Starting Up Silicon Valley: An evening with author Katherine Maxfield

Katherine Maxfield, the author of “Starting Up Silicon Valley: 
How ROLM Became a Cultural Icon and Fortune 500 Company”, will read and sign books.

Decades before Facebook, seven years before Apple, four young Stanford graduates were hard at work in a prune-drying shed designing ''the world's toughest computer.'' That was the founding of ROLM Corporation, at a time when the orchards of Santa Clara County were being transformed into what would become Silicon Valley.
By 1984--merely fifteen years later--ROLM was a Fortune 500 company with worldwide offices and a park-like campus. That same year, IBM bought the company in the biggest deal Silicon Valley had ever seen. 
Starting Up Silicon Valley reveals 
- leadership's challenges, doubts, and convictions, from start-up to buyout and beyond;
- how ROLM's technological innovations disrupted two industries;
- why ROLM was known as a Great Place to Work (GPW) and how that style can influence today's workplace;
- the dirty tricks that giant AT&T undertook to smash competition that threatened its domain; and
- the hopes and frustrations of an IBM merger, from both sides of the story.
Humorous anecdotes and the wisdom of some of Silicon Valley's most respected leaders make Starting Up Silicon Valley an intimate story of one of the Valley's most important and culturally influential companies.

“There are two great ways to learn about what goes on inside a start-up—work for one or read this book.” Bill Davidow, venture capitalist and tech columnist for The Atlantic.