Latest / General Magic & The Soul of Tech / Ep. 2 | Size Corrupts: Why Great Tech Teams Stop Being Great | Scott Knaster

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Ep. 2 | Size Corrupts: Why Great Tech Teams Stop Being Great | Scott Knaster · General Magic & The Soul of Tech

0:00
SPEAKER_0: This is Mike Stern.
0:04
SPEAKER_1: And I'm Tom "Hersh" Hershenson.
0:05
SPEAKER_1: Welcome to General Magic & The Soul of Tech.
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SPEAKER_2: We believed we were building something that would change the world, and in some ways we did.
0:12
SPEAKER_2: In others, we didn't understand what we were setting in motion.
0:16
SPEAKER_2: The story of General Magic isn't over.
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SPEAKER_2: We're still living inside what it started.
0:26
SPEAKER_0: Our special guest today is Scott Knaster, one of the master storytellers of Silicon Valley.
0:31
Scott has worked in virtually every household name company
0:34
in Silicon Valley — starting at Apple,
0:36
working at General Magic,
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where the three of us met,
0:38
going on to work at Google,
0:40
at Microsoft, at Danger, Andy Rubin's first mobile telephone startup.
0:44
And Scott has recorded,
0:46
and lived through some of the seminal experiences that people in
0:50
the tech world can undergo.
0:52
I wanted to kind of start off, Scott,
0:54
by asking you to talk about the different places you've worked and how
0:58
the experiences differed from starting at Apple when it was not yet
1:01
the Apple we know today and the through line after that.
1:05
SPEAKER_3: I started off by falling in love with the company that Apple was in 1983.
1:11
I was struck by the same thing that so many other people have been struck by,
1:16
just the image that Apple projected,
1:19
the soul that was in its products
1:21
when everybody else was advertising big metal boxes,
1:24
Apple had an Apple II and it was beige and you could open it up.
1:29
And other people had ads with speeds and feeds and what kind of bus they had
1:34
and what the CPU was.
1:36
Apple had an ad with a guy sitting at his kitchen table doing finances
1:40
and his wife was in the kitchen too and she took her turn on the Apple II.
1:44
So I was I was just struck by the humanity that Apple brought and I ended up moving
1:50
from Colorado to California to work for the company.
1:53
SPEAKER_3: and I wasn't an engineer ever.
1:54
I never made any hardware or software,
1:56
but I was really good at learning things and teaching other people.
2:00
SPEAKER_3: So I did support and writing.
2:03
I started at Apple,
2:04
did that for a few years and moved on to a lot of the other places you mentioned,
2:08
trying to find,
2:09
I guess,
2:09
the most Apple like or the most human or humanitarian place in all
2:14
of those companies.
2:16
and General Magic certainly felt that way maybe even more than Apple itself by
2:21
the time I went there in 1990.
2:25
I felt really privileged to get to be at General Magic in the early days
2:29
with people like Bill and Andy who were my heroes in tech
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because like i said i never made any software i never built any hardware
2:38
but they needed somebody to explain all this to developers and that i could do.
2:43
And then at the other places:
2:45
really similar i was always looking for something that touched people
2:50
that wasn't just about technology but was about something fun or interesting
2:55
or life improving, although that might be a little bit lofty of a goal.
2:59
SPEAKER_3: You know, if I'd wanted that I probably would have joined the Peace Corps.
3:02
But I just I loved the idea of using technology to see where we could go as humanity
3:08
and so the best part was getting to be around all these incredible projects
3:12
and super smart, thoughtful, usually thoughtful people.
3:17
and then one through line in particular that's really affected me now is
3:21
at General Magic I learned the tradition of storytelling in tech.
3:25
And I learned it from Andy Hertzfeld
3:27
and Darin Adler were very this was very important to them
3:31
and they would sit us all down.
3:33
SPEAKER_3: We would sit around and tell stories fairly often.
3:36
I think Andy said he got it from Woz I'm not sure where Woz got it from,
3:40
but I guess it's been passed on.
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SPEAKER_3: And from this I learned that this was probably my thing that I ought to do is tell stories.
3:48
SPEAKER_3: And so blogs came along and I started writing them in blogs.
3:52
And then my life took a surprising left turn and I ended up performing on stage,
3:57
in shows and musicals.
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SPEAKER_3: And decided to start telling these stories on stage.
4:01
SPEAKER_3: And that was incredibly fulfilling.
4:04
SPEAKER_3: and now I guess we're in an age of Substack.
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So I decided to start writing all my stories down before I forget them,
4:12
which is starting to happen.
4:13
So now I can look things up in my own archive on Substack,
4:16
and I really have a have fun putting those out.
4:18
SPEAKER_0: Yeah, I think you have one of the stellar collections, other than the Computer History Museum.
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SPEAKER_0: Any anywhere in the Bay Area at least, you know, of great artifacts.
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SPEAKER_0: because you share some of them online and they're terrific.
4:29
SPEAKER_0: you were one of the earliest employees at General Magic.
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SPEAKER_0: I was one of the first twenty, and you were there long before I was.
4:34
was it an Apple thing or was it something that Andy
4:36
and Bill themselves particularly wanted to do.
4:39
you were a technical writer to use the old term,
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but you were writing the documentation, both for users and for developers.
4:46
SPEAKER_0: But you were there at the beginning before there was a product, before there was a mock-up
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SPEAKER_3: Right.
4:49
SPEAKER_0: of a product.
4:50
SPEAKER_0: that's really unusual.
4:51
so you were in at the very beginning of the conceptualization,
4:55
development and instantiation of the product.
4:58
SPEAKER_0: was that unique to us or was that an Apple thing?
5:00
SPEAKER_3: I don't think it was an Apple thing.
5:02
SPEAKER_3: I think it was I think it was unusual.
