Steve Blank Secret History of Silicon Valley

In Victory: Magnanimity

Posted on December 14, 2009 by steve blank

“In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Goodwill.” Winston Churchill

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In March I was the keynote at the In-Q-Tel Venture Capital Conference, giving a talk on the Secret History of Silicon Valley. (In-Q-Tel is the Central Intelligence Agency’s Venture Capital firm in Silicon Valley.)
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The gist of the talk was that the needs of electronic intelligence in the midst of the Cold War and a single Stanford Professor was a key catalyst for entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley.

There were about 300 people in the audience, about 150 from the U.S. intelligence community.

Irony
Last week I was the keynote at the American Business Association of Russian Speaking Professionals.

There were about 300 people in the audience, almost all from the old Soviet Union.

I presented the same Secret History talk, pointing out that the launch of the first Soviet satellite (Sputnik) galvanized the U.S. government to accidentally contribute to the start the Venture Capital industry as we know it.

Afterwards a few of the audience came up and told me stories about Soviet weapons systems that could have won someone an intelligence medal 30 years earlier.

I would have loved to have given the talk to both audiences at the same time.

Close enough.
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The Secret History of Silicon Valley 12: The Rise of “Risk Capital” Part 2

Posted on October 29, 2009 by steve blank

This post is the latest in the “Secret History Series.” They’ll make much more sense if you watch the video or read some of the earlier posts for context. See the Secret History bibliography for sources and supplemental reading.

This is the second of three posts about the rise of “risk capital” and how it came to be associated with what became Silicon Valley.

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The First Valley IPO’s
Silicon Valley first caught the eyes of east coast investors in the late 1950’s when the valleys first three IPO’s happened: Varian in 1956, Hewlett Packard in 1957, and Ampex in 1958. These IPOs meant that technology companies didn’t have to get acquired to raise money or get their founders and investors liquid. Interestingly enough, Fred Terman, Dean of Stanford Engineering was tied to all three companies.

Varian made a high power microwave tube called the Klystron, invented by Terman’s students Russell and Sigurd Varian and William Hansen. In 1948 the Varian brothers along with Stanford professors Edward Ginzton and Marvin Chodorow founded Varian Corporation in Palo Alto to produce klystrons for military applications. Fred Terman and David Packard of HP joined Varian’s board.

Terman was also on the board of HP. Terman arranged for a research assistantship to bring his former student, David Packard, back from a job at General Electric in New York to collaborate with William Hewlett, another of Terman’s graduate students. Terman sat on the HP board from 1957-1973.

Ampex made the first tape recorders in the U.S (copied from captured German models,) and Terman was on its board as well. Ampex’s first customer was Bing Crosby who wanted to record his radio programs for rebroadcast (and had exclusive distribution rights.) Ampex business took off when Terman introduced Ampex founder Alex Poniatoff to Joseph and Henry McMicking. The McMicking’s bought 50% of Ampex for $365,000 (some liken this to the first VC investment in the valley.) McMicking and Terman introduced Ampex to the National Security Agency, and Ampex sales boomed when their audio and video recorders became the standard for Electronic Intelligence and telemetry signal collection recorders.

Meanwhile on the West Coast – “The Group” 1950’s
When Ampex was raising its money, in 1952, an employee of Fireman’s Fund in San Francisco, Reid Dennis, managed to put $15,000 in the deal. (Three-and-a-half years later it was worth $800,000.) Five years later Dennis and a small group of angel investors who called themselves “The Group” started investing in new electronics companies being formed in the valley south of San Francisco. These angels who were all working in their day jobs at various financial institutions, would invite startup electronics companies up to San Francisco to pitch their deals and they would invest an average of $100K per deal and help startups raise the rest – typically $250,000 in total.

The Group is worth noting for:

Investing their own private money,
Reid Dennis would found Institutional Venture Partners in 1974
First group specifically investing in the valley’s electronics industry
From the mid 1950s to mid 1960’s they invested in twenty-five companies. Eighteen of them were wildly successful

SBIC Act of 1958
During the cold war the launch of Sputnik-1 by the Soviet Union in 1957 both traumatized and galvanized the United States. Having the first earth satellite launched by a country that been portrayed as a third-world backwater with a bellicose foreign policy shocked the U.S. into believing it was behind the Soviet Union in innovation. In response, one of the many U.S. national initiatives (DARPA, NASA, Space Race, etc.) to spur innovation was a new government agency to fund new companies. The Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) Act in 1958 guaranteed that for every dollar a bank or financial institution invested in a new company, the U.S. government would invest three (up to $300,000.) So for every dollar that a fund invested, it would have four dollars to invest.

While SBIC’s were set up around the country, companies in Northern California including Bank of America, and American Express, began to set up SBIC funds to tap the emerging microwave and new semiconductor startups setting up shop south of San Francisco. And for the first time, private companies like Continental Capital, Pitch Johnson & Bill Draper and Sutter Hill were formed to take advantage of the government largesse from the SBA. Like all government programs, the SBIC was fond of paperwork, but it began to formalize, professionalize and standardize the way investors evaluated risk.

SBIC’s were worth noting for:

The good news – government money for startups encouraged a “risk capital” culture at large financial institutions.
The better news – government money encouraged private companies to form to invest in new startups
The bad news – the government was more interested in rules, regulations and accounting then startups (because some SBIC’s saw the government funds as a license to steal)
By 1968 over 600 SBIC funds provided 75% of all venture funding in the U.S.
In 1988 after the rise of the limited partnership that number would be 7%.

Limited Partnerships
By the end of the 1950’s there was still no clear consensus about how to best organize an investment company for risky ventures. Was it like George Doriot’s ARD venture fund – a publicly traded closed end mutual fund? Was it using government money as a private SBIC firm? Or was it some other form of organization? Many investors weren’t interested in working for a large company for a salary and bonus, and most hated the paperwork and salary limitations that the SBIC imposed. Was there some other structure?

The limited partnership offered one way to structure an investment company. The fund would have limited life. It would charge its investors annual “management fees” to pay for the firm’s salaries, building, etc. In a typical venture fund, the partners receive a 2% management fee.

But the biggest innovation was the “carried interest” (called the “carry”.) This is where the partners would make their money. They would get a share of the profits of the fund (typically 20%.) For the first time venture investors would have a very strong performance incentive.

In 1958 General William Draper, Rowan Gaither (founder of the RAND corporation) and Fred Anderson (a retired Air Force general) founded Draper, Gaither and Anderson, Silicon Valley’s (and possible the worlds) first limited partnership. The venture firm was funded by Laurance Rockefeller and Lazard Freres, but after some dispute lost to the sands of time, Rockefeller pulled his financing, and the firm was dissolved after the first fund.

The first limited partnership that lasted for a while was formed by Davis and Rock in 1961. Arthur Rock, an investment banker at Hayden Stone in New York (who helped broker the financing of Fairchild) moved out to San Francisco in 1961 and partnered with Tommy Davis. Davis (an ex-WWII OSS agent) then a VP at the Kern Land Company got involved with investing in technology companies through Fred Terman. Davis’s first investment in 1957 was Watkins-Johnson (the maker of microwave Traveling Wave Tubes for electronic intelligence systems) where he sat on its board with Fred Terman. Rock and Davis would raise a $5M fund from east coast institutions and while they invested only $3.4 million of it by the time they dissolved their partnership in 1968 – they returned $90 million to their limited partners – a 54% compound growth rate.

Limited partnerships are worth noting for:

By the 1970’s the limited partnership would become the preferred organizational form for venture investors
The “carried interest” (the “carry”) assured that the venture partners would only make real money if their investments were successful. Aligning their interests with their limited investors and the entrepreneurs they were investing in.
The limited life of each fund; 7-10 years of which 3-5 years would be spent actively investing, focused the firms on investments that could reasonably expect to have “exits” during the life of the fund.
The limited life of each fund allowed venture firms to be flexible. They could change the split of the carry in follow on funds, add partners with carry in subsequent funds, change investing strategy and focus in follow-on funds, etc.

Silicon Innovation Collides with Risk Capital
Lacking a “risk capital” infrastructure in the 1950’s military contracts and traditional bank loans were the only options microwave startups had for capital. The first semiconductor companies couldn’t even get that – Shockley and Fairchild could only be funded through corporate partners. But by the 1960’s the tidal wave of semiconductor startups would find a valley with a growing number of SBIC backed venture firms and limited partnerships.

A wave of silicon innovation was about to meet a pile of risk capital.

