.org/Content/media/PledgeLetters.pdf.
Gates, William H. “Raising Bill Gates.” CNNMoney, May 1,
2009.
Goodell, Jeff. “Bill Gates.” Rolling Stone, November 15,
2007: 170-173.
Grossman, Lev. “Bill Gates Goes Back to School.” Time,
June 18, 2007.
Grynbaum, Michael. Mark E. Zuckerherg '06: The whiz
behind thefacebook.com, June 10, 2004. http://www
.thecrimson.eom/article/2004/6/10/mark-e-zuckerberg
-06-the-whiz/.
Helft, Miguel. Google Founders’ Ultimate Perk: A NASA
Runway, September 13, 2007. www.newyorktimes.com
(accessed April 15, 2011).
Hertzfeld, Andy. Folklore, February 1981. http://folklore
.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Reality
_Distortion_Field.txt&sortOrder=SortbyDate.
Ignatius, Adi. “Meet the Google Guys.” Time, February 12,
2006.
“In Search of the Real Google.” Time, February 12, 2006.
13B TECH TITANS

“Inspiring Interview with Larry Page, Founder of Google.”

January 18, 2009. http://changeminds.wordpress
.com/2009/01/18/inspiring-interview-with-larry-page
-founder-of-google/.
Issacson, Walter. “In Search of the Real Bill Gates.” Time,
January 13, 1997: 44.
“Jeff Bezos Interview.” Academy of Achievement, May
4, 2001. http://www.achievenient.org/autodoc/page/
bezOint-1.
Jennings, Peter. “Persons of the Week: Lary Page and
Sergey Brin.” February 20, 2004. http://abcnews.go.com/
WNT/PersonOfWeek/story?id=131833&page=l.
Jobs, Steve. “Commencement address at Stanford
University.” Stanford University News, June 12, 2005.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/junel5/jobs-061505
.html
Kahney, Leander. John Sculley on Steve Jobs, The Full
Interview Transcript, October 14, 2010. http://www
. cultofmac .com/j ohn- sculley- on- st eve -j obs - the -full
-interview-transcript/63295/comment-page-l (accessed
March 15, 2011).
Krantz, Michael, David S. Jackson, Janice Maloney, and
Cathy Booth. “Steve s Two Jobs.” Time, October 18,
1999: 62.
BIBLIQGRRPHV 137

Levy, Steven. “The Future of Reading.” Newsweek,

November 7, 2007.
Moritz, Michael. “The Updated Book off Jobs.” Time,
January 3, 1983.
Morrow, Daniel. “Transcript of interview with Steve Jobs.”
Steve Jobs, Smithsonian Institution Oral and Video
Histories, April 20, 1995.
“NASA.” NASA Press Release, February 1, 2010. http://
WWW. nasa. gov/home/hqnews/2 010/feb/HQ_C 10-004
_Commercia_Crew_Dev.html.
Quittner, Joshua. “Jeff Bezos: Bio: An Eye On the Future.”
Time, December 7, 1999.
Sewer, Andy. “Gates on Gates.” Fortune International
(Asia), July 6, 2009: 40-40.
“Tales of a Real-Life Zuckerberg.” Dealbook, New York
Times, September 13, 2010.
Williams, Gregg, and Rob Moore. “The Apple Story.”
Apple History, December 1984. http://apple2history.org/
museum/artuckes/byte8412/.
Wilson, Lyzette. “One on One with Larry Page, CEO of
Google.” TeehBiz, August 5, 2001. http://www.biz
journals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2001/08/06/
newscolumn8.html.
13B TECH TITANS

“Zuckerberg Dad: Mark Got Computer Exposure Young ”

Associated Press. February 5, 2011. http://www.sun
times.com/lifestyles/3682480-423/zuckerberg-mark
-certain-early-son.html.

WEBSITES
http://blueorigin.com/nsresearch.html
http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html
http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html
http://www.exeter.edu/admissions/109_1220.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/about/en/us/default.aspx
INDEX 139

INDEX

Alcorn, Al, 37-38 founding of Blue Origin

All-One Farm, 37, 40 by, 70-73
Allen, Paul, 10—16, 15—16, introducing Kindle,
18-19 68-69
Altair 8800 computer, 16— investing in Google, 93
17, 39 Bezos, MacKinezie Tuttle,
AltaVista, 92 62, 65
Amazon.com, 57, 62—69 Bill & Melinda Gates
early version of, 66 Foundation, 25—26
location of, 132 Blue Origin, 70—73
Apple Computer, 21-22 Brennan, Chris-Ann, 43—44
founder of, 28 Brin, Anne Wojcicki, 102—
founding of, 40-45 103
location of, 132 Brin, Sergey, 5, 23, 74, 130,
return of Jobs to, 49—55 131
success of, 45-48 cofounding Google,
trouble at, 48-49 89-102
Apple I computer, 41 early life of, 75—77
Apple II computer, 42-43, education of, 78-79
60 partnership with Larry
ARPANET, 62 Page, 84-90, 103-107
Atari, 37—38 Buchheit, Paul, 101
Atari 800 computer, 110 Buffett, Warren, 26

Bechtolsheim, Andy, 93 Chan, Priscilla, 115, 123

Bezos, Jeff, 5, 56, 130, 131 Computer games, 111—112
early life of, 57—60 Computer technology.
education of, 60-61 innovators in, 4—5
family life of, 70—71 ConnectU (Harvard
founding of Amazon by, Connection), 117—118, 121,
62-68 122