5:04
And I think it was kind of like you know,
5:06
draft the best player technique in football I was around and available
5:12
and they knew they would need somebody like me eventually,
5:16
and people there knew me, so That's how I got in.
5:19
SPEAKER_3: And I was number 14, by the way.
5:23
And the way the way I got in is a bit of a Silicon Valley story too,
5:26
which is at Apple,
5:28
I was working at Apple and there was a thing,
5:29
an experiment called Rumormonger, written by Harry Chesley.
5:33
And this was a really a wonderful Apple talk-based piece of software that you ran
5:38
on your on your computer.
5:40
SPEAKER_3: And it talked to other clients running the software on other computers.
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And you could type in a message like,
5:46
"Hello from Deanza 1," and it would float out anonymously,
5:52
on the network to and other people would randomly see this message.
5:56
And after many clients,
5:58
many people typing many messages,
6:00
you didn't see every message,
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you just saw what the program picked for you at random.
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SPEAKER_3: So it was chaotic and anarchic, and it was shut down before too long.
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But before it was shut down,
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I saw a message float by one day that said,
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Phil Goldman is leaving Apple for General Magic.
6:18
SPEAKER_3: I didn't know what General Magic was.
6:20
SPEAKER_3: I knew Phil.
6:21
and I heard that there was a going-away party,
6:24
so I walked across the street to the going-away party.
6:27
found out about General Magic and talked to Dan Winkler,
6:31
who of course was at General Magic very early working on the scripting language
6:36
for Magic Cap And I had known Dan because we wrote a book together about hypertalk.
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SPEAKER_3: So Dan was kind of my ticket and said, we're gonna need a technical writer.
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SPEAKER_3: Maybe it could be you.
6:47
SPEAKER_3: And I interviewed and I knew Andy a little bit, Bill not at all, Marc not at all.
6:52
and I didn't need to be wowed,
6:55
but they wowed me and they decided they could spend a headcount on
6:58
a technical writer.
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SPEAKER_0: Yeah, when I left academia, I spent a year in industry as a technical writer.
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SPEAKER_0: they'd handed me the finished thing and said, "Okay, now you write the documentation."
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SPEAKER_0: So I didn't have a clue, right?
7:08
SPEAKER_0: And you know, it that's so different from your experience.
7:11
Yeah, and it's incredibly valuable I mean,
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the earlier you can get there as the person documenting it,
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the better the job you can do because you can you can do more rewrites
7:21
and you can see the software evolve or the product evolve.
7:25
You can see the dead ends,
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and then when you're explaining the way it is now, you understand how it got there.
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SPEAKER_3: And so you can you can be more informative.
7:33
And I think actually now that I think about it,
7:36
Apple on the Macintosh kind of worked that way in
7:38
that they had several technical writers led by Caroline Rose working
7:43
on Inside Macintosh,
7:44
which is the programming documentation for the Mac, very early on.
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SPEAKER_3: And they went through many, many drafts of the docs as the software evolved.
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And I've heard Andy talk about how
7:55
If Caroline couldn't explain how something worked,
7:58
they redesigned it because they knew it wasn't simple or powerful
8:02
or well structured enough.
8:04
So in that way the writer actually affected the design of
8:08
the products Now not every technical writer is Caroline Rose.
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SPEAKER_3: There's only one of her, but if you choose well, then having a writer in early can pay off.
8:16
SPEAKER_0: What was the hardest thing to explain both to developers and to the partners
8:21
Well, I worked mainly on MagicCap and MagicCap is a direct descendant of
8:27
the graphical user interface frameworks we all worked on and knew at Apple.
8:31
SPEAKER_3: So that was relatively straightforward.
8:34
SPEAKER_3: I worked a little bit on Telescript.
8:36
SPEAKER_3: That was a lot harder because it wasn't the descendant of anything that was that was popular.
8:43
And in particular,
8:44
I remember my fellow writer,
8:46
David Sloo, saying we're writing about air travel in the 1700s.
8:52
And I said yeah it's essentially science fiction because we were writing
8:56
about networks and agents and there weren't any and unlike MagicCap,
9:01
I had trouble conceptualizing it.
9:03
SPEAKER_3: And so did everybody else, really.
9:05
SPEAKER_3: So I just remember one day having an aha moment and realizing I like to oversimplify.
9:10
SPEAKER_3: That's how I get my best insights.
9:12
And just realizing,
9:13
These are little programs that go out in the network and do things and talk
9:17
to other little programs out in the network.
9:19
Just that simplification helped me start to grok it once I figure out
9:23
the super simplification, then I can often explain it.
9:27
But I think the hardest thing
9:28
to explain was maybe what we'd now call agentic behavior,
9:32
just agents going out into the cloud and doing something independently with
9:37
a manifest and a list of rules that they have to follow.
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SPEAKER_3: That was the most futuristic.
9:43
SPEAKER_0: Did you have any culture shock working?
9:45
I mean, you know,
9:45
I think of Microsoft,
9:46
you know, and back when we were building Magic and building the Alliance.
9:49
SPEAKER_0: Well, the Alliance was against the Axis, which was Microsoft and IBM.
9:55
SPEAKER_0: Was there culture shock when you got to Redmond?
9:57
SPEAKER_0: it was the Borg, right?
9:58
SPEAKER_0: back in the nineties.
9:59
SPEAKER_0: How did that feel?
10:00
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, definitely culture difference, occasionally culture shock.
10:04
SPEAKER_3: So I worked in the Mac group at Microsoft, which was in Mountain View.
10:09
And I remember when the recruiter called and I called her back and she said,
10:13
Wow, none of the Mac people ever call me back.
10:15
SPEAKER_0: Yeah.
10:16
but it was it was kind of the dawn of the browser era of the internet and I wanted
10:21
to find out what was going on.