More on this in Part XIII of the Secret History of Silicon Valley.

sgblank · The First Valley IPOs

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The Secret History of Silicon Valley 11: The Rise of “Risk Capital” Part 1

Posted on October 26, 2009 by steve blank

This is the first of a few posts about the rise of “risk capital” and how it came to be associated with what became Silicon Valley.
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Building Blocks of Entrepreneurship
By the mid 1950’s the groundwork for a culture and environment of entrepreneurship in the United States was taking shape on the east and west coasts and of all places in and around Minneapolis. Stanford and MIT were building on the technology breakthroughs of World War II and graduating a generation of engineers into a consumer and cold war economy that seemed limitless. Meanwhile in Minneapolis one of the first computer companies was formed to help break codes for the National Security Agency. On the east and west coast communication between scientists, engineers and corporations was relatively open, and ideas flowed freely. There was an emerging culture of cooperation and entrepreneurial spirit.

Stanford Commercialization Strategy
At Stanford, Dean of Engineering Fred Terman wanted companies outside of the university to take Stanford’s prototype microwave tubes and electronic intelligence systems and build production volumes for the military. While existing companies took some of the business, often it was a graduate student or professor who started a new company. The motivation in the mid 1950’s for these new microwave startups was a crisis – we were in the midst of the cold war and the United States military and intelligence agencies were rearming as fast as they could.

Yet one of the most remarkable things about the boom in microwave and first silicon startups occurring in the 1950’s and 60’s Silicon Valley was that it was done without venture capital or public offerings. There was none. Funding for the companies spinning out of Stanford’s engineering department in the 1950’s benefited from the tight integration and web of relationships between Fred Terman, Stanford, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies and defense contractors.

These technology startups had no risk capital – just customers/purchase orders from government contractors/ military services/ or our intelligence agencies.

This post is about the rise of “risk capital” and how it came to be associated with what became Silicon Valley. (It is interesting that during the 50’s and 60’s other innovation clusters were using different methods – the first Venture Capital firm was in Boston, and subordinated debt and public offerings were common in Minneapolis.)

Risk Capital via Family Money – 1940’s
During the 1930’s, the heirs to U.S. family fortunes made in the late 19^th century – Rockefeller, Whitney, Bessemer – started to dabble in personal investments in new, risky ventures. Post World War II this generation recognized that:

Technology spin-offs coming out of WWII military research and development could lead to new, profitable companies
Entrepreneurs attempting to commercialize these new technologies could not get funding; (commercial and investment banks didn’t fund new companies, just the expansion of existing firms,) and existing companies would buy up entrepreneurs and their ideas, not fund them
There was no organized company to seek out and evaluate new venture ventures, manage investments in them and nurture their growth.

Several wealthy families in the U.S. set up companies to do just that – find and formalize investments in new and emerging industries.

In 1946 Jock Whitney started J.H. Whitney Company by writing a personal check for $5M and hiring Benno Schmidt as the first partner (Schmidt turned Whitney’s description of “private adventure capital” into the term “venture capital”).

Jock Whitney writes himself a check to fund J.H. Whitney Co.

That same year Laurance Rockefeller founded Rockefeller Brothers, Inc., with a check for $1.5 million. (23 years later they would rename the firm Venrock.)
Bessemer Securities, set up to invest the Phipps family fortune (Phipps was Andrew Carnegie’s partner,)

These early family money efforts are worth noting for:

They were “risk capital,” investing where others feared
They invested in a wide variety of new industries – from orange juice to airplanes
They almost exclusively focused on the East Coast
They used family money as the source of their investment funds

East Coast Venture Capital Experiments
In 1946, George Doriot, founded what is considered the first “venture capital firm” – American Research & Development (ARD). A Harvard Business School professor and early evangelist for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, Doriot was the Fred Terman of the East Coast. Doroit had the right idea with ARD (funding startups out of MIT and Harvard and raising money from outsiders who weren’t part of a private family) but picked the wrong model for raising capital for his firm. ARD was a publicly traded venture capital firm (raising $3.5 Million in 1946 as a closed-end mutual fund) which meant ARD was regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC.) For reasons too numerous to mention here, this turned out to be a very bad idea. (It would be another three decades of experimentation before the majority of venture firms organized as limited partnerships.)

In 1958, in Minneapolis, Midwest Technical Development Corporation was founded to emulate Doriot’s ARD venture firm. And by 1961 they were one of the most successful venture firms in the country investing in National Semiconductor, one of Silicon Valley’s earliest chip companies. Like ARD, the firm ran afoul of the SEC and closed in 1963.

The region around Boston’s Route 128 would boom in the 1950’s-70’s with technology startups, many of them funded by ARD. ARD’s most famous investment was the $70,000 they put into Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1957 for 77% of the company that was worth hundreds of millions by its 1968 IPO. It wasn’t until the rise of the semiconductor industry and a unique startup culture in Silicon Valley that entrepreneurship became associated with the West Coast.

Georges Doriot the first VC

Doriot and American Research and Development are worth noting for:

Some of the very early VC’s got their venture capital education at Harvard as Doriot’s students (Arthur Rock, Peter Crisp, Charles Waite.)
ARD was almost exclusively focused on the East Coast
ARD proved that institutional investors, not just family money had an appetite for investing into venture capital firms.

Corporate Finance
One of the ironies in Silicon Valley is that the two companies which gave birth to its entire semiconductor industry weren’t funded by venture capital. Since neither of these startups were yet doing any business with the military—and venture capital as we know it today did not exist, they had to look elsewhere for funding. Instead, in 1956/57, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory and Fairchild Semiconductor were both funded by corporate partners — Shockley by Beckman Instruments, Fairchild by Fairchild Camera and Instrument.

More on the rise of SBIC’s, Limited Partnerships, the venture capital industry as we know it today, and its influence on the creation of the Department of Defense of Office of Strategic Capital in Part XII of the Secret History of Silicon Valley here.

sgblank · The Rise of Venture Capital

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The Secret History of Silicon Valley” Part IVb – The End of Innocence

Posted on August 24, 2009 by steve blank

Remember when the days were long
And rolled beneath a deep blue sky
Didn’t have a care in the world
With mommy and daddy standin’ by
But “happily ever after” fails

The End of The Innocence – Don Henley/Bruce Hornsby

This is Part IVb of how I came to write “The Secret History of Silicon Valley“.
Read Part IV first and it will make a bit more sense.

Discovering that your worldview is wrong or mistaken can be a life-changing event. It’s part of growing up but can happen at any age. What you do when it happens shapes who you’ll become.

Dinner in a Strange Land
When I was in my mid 20’s working at ESL, I was sent overseas to a customer site where the customers were our three-letter intelligence agencies. All of us knew who they were, understood how important this site was for our country, and proud of the work we were doing. (Their national technical means of verification made the world a safer place and hastened the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War.)

As a single guy, I got to live in a motel-like room on the site while the married guys lived in town in houses and tried to blend in with the locals. When asked what they did, they said they worked at “the xxx research facility.” (Of course the locals translated that to “oh do you work for the yyy or zzz intelligence agency?”)

One warm summer evening I got invited over to the house of a married couple from my company for a BBQ and after-dinner entertainment – drinking mass quantities of the local beer. The quintessential California couple, they stood out in our crowd as the engineer (in his late 20’s, respected by his peers and the customer) had hair down to his shoulders, sharply contrasting with the military crewcuts of the customers and most of the other contractors.

His wife, about my age, could have been a poster child for the stereotypical California hippie surfer, with politics that matched her style – antiwar, anti government, antiestablishment.

One of the rules in the business was that you didn’t tell your spouse, girlfriend, significant other who you worked for or what you worked on – ever. It was always a welcome change of pace to leave the brown of the unchanging desert and travel into town and have dinner with them and have a non-technical conversation about books, theater, politics, travel, etc. But it was a bit incongruous to hear her get wound up and rail against our government and the very people we were all working for. Her husband would look at me out the corner of his eyes and then we’d segue the conversation to some other topic.

That evening I was there with three other couples cooking over the barbie in their backyard. After night fell we reconvened in their living room as we continued to go through the local beer. The conversation happened to hit on politics and culture and my friend’s’ wife innocently offered up she had lived in a commune in California. Well that created a bit of alcohol-fueled cross-cultural disconnect and heated discussion.

Until one of the other wives changed a few lives forever with a slip of the tongue.

Tell Me it Isn’t True
One of the other wives asked, “Well what would your friends in the commune think of you now that your husband is working for intelligence agencies x and y?”

As soon as the words came out of her mouth, I felt time slow down. The other couples laughed for about half a second expecting my friend’s wife to do so as well. But instead the look on her face went from puzzlement in processing the question, to concentration, as she was thinking and correlating past questions she had about who exactly her husband had been working for. It seemed like forever before she asked with a look of confusion, “What do you mean agencies x and y?”

