Starting Up Silicon Valley: How ROLM Became a Cultural Icon and Fortune 500 Company - Hardcover

Katherine Maxfield

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1937110621 ISBN 13: 9781937110628

Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2014

Synopsis

From Fruit Shed to Fortune 500: The inside story of ROLM and its continuing influence on Silicon Valley

Decades before Facebook, seven years before Apple, four young men were hard at work in a prune-drying shed designing ''the world's toughest computer.'' That was the founding of ROLM Corporation, at a time when the orchards of Santa Clara County were being transformed into what would become Silicon Valley.

By 1984--merely fifteen years later--ROLM was a Fortune 500 company with worldwide offices and a park-like campus. That same year, IBM bought the company in the biggest deal Silicon Valley had ever seen. By then, Silicon Valley was the world's center of innovation, with a hallmark culture very different from the rest of corporate America. ROLM set the benchmark for that culture by providing significant financial rewards for smart, successful work, and an environment where employees could unwind--swimming laps, playing tennis, or dining brookside. ROLM's influence extends today, in campuses like those of Google and Cisco, where onsite masseuses and sushi chefs are commonplace.

Starting Up Silicon Valley reveals
- leadership's challenges, doubts, and convictions, from start-up to buyout and beyond;
- how ROLM's technological innovations disrupted two industries;
- why ROLM was known as a Great Place to Work (GPW) and how that style can influence today's workplace;
- the dirty tricks that giant AT&T undertook to smash competition that threatened its domain; and
- the hopes and frustrations of an IBM merger, from both sides of the story.

Humorous anecdotes and the wisdom of some of Silicon Valley's most respected leaders make Starting Up Silicon Valley an intimate story of one of the Valley's most important and culturally influential companies.

About this title

About the Author

Katherine Maxfield distributed phone books one summer during high school in Ohio. That did not lead to her 25 years of work (as an employee or as a consultant) for technology companies in Silicon Valley. An MBA did, coupled with her innate (as in, who knew?!) ability to translate technology into features and capabilities that customers needed and could relate to--marketing.

After retiring from the corporate world, she turned from writing marketing and business plans to writing fiction, with the help of an MFA in creative writing. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, and her personal perspective nonfiction has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

She lives in Saratoga, California, with her husband.

From the Back Cover

"ROLM, in its prime, was called a Great Place to Work and epitomized how successful an agile, well-managed start-up could be in a world dominated by giants. From the mid-1970s until IBM bought it, ROLM was a leading cultural icon of Silicon Valley, a company that was admired and imitated." James Mitchell, San Jose Mercury News

"There are two great ways to learn about what goes on inside a start-up--work for one or read Starting Up Silicon Valley." Bill Davidow, technology columnist for The Atlantic, venture capitalist, and former Senior VP of Marketing and Sales at Intel.

"ROLM Corporation play a large and important part in the history of Silicon Valley. This book is a must-read in understanding the technology and start-up phenomenon. ROLM was one of the important players that made it all possible and is extremely well chronicled by Katherine Maxfield." Arthur Rock, early investor in Intel, Apple, and other tech companies.

"I really enjoyed Starting Up Silicon Valley. It is a wonderful story of entrepreneurship and innovation, providing an amazing window into the personalities, institutions, and networks that built Silicon Valley. Maxfield makes the ROLM story very educational and highly entertaining at the same time." Michael Spence, former dean of the Stanford School of Business and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics

"Using humorous and revealing anecdotes, Katherine Maxfield has written a fascinating and very readable history of ROLM, one of Silicon Valley's great success stories." Sandra Kurtzig, CEO and founder of Kenandy and former CEO and founder of Ask Computer Systems

Edition details

• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1937110621
• ISBN 13: 9781937110628
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368