10:23
our group in Mountain View was led by a guy named Don Bradford,
10:27
who was ex-Apple, and his whole team was ex-Apple.
10:30
SPEAKER_3: And Don made it a point to keep us away from Redmond physically and spiritually.
10:36
SPEAKER_3: So my contact with the actual Borg was fairly limited.
10:41
Like I remember when I started,
10:43
I was telling the admin there,
10:44
I got an email to go to Redmond for training for orientation.
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SPEAKER_3: And she said, yeah, don't worry, we'll take care of that.
10:50
SPEAKER_3: So we were Borg super light, very light, but occasionally.
10:54
SPEAKER_3: For example, that was the group that worked on Internet Explorer for Macintosh.
10:59
And We got the word that our next version had to have the Windows logo in the corner
11:04
as the progress bar.
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SPEAKER_3: And no, that can't happen.
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SPEAKER_3: So we had a little a little fight about that.
11:11
And but Don did a great job of keeping us separate and it paid off because Microsoft
11:16
for several years wrote some really good Macintosh software against all odds.
11:21
It was the dissonance of Microsoft did good Mac like Mac software
11:25
while Netscape was producing the same thing for both Macs and Windows,
11:30
which is kind of the reverse of what you would think.
11:33
SPEAKER_3: But that's that's how it worked out.
11:34
SPEAKER_3: I'm a cultural anthropologist amateur.
11:37
And I used to love to,
11:39
when I finally did get to Redmond,
11:41
just kind of walk around at night,
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walk around the buildings and the campus,
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just to see how this company grew up and how it was different from the from
11:48
the other companies I had been at.
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SPEAKER_3: You know, because it has a rich history.
11:51
SPEAKER_3: it's fun just to what do they put up on the walls?
11:53
SPEAKER_3: What kind of projects are people working on?
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SPEAKER_3: and it was very, very different in very many ways.
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SPEAKER_3: And you know, I did the same thing at Google.
12:02
And now I haven't been at these companies for a while,
12:04
but things started to get locked down, even for employees.
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SPEAKER_3: Like when I left Google, there were starting to be silos of based on the org chart.
12:13
SPEAKER_3: You know, if you worked in Building A, you didn't have access to Building B.
12:17
SPEAKER_3: And I think Apple pioneered a lot of that.
12:20
SPEAKER_3: But I guess Microsoft is probably the same way.
12:23
And so for folks like me who like to skulk around and see what's going
12:28
on unofficially at night, I don't know that you can do that anymore.
12:32
SPEAKER_1: I wanna recall
12:33
SPEAKER_3: Right.
12:33
SPEAKER_1: the story.
12:34
I know you're the storyteller,
12:36
but I remember after you joined Microsoft,
12:39
we had lunch after you'd come back from Redmond for a company meeting.
12:43
SPEAKER_1: I think it was an all hands.
12:44
SPEAKER_3: I did get there eventually.
12:46
SPEAKER_1: And you said you said all these guys care about is the win.
12:49
SPEAKER_1: They don't care about a vision, they don't care about helping the world.
12:52
SPEAKER_1: It's just look at the revenue and the profit, and it's just a really simple yardstick.
12:59
And I remember feeling not that was an evil way to think about the world,
13:04
but it just seemed so cold and soulless.
13:08
And yet there was Microsoft still in business,
13:10
and warm and fuzzy, cuddly General Magic was a heap of ashes.
13:16
So that was my the story that came to mind talking about the culture shock
13:21
or culture shift between General Magic and your days at Microsoft.
13:26
SPEAKER_1: Did it feel that way at Microsoft or was that just kind of a one-off experience?
13:31
SPEAKER_3: No, in fact, I can flesh that out a little.
13:33
SPEAKER_3: because I was at Apple when Apple was descending.
13:36
when Steve Jobs came back and Apple was at its lowest point,
13:39
and Steve connected with Bill Gates to have there be Microsoft software for the Mac,
13:44
that's when I was at Microsoft.
13:46
SPEAKER_3: And Microsoft was riding pretty high at the time.
13:49
SPEAKER_3: And so what I noticed culturally was at Apple it has to be cool.
13:53
SPEAKER_3: At Microsoft, it has to win.
13:55
SPEAKER_3: And that's my oversimplification of how things worked at the time.
13:58
And the other the thing that kind of grew out of that was at Microsoft
14:02
the leadership would Decide on a direction and send the message down.
14:07
SPEAKER_3: And at each level it would be refined, and everybody would say, Yep, and agree and work on it.
14:13
SPEAKER_3: And the incentive was: well, the last time we did this, we succeeded.
14:16
SPEAKER_3: we did really well, so let's let's do that again.
14:19
SPEAKER_3: That formula wins.
14:20
SPEAKER_3: At Apple, The leadership would have a vision and send it down.
14:23
SPEAKER_3: And then the next level would say, I know what they really want.
14:26
SPEAKER_3: It's this other thing, it's similar, but we need to do it this way.
14:29
SPEAKER_3: And then the next level down would say, That's not what they want.
14:32
SPEAKER_3: It'll be much better if we do it this way.
14:34
SPEAKER_3: And then nothing got done the way the leadership wanted it to get done.
14:39
You had a thousand cooks,
14:40
and none of them Tim,
14:42
and if you had a genius somewhere doing a genius thing by themselves,
14:46
that's when you had a hit product or a great success.
14:49
But there was no organizational process that I could see that caused success
14:53
to happen until Steve came back and became the genius at the top.
14:57
SPEAKER_3: And you know, Apple did not fade from the earth.
15:00
SPEAKER_3: Apple did okay after that.
15:02
SPEAKER_3: But yeah, I remember I remember that distinctly also.
15:05
SPEAKER_3: And I don't think people there, myself included, thought it was soulless.
15:09
It was less soulful than Apple,
15:11
but I think Apple had to back off of that soul somewhat to achieve success
15:17
because you need discipline too.