The laughter in the room stopped way too soon, and the room got deathly quiet. Her face slowly went from a look of puzzlement to betrayal to horror as she realized that that the drunken silence, the dirty looks from other husbands to the wife who made the agency comment, and the wives now staring at their shoes was an answer.

She had married someone who never told her who he was really working for. She was living in a lie with people she hated. In less than a minute her entire worldview had shattered and coming apart in front of us, she started screaming.

This probably took no more than 10 seconds, but watching her face, it felt like hours.

I don’t remember how we all got out of the house or how I got back to the site, but to this day I still remember standing on her lawn staring at strange constellations in the night sky as she was screaming to her husband, “Tell me it isn’t true!”

The next day the site supervisor told me that my friend and his wife had been put on the next plane out of country and sent home (sedated) along with the other couple that made the comment. By the time I came back to the United States, he was gone from the company.

It’s been forty years, but every once an awhile I still wonder what happened to the rest of their lives.

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The End of Innocence
In much smaller ways I’ve watched my children and now my students discover that their worldview is wrong, mistaken or naive. I’ve watched as they realize there’s no Santa Claus and Tooth Fairy; the world has injustice, hypocrisy and inequality; capitalism and politics don’t work like the textbooks and money moves the system; you can’t opt out of dying, and without regulation people will try to “game” whatever system you put in place.

Learning to accept the things you can’t change, finding the courage to change the things you can and acquiring the common sense to know the difference, is part of growing up.

Part V of the Secret History of Silicon Valley continues here.

Download the podcast here or here

Filed under: ESL, Family/Career/Culture, Secret History of Silicon Valley | Tagged: Tips for Startups | 14 Comments »

The Secret History of Silicon Valley Part X: Stanford Crosses the Rubicon

Posted on August 17, 2009 by steve blank

This post is the latest in the “Secret History Series.” They’ll make much more sense if you read some of the earlier ones for context. See the Secret History bibliography for sources and supplemental reading.

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Swords Into Plowshares
After the end of World War II, returning veterans were happy to beat swords into plowshares (and microwave tubes) on the Stanford campus. From 1946 until 1950, Stanford’s Electronic Research Lab conducted basic research in microwave tubes. Although this reseearch would lead to the development of the Backward Wave Oscillator and Traveling Wave Tube for military applications, Stanford was building tubes and circuits not entire systems. The labs basic research was done by graduate students or Ph.Ds doing postdoctoral internships, supervised by faculty members or hired staff (many from Fred Terman’s WWII Electronic Warfare lab.)

In 1949, with the detection of the first Soviet nuclear weapons test, the Iron Curtain falling across Europe and the fall of China to the Communists, Cold War paranoia drove the U.S. military to rearm and mobilize.

Source: Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation (in constant 2009 $’s)

We’ll Do Great in the Next War
Early in 1950, just months before the outbreak of the Korean War the Office of Naval Research asked Fred Terman to build an Applied electronics program for electronic warfare. All branches of the military (the Air Force and Army would fund the program as well) wanted Stanford to build prototypes of electronic intelligence and electronic warfare systems that could be put into production by partners in industry. The Navy informs Terman that, “money was not a problem but time was.”

Pitching the idea to the President of Stanford, Terman enthusiastically said, “In the event of all-out war, Stanford would become one of the giant electronic research centers…” (A bit optimistic about the outcome perhaps, given that at this point both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons.)

Crossing the Rubicon – The Applied Electronics Lab
Setting up a separate Applied Electronics Lab for military funded programs doubled the size of the electronics program at Stanford. The new Applied Electronics Laboratory was built with Navy money and a gift from Hewlett-Packard. With the memories of WWII only five years old, and the Cold War now a shooting war in Korea, there was very little discussion (or dissension) about turning a university into a center for the production of military intelligence and electronic warfare systems.

The work in the applied program focused in microwave and electronic fields in which faculty members or senior research associates specialized. Many of the other staff in the applied program were full-time employees hired to work solely on these military programs.

Electronic Intelligence (ELINT), Jammers and Over the Horizon Radar (OTHR)
The Applied Electronics Lab used the ideas and discoveries (on microwave tubes and receiver circuits) from Terman’s basic research program in the Electronic Research Lab. The Applied Lab would build prototypes of complete systems such as Electronic Intelligence systems, Electronic Warfare Jammers, and Over the Horizon Radar. The Applied Electronics Lab also continued work on the Klystron, pushing the tube to produce megawatts in transmitted power. (Stanford designed Klystrons producing 2½ Megawatts were manufactured by Varian and Litton would power the radar in the BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System) built at the height of the cold war.) The close tie between the two labs was a unique aspect of the Stanford Lab. Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab. The discoveries in tube and circuit research suggested new electronic intelligence and countermeasure techniques and systems; in turn the needs of the Applied Lab pushed tube and circuit development. With the Applied Electronics Lab Stanford was becoming something akin to a federal or corporate lab run under university contract. The university found government contracts profitable as the government reimbursed their overhead charges (their indirect costs.) This means they could fund other non-military academic programs from this overhead.

The Stanford Applied Electronics Lab built prototypes which were handed off to the military labs for their evaluation. Subsequently military labs would contract with companies to build the devices in volume. In some cases, branches of the military contracted directly with Stanford which worked with local contractors in Silicon Valley to build these components or systems for the military. The prototype ELINT receivers built by the Applied Electronics Lab used the Stanford Traveling Wave Tubes. They quickly went into production at Sylvania Electronic Defense Labs down the street in Mountain View and Hallicrafters in Chicago. Later versions would be built by numerous industry contractors and installed on the fleet of ELINT planes orbiting the Soviet Union. These traveling wave tubes would also become the heart of the panoramic receiver used on the B-52 by the electronic warfare officer to get the bomber through the Soviet Air Defense system.

Jammers built by the Stanford Applied Electronics Lab used the Stanford Backward Wave Oscillators to produce high power microwaves. Unlike the simple noise jammers used in World War II, Soviet radars were becoming more sophisticated and newer designs were fairly immune to noise. Instead the jamming signal needed to be much smarter and have a deep understanding of how the targeted radar worked. Taking the information gleaned from our ELINT aircraft, Stanford built prototypes of jammers modulated with two new deception jamming techniques – angle jamming and range-gate pull-off. Some form of these deception jammers would eventually find their way into most electronic warfare defense systems used in the Cold War; first in the spy planes; the U-2, A-12 and SR-71. (Ironically the B-52 bomber, which would become the airborne leg of our nuclear triad, would use dumb noise jammers for two more decades – the Air Force opting to put the smart jammers on the B-58 and B-70, high altitude supersonic bombers – one soon obsolete and other never made it into production.)

The last major area of research that the Applied Electronics Lab group investigated was how radio signals propagated within the earth’s ionosphere. Over the next fifteen years this Radio Science Laboratory would receive the most funding of all departments in the lab (from the CIA) to build a ground based ELINT system. They would build and deploy two Over The Horizon Radar (OTHR) systems to detect Soviet and Chinese ballistic missile tests using ground based radars.

Guards at the Door – Stanford Joins the Cold War
In 1953 the Office of Naval Research told Terman that all military-funded projects (basic or applied, classified or not) needed to be in their own separate physical building. As a result Stanford moved the Applied work from the Electronics Research Lab into its own building.

In 1955, the pretense of keeping unclassified and classified work separate imposed too much of an administrative overhead and Stanford merged the Applied Electronics Lab and the Electronics Research Laboratory into the Systems Engineering Lab. The Applied Electronics portion of the lab was now the size of a small company. It had 100 people, 18 of them full time faculty, 33 research associates and assistants and 33 other tube technicians, draftsman, machinists, etc. Over half this lab would hold clearances for military secrets. (Top Secret: Terman, Harris, McGhie, Secret: 44 others, Confidential: 8 others. Terman, Harris and Rambo also had Atomic Energy Commission “Q” clearances.) Some students who were getting their engineering graduate degrees wrote masters and PhD thesis that were classified. Unless you had the proper clearances you couldn’t read them. Terman and Stanford had just made a major bet on the cold war, and Stanford ranked sixth among university defense contractors.

A security guard was stationed at the door of the Applied Electronics Lab to ensure that only those with proper security clearance could enter. The law of unintended consequences meant that this most casual addition in front of a university building would result in the occupation and destruction of the lab (and its twin at MIT) and the end of the program during the Vietnam War 14 years later. (More on this in a later post.)

Show and Tell – The Stanford ELINT and Electronic Warfare Contractors Meeting
During a typical year, the Applied Electronics Lab would host classified visits from military labs and defense contractors. By early 1950’s Stanford started holding a two day meeting for contractors and the military.

