Robert Smith

We're going back to the show.

1974.

Atari, Nolan Bushnell has dreams of selling a version of Pong that people can play at home.

We know it's going to work because you played it.

Young Robert Smith's waiting.

How are they going to get the money to do it?

There's not a whole system for it.

The culture hasn't caught up that much.

You talked about the culture shift last time.

And so, you know, a few VCs do go by Atari and they see that it's a roller rink.

Full of weed smokers.

And they're like, this is not the business we're in.

But one day, a venture capitalist named Don Valentine walked in.

Valentine had worked at Fairchild Semiconductor, that company that was at the heart of the birth of Silicon Valley that we talked about last time.

Valentine was the sales manager there.

And Fairchild was like this fountain of startups.

They called them the Fair Children.

Somebody from there started AMD, still one of the biggest chip makers in the world.

And Valentine, because he had worked with these startups,

guys, knew them, had invested out of his own pocket in some of the companies, understood what was happening in technology.