15:18
Yeah, but I would say that,
15:20
we've gone from soulful to a little less soulful to soulless to worse in
15:26
the valley these days.
15:28
SPEAKER_0: it's not just winning, it's about wealth, power and the depredations of greed.
15:33
you can contest that if you don't see but that's my sense of what
15:36
the broliarchy has wrought in the valley.
15:38
SPEAKER_0: You know, nobody cares about people or customers or anything else.
15:42
SPEAKER_0: They care about money and winning.
15:44
SPEAKER_3: I don't think that's wrong.
15:45
SPEAKER_3: The only thing I would say there are Maybe there are hopeful spots.
15:49
SPEAKER_3: Maybe there are people that don't feel that way.
15:52
SPEAKER_3: And I'm might have trouble naming any, but
15:53
SPEAKER_0: Yeah.
15:54
but just I'm just too optimistic and too much of an optimist and even a Pollyanna
16:00
to accept that it's totally universal, but it's the preponderance for sure.
16:05
I remember When digital TV started to happen and streaming and D VRs,
16:11
and it seemed to me there were two factions.
16:13
There was the Silicon Valley, Apple,
16:17
Microsoft,
16:18
the tech faction, and the traditional entertainment TV company, studio faction.
16:25
And it seemed like the tech faction wanted to succeed
16:29
by giving customers everything they wanted and charging them for it.
16:33
So for example,
16:34
I remember attending a presentation about digital video
16:37
and someone saying you'll be able to get any movie you want whenever you want but
16:42
of course that doesn't take into account things like rights who stuff belongs to
16:47
and what and or not even not even just controlling rights but let's take this off
16:51
the market for a while so it's worth more in six months.
16:54
SPEAKER_3: Which really wasn't the space that Silicon Valley was thinking in.
16:58
They wanted to provide abundance,
17:00
anything you want on any device,
17:02
and you'll pay for a subscription or you'll pay for a movie.
17:05
That was Steve Jobs' whole push behind selling music in the iTunes store
17:10
for ninety-nine cents a song.
17:12
if it's easier to get a good clean copy through an easy user interface for
17:17
a buck rather than steal it, people will pay a buck.
17:20
And he wanted to make sure they paid that buck,
17:23
but he wanted to make sure it was easy and they got whatever they needed
17:25
and whatever they wanted.
17:26
SPEAKER_3: And I'm not sure we still have that anymore.
17:29
SPEAKER_0: Well, we're the we're the customers are the products now, you know, algorithmic extraction.
17:33
SPEAKER_0: it's about your personal data.
17:35
SPEAKER_0: you're the customer to be sold to advertisers.
17:37
SPEAKER_0: it's not the product or the service, it's you.
17:41
SPEAKER_0: And you know, that's what surveillance capitalism is all about.
17:44
SPEAKER_0: you were at Google when this transformation was underway.
17:47
I mean, you were at Google and it was still do no evil and you started right in
17:51
the do no evil era.
17:52
SPEAKER_3: Yep, yep, yep.
17:53
SPEAKER_0: But stayed longer.
17:54
SPEAKER_0: I mean, again, did you see that happening?
17:55
SPEAKER_0: Or am I over dramatizing it?
17:59
SPEAKER_3: I definitely saw things change when I went there.
18:03
SPEAKER_3: So I got there in just after the IPO, tragically for me, in
18:08
SPEAKER_0: Yeah.
18:10
SPEAKER_3: 2006.
18:11
SPEAKER_3: And don't be evil was sincere.
18:13
SPEAKER_3: It was absolutely created and utilized in all sincerity.
18:18
SPEAKER_3: I wasn't there when Google figured out how to sell ads.
18:23
but my understanding is that a lot of the early engineers,
18:27
just like engineers now, didn't like ads, didn't like the idea.
18:31
So they made sure that the ads were relevant and were clearly marked
18:36
and were not intermixed with search results and whatever evil it was to put ads
18:41
on search results was reduced to the minimum evil.
18:44
I don't know, maybe,
18:46
but and over time I think there was tension you know,
18:49
the bug in capitalism is you gotta keep growing.
18:52
SPEAKER_3: so that means sometimes old lines that used to exist are crossed.
18:57
I wanna think that Google still maintains some of those lines and I think they do,
19:01
but at the same time, things have been pushed a lot.
19:05
SPEAKER_3: Google used to strictly be opt-in for new technologies and ideas and features.
19:11
SPEAKER_3: And I don't feel like I get to opt in to stuff all the time now.
19:17
SPEAKER_3: And then for me, I left Google in 2022.
19:20
I think it was a year later that Google did their layoffs,
19:23
the first real substantial layoffs,
19:28
in the most cruel and apparently random way possible.
19:32
You know,
19:32
the way where you show up for work,
19:34
and if you haven't checked your personal email at 5 a.m.,
19:37
your badge doesn't work,
19:38
and the security guard tells you... something, I don't know.
19:43
And I think a lot of people,
19:45
myself included,
19:46
believed that there was enough don't be evil left that wouldn't happen there,
19:52
that it happened at other places.
19:54
SPEAKER_3: and so to me that was a massive milestone.
19:57
And I thought a lot about the people who were laid off that I had worked with,
20:02
but also about the managers left behind who lost half their groups with no say in
20:07
who was going or why.
20:09
it was a really I think a turning point in at least how I externally as
20:17
a former employee there thought about the company and I don't know
20:21
if it enabled other things to happen in the future or not, but it wasn't good.
20:28
I'm very I'm fascinated by that, Scott,
20:31
because there what you're describing in my mind is an inflection point, right?
20:35
SPEAKER_1: That once
20:36
SPEAKER_3: Mm-hmm.
20:36
SPEAKER_1: upon a time it would have been this way, but in that moment it was the other way.