1955 Stanford Contractors Meeting

The 1955 attendee list gives you a feeling of the “who’s who” of the military/industrial establishment: RCA, GE, Motorola, AIL, Bendix, Convair, Mepar, Crosley, Westinghouse, McDonnell Aircraft, Douglas Aircraft, Boeing, Lockheed, Hughes Aircraft, North American, Bell Aircraft, Glen Martin, Ryan Aeronautics, Farnsworth, Sperry, Litton, Polarad, Hallicrafters, Varian, Emerson, Dumont, Maxson, Collins Radio. Other universities doing classified ELINT and Electronic Warfare work attended including University of Michigan, Georgia Institute of Technology and Cornell. Over a hundred government contractors reviewed Stanford’s work on microwave tubes and systems.

Stanford Contractors Meeting 1955 Attendees

This was a classified conference at a university, the contractors not only got to hear the conference lectures, but also visited exhibits on the ELINT and electronic warfare devices and systems the lab had built. The lab would repeat the conference the following week for government agencies doing military work.

Barely noticed at the 1955 conference, a year before the first transistor company opened in Silicon Valley, one of the sessions described how to use a new device called a“transistor” to build wide-band amplifiers. (Terman had sent faculty and graduate students to the University of Illinois in 1953 to learn transistor physics.)

The World Turned Upside Down
The Applied Electronics Lab solidified Stanford’s lead as one of, if not the place in the U.S. military for advanced thinking in ELINT and Electronic Warfare. It would turn on its head the relationship of universities and corporations.

Traditionally universities chased corporations for funding and patronage, but the military’s dependence on Stanford’s and Fred Terman’s judgment turned that relationship on its head. Now the military was listening to Terman’s advice about which military contractors should get the order for to mass produce the Stanford systems. The contractors were now dependent on Stanford.

Terman the Rainmaker
During the 1950’s Fred Terman was an advisor to every major branch of the U.S. military. He was on the Army Signal Corps R&D Advisory Council, the Air Force Electronic Countermeasures Scientific Advisory board, a Trustee of the Institute of Defense Analysis, the Naval Research Advisory Committee, the Defense Science Board, and a consultant to the President’s Science Advisory Committee. His commercial activities had him on the board of directors of HP, Watkins-Johnson, Ampex, and Director and Vice Chairman of SRI. It’s amazing this guy ever slept. Terman was the ultimate networking machine for Stanford and its military contracts.

Stanford Industrial Park – Microwave Valley Booms
One part of Terman’s strategy was to use government funding to build Stanford’s engineering school and electronics program into a world-class program. However, he realized that building a connection to industry was equally important. (Turning Stanford into an outward facing university would be one of his singular accomplishments. In the 1950’s this was a radical idea.) Starting with Hewlett Packard and the microwave spinouts, Terman wanted a local industrial base tightly coupled with his Stanford engineering program.

By the early 1950’s many of the corporations that attended the yearly Stanford Electronic Warfare conferences would establish research labs centered around Stanford for just this reason – to learn from Stanford’s basic and applied research and get a piece of the ELINT and Electronic Warfare contracting pie.

Stanford Industrial Park was the first technology office park set up to house local and out of state microwave and electronics startups. First occupied in 1953 it would include Varian, Watkins Johnson, Admiral, HP, General Electric, Kodak, Lockheed. Other east coast companies which established branches in Microwave valley in the 1950’s included IBM, Sylvania, Philco, Zenith and ITT.

The Future is Clear – Microwave Valley Forever
By 1956 Fred Terman had every right to be pleased with what he had helped build in the last ten years in and around Stanford. The Stanford Electronics Lab was now the center of ELINT and Electronic Warfare.

Startups were sprouting all over Microwave Valley delivering microwave tubes and complete military systems, slowiy replacing the orchards and fruit trees. Granger Associates was a 1956 startup founded by Bill Ayer, a graduate student in the Applied Electronics Radioscience Lab, and John Granger, a former Harvard Radio Research Lab researcher, building ELINT and Electronic Warfare systems (the Granger jammer was carried on the U-2.) Four years later Ayer and another Granger engineer would leave Granger and found one of the preeminent electronic warfare and ELINT companies: Applied Technology.

The future of the valley was clear – microwaves.

1956 – Change Everything
Yet in 1956 two events would change everything. At the time neither appeared earthshaking or momentous. First, a Bell Labs researcher who had grown up in Palo Alto, had his own interesting World War II career, and recently served as a military advisor on cold war weapons systems, decided to follow Fred Terman’s advice to locate his semiconductor company near Stanford.

The second was when a Southern Californian aircraft company decided to break into the missiles and space field by partnering with Stanford electronics expertise. It moved its electronics research group from Burbank to the new Stanford Industrial Park and built its manufacturing facility in Sunnyvale.

Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory and Lockheed Missiles Systems Division would change everything.

Read about it in Part XI of the Secret History of Silicon Valley here.

sgblank · Stanford and Weapons Systems

Filed under: Secret History of Silicon Valley, Technology | Tagged: Cold War, Electonic Warfare, Fred Terman, Signals Intelligence | 6 Comments »

The Secret History of Silicon Valley Part IX: Entrepreneurship in Microwave Valley

Posted on August 10, 2009 by steve blank

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In the 1950’s Stanford University’s Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) continued to develop innovative microwave tubes for the U.S. military. This next product, the Traveling Wave Tube, would have a major impact on electronic intelligence. As Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, Fred Terman, encouraged scientists and engineers to set up companies to build these microwave tubes for the military. Funded by military contracts, these 1950’s microwave tube startups would help build Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture and environment.

Why Electronics Intelligence?
Starting in 1946 Electronic Intelligence aircraft (ELINT) had been probing and overflying the Soviet Union to understand their air defense system. During the 1950’s, the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command, U.S. Navy, NSA, and the CIA were the primary collectors of tactical and operational ELINT on the Soviet PVO Strany Air Defense system. (The NSA owned COMINT collection.) They flew an alphabet soup of Air Force and Navy planes (Navy PB4Y-2’s, P2V’s, P4M’s and EA-3’s, Air Force B-17s, EC-47’s, RB-29s, RB-50’s, and the ultimate ELINT collector of the 1950’s – the RB-47H.) Common to all these planes (generically called Ferrets) is that they were loaded with ELINT receivers, manned by crews called Crows.

The Strategic Air Command needed this intelligence to understand the Soviet air defense system (early warning radars, Soviet fighter plane radar, Ground Control Intercept radar, Anti-Aircraft gun radar, and radars guiding Soviet Surface to Air Missiles.) We needed this data to build radar jammers that could make the Soviet air defense radars ineffective so U.S. bombers with nuclear payloads could reach their targets. The information we collected would be passed on to defense contractors who would build the jammers to confuse the Soviet air defense radars.

ELINT Tasking
The ELINT program sought answers to operational questions like: What was the Radar Order of Battle a penetrating bomber would face? Were there holes in their radar coverage our bombers could sneak through? What was the best altitude to avoid the Soviet defenses? ELINT operators on each flight were tasked to gather basic data about the characteristics of the radar: is this a new type of radar or an existing one? What is its frequency, power, pulse repetition interval, rotation rate, scan rate, polarization, carrier modulation characteristics, etc. Then they would use direction finding equipment on their aircraft to locate its position.

ELINT Receivers
Early ELINT receivers were not much different then the radios you had at home – someone had to manually turn a dial to tune them to the correct frequency. By the 1950’s these receivers could automatically “sweep” a frequency band, but this action was mechanical and slow. That was fine if a Soviet radar was operating continuously, but if it was just a brief radar transmission or burst communication (which Soviet submarines used), it would probably miss hearing it. The Soviets kept their radars turned off to stop us from recording their signals. So at times multiple ELINT planes would fly on a mission – one to run at the Soviet border appearing to attack, the other to pick up the signals from the air defense network as it responded to the intrusion. (Keep in mind that 32 of these reconnaissance planes were shot down in the Cold War.)

The ultimate dream of ELINT equipment designers was a “high-probability of intercept” receiver, one that would pick up a signal that came up on any frequency and capture even a single pulse, however brief.

This was a two-pronged challenge: the U.S. needed receivers that could tune much faster than any of the manual methods that existed, and it needed receivers that could tune a much broader range of frequencies along the electromagnetic spectrum. Again Stanford technology would solve these challenges.

Rapid Scan/High Probability of Intercept – Stanford’s contribution
In the last post we described Stanford’s high power, electronically tuned microwave tubes (the Backward Wave Oscillator) which made high power, frequency agile airborne jammers possible.

