notes, “but I wanted to bring it into the environment of other technology companies, and learn myself about how they grow and scale their technology in the best possible way toward success. This [Silicon Valley] was the absolute best place to do that.” The right stuff Over the decades, California had become the country’s locus of technological innovation, enterprise and development. In the 1970s, the state underwent perhaps its most consequential shift when Silicon Valley became the hub for profound technological change. Especially focused in the San Francisco Bay area and farther south in the Santa Clara Valley, the “digital revolution” fomented a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship unparalleled in the modern world. For its part, the state’s southern region (around Pasadena) became the center for more hardware- related tech industries and organizations, among them, Caltech, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Northrop Grumman. As Francis J. Gavin, an historian and Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., describes it, “[The digital revolution] didn’t simply do things such as increase computing power and capabilities, but—first through Apple—began to put these tools in the hands of individuals, rather than at the service of larger organizations. It also connected
these technologies to increased levels of access to information, unmediated through the state or other institutions, providing individual independence and communication.” On the rise Gavin might as well have been speaking directly about Schmidt, who describes his success as a digital acolyte. “It’s because I started in the era when cloud computing was first introduced, when it vastly changed how rapidly and inexpensively startups could get up and running across an unlimited spectrum of use cases, to build and scale digital businesses, bringing them to a global audience in weeks, rather than months or years.” Schmidt started his video platform enterprise using a leased Rackspace server and, six months later, migrated all his software to a new, then-barely understood cloud architecture called Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS happens to be the same infrastructure that was used to build the now world- beating tech conglomerate, Amazon.com. “Back then, AWS billed me for computing, storage and a slate of other services, charging by the minute, and I took advantage of that arrangement to scale up and down my operation in real time, all of it automated, based on my customer demand,” Schmidt points out. “Cloud computing as such was a game- changer for me and thousands of other startups, and has become ‘de rigueur’ for both startups and long- running, successful enterprises alike.”
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