The Entrepreneur’s Bookshelf: Pirates of Silicon Valley

After watching bits and pieces of this movie in youTube, I took a trip down to HMV and acquired a DVD copy of the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. Starring Noah Wyle (famous from ER) as Steve Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates, and directed by Martyn Burke, the movie documents the rise of the personal computer industry through the rivalry between Apple and Microsoft in the early years.

The movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley is an unauthorized tele-movie based upon the book by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine entitled “Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer”. Basically, the movie depicts the rise of Steve Jobs through the eyes of Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates similarly through Steve Balmer. A rags-to-riches tale for two of the most famous technopreneurs, we can draw a few interesting lessons in business with Shakespearean themes of lust, greed, ambition, love and hate from this movie. If you look at these characters in a nutshell, they see the world differently at the very start of their dream. Yet, no doubt in a way, you see a powerful team formed in each group. The beginning of the movie starts from a flashback where Bill Gates was on big TV screen behind Steve Jobs (when he came back to Apple in 1997). Using the analogy of the famous 1984 ad by Apple, the director demonstrated the irony behind the switch of positions between Jobs and Gates.

“I don’t want you to think of this as just a film – some process of converting electrons and magnetic impulses into shapes and figures and sounds – no. Listen to me. We’re here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here? We’re creating a completely new consciousness, like an artist or a poet. We’re rewriting the history of human thought with what we’re doing. That’s how you have to think of this.” – Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs

I would say that Noah Wyle did a good job in mimicking the mannerisms of Steve Jobs in the movie, about his complex background as an adopted child and how he grew from an immature and irresponsible person to a father who finally accepted his first child, Lisa to his family. Of course, his obsession in viewing computers as works of art rather than science take a different twist to the kind of innovation that happened in Apple. The sombre and serious story telling of Steve Jobs is contrasted with the black comedy-like illustration of Bill Gates. In this movie, you find Bill Gates to be like an evil genius, particularly how he called bluff in the front of the IBM executives and his misdemeanour of speeding with cars at his early age. If I have to rate this movie, I give it about 7 out of 10. Afterall, the movie has been nominated for 5 Emmy awards.

A few interesting themes stood out as I watched the movie.

• “Good artists copy, Great Artists steal”: so said Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the greatest inventor of all time. The movie flashed out the reality of first-mover advantage being crushed by upcoming “me-too” companies. If you look at how Apple took out Xerox’s innovations to create their graphic user interface (GUI) and in the same light how Microsoft did the same to them, you find that there is a similar pattern at play. In a world flooded with over-reaching patents and protection, these startups found a way to survive. It also reflects the reality on the ground for some innovators here to think about the fact that a big company can buy them out and end up exploiting their inventions to reap more wealth.
• Personal ego: I never dispute the notion that all entrepreneurs have great egos. I would argue that without their egos, they would not be at that place which they are at. Often history is written by the winners, the issue is more about how an entrepreneur contain his ego. I suppose that a good entrepreneur must have an ego and at the same time, learn to find ways and means to stop the ego from dominating. Contrast Steve Jobs to Bill Gates in this movie, you find that both are surrounded by good people.
• Big companies miss the mark at times: One thing that I found that this movie did pretty well is to flash out how inefficient and incompetent the middle and high level management in Hewlett-Packard, Xerox and IBM was in failing to realize the value of the personal computer, the mouse and the graphics user interface which are now on every desk of an enterprise today. Managing innovation seems to be a common feature of an company reaching maturity in their industry. Microsoft and Apple will reach the same stage someday, and hopefully, they will remember the lessons they taught these big companies about innovation and speed.

I do recommend this movie for those who want to understand how these people come about. They see the world in a different way and pursue to make it happen. That would be what I find is the greatest asset in entrepreneurs.

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