Now Stanford’s Electronics Research Laboratory delivered receivers using another tube which forever changed electronic intelligence – the Traveling Wave Tube (TWT.) Invented in Britain and further developed at Bell Labs, this tube would deliver the “holy grail” for ELINT receivers – instantaneous scan speed and extremely broad frequency range. A Traveling Wave Tube (TWT) could electronically tune through microwave frequencies at 1000 times faster than any other device, and it could operate in a frequency range measured in gigahertz. As a microwave preamplifier, it had high gain, low noise, and extremely wide bandwidth. It was perfect for a new generation of ELINT receivers to be built into the Ferret planes searching for signals around the Soviet Union and bombers attempting to enter it. Later on TWTs would be built that could not only be used in receivers, but also actually transmit broadband microwaves at high power.

Invention Versus Commercialization
While Stanford was doing its share of pure research, what’s interesting about the Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) was its emphasis on delivery of useful products for its customers – the military – from inside a research university. The military had specific intelligence requirements and that meant that a TWT needed to be rugged enough to withstand being put on airplanes. This military/university collaboration for deliverable products is where the Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) would excel – and ultimately end up leading to its destruction.

The Rise of “Microwave Valley” – More Stanford Tube Startups
The Traveling Wave Tube generated another series of startups from Stanford’s Electronics Research Laboratory. R. A. Huggins, a research associate at the Stanford’s Engineering Research Lab, left in 1948 to start Huggins Laboratories in Palo Alto and put the first commercially manufactured traveling wave tube on the market. With a boost from military R&D contracts, Huggins Labs continued to expand, diversifying into backward-wave oscillators, low-noise TWTs, and electrostatic focused tubes. (In the 1970’s Huggins Labs sold to an east coast company, Microwave Associates (which became M/A-COM.)

Stanley Kaisel, a research associate at the Stanford ERL tube laboratory, left to join Litton’s startup. He left Litton in 1959 and started Microwave Electronics Corporation (MEC) to make low power, low noise TWTs. He sold the company to Teledyne in 1965.

Venture Capital, Microwaves and the OSS
Dean Watkins, the leader of TWT research at Stanford’s Electronic Laboratory, left Stanford in 1957 and co-founded Watkins-Johnson (with R.H. Johnson the head of Hughes Aircraft microwave tube department) to market advanced TWTs to the military. Unlike the other Stanford tube spinouts which were funded with military contracts, Watkins-Johnson would be one of the first venture capital funded companies in the valley. Its first round of funding came from Tommy Davis (an ex-WWII OSS agent) then at the Kern County Land Company who knew Fred Terman through his military contacts. Terman and Davis negotiated the Watkins-Johnson investment and would sit on the Watkins-Johnson board together.

Frustrated with Kern’s lack of interest in investing in more technology companies, Tommy Davis would go on to found one of Silicon Valley’s first VC firms with Arthur Rock, creating Davis and Rock, founded in 1961. They would be one the first venture firms to organize their firm as a partnership rather than an SBIC or public company. They would also set the standard for the 20% carry for general partners. Tommy Davis would go on to found the Mayfield Fund in 1969.

These Stanford tube spinoffs joined the growing list of other microwave tube manufacturers in the valley including Eitel-McCullough, Varian, Litton Industries and Stewart Industries. Others would soon join them. By the early 1960s, a third of the nation’s TWT business and a substantial share of the klystron and magnetron industry was located in the Santa Clara Valley– and almost all of these companies emerged from one engineering lab at Stanford.

But microwave tubes were just the beginning of Stanford’s relationship with the military. Fred Terman was just getting warmed up. Much more was to come.

Read about in Part X of the Secret History of Silicon Valley here.

sgblank · Stanford and Electronic Intelligence

Filed under: Secret History of Silicon Valley | Tagged: Cold War, Electonic Warfare, Fred Terman, Signals Intelligence | Leave a comment »

The Secret History of Silicon Valley Part VIII: The Rise of Entrepreneurship

Posted on August 6, 2009 by steve blank

This post makes sense in context with the previous post.

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The Korean War catapulted Stanford’s Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) into a major player in electronic intelligence and electronic warfare systems. Encouraged by their Dean, Fred Terman, scientists and engineers left Stanford Electronics Research Laboratory to set up companies to build microwave tubes and systems for the military. Funded by military contracts these 1950’s startups would help build Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture and environment.

The Beginnings – “Vacuum Tube Valley” Ecosystem circa 1950
From its founding in 1946 Stanford’s Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) did basic research into vacuum tubes that could operate at microwave frequencies. The research was funded and paid for by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and later by the Air Force and Army. Much of the basic research work was done by advanced students or by recent Ph.Ds doing postdoctoral internships, supervised by Stanford engineering faculty members or senior research associates (staff.)

In a 1950 proposal to the Navy Fred Terman noted that the work that Stanford proposed “correlates almost ideally with related industrial activities in this area.” There were already “tube manufacturers in the area (Eitel-McCullough, Litton Industries, Varian Industries, Henitz and Kaufman and Lewis and Kaufman) that represented an integrated set of tube facilities for basic research, advanced development, engineering of new tubes, model shop and pilot and quantity production. And that circuit work is carried on by several organizations in the neighborhood, with Hewlett Packard Company being especially notable in this regard.” Terman was describing the valley’s already existing ecosystem for building vacuum tubes in 1950.

But unlike the majority of existing tube manufacturers in the valley who were making products for radios, Stanford Electronics Research Lab tube group had a special customer with very special needs – the U.S. Air Force and its Strategic Air Command.

So what exactly was the Electronics Research Lab designing? What were these microwave tubes? Why were they so important to the military? And what were these electronic intelligence and warfare systems used for?

Stanford Joins the Cold War – Microwave Power Tubes
Stanford’s work in microwave power tubes would solve two of the Strategic Air Command’s most important cold war problems.

In case of a nuclear war in the 1950’s the Strategic Air Command planned to fly its bombers with nuclear weapons into the Soviet Union. To protect their country, the Soviets were building an air defense network to warn, track and destroy these attacking bombers. Our bombers used Electronic Warfare jammers to confuse the Soviet air defense radars. But the jammers that we built in WWII were no longer sufficient to protect the planes we wanted to send into the Soviet Union.

These 1940’s jammers fitted to bombers (built by the wartime Harvard Radio Research lab headed up by Terman and his team now at Stanford) had been built around tubes originally designed for radio applications. They put out 5-20 watts of power. This miniscule amount of jamming power was acceptable because each WWII bomber flew in formation with hundreds of other planes, together attacking just a single target each day. The combined jamming power of all the bombers on a mission was enough to saturate and confuse German radar. But in a potential cold war attack on the Soviet Union, our bombers were not going to fly in a massed formation to attack one target. Instead we would attack multiple targets in the Soviet Union at the same time. And while a few bombers would penetrate the periphery of the Soviet Union together, each plane — now able to carry more explosive power than all the bombs dropped in WWII — would approach its target individually.

As a result of this change in strategy (and explosive capacity), each bomber penetrating the Soviet air defense system in the Cold War needed jammers that had 1. enough jamming power to defend itself (hundreds of times more power than WW2 devices), 2. could cover multiple frequencies, and 3. these jammers could be tuned instantaneously.

B-47 – primary Strategic Air Command Bomber in the 1950’s

Frequency Agility
Frequency agility can be best described by what happened over Germany in WWII. As the allies jammed Germany radar, the Germans tried to avoid the effect of jamming by changing the frequency on which their radars transmitted. This was possible since the jammers in U.S. planes’ could only transmit on a narrow band of frequencies (called spot jamming) and could not be re-tuned in the air. To cover all the possible frequencies German radars might be operating on, electronic warfare technicians pre-tuned the jammers before each bomber raid so that each plane transmitted on a different frequency. The combined effect of hundreds of planes in the bomber stream was to cover a broader frequency range than one jammer could by itself. (This technique of covering a broad range of frequencies was known as barrage jamming.)

(A good Radar and Electronic Warfare tutorial is here.)

For example, one of the first Soviet radars U.S. bombers would encounter was the Soviet P-20 Token early warning radar). The P-20 transmitted on 5 different frequencies over a band 300mhz wide. To jam it, all five frequencies had to be jammed at the same time. Our WWII jammers couldn’t do the job.

Terman’s Systems Engineering Research Lab at Stanford would develop microwave power tubes that offered a solution to both high power, frequency agility and instantaneous tuning and would be a a game changer for electronic warfare at the time.

High Power, Instant Tuning – Stanford’s contribution
Stanford’s Electronics Research Laboratory first contribution to high power microwave tubes for airborne electronic warfare in the 1950’s was the Backward Wave Oscillator (BWO). Stanford engineers realized that this tube, which had been invented in France, could electronically tune through microwave frequencies while producing almost a 1,000 watts of power – (equivalent to the output of 200 jammers over Germany in WWII.) This was a critical development to support the new tactics of single bombers penetrating the Soviet Union. Perfecting this tube for use as an airborne jammer became one of the labs primary objectives.

