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Friday, January 30, 2009
Two books look back at early Mass. tech leaders
By Alan R. Earls, Special to Mass High Tech
How is the economic crisis affecting tech companies?
Flash Slideshow: Mass High Tech All-Stars Thought Leadership Roundtable
With the relentless flow of bad-to-worse to even-worse business news in 2008, it is perhaps not surprising that two new books with regional relevance avoided the limelight last year. For Mass High Tech readers, though, they should be of special interest.
One is a memoir from the indomitable Leo Beranek (the second B in BBN Technologies, the company that helped build and run the ARPANET) spanning his Iowa farm boy childhood in the era of the Model T — he is 95 — up to his continued role as a 21st century acoustician. Then there is Creative Capital: George Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital by Spencer Ante (Harvard Business School Press, 2008), the long-overdue biography of the Frenchman who set down roots in Boston and, among other accomplishments, pretty much invented the modern venture capital industry.
Along the way, he funded a significant number of the first Massachusetts companies to wear the high-tech moniker, including Ionics, Digital Equipment Corp. and Teradyne Inc. He even helped bankroll George H.W. Bush’s foray into the offshore oil industry.
Beranek’s book, like its author, is warm and engaging. Beranek, whom I interviewed for MHT back in the 1980s, is always fronted by an ever-ready smile and an unfailing sense of confidence. And this comes through the pages of his memoir whether he is packing off to Harvard University for the first time, running a high-profile acoustics laboratory for the government during World War II, or designing concert halls, and hiring legendary pioneers in computing to help his company get up to speed in that new field.
In addition to being smart and persistent in his focus on problems, Beranek seemed to have had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. His arrival at Harvard came from offering to change a flat tire for a stranger passing through town. During World War II, he snagged an invitation to the White House after sitting next to Eleanor Roosevelt on an airplane.
By the time, in the 1960s, that his high-tech company had become a force in networking and a leading player in time-shared computer services, he was already involved in a new venture — attempting to launch and then operate the Boston TV station WCVB.
Beranek’s title, Riding the Waves: A Life in Science, Sound and Industry (MIT Press, 2008) takes us through the seminal years of technical fields as well as the formative years of the Boston-Route 128 high-tech scene. There’s even a cameo with Georges Doriot, better known as “The General,” who threatened to sue BBN for recruiting key employees.
The General finally graduates from misty legend to multidimensional humanity in Creative Capital. Although venture capital is now taken as a natural element in a high-tech economy, that was not the case 50 years ago. Wary of the nation’s fondness at the time for large, stable enterprises and concerned that innovation was lagging, Doriot and other New England figures established American Research & Development after World War II. Doriot had come to the states in the early 1920s and conquered Harvard. He spent the war years as a brigadier general in the U.S. Army revolutionizing R&D and procurement at the quartermaster corps.
At ARD, Doriot fulfilled a dream of connecting inventors, researchers and entrepreneurs with the capital and guidance they would need to create new companies and perhaps even new industries.
At the time, only a few funds, tied to wealthy families such as the Rockefellers, offered anything similar. One by one, the majority of ARD’s progeny became profitable and began to grow — most notably DEC, which Doriot had blessed with a paltry initial investment of $70,000 in 1957.
Between his helmsmanship of ARD and his influence over nearly two generations of Harvard Business School students, Doriot, who died in 1987, made an indelible mark on Boston and the nation.
Creative Capital is a look at a remarkable man who did much to make Boston a high-tech hub.
Alan Earls is a freelance writer and former editor of Mass High Tech. He can be reached at alan.earls@comcast.net.
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