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Not competing in these Olympics, but still contributing to the industry’s success were the thousands of women who worked in the Valley’s microchip factories and other manufacturing facilities from the 1960s to the early 1980s. Some of them are Asian and Mexican-American, their mothers and grandmothers worked in pre-war valley orchards and orchards. Others were recent immigrants from the East and Midwest, white and often college-educated, who needed income and worked in technical jobs.
Because there are few other technical jobs in the valley, women work for less. The abundance of women on the line has helped the region’s factory wages rank among the lowest in the country. Women continue to dominate high-tech assembly lines, even though most factories are now thousands of miles away. In the year In 1970, an early American-owned Mexican production line employed 600 workers, 90% of whom were women. Half a century later, the pattern continued. In 2019, women made up 90% of the workforce at a giant iPhone assembly plant in India. Women make up about 80 percent of Vietnam’s tech workforce.
Venture: “The Boys’ Club.”
Chipmaking’s fierce competition and unusual management culture filtered through the first semiconductor generation of millionaires as they deployed their wealth and management experience in other companies. But the semiconductor culture of venture capital cast its longest shadow.
The Valley’s first venture capitalists were a tight-knit group of mostly young men who managed money from very wealthy men. At the beginning, there were very few of them, so they reserved a table in a San Francisco restaurant, and they called all the founders to vote at once. So many opportunities were pouring in that it wouldn’t matter much if a deal went to someone else. Charter members like Silicon Valley venture capitalist Reid Dennis call it “the team.” Other observers, such as journalist John W. Wilson, called it a “boys club.”
Wayne Miller/MAGNUM PHOTOS
In the early 1970s, the venture capital business was booming, even though depressed markets made it a terrible time to raise money. But during this period, companies founded and led by semiconductor veterans became industry-defining. Gene left Kleiner Fairchild Semiconductor to found Kleiner Perkin, whose long list of accomplishments included Genentech, Sun Microsystems, AOL, Google and Amazon. Master scaremonger Don Valentine founded Sequoia Capital, making early stage investments in Atari and Apple, and later in Cisco, Google, Instagram, Airbnb and many others.
Generations: “Pattern Recognition”.
Silicon Valley venture capitalists have left their mark not only by choosing who to invest in, but also by mentoring and shaping the business acumen of those they fund. They were more than bankers. They are mentors, professors and father figures to young and inexperienced men who often know too much about technology and know nothing about how to start and grow a business.
“This is one of the most important and least recognized secrets of Silicon Valley’s continued success in providing funding and management know-how to the next generation of entrepreneurs,” says Silicon Valley historian Leslie Berlin. ” Technology leaders agree with Berlin’s assessment. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, learned what he knew about business from the guys in the semiconductor industry – likening it to passing the baton in a relay race.
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