Equipping a bomber with multiple jammers built around Backward Wave Oscillator could give it enough power to use barrage jamming against multiple radars and get it through to its target. Stanford gave its Backward Wave Oscillator design drawings to tube manufacturers throughout the U.S. By the 1960’s, the U.S. Air Force would ultimately equip its B-52 bombers with 1,000’s of jammers using these these oscillators.

The Rise of “Microwave Valley” Stanford Tube Spinouts
A technician in Stanford’s ERL tube shop, Ray Stewart, thought he could build these Backward Wave Oscillators commercially, and in 1952 left to start Stewart Engineering in Scotts Valley near Santa Cruz. The company had more orders from the military than it could handle. (Stewart would sell his company to Watkins Johnson, one of the most financially successful of the Stanford microwave tube spinoffs. More about Watkins-Johnson in the next post.) Stewart joined a growing list of other microwave startups beginning to populate the valley.

One of the early microwave spinouts from Stanford was built around a microwave power tube called the Klystron, invented by Terman’s students Russell and Sigurd Varian and William Hansen. In 1948 the Varian brothers along with Stanford professors Edward Ginzton and Marvin Chodorow founded Varian Associates in Palo Alto to produce klystrons for military applications. (Fred Terman and David Packard of HP joined Varian’s board.) While the Klystrons of the 1950’s had too narrow a bandwidth and were too large for airborne use, they could be scaled up to generate megawatts of power and were used to power the U.S. ground-based Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radars (and the Stanford Linear Accelerator.)

Another of Terman’s students, Charles Litton, would start several Silicon Valley companies, and in the 1950’s Litton Industries would become the leader in pulse and continuous wave magnetrons used in jammers and missiles. Magnetrons were the first high power microwave device invented in WWII. Used in radars systems and missiles, magnetrons could produce hundreds of watts of power.

More to Come
These first microwave tubes were just the beginning of a flood of innovative products for the military. The next Stanford tubes and systems would revolutionize the Electronic Intelligence aircraft that were circling (and flying over) the Soviet Union.

More in the next post, Part IX of the Secret History of Silicon Valley.

sgblank · Stanford and the Rise of Cold War Entrepreneurship

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The Secret History of Silicon Valley Part VII: We Fought a War You Never Heard Of

Posted on August 3, 2009 by steve blank

These next series of posts chronicles the untold story of how one professor returning from one war decides to enlist Stanford University in waging the next one and by accident, laid the foundation for Silicon Valley, venture capital and entrepreneurship as we know it today.

These posts cover two distinct periods – the first, the rise of “Microwave Valley” chronicles the decade of 1946-1956 as Stanford University became the hub of military/industry contracting in the Bay Area.

The second series of posts, the rise of “Spy Satellite Valley,” starts in 1956 with two game changing events– one very public – the valley’s first semiconductor company and one very, very private – the valley as the home of the first optical and ELINT spy satellites and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. That story ends in 1969 with campus riots at Stanford during the Vietnam War.

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These posts will make a lot more sense if you look at the earlier Secret History posts. If you read only one previous post, read this one (or this one.)

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The Birth of Entrepreneurship in The Hot Cold War
Silicon Valley entrepreneurship was born in the middle of a secret war with the Soviet Union. It’s a war you probably never heard of since most of it was classified, and both parties never wanted it public lest it got out of hand. Yet it was a war in which tens of thousands of Americans fought and hundreds died. Frederick Terman, Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, enlisted Stanford University as a major arms suppliers in this war. In doing so he accidentally launched entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley – with the help of the U.S. military, the CIA and the National Security Agency.

Stanford as a Center of Microwave and Electronics
In 1946 after running the military’s secret 800 person Electronic Warfare Lab at Harvard, Fred Terman returned to Stanford as the dean of the engineering school. Terman’s goal was to build Stanford’s electrical engineering department into a center of excellence focused on microwaves and electronics. Having already assembled one of most advanced electronic labs in World War II, Terman was one of the few academics who could do it.

Fred Terman

Terman’s first step was to recruit 11 former members of his staff from the Harvard Radio Research Lab — “Congratulations, you’re now Stanford faculty.” Not only were they all great researchers, but they also had just spent three years building electronic warfare systems that were used in World War II. They would become the core of Stanford’s new Electronics Research Lab (ERL.) While officially in the electrical engineering department, the lab reported directly to Terman.

Next, Terman used his military contacts to secure funding for the Lab from the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force and the Army Signal Corps. (Although the country had returned to peace, some in the military wanted to preserve our ability to fight the next war.) By 1947 the U.S. military was funding half of Stanford’s engineering school budget. Terman proudly pointed out that only Stanford, MIT and Harvard had a military sponsored electronics program.

Stanford Leads in Electronic Intelligence and Electronic Warfare
In the 1950’s Stanford Engineering Research Lab (ERL) made major contributions to electronic intelligence and electronic warfare. Its basic research focused on three areas: microwave receiving and transmitting tubes, radar detection and deception techniques and understanding the earth’s ionosphere.

Stanford became one of the leading research centers in advancing the state of microwave tubes including the klystron which could provide high-power microwave in pulses, magnetrons which could provide continuous wave microwave power, and backward wave oscillators and traveling wave tubes – both electronically tunable microwave tubes.

Stanford’s research on the earth’s ionosphere would lead to meteor-burst communication systems and Over the Horizon Radar used by the NSA and CIA to detect Soviet and Chinese missile tests and ultimately to the research that made Stealth technologies possible.

Its studies in radar detection and deception techniques would lead Stanford to the applied part of it mission. Stanford would build prototypes of electronic intelligence receivers (high probability of intercept/rapid scan receivers) for use by the military. These applied systems were prototypes of the jamming devices found on our bombers and receivers found in NSA ground stations and the fleet of ELINT aircraft flying around and in the Soviet Union and later on in the U-2, SR-71 and ELINT ferret subsatellites.

Later posts will talk about these technologies and the startups that spun out of Stanford to build them. But first, to understand what happened at Stanford and in Silicon Valley under Fred Terman, some context about the Cold War is helpful. (Skip the next section if you’re a history major.)

The Cold War
After World War II ended, our wartime ally the Soviet Union kept its army in Eastern Europe and forcibly installed Communist governments in its occupied territories. Meanwhile the U.S. demobilized its army, sent its troops home, scrapped most of its Air Force and mothballed almost all its Navy. As tensions rose, there was a growing fear that the Soviets could invade and occupy all of Western Europe.

In 1949, the Soviets exploded their first nuclear weapon and ended the U.S monopoly on atomic weaponry. That same year China fell to the communists under Mao Zedong, and the Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan. A year later the Korean War turned the cold war hot, as communist North Koreans attacked and overran most of South Korea (except for a small defensive perimeter in the south.) American and United Nations troops entered the war fighting North Koreans and then Communist Chinese ground troops, and Soviet fighter pilots for three years. 34,000 U.S. soldiers died in battle.

To the U.S. the Soviet Union seemed bent on world conquest with Korea just a warm-up for an atomic war with massive casualties. (This was not an unreasonable supposition after a conventional world war which had left 50 million dead.) Faced with the reality of the Korean War, the U.S. began to rebuild its military. But now the Soviet Union was its target enemy, and nuclear weapons had become the principal instrument of offense. Instead of rebuilding its WWII forces, the U.S. military embraced new technologies (jets, electronics, missiles, nuclear subs) and built entirely new weapon systems (bombers with nuclear weapons, ICBMs, SLBM’s) for a new era of international conflict.

Europe, completely outnumbered and outgunned by the Soviet Union, built the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as a bulwark against ground Soviet attack. And the U.S. planned strikes with nuclear armed bombers if war in Europe broke out.

Stanford’s Electronic Research Lab (ERL) which had focused on basic research on microwave tubes from 1946 was about to scale up for the Cold War.

Smarter Intelligence
One of the major differences between the war with Germany and the cold war confrontation with the Soviet Union had to do with access. The Soviet Union was a closed country. Unlike Germany in World War II, the U.S. could not fly across the Soviet Union to learn how their defenses were set up. We did not have radar maps of their cities. The Soviet’s secrecy fed our cold war paranoia. The U.S. was determined to find out what was going on inside. And the way we were going to do it was with electronic/signals intelligence.

But the technology that supported intelligence gathering against our WW II enemies was not sufficient to penetrate the Soviet Union. The U.S. military had to develop new ways to collect intelligence. The engineering department and labs that Fred Terman established at Stanford University would play a key role in advancing electronic intercept and jamming technology to support the more sophisticated intelligence systems that the Cold War required.

The Air Force Needs to Know
By the Korean War, U.S. policy held that the Air Force, carrying nuclear weapons into the Soviet Union, would be the means to fight World War III.