20:41
do you have a theory of how those shifts occur in the human beings who are
20:45
in leadership and who evolve in a certain way, for better or for worse?
20:50
SPEAKER_3: Size corrupts.
20:54
SPEAKER_3: Google held on to its soul longer than it should have been able to.
20:59
SPEAKER_3: when I started, there were over 10,000 employees.
21:02
And yet every week there was a company-wide meeting with the founders
21:06
who would answer literally any question.
21:08
and usually with direct real answers and I was amazed that they could do that and
21:14
the information didn't leak and they trusted us and so we got to ask those sorts
21:19
of questions and get those sorts of answers.
21:21
And that was in two thousand six and then over time maybe it took ten years
21:28
that began to break down.
21:29
SPEAKER_3: there were leaks of information.
21:31
SPEAKER_3: People started gaming the ability to ask questions.
21:34
SPEAKER_3: You know, they used it to push their project or just get some fame internally.
21:39
SPEAKER_3: And then people started surreptitiously live streaming the meetings, which
21:43
SPEAKER_0: Yeah.
21:44
SPEAKER_3: made no sense to me.
21:45
SPEAKER_3: You know, what why?
21:46
SPEAKER_3: What could you possibly get out of that?
21:50
And eventually the rules of the meeting changed drastically,
21:54
it happened over time,
21:55
and I felt like it was inevitable given the numbers of people,
21:58
the size of the company.
21:59
SPEAKER_3: So size corrupts, size perverted the mission.
22:05
SPEAKER_3: There's some point where it's just too many.
22:08
SPEAKER_3: I remember reading about the original Macintosh team.
22:12
SPEAKER_3: Before I worked at Apple.
22:14
SPEAKER_3: Steve Jobs, talked about ideal team size, twenty, thirty, fifty.
22:19
SPEAKER_3: But when it gets too big, you just can't you can't do it anymore.
22:23
SPEAKER_0: was a client of ours, my law firm, my original law firm, after he left Apple.
22:27
And the literally the week we made the Law 100 and hired our 100th lawyer,
22:33
he came to lunch and he said,
22:35
you know, when a company hits a hundred people, it's dead.
22:37
SPEAKER_0: We all just sat there and went,
22:39
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
22:39
SPEAKER_0: we had met you know, a success milestone, right?
22:42
SPEAKER_3: Sure.
22:43
SPEAKER_3: I'm sure you guys know the term building edif edifice complex.
22:47
SPEAKER_3: in the valley when you get your big building it's all over.
22:49
SPEAKER_3: You know, all the good stuff happens in the small startup building.
22:54
I wanted to go back to your days at Apple,
22:57
and you have I think some stories and some first hand experience
23:01
or certainly observed Steve Jobs,
23:04
what I'm curious about is the gap between the wizard and the guy who was behind
23:10
the curtain.
23:11
You know,
23:11
there's mythology and part of what storytellers do,
23:14
I suppose,
23:16
is create or pass along myths, but there's a gap between the myth and reality.
23:22
SPEAKER_1: What did you see behind the curtain that wasn't congruent with that mythology?
23:26
SPEAKER_3: Well, Steve Jobs was a human being, as far as I know, and he was extraordinary, singular.
23:32
SPEAKER_3: And it's hard to describe in what ways.
23:35
SPEAKER_3: he had an intuition about design and human taste that I've never seen anybody else have.
23:42
But he had the ability to transmit his vision through other people
23:46
who could do what he wanted them to do and then iterate,
23:50
iterate,
23:50
iterate until it matched not necessarily the first thing he thought of,
23:54
but the thing that he thought was best.
23:57
SPEAKER_3: and I don't think any of that is a lie or mythology.
24:01
He really did have that ability to invent things in his head,
24:05
imagine how they ought to be, and guess correctly.
24:08
You know,
24:08
he figured out,
24:10
through whatever power he possessed, what would be the best right way to do things.
24:16
SPEAKER_3: Not a hundred percent of the time.
24:17
SPEAKER_3: maybe ninety-seven percent of the time, you know, he loved the round mouse.
24:21
SPEAKER_3: Nobody else wanted a round mouse.
24:23
SPEAKER_3: but gosh, everything else, so much else that he nailed.
24:27
And he was probably utopian enough to not think of
24:31
the social media tech bro hell we've ended up in either.
24:35
because he was I think utopian is the perfect word for him, Mike,
24:39
because he saw technology as a way for people to do more and get better
24:45
and get happier.
24:48
SPEAKER_3: you know, there are rules, rules of Steve Jobs stories.
24:51
SPEAKER_3: any story with Steve Jobs in it becomes a Steve Jobs story.
24:54
You know,
24:55
if you say,
24:57
I swam the length of the Mississippi, and when I climbed out, Steve Jobs was there.
25:02
SPEAKER_3: That becomes a Steve Jobs story.
25:04
SPEAKER_3: He's the most interesting character in the story.
25:06
SPEAKER_3: Within a few days it'll spread around social media because it's a Steve Jobs story.
25:12
I wrote an hour-long stage show about my experiences in Silicon Valley
25:17
with like this much Steve Jobs in it.
25:19
SPEAKER_3: He took over my show because he's so interesting.
25:22
he's the most interesting human being I can think of in the last 75 years,
25:27
I would, you know, do this show for people who weren't in tech.
25:30
SPEAKER_3: It was mostly about things in tech.
25:32
SPEAKER_3: And at the end of the show they'd say, What was Steve Jobs like?
25:35
SPEAKER_3: And Steve Jobs was like five percent of the show because he's fascinating and he deserves it.
25:41
SPEAKER_3: And wanna hear a real quick Steve Jobs story?
25:43
SPEAKER_1: Of course, of
25:44
SPEAKER_3: I used to go to the Apple shareholders meetings back when Those happened in physical space.