■■
14D TECH TITANS

Cook, Tim, 54 family life of, 22—23

CourseMatch, 115-116 at Harvard, 14-17
D’Angelo, Adam, 113, 114 Harvard commencement
Davis, Kevin, 121—122 speech of, 24
in Lakeside
Programmers Group,
Engelbart, Doug, 21 12-14
Exidy Sorcerer computer, tribute to Steve Jobs, 55
82-83 wealth and philanthropy
of, 25-27
Giving Pledge, 26-27, 129
Facebook Gmail, 101
court case against, Google
121-124 casual environment of,
development of, 119—121 100-101
founder of, 108 cofounders of, 74, 80
homepage of, 118 development of, 91—92
location of, 132 financial success of,
success of, 124-128 97-99
Facemash, 116-118 homepage of, 90, 91
Farentino, Rick, 31-32 location of, 132
Filo, David, 92 naming, 91
Friendster, 121 official founding of,
93-95
uniqueness of, 95-96
Gates, Melinda French, 22 Googleplex, 99-102
Gates, William Henry III
(Bill), 4, 6, 39, 58, 130, 131
challenging personality Hewlett, Bill, 35
of, 8 Hewlett-Packard’s Explorers
computers and, 9—12 Club, 34
developing Microsoft, Hill, Imogene “Teddy,”
17-22 32-33
early life of, 7-8 Homebrew Computer Club,
education of, 8—9 39
INDEX 141

Hughes, Chris, 120 Kottke, Dan, 38

iCloud, 54 Lakeside Programmers

Intel microprocessor chips, Group, 12
13-16 Lang, Larry, 30—31, 34
Internet, 62-63, 85 Lisa project, 46-47
commerce on, 61—69 Lucas, George, 49-50
development of, 22-23
searching on, 86-90
social networking on, Macintosh computers, 21—
116-124 22, 46-48
iPad, 52 Mackintosh software, 21—22
iPhone, 52 McCollum, Andrew, 121
iPod, 52 McKenna, Regis, 42—44
iTunes, 52 Microsoft
cofounder of, 6
founding of, 17-19
Jobs, Paul, 30 growth of, 19-22
Jobs, Steve, 5, 21—22, 28, investing in Apple, 51
130, 131 location of, 132
Apple Computer and, Microsoft Disc Operating
41-55 System (MS-DOS), 20
early career of, 36-38 Moffett Field, 103—104
early life of, 29-31 Moskovitz, Dustin, 119—120
education of, 31—36
Google and, 98
Steve Wozniak and, Napster, 121
39-41 Narendra, Divya, 117—118
Jobs-Brennan, Lisa Nicole, suing Zuckerberg, 121—
44-45 124
NASA, 71-72
New Shepard, 71—73
Kaphan, Shel, 65 Newman, David, 110
Kindle, 69 NeXT, 49, 51
142 TECH TITANS

Page, Larry, 5, 23, 79, 80, Students for the

130, 131 Exploration and
cofounding Google, Development of Space
89-102 (SEDS), 61
early life of, 81—82 Sun Microsystems, 93
education of, 82—84 Synapse program, 113-115
other projects of, 102—103
partnership with Brin,
84-90, 103-107 Technological improvements,
Page, Lucy Southworth, 103 4
Parker, Sean, 121 Traf-O-Data, 14, 15
Personal computers, early,
34
Pixar, 49—51 Walter, Barbara, Google
cofounder interview of,
101-102
Quantex 486DX computer, Web crawlinng, 88
111 Winklevoss, Cameron and
Tyler, 117-118
suing Zuckerberg, 121—
The Road Ahead, 23 124
Winograd, Terry, 87
Wojcicki, Susan, 94, 97
Sandberg, Sheryl, 124 Wozniak, Steve, 34, 39-41,
Saverin, Eduardo, 119-120 42, 46
Schmidt, Eric, 98—99, 104
Sculley, John, 46, 48, 51-52
Search engines, 86—90. See Yahoo!, 92
also Google Facebook and, 123
Shaw, D. E., 63—64 Yang, Jerry, 92
Silicon Valley, 30, 30, 93,
102, 120-121
Social networks, 116—124 Zuckerberg, Mark, 23, 108,
Space tourism, 70—73 130, 131
INDEX

designing Synapse,
113-115
developing Facemash
program, 116—118
early life of, 109-110
education of, 110-113
Facebook profile of, 122
fame and fortune of, 126-
128
founding Facebook, 119-
121
lawsuit against, 121-124
running Facebook, 124—
126
as Time's Person of the
Year, 126—127
144 TECH TITfiNS

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PROFILES: THE CIVIL WRR

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PROFILES: WORLD WAR 11

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ffjgp yQUP typical biography.)

Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon ..

These are the men behind the names.

It takes more than one person to bring about change and

innovation. PROFILES: TECH TITANS focuses on six of the
most prominent figures in the technological world today:

SILL. EJ R T E S

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Find out about their childhoods, where they grew up, what
their families were like, their major accomplishments,
and how all of their lives intersect. Learn how important
they are to one another, and how the world as we know it
today would not be the same without them.

MSCH isbn 9780545365772

isbn 9780545365772
www.se
Cover des

$6.99 U
sbn 9780545365772