Through World War II, the U.S. Air Force had been a part of the U.S. Army. It split off into a separate service in 1947. By the 1950’s, the Strategic Air Command (SAC) had become the U.S. Air Force’s long range bombing arm and the designated instrument of Armageddon.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the defense of the Soviet Motherland lay with the Soviet Air Defense Forces, called PVO Strany, a separate branch of the Soviet military formed in 1948 designed to detect U.S. bomber raids, target and aim radar-guided weapons and destroy the U.S. bombers.

Example of Early Warning Radar Coverage – Japan in WWII

SAC needed intelligence to understand the components of the PVO Strany air defense system in order to shut them down and make them ineffective so our bombers with their nuclear payloads could reach their targets. (The information we collected would be passed on to contractors who would build jamming devices the bombers would carry.) It sought answers to tactical questions like: What was the Radar Order of Battle a penetrating bomber would face? (Were there holes in their radar coverage our bombers could sneak through? What was the best altitude to avoid the Soviet defenses?) What were the different types of Soviet fighter planes? How many? How effective? What about the anti-aircraft (AAA) gun defenses? In addition the Soviets were adding a new type of defensive radar-guided weapon called the Surface to Air Missile (SAM).

Example of Jammer versus Radar Coverage- Germany in WW11

Example of Jammer versus Radar Coverage – Allied Jammers over Germany in WW11

The Strategic Air Command also needed to know what the navigational waypoints and the target would look like on their air-to-ground bombing radars. (These radars painted a map-like picture of the ground and prior to GPS, this is how bombers navigated their way to the target.)

And on top of all this the Strategic Air Command needed to understand the current state of the Soviet Air Defense Force readiness and deployment updated on a daily basis.

The CIA Needs to Know
While the Air Force was working on collecting intelligence to execute their tactical missions, the CIA, founded in 1947, was responsible for providing U.S. political leadership with a much bigger picture. They developed the National Intelligence Estimate – a series of reports which summarized their judgment about the size of the Russian threat. Also seeking to learn more about the Soviet Union’s offensive weapon systems, the CIA wanted intelligence to help them understand: What type of strategic bombers did the Soviets have? How many did they have? How would they reach the U.S.? How would we know if they were coming? (Have they moved to their forward operating bases in the Artic?) The same was true about the Soviet defensive systems – how many fighters would they build and of what type? How many Surface to Air Missiles – what was their range and accuracy?

And by the mid 1950’s the Soviets were testing ballistic missiles, both intermediate range that could reach Europe and intercontinental range that could reach the U.S. Whatwas their range? What was their accuracy? How big of a nuclear warhead could they carry (throw weight and yield)? The military needed to answer these same questions about the nuclear armed missiles the Soviets were putting on their submarine force.

To give our leadership an estimate of the Soviet’s nuclear production capacity, the CIA also had to estimate how many nuclear weapons could the Soviet Union make. Where were their production facilities? What was the yield of the weapons and their weight and size?

Throughout the 1950’s the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence was heavily involved in the development of Electronics Intercept and Electronic Warfare Intelligence – and Stanford and the emerging startups around it would provide the systems and concepts to help.

The NSA and ELINT
In the 1950’s the Strategic Air Command and the U.S. Navy were the airborne ELINT assets for the U.S. Beginning in the mid/late 1950’s the National Security Agency (NSA) starting taking more and more responsibility for collection – first in communications intelligence, then in signals and telemetry intelligence. The NSA ultimately built up hundreds of ground stations, satellites and aircraft manned by tens of thousands servicemen (under the cover of the Air Force Security Service, Army Security Agency and the Naval Security Group.)

The “Hot” Cold War
Remember the Soviet Union was a closed country. To collect the intelligence to answer its questions about the Soviet threat, the U.S. military resurrected the signals Intelligence lessons and skills we invented in World War II. Starting in 1946 ELINT aircraft had been probing and overflying the Soviet Union. SAC, the CIA, the Navy and our British allies flew modified planes called Ferrets around the periphery of the Soviet Union to understand their air defense system (the crews were called Crows). (What isn’t well known is that the U.S. and Britain flew planes on deep penetration missions into and across the Soviet Union numerous times – well before a U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960.)

British Canberra PR3 – Overflew Kapustin Yar 1953

The Air Force adopted a cover story that these were weather data gathering missions. These flights were no secret to the Soviets, (given the sheer number of surveillance flights around the Soviet Union it’s surprising they didn’t need their own air traffic control system,) and they started to protest diplomatically in 1948. When our flights continued, the Soviets took direct action. In 1950, two months before the Korean War started, the Soviets shot down an ELINT plane over the Baltic. All ten crew members were killed. This was the beginning of a Soviet policy to stop ignoring incursions. They would attempt to force the ELINT planes to land in the Soviet Union or they would destroy them. Every year through the the 1950’s and the early ’60’s the Soviets attacked and shot down at least one of our ELINT ferret aircraft. This was a deadly game.

pb4y-2 Privateer Navy ELINT

We kept on probing their defenses convinced that it was in our national interest to continue. The low-level conflict continued until the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the local Soviet commander shot down a U-2 over Cuba. Both countries realized that a miscalculation could have been a catalyst for World War III and the Soviets stop attacks on U.S. spyplanes. (The Communist Chinese continued to shoot down U-2’s flown by Nationalist Chinese pilots until 1970, and the Soviet Union accidently attacked two Korean airline passenger planes in the Far East, one damaged in 1978 and one destroyed in 1983.)

During the Cold War 32 U.S. ELINT planes were shot down by Soviet pilots with 225 U.S. airmen killed. (The numbers vary depending on the sources you read.) Regardless of the number, this was a deadly shooting war.

Stanford and an emerging set of Silicon Valley startups would be deeply involved in designing the technologies, techniques and ELINT systems on these planes. Microwave Valley was about to take off.

Details in the next post, Part VIII of the Secret History of Silicon Valley.

Filed under: Secret History of Silicon Valley | Tagged: Cold War, Electonic Warfare, Fred Terman, Steve Blank | 10 Comments »

A Wilderness of Mirrors

Posted on July 1, 2009 by steve blank

Excuse the non-Customer Development, non-entrepreneurial post. I can’t get this one out of my head.

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The VENONA Project
One of the most interesting (declassified) stories of cryptography is the deciphering of Soviet communications to their diplomatic missions in the U.S during World War II. What was amazing about these decrypts was the Soviets used one-time pads which were theoretically unbreakable. The National Security Agency has a great website on the subject.

I had dinner last week with someone involved in the VENONA project (now retired.) We talked about one of the spies unearthed in the decoded messages; Ted Hall, a 19-year scientist at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project. For lots of complicated reasons Hall was never arrested nor charged with a crime. Hall’s interest in Communism came from literature his older brother Ed brought home from college.

When Ted Hall went to work on the Atomic Bomb during World War II his older brother Ed joined the Air Force.

My Brothers Keeper
During the Cold War, when Ted Hall was under suspicion of being a Soviet spy, his brother Ed Hall, stayed in the Air Force and worked on every U.S. military missile program in the 1950’s (Atlas, Thor, etc.)

Ed Hall eventually became the father of the Minuteman missile project, our land-based ICBM carrying nuclear weapons to destroy the Soviet Union.

Surely the KGB, who ran Ted Hall as a spy, knew about his brother? Perhaps even first…?

A Wilderness of Mirrors
My dinner companion, (who had a hand in his agencies counterintelligence group,) “acted” surprised about the connection between the two…

Oh, what a wilderness of mirrors we live in.

Filed under: Secret History of Silicon Valley | 2 Comments »

The Secret History of Silicon Valley Part VIb: Every World War II Movie was Wrong

Posted on April 27, 2009 by steve blank

This is Part VI of how I came to write “The Secret History of Silicon Valley“. This post makes a lot more sense if you look at the earlier posts as well as the video and slides.

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The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers, and Tina Seelig invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office was in the (now demolished) Terman Engineering Building.

Fred Terman – the Cover Story
I’d heard of Terman but I didn’t really know what he did – his biography said that he was one of the preeminent radio engineers in the 1930’s literally writing the textbooks. He was the professor who helped his students Bill Hewlett and David Packard start a company in 1939. In World War II he headed up something called the Harvard Radio Research Lab. There was plenty in his biography about his post WWII activities: chair of electrical engineering in 1937, dean of engineering in 1946, provost in 1955. He started the Stanford Honors Co-op in 1954 which allowed companies in the valley to send their engineers to Stanford graduate engineering programs.

Since I was interested in the history of Silicon Valley, Entrepreneurship, and now Terman, I began to understand that Terman had a lot to do with the proliferation of microwave companies in Silicon Valley in the 1950’s and ’60’s. But how? And why? So I started to read all I could find on the development of microwaves. That led me back to the history of radar in World War II – and a story you may not know.

