The Oral History Of Regis McKenna
2 min readDec 14, 2021
The aim of this pageđź“ť is share some notes from the Oral History of Regis Mckenna talking at length about his experience of the creation of Silicon Valley from the 1963 up until 2010s.
1. pt 1
- 1h:2min 1963, coming to California as a salesman
- 1h:18min 1966, joining GME that split from Fairchild Semiconductor — selling mainly to the military market
- 1h:25min A general point on how technology is created — tech business in Silicon Valley — from experimentation and handcrafting, similar to the story of Airbnb in the Masters of Scale podcast
- 1h:36min Factors of success for experimenting startups: It is not just know-how. You need the right backing — First, Fairchild. HP labs backed by HP. Commercial enterprises support their labs. Startups were failing a lot. More recently VC community.
- 1h:40min On leaders in Silicon Valley in the late 60s. Difficult to say. Fairchild had a long tail of people with expertise. Semiconductors were the business.
- 1h:45min On culture of Silicon Valley in late 60s. The start is microelectronics and applying circuitry into machine tools. Different kinds of instrumentation — medical, sonograms, etc. Circuitry became more sophisticated.
- 1h:50min Why risk-taking and innovation took roots in SV and not anywhere else. Characters were appearing against the eastcoast bunch like IBM, etc. — the characters are renegade west coasters (as expressed in 1984 Apple Commercial).
- 1h:58min Moving from GME to National Semiconductor after GME was bought by Philco and got destroyed.
