Duke: My dad used to say that the Silicon Valley’s dirty little secret was that all entrepreneurial vision was underwritten by Defense Dept dollars.
The model you mention was in existence from the beginning, and it started with companies like Xerox, IBM, HP and Fairchild. Stanford University also threw off a tremendous number of entrepeneurs and innovators (few folks know that SUN Microsystems stands for Stanford University Network).
The New New Thing has always been the raison d’etre of Silicon Valley and the adage there has always been Innovate or Die (or be acquired, which is where Yahoo is right now). Funny that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
I still get a laugh whenever someone quotes Al Gore and his “inventing the internet” nonsense. My dad had a DARPANet connection to Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore Labs starting back in the 1970s. DARPANet was the forerunner to the internet, and a major interconnection point between the defense contractors, the universities and the testing facilities. As liberal as Stanford and Cal might have been (and continue to be), they didn’t hesitate to take Uncle Sam’s money for defense work.
