MW Here's what I've learned after writing about Apple, Intel and Silicon Valley for over 30 years

By Therese Poletti

History repeats itself in Silicon Valley, a few wacky stories are worth remembering and AI is getting creepier every day

After more than 30 years of covering the tech industry, mostly in Silicon Valley, I'm retiring from MarketWatch.

I had a front-row seat to stories ranging from International Business Machines Corp.'s $(IBM)$ near bankruptcy and turnaround, the dot-com boom and bust, the Hewlett Packard proxy battle and pretexting scandal, the introduction of the iPhone, the social-media revolution, the transformation of Nvidia Corp. $(NVDA)$ and the rise of artificial intelligence.

I met executives ranging from Lou Gerstner of IBM, Mitch Kapor of Lotus Development Corp., Oracle Corp. $(ORCL)$ co-founder Larry Ellison, as well as Advanced Micro Devices Inc. $(AMD)$ CEOs Jerry Sanders and later Lisa Su. I annoyed former Intel Corp. $(INTC)$ CEO Craig Barrett with a profile that took so long he joked it would be his obituary. At one point, I got to ride in a dirigible over the Valley.

Silicon Valley's decades of innovation have been fueled by huge gains in processing power so it was a good base to start learning about tech with semiconductors in the late 1980s. I also covered Apple's near-death experience, the dot-com boom and bust, and now the rollercoaster of the current AI frenzy and its many similarities to past booms.

The dot-com era was a pivotal moment in my career, teaching me that you cannot always predict which companies will have the most longevity or survivability, and that tech often takes a lot longer to see fruition than CEOs and others claim.

Surprising winners and losers

Among tech's survivors, who would have thought a company that started by selling a broken laser pointer and let individuals host virtual garage and estate sales would continue to thrive? Many collectors around the world still look to eBay Inc. (EBAY )as the first place to search for items ranging from 1960s Bubble Cut Barbie dolls to Taylor Swift memorabilia.

On the other hand, the demise of companies like Netscape, which created the first popular internet browser, would have been hard to predict at the time.

What does this portend for AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and others? The funding environment is much different than it was over 20 years ago, when companies rushed to go public. These companies are staying private much longer as their valuations grow. But with China's DeepSeek and other developments as companies look for lower-cost ways to create AI models, there is no guarantee that OpenAI and ChatGPT will be the winner-takes-all company of AI.

Meeting semiconductor luminaries

The semiconductor industry is full of the real legends of Silicon Valley and I got to meet several across my career. While I did not get to meet Intel co-founder Robert Noyce, who died in 1990, I interviewed famed former CEO Andy Grove. He was whip smart, tough as nails and funny, all at once.

Gordon Moore, the creator of Moore's Law, was also very personable, sharing stories for a celebration of an anniversary of the "Fairchild Eight," the eight engineers at Shockley Labs who walked off the job en masse in 1957 to form Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. It was a formative moment in the Valley of Heart's Delight, as the agricultural Santa Clara Valley was then known, leading to the birth of Silicon Valley.

The books that shaped tech

I learned a lot about tech from the conversations I had, but also from books. Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma," is still relevant today, especially in light of China's efforts in AI. Christensen discussed disruptive technologies, and how lower-cost, "good enough," rival products can begin to threaten entrenched leaders. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is said to be a big fan of this Silicon Valley bible, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman might want to check it out too.

Another seminal book is "Only the Paranoid Survive," by Intel's Grove. Could Grove, who was obsessed with staying ahead of the competition, and avoiding complacency, have kept the chip giant from its downfall in the past decade? We'll see if new CEO Lip-Bu Tan applies some of these principles as he tries to restore Intel's engineering culture.

Read also: How did Intel lose its Silicon Valley crown?

Following Apple's journey

I watched many an Apple keynote and talked to the fanboys who devoured them. One told me that his only thought while watching cofounder Steve Jobs present a new product was: "I WANT IT."

I can testify firsthand to Jobs' power of persuasion. One year I even went out and bought the first generation of the iPod Nano, sucked in by Jobs's famous reality distortion field, even though I am not a Mac user.

He was polite, controlling and precise in the few times I briefly interviewed him, including when I was one of a couple of reporters to show up at a Next Computer event on Wall Street in 1991. But even though I was not in the Jobs fan camp, I was alarmed when we all first saw the signs of his drastic weight loss at an Apple WWDC keynote in 2008, just a year and a half after the launch of the iPhone, and a sign of the illness that led to his death in 2011.

In between quarterly earnings and other big tech news, I also tried to have some fun. After an Apple employee left an iPhone 5 prototype behind in a bar, I went on a search for more bars where one might be able to find unreleased versions of Apple gadgets, and met Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard. I have also tried to help investors by calling out companies like Tesla on poor corporate governance and advocating greater financial disclosures, including after Apple stopped breaking out unit numbers.

Some final thoughts

I am not a total optimist about the potential of AI and the unrelenting embrace of it around the world. Without any regulatory guardrails, it could eventually become very dangerous, especially in warfare and cyberattacks, and I am nervous about its impact on the global environment.

For now, my adventures will be less focused on tech. I hope to work on a historical mystery novel, write articles about architecture and Art Deco and continue leading walking tours in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Thanks for spending the years with me learning about the wild ways of Silicon Valley. History does repeat itself, and remember: When it comes to tech, always watch your back, and know that often you are the product.

-Therese Poletti

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May 03, 2025 11:24 ET (15:24 GMT)

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