The Electronic B@zaar: Part 3 - The Flight of the Roast Chicken

* The Flight of the Roast Chicken *

When I first visited California in 1991, I was shown around by a friend who had lived in Palo Alto for five years. We spent a few days at a database show in the valley, meeting software vendors she knew and talking to journalists. She also spent a day introducing me to some of the tourist attractions of San Francisco: the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman's Wharf, the trams, and the quaint boathouses of Sausalito. And in the evening we visited a restaurant that she knew well, called MacArthur Park, in Palo Alto.

The restaurant was very large and it gave the impression of being more like a canteen than a restaurant. It had an odd but enjoyable ambiance, a jazz pianist tinkling lazily on the piano, and the tables were populated by casually dressed business folk in their thirties. This restaurant, she explained, had once been an informal meeting place for the young entrepreneurs of the valley.

"Imagine what it was like in the early eighties," she said. "All those college kids falling out of Berkeley and Stanford writing software or designing circuits, building new devices, inventing the future. This is where many of them used to dine. The restaurant provided paper placemats that techies could draw diagrams or write code on. Some of these dining tables are historic. People came in here to be headhunted or make partnerships or talk to VCs. This is where it happened."

The restaurant did its best to preserve the spirit of those heady days. Stock-market prices were displayed in moving lights across the top of one wall-an innovation that some of the customers had requested. The paper placemats still existed and the waiters had handheld electronic notepads for taking orders, which transmitted directly to the kitchens. It was an enjoyable venue for a meal that exuded the spirit of Silicon Valley, and for some strange reason it had me thinking of the coffee houses of eighteenth-century London, where other entrepreneurs had gathered to chew the fat and make their fortunes.

In my final year before graduating from Nottingham University, I was warned by my careers adviser that "there is no point in standing around with your mouth open, hoping that a roast chicken will fly into it." Such luck is rare, but it is not impossible. At some points in history some individuals get to be in the right place at the right time and they prosper accordingly, just as every day of the week someone somewhere is made very rich by the purchase of a lottery ticket. The youthful entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley were just standing around when a whole flock of roast chickens appeared over the horizon and began flapping their wings towards them. Of course they were going to open their mouths-what would you have done?

In the 1980s, Silicon Valley was a place where fortunes were being made. In the spring of 1999, I was sitting in a different restaurant in Palo Alto, talking to an executive from a software start-up. He related to me the sad fate of those early Californian entrepreneurs, the 1980s millionaires.

"They are in their forties and they are worth maybe forty or fifty million. And they sit at their tables in restaurants like this, eating their foie gras, and they feel like failures, because over there in the corner sitting at some other table is some fresh-faced kid in his twenties and he is worth four hundred to five hundred million."

All down the West Coast of the US, from Seattle to Santa Cruz, flocks of roast chicken have been seen in flight again, and they are ten times bigger than they were 20 years ago.

'The Electronic B@zaar - part one': http://www.silicon.com/a38257
'The Electronic B@zaar - part two': http://www.silicon.com/a38281

** Extracted from 'The Electronic B@zaar: From the Silk Road to the e-Road' by Robin Bloor published by Nicholas Brealey Publishing, £19.99.