25:50
SPEAKER_3: And the main reason I went was Steve was there, and you'd get a little bit of Steve.
25:54
SPEAKER_3: he'd come on at the end and do QA.
25:57
SPEAKER_3: And one year he was up there looking not really happy to be there.
26:01
SPEAKER_3: And the first question was, Steve, what keeps you up at night?
26:04
SPEAKER_3: And he said, having to answer questions at the shareholders' meeting.
26:09
SPEAKER_3: That was his whole answer.
26:11
Then the next person got up and said,
26:13
Steve, I'm worried because the Mac only has 5% market share.
26:18
SPEAKER_3: And how can we succeed as shareholders of this company when the Mac is only 5% of the market?
26:24
SPEAKER_3: Steve said, Market share isn't everything.
26:28
SPEAKER_3: Take your car, for example.
26:30
SPEAKER_3: What do you have?
26:30
SPEAKER_3: A Mercedes?
26:31
SPEAKER_3: And she said, Yes, yes, I have a Mercedes.
26:34
SPEAKER_3: He said, Well, Mercedes has a lower than five percent market share, but they're doing fine.
26:39
SPEAKER_3: And I'm like, how did he pin it on Mercedes?
26:42
SPEAKER_3: it didn't seem like he knew her?
26:43
He's not gonna plant a shill in the audience,
26:46
but that's the time when I think maybe he was something more than a human being.
26:50
But I think he was just a super extraordinary person and he was not perfect
26:54
and he did things that were less than perfect,
26:57
but I also think he grew and changed over his life,
26:59
like so many of us do,
27:01
and matured and became a better human being and a better business person.
27:05
SPEAKER_3: I don't think the stories about him are often exaggerated.
27:09
SPEAKER_3: I think most of them are well earned and deserved.
27:12
SPEAKER_1: Did you feel any sort of kinship with Apple when you were there that flowed through Steve?
27:17
I mean, did you feel that,
27:18
you know,
27:19
he was the leader and that he had a charisma that infused what you
27:24
and your colleagues were doing there?
27:25
SPEAKER_3: Absolutely.
27:26
I went there in eighty three and I felt that way about him and then when
27:29
the Macintosh came out and didn't succeed and he left the company in eighty five,
27:33
a lot of us were bereft.
27:35
I was bereft because he seemed to be not just the product guy,
27:38
but the person who understood what we were doing.
27:42
Apple, had become as often happens with founders,
27:45
Apple was like a physical manifestation of what he wanted to do,
27:50
what he thought Woz was the technical genius.
27:53
But really kind of through the Apple II,
27:56
sort of the Apple III, which had Apple II heritage, and not so much the Mac.
28:01
SPEAKER_3: Steve was there the whole time.
28:03
SPEAKER_3: so yeah, when he was there, you felt like he was running the show.
28:08
SPEAKER_3: And if you didn't think so, he might show up and then you would know for sure.
28:12
SPEAKER_3: That never happened to me, but it did happen.
28:15
So and yeah,
28:16
when he left it was you know,
28:19
Apple became soulless and directionless until he came back.
28:23
SPEAKER_3: It's the evidence is pretty clear.
28:25
I want to pivot to talking about the dark side with respect
28:29
to what General Magic you could say helped put in motion in terms
28:35
of what Mike was alluding to earlier,
28:38
surveillance capitalism,
28:39
a increasingly polarized society, mass disinformation, and the list goes on.
28:46
SPEAKER_1: Why do you think at General Magic we didn't consider those possibilities?
28:51
I remember you once saying to me,
28:52
human beings get into trouble when they forget that they're animals.
28:56
And certainly technology has enabled the baser instincts of humans to
29:01
in certain places run supreme.
29:03
So why wasn't it on our radar to kind of think through the worst case scenarios
29:09
and take steps to try to head those off before they metastasized?
29:13
SPEAKER_3: Maybe because we were not people who would ever do that.
29:16
SPEAKER_3: Maybe because all we thought about was the utopian vision, the positive part of it.
29:21
SPEAKER_3: And I mean, speaking for myself, not only was I extremely young, but I was very naive.
29:27
SPEAKER_3: now I'm still naive and I just don't think it didn't occur to us.
29:32
SPEAKER_3: You know, the people who invented email didn't think about spam.
29:35
And I think in a lot of cases,
29:37
until maybe 10-15 years ago,
29:40
technologists fail to envision the worst uses of their technology.
29:46
SPEAKER_3: I was at Apple when the virus was invented.
29:49
SPEAKER_3: Nobody saw that coming.
29:50
I think that surveillance capitalism and even worse,
29:54
surveillance for evil isn't something that anybody warned about that I ever heard
30:02
about, and certainly not at General Magic in the early days.
30:06
SPEAKER_3: Because for one thing, you need online ubiquity.
30:09
SPEAKER_3: Like nothing that we have today would ever work.
30:12
SPEAKER_3: if the whole world and all our communications and documentation hadn't migrated to online.
30:19
when the web browser started and somebody said, hey,
30:22
this author has made his book available online or you can watch this video
30:27
and it's online.
30:28
SPEAKER_3: That was a rare exception.
30:31
to imagine that government offices and libraries and content companies would
30:37
by default put things online maybe behind a paywall maybe free newspapers online
30:42
for free nobody could have imagined that early on
30:46
so once everything was online it enabled some bad things too like more surveillance
30:52
and the modern successors of viruses,
30:55
internet worms and ransomware, horrible things.
30:59
SPEAKER_3: so I think for starters we were all sweet and innocent.
31:05
SPEAKER_3: maybe we didn't think enough.
31:06
SPEAKER_3: You know, maybe we underestimated the evil ingenuity of the human race.
31:10
SPEAKER_1: Yeah,
31:10
SPEAKER_3: 'Cause
31:10
SPEAKER_1: you know, there's something we pondered as well, you know, a failure of imagination.
