Zucked: How Users Got Used and What We Can Do About It. Roger McNamee

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      Every weekday morning in San Francisco I watched a locally produced stock market show hosted by Stuart Varney, who went on to a long career in broadcasting at CNN and Fox Business Network. After watching the show for six months and reading Barron’s and stacks of annual reports, I finally summoned the courage to buy one hundred shares of Beech Aircraft. It went up 30 percent in the first week. I was hooked. I discovered that investing was a game, like Monopoly, but with real money. The battle of wits appealed to me. I never imagined then that investing would be my career. In the fall of 1978, I reapplied to Yale. They accepted me again, just weeks before two heartbreaking events chased me from San Francisco: the mass suicide of hundreds of San Franciscans at Jonestown and the murder of San Francisco’s mayor and supervisor Harvey Milk by another member of the city’s board of supervisors.

      Celebrating my first Christmas at home since 1975, I received a gift that would change my life. My older brother George, ten years my senior, gave me a Texas Instruments Speak & Spell. Introduced just months earlier, the Speak & Spell combined a keyboard, a one-line alphanumeric display, a voice processor, and some memory to teach elementary school children to pronounce and spell words. But to my brother, it was the future of computing. “This means that in a few years, it will be possible to create a handheld device that holds all your personal information,” he said.

      He told me this in 1978. The Apple II had been introduced only a year earlier. The IBM PC was nearly three years in the future. The PalmPilot was more than eighteen years away. But my brother saw the future, and I took it to heart. I went back to college as a history major but was determined to take enough electrical engineering courses that I could design the first personal organizer. I soon discovered that electrical engineering requires calculus, and I had never taken calculus. I persuaded the professor to let me take the entry-level course anyway. He said if I did everything right except the math, he would give me a B (“for bravery”). I accepted. He tutored me every week. I took a second, easier engineering survey course, in which I learned concepts related to acoustics and mechanical engineering. I got catalogues and manuals and tried to design an oversized proof of concept. I could not make it work.

      A real highlight of my second swing through Yale was playing in a band called Guff. Three guys in my dorm had started the band, but they needed a guitar player. Guff wrote its own songs and occupied a musical space somewhere near the intersection of the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, and punk rock. We played a ton of gigs, but college ended before the band was sufficiently established to justify making a career of it.

      The band got paid a little money, but I needed to earn tuition-scale money. Selling ads paid far better than most student jobs, so I persuaded the Yale Law School Film Society to let me create a magazine-style program for their film series. I created a program for both semesters of senior year and earned almost enough money to pay for a year of graduate school.

      But before that, in the fall of my senior year, I enrolled in Introduction to Music Theory, a brutal two-semester course for music majors. I was convinced that a basic knowledge of music theory would enable me to write better songs for my band. They randomly assigned me to one of a dozen sections, each with fifteen students, all taught by graduate students. The first class session was the best hour of classroom time I had ever experienced, so I told my roommate to switch from his section to mine. Apparently many others did the same thing, as forty people showed up the second day. That class was my favorite at Yale. The grad student who taught the class, Ann Kosakowski, did not teach the second semester, but early in the new semester, I ran into her as she exited the gymnasium, across the street from my dorm. She was disappointed because she had narrowly lost a squash match in the fifth game to the chair of the music department, so I volunteered to play her the next day. We played squash three days in a row, and I did not win a single point. Not one. But it didn’t matter. I had never played squash and did not care about the score. Ann was amazing. I wanted to get to know her. I invited her on a date to see the Jerry Garcia Band right after Valentine’s Day. A PhD candidate in music theory, Ann asked, “What instrument does Mr. Garcia play?” thinking perhaps it might be the cello. Ann and I are about to celebrate the thirty-ninth anniversary of that first date.

      Ann and I graduated together, she a very young PhD, me an old undergraduate. She received a coveted tenure-track position at Swarthmore College, outside of Philadelphia. I could not find a job in Philadelphia, so I enrolled at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, in Hanover, New Hampshire. So began a twenty-one-year interstate commute.

      My first job after business school was at T. Rowe Price, in Baltimore, Maryland. It was a lot closer to Philadelphia than Hanover, but still too far to commute every day. That’s when I got hit by two game-changing pieces of good luck: my start date and my coverage group. My career began on the first day of the bull market of 1982, and they asked me to analyze technology stocks. In those days, there were no tech-only funds. T. Rowe Price was the leader in the emerging growth category of mutual funds, which meant they focused on technology more than anyone. I might not be able to make the first personal organizer, I reasoned, but I would be able to invest in it when it came along.

      In investing, they say that timing is everything. By assigning me to cover tech on the first day of an epic bull market, T. Rowe Price basically put me in a position where I had a tailwind for my entire career. I can’t be certain that every good thing in my career resulted from that starting condition, but I can’t rule it out either. It was a bull market, so most stocks were going up. In the early days, I just had to produce reports that gave the portfolio managers confidence in my judgment. I did not have a standard pedigree for an analyst, so I decided to see if I could adapt the job to leverage my strengths.

      I became an analyst by training, a nerd who gets paid to understand the technology industry. When my career started, most analysts focused primarily on financial statements, but I changed the formula. I have been successful due to an ability to understand products, financial statements, and trends, as well as to judge people. I think of it as real-time anthropology, the study of how humans and technology evolve and interact. I spend most of my time trying to understand the present so I can imagine what might happen in the future. From any position on the chessboard, there are only a limited number of moves. If you understand that in advance and study the possibilities, you will be better prepared to make good choices each time something happens. Despite what people tell you, the technology world does not actually change that much. It follows relatively predictable patterns. Major waves of technology last at least a decade, so the important thing is to recognize when an old cycle is ending and when a new one is starting. As my partner John Powell likes to say, sometimes you can see which body is tied to the railroad tracks before you can see who is driving the train.

      The personal computer business started to take off in 1985, and I noticed two things: everyone was my age, and they convened at least monthly in a different city for a conference or trade show. I persuaded my boss to let me join the caravan. Almost immediately I had a stroke of good luck. I was at a conference in Florida when I noticed two guys unloading guitars and amps from the back of a Ford Taurus. Since all guests at the hotel were part of the conference, I asked if there was a jam session I could join. There was. It turns out that the leaders of the PC industry didn’t go out to bars. They rented instruments and played music. When I got to my first jam session, I discovered I had an indispensable skill. Thanks to many years of gigs in bands and bars, I knew a couple hundred songs from beginning to end. No one else knew more than a handful. This really mattered because the other players included the CEO of a major software company, the head of R&D from Apple, and several other industry big shots. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen played with us from time to time, but only on songs written by Jimi Hendrix. He could shred. Suddenly, I was part of the industry’s social fabric. It is hard to imagine this happening in any other industry, but I was carving my own path.

      My next key innovation related to earnings models. Traditional analysts used spreadsheets to forecast earnings, but spreadsheets tend to smooth everything. In tech, where success is binary, hot products always beat the forecast, and products that are not hot always fall short. I didn’t СКАЧАТЬ