What Does WWII Have to Do with Silicon Valley?
Just a quick history refresher. In December 1941, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, and Germany declares war on the United States. And while the Soviets are fighting the Germans in massive land battles in eastern Europe, until the allies invade Western Europe in June 1944, the only way the U.S. and Britian can affect German war-fighting capability is by mounting a Strategic Bombing campaign, from England. Their goal was to destroy the German capability to wage war by aerial bombing the critical infrastructure of the German war machine.

The allies bombed the German petroleum infrastructure, aircraft manufacturing infrastructure, chemical infrastructure, and transportation infrastructure. The Americans and British split up the air campaign: the British bombed at night, the Americans during the day.

The Odds Weren’t Good
These bombers flew for 7+ hours from England and over occupied Europe, through a gauntlet of intense antiaircraft fire and continuous attack by German fighter planes. And they got it coming and going to the target.

But what the bomber crews didn’t know was that the antiaircraft fire and German fighters they encountered were controlled via a sophisticated radar-guided electronic air defense system covering all of occupied Europe and Germany.

The German electronic air defense system was designed to detect the allied bomber raids, target and aim the German radar-guided weapons, and destroy the American and British bombers. The German air defense system had 100’s of early warning radars, and thousands of radar controlled anti-aircraft guns, and Ground Controlled Intercept radars to guide the fighters into the bombers.

And the German night fighters had their own on-board radar. In all the Germans had over 7,500 radars dedicated to tracking and killing the allied bombers.

Each allied bombing mission lost 2-20% of their planes. Bomber crews had to fly 25 missions to go home. 160,000 U.S. and British airmen were killed. The German objective was to make strategic bombing too costly for the Allies to continue.

By 1942 the Allied Air Command recognized they needed to reduce allied losses to fighters and flak. They needed a way to shut down the German Air Defense system. (Bear with me as this history takes you from the skies of Europe to Fred Terman.)

The Electronic Shield
To shut it down we first needed to understand the German “Radar Order of Battle.” What radars did the Germans have and what were their technical characteristics? How effective they were? What weapons were they associated with? We needed to find out all this stuff and then we needed to figure out how to confuse it and make it ineffective.

So the U.S. set up a top secret, 800-person lab to do just that, first, to gather electronic intelligence to understand the “Radar Order of Battle” and then, to wage “electronic warfare” by building mechanical and electronic devices to severely hamper the Germans’ ability to target and aim their weapons.

Ferrets and Crows – Electronic Intelligence
The first job of the secret lab was to find and understand the German air defense system. So we invented the U.S. Electronic Intelligence industry in about 12 months (with help from their British counterparts at the Telecommunications Research Establishment.) These mission of the planes called Ferrets, manned by crews called Crows, was to find and understand the German electronic air defense system. We stripped out B-24 bombers, took out all the bomb racks, took out all the bombs and even took out all the guns. And we filled it with racks of receivers and displays, wire and strip recorders and communications intercept equipment that could search the electromagnetic spectrum from 50 megahertz to 3 gigahertz, and this is 1943.

We flew these unarmed planes in and out of Germany alongside our bombers and basically built up the “radar order of battle.” We now understood where the German radars were, their technical details and what weapons they controlled.

Tin Foil Rain – Chaff
We first decided to shut down the German radars that were directing the anti-aircraft guns and the fighter planes. And to do that we dropped tin foil on the Germans. No kidding. Radar engineers had observed if you cut a strip of aluminum foil to 1/2 the wavelength of a radar transmitter and throw it in front of the radars antenna, the radar signal would reflect perfectly. All the radar operator would see was noise, rather than airplanes.

Well, you couldn’t stand in front of the German radars and throw out tin foil, but you could if you had a fleet of airplanes. Each plane threw out packets of aluminum foil (called “chaff”.) The raid on Hamburg in July, 1943 was the first use of chaff in World War II. It completely shut down the German air defense system in and around Hamburg. The British and then the Americans firebombed the city with minimal air losses.

Chaff used 3/4’s of all the aluminum foil in the U.S. in World War II, because by the end of the war, every bomber stream was dumping chaff on every mission.

Jam It and Shut it Down – Electronic Warfare
But this secret lab was focused on electronic warfare. So they systematically designed electronic devices called “jammers” to shut down each part of the German air defense system. Think of a “jammer” as a radio transmitter broadcasting noise on the same frequency of the enemy radar set. The goal is to overwhelm the enemy radar with noise so they couldn’t see the bombers. We built electronic jammers to target each part of the German air defense system: their early warning radars, the short range radars, the antiaircraft gun radars, the Ground Control Intercept Radars, the air to ground radio links and even the radars onboard the German night fighters. By the end of the war we had put multiple jammers on every one of our bombers, and while their power output was ridiculously low, these jammers were flying in formation with 100’s or even 1,000 other planes with their jammers on, and the combined power was enough to confuse the radar operators.

Just to give you a sense of scale of how big this electronic warfare effort was, we built over 30,000 jammers, with entire factories running 24/7 in the U.S. making nothing but jammers to put on our bombers.

By the end of World War II, over Europe, a bomber stream no longer consisted of just planes with bombs. Now the bombers were accompanied by electronics intelligence planes looking for new radar signals, escort bombers just full of jammers and others full of chaff, as well as P-51 fighter planes patrolling alongside our bomber stream.

Every WWII Movie and Book with a Bomber was Wrong
While there were lots of stories about how the British early warning radar system, called “Chain Home” saved England during the Battle of Britain by giving the Spitfire pilots time to scramble to intercept German bombers, there wasn’t a coherent story about American and British bombers encountering the German radar-guided air defense system. (The best book on the subject is the Nuremberg Raid.)

This lack of information meant that every World War II movie or book that had airplanes on bombing missions in it was wrong. Every one of them. (To someone who had grown up with reruns of WWII war movies on TV, this was a shock.) Every movie I had seen – 12 O’clock High, Memphis Belle, etc. – assumed that there were no electronics other than radios on these bombers. Wrong. Not only didn’t the movie makers know, but the pilots and crews didn’t know about the German radar guided system trying to kill them. Nor did they know about the electronic shield being assembled to try to protect them.

But while this may be a great story what the does this have to do with the history of Silicon Valley?

The answer lies with who ran this lab and became the father of electronic warfare and Electronic Intelligence in the Cold War for the next 20 years.

Who Ran the Most Secret Lab You Never Heard of?
It was Fred Terman of Stanford. The Harvard Radio Research Lab was his creation. A Stanford professor was at Harvard in World War II because the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development thought Terman was the best radio engineer in the country. (Why couldn’t he have set up a lab at Stanford? Apparently, the Office of Scientific Research and Development thought that the rest of Stanford’s engineering department was second rate.)

Finally, I had an answer to the question I had asked 35 years earlier when I was in Thailand: “How did electronic warfare get started?” Now I knew that it began in the early days of World War II as a crash program to reduce the losses of bombers to the German air defense network. Electronic warfare and electronic intelligence in the U.S. started with Fred Terman and the Harvard Radio Research Lab.

Spooky Music
Reading about Terman was like finding the missing link in my career. Here was the guy who invented the field I had spent the first five years of my adult life working on. And 30 years later I was teaching at Stanford in a building named after him and never knew a thing about him. Play spooky music here.

I began to realize a few things: First, everything we had done in electronic warfare in the Vietnam War was just a slightly more modern version of what we had done over occupied Europe in World War II. (And in hindsight, we seemed a bit more agile and innovative in WWII.)

Unbelievably, in less than two years, Terman’s Radio Research lab invented an industry and had turned out a flurry of new electronic devices the likes of which had never been seen. Yet decades later the military lacked the agility to write a requirements in two years, let alone get 10’s of thousands of new systems deployed on aircraft as Terman had done. How was this possible? In 21^st century terminology we’d say that Terman built the Radio Research lab into a customer-centric organization doing agile development. And Vannevar Bush with OSRD had turned the U.S. military into an ambidextrous organization.

Just the Beginning
The public history of Terman’s involvement with the military ends when he returns back to Stanford at the end of the war. Nothing in his biography or any Stanford history mentions anything as exciting as his work in World War II. The public story of his last 20 years at Stanford, in the 1950’s and ’60’s, seems to have him settle into the role of the kindly dean and innovative provost.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Secret Life of Fred Terman in a War you never heard of in Part VII of the Secret History of Silicon Valley.

sgblank · Stanford, Terman, and WWII

Filed under: Air Force, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Technology | Tagged: Electonic Warfare, Fred Terman, Signals Intelligence, Steve Blank, World War II | 19 Comments »

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