31:14
SPEAKER_1: And I think you're right.
31:15
SPEAKER_1: People at General Magic were well intentioned, good hearted people.
31:19
SPEAKER_0: I wanted to circle back one little bit.
31:21
SPEAKER_0: What in your hour long show, what general magic anecdotes did you use?
31:26
SPEAKER_0: the juiciest bits from those days?
31:29
Well, I went more for fun than juice,
31:31
but my fun General Magic story in that show is the night of the 2 a.m.
31:38
Charles Irby speech when we had to finish a release of MagicCap and Telescript
31:45
and deliver it to AT&T that morning or we would miss a deadline
31:51
And engineers had been and everybody we'd had a test marathon all week.
31:56
SPEAKER_3: People were banging on it and it wasn't in great shape.
32:02
SPEAKER_3: And we had a meeting and everybody was still there.
32:04
So at two o'clock in the morning we all gathered in the big room
32:09
and Charles Irby was our newly acquired VP of Technology, I think.
32:14
SPEAKER_3: Engineering,
32:15
SPEAKER_0: Engineering, yeah.
32:15
SPEAKER_0: He was yeah.
32:16
SPEAKER_3: yeah.
32:17
SPEAKER_3: And he called on people in the room to give their impressions.
32:22
SPEAKER_3: And one person said, It's okay.
32:25
SPEAKER_3: And the next person said, It's awful.
32:27
SPEAKER_3: And the next person said, It's it crashed five times in the hour that I was using it.
32:32
SPEAKER_3: And it kind of went on like that for not that long, 10, 15 minutes.
32:35
SPEAKER_3: And then at the end he said, I've heard what everybody says.
32:40
SPEAKER_3: We are a partnership.
32:41
SPEAKER_3: We have a partner.
32:42
SPEAKER_3: They're expecting this tomorrow.
32:44
SPEAKER_3: And I think we're gonna go ahead and ship it.
32:46
SPEAKER_3: And then he walked out of the room.
32:48
SPEAKER_3: so that was my story.
32:49
And actually there's a lighthearted moment in there too,
32:52
which is one engineer in particular who was very a low-level engineer.
32:57
SPEAKER_3: about 1 a.m.
32:59
I was walking and he was walking and we got to a corner and we both came around
33:03
the corner and we're both exhausted.
33:05
SPEAKER_3: And we did that thing where I move to the right, but he moves to the right.
33:09
SPEAKER_3: And I go like this and he goes like this.
33:12
SPEAKER_3: And then he just stopped moving and he said, I'm too tired to calculate the optimal path.
33:17
SPEAKER_1: Well, that was that was exactly the problem.
33:19
SPEAKER_1: We were too tired collectively to calculate the optimal path
33:21
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
33:21
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
33:24
SPEAKER_0: you've written seventeen books according to our research.
33:27
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
33:27
SPEAKER_0: which is your favorite child?
33:30
SPEAKER_3: I have to say it's my first one.
33:31
SPEAKER_3: it's called "How to Write Macintosh Software."
33:33
And it came out when before there was a lot of Mac documentation,
33:37
there were a lot of people who wanted to write Mac programs.
33:41
SPEAKER_3: And I was lucky to be in this wonderfully unique place where I worked at Apple.
33:46
SPEAKER_3: My job was helping developers.
33:48
There were thousands of people who wanted to know this stuff,
33:51
and there was not a good channel to get it to them.
33:53
SPEAKER_3: And there was no internet, there wasn't even really email.
33:55
SPEAKER_3: So there were books.
33:56
And I was lucky that I was in the one place on Earth
34:00
where I could gain this knowledge working at Apple and that I had the ability
34:03
to put it into words and then a publisher that would put it out in the world
34:08
And it was so great to do that and get the reaction from people and it's not
34:14
an exaggeration to say it gave me a career job after job
34:20
when I interviewed someone was familiar with that book.
34:22
Someone had learned to program the Macintosh reading that book,
34:26
and now they were at Google or Microsoft or a startup or you know,
34:32
that it just happened over and over again.
34:33
SPEAKER_3: That's how I got connected with Dan Winkler and ended up at General Magic.
34:37
SPEAKER_3: So and it's also probably the most insightful book I wrote.
34:41
SPEAKER_3: You know, my books are all technical.
34:43
SPEAKER_3: And it I dove deep.
34:44
SPEAKER_3: learned well I already knew because it was my job.
34:47
SPEAKER_3: I really had to do very little research.
34:50
SPEAKER_3: All I did was just put into words on paper what I knew from my job.
34:54
SPEAKER_3: And that's my favorite for all those reasons.
34:57
SPEAKER_1: I Would be remiss not to ask you about your Substack.
35:01
You've talked about it a little bit,
35:03
but just how that came to be,
35:05
what inspires you,
35:07
how frequently you updated any notable greatest hits and other things
35:12
that I'm sure our audience would appreciate knowing about.
35:15
SPEAKER_3: Sure, sure.
35:18
About 10 years ago,
35:20
when I worked at Google,
35:22
I had a boss named Lewis Gray,
35:24
who was a prolific blogger,
35:26
and he knew and maybe appreciated all my old-timey stories.
35:31
SPEAKER_3: and he encouraged me to blog them.
35:32
SPEAKER_3: So I started a blogger blog, and I started writing them.
35:36
And then as I mentioned,
35:37
I got into the theater and told some stories on stage at different venues.
35:44
And then I guess about a year and a half ago I decided I wanted to write all
35:50
the stories that I knew.
35:52
SPEAKER_3: Seriously, before I started forgetting, because you forget details or entire stories.
35:57
So I happened to be talking to my old boss,
36:00
Guy Kawasaki, at the time, and asked for advice, and he said, start a Substack.
36:07
SPEAKER_3: So I just started writing.
36:09
the first thing I did was I sat down and brainstormed my own stories and I listed
36:12
over 200 ideas that I thought could be posts.
36:17
SPEAKER_3: it's just so much fun to revisit old stories or write stories down that I never wrote before.
36:23
SPEAKER_3: and I have to admit that I enjoy rereading old ones.
36:25
SPEAKER_0: Do you use AI at all when you're writing?
36:28
SPEAKER_3: I use it to proofread.
36:30
SPEAKER_3: in addition to it not doing a good job of writing a story for me, I don't want that.
36:34
SPEAKER_3: I enjoy the writing.
36:36
SPEAKER_3: I have no need.
36:37
SPEAKER_3: I feel fortunate that I don't need to use or don't want to use that aspect of AI.
36:41
SPEAKER_3: Some of my posts are not about technology at all.
36:44
One of them is about a photo of the 1956 Denver Bears baseball team,
36:48
minor league baseball team, that used to sit in my dad's office.
36:53
and I used to sit in that office and stare at that photo,
36:56
when he sold the place, I took it with me and I came across it here at home one day.
37:00
SPEAKER_3: And I looked at it some more and I saw Tommy Lasorda, Marv Throneberry, other familiar names.
37:06
SPEAKER_3: This was 1956 in the minor leagues.
37:08
SPEAKER_3: So I decided to write a post about what happened to these guys.
37:13
SPEAKER_3: And this one I did use more AI than probably others.
37:16
SPEAKER_3: I used it for research.
37:18
And I found out there were in addition to Tommy Lasorda,
37:21
who's in the Hall of Fame, and won three World Series, two World Series.
37:26
SPEAKER_3: there are other Hall of Famers in the picture.
37:30
there are pennant winning managers,
37:31
there are all-stars,
37:32
there's a guy who went to work for an electronics company,
37:36
just all these stories, great and small.
37:38
SPEAKER_3: My favorite story was the Bat Boy.
37:41
SPEAKER_3: I found his obituary.
37:43
SPEAKER_3: And in his obituary, he transitioned to a woman.
37:46
SPEAKER_3: he was trans, his family used all pronouns with him, and he was cool with that.
37:51
SPEAKER_3: and there's a photo from the obituary, and it's the same face as the bat boy.
37:56
SPEAKER_3: Same smiling face, decades later, some 60 years later.
38:00
But the same smiling face,
38:01
it's the same person,
38:03
obituary written by his loving family,
38:06
by his loving niece, about how he taught them all to cook.
38:09
They called him Aunt,
38:10
uncle, uncle, aunt, sometimes he just seemed so relaxed with his presence on earth.
38:18
and I wrote about that with all the baseball hall of famers,
38:22
this person emerged as the star of the story.
38:24
SPEAKER_3: So and then the next thing I thought, well, this should be a musical.
38:26
SPEAKER_3: But I didn't get that
38:27
SPEAKER_0: Yeah.
38:30
SPEAKER_3: far.
38:31
Scott, for those not familiar with you,
38:33
I think that story that you just recounted is so lovely in your recounting of it
38:37
because I've always thought the phrase that popped into my mind was a gentle eye for
38:42
the absurd,
38:43
that you have story after story have strange twists or kind of magical moments,
38:50
not necessarily epiphanies,
38:51
but things take a an un unexpected turn that in the end turns out to be
38:56
a delightful one.
38:57
So I hope that there are other stories like that and I can't recommend
39:01
the Substack highly enough.
39:03
SPEAKER_3: Tha thank you.
39:04
SPEAKER_3: I appreciate that so much because that's exactly what I'm going for.
39:08
my Substack is called "Occasionally Misses Expectations"
39:12
which was my frequent review grade when I was at Google
39:16
SPEAKER_0: That's great.
39:19
SPEAKER_1: to one of two important matters that we've not gotten to.
39:22
SPEAKER_1: First of all, we have a almost no profanity rule in the interviews.
39:28
there's always the checkbox that has to be marked off,
39:32
ticked off, which is me using profanity once in the interview.
39:35
SPEAKER_1: So it's fucking great to see you and we can check
39:37
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
39:38
SPEAKER_1: that one.
39:39
Number two,
39:40
we like a guest to provide the bumper sticker that they think summarizes
39:48
or encapsulates who they are,
39:51
what they've done,
39:52
or just whatever strikes their fancy that they would put on the back of their car.
39:56
SPEAKER_1: So what is the Scott Knaster bumper sticker?
39:59
SPEAKER_3: Adjacent to Greatness.
40:00
SPEAKER_3: That's that's my
40:01
SPEAKER_1: There you go.
40:02
SPEAKER_3: whole career.
40:03
My whole career is I worked with Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld and I worked
40:10
with Andy Rubin and Tony Fadell and I was near Steve Jobs
40:16
and you know Bill Gates directed my group but what did I do?
40:23
SPEAKER_3: I wrote a book once.
40:23
SPEAKER_3: So
40:24
SPEAKER_0: What?
40:26
SPEAKER_3: yeah, adjacent to greatness would be me.
40:29
SPEAKER_0: Well, and great yourself.
40:30
SPEAKER_0: I say you're the one of the master storytellers of the valley and of the industry in general.
40:35
SPEAKER_0: it was great to have you.
40:37
SPEAKER_0: Thanks so much for being here and for sharing some of your great stories with us.
40:41
SPEAKER_3: My pleasure, Mike.
40:42
SPEAKER_3: Anytime.
40:42
SPEAKER_3: Tom, great to talk to you as well.
40:44
SPEAKER_3: And really it was a blast.
40:47
SPEAKER_2: Thank you for listening to General Magic and the Soul of Tech podcast.
40:51
Tune into our Substack for more interviews and articles
40:54
at spellboundproductions.substack .
40:56
SPEAKER_2: com.