A Truck Full of Money by Tracy Kidder Page A

windshield: “I’m going to sweep people in over the next few months with my enthusiasm. I could totally do it without Kayak people, but Billo and Schwenk and I have worked together a long time.”
    He concluded, “Last night I resigned, and today I’m pitching something new. It’s an exciting time for me.”
    Two days later, Paul wrote up a document, time-stamped at a little after four in the morning:
Blade incubator requirements
    1. Space for 12 engineers (core team) expansion possibility for up to 30.
    2. Maybe ~ 150 square feet per engineer (?)—thus spaces from 2,000 to 5,000 square feet?
    3. Walk to MBTA.
    4. A dozen restaurants and bars within a block or two.
    5. Very hip feel. Distinctive from the street.
    6. Very open space.
    7. Move-in date June 2013 or sooner.
    8. Lease or purchase options considered.
    9. Parking options to be discussed.

PART III

AS MALL U NIVERSE

1
    One is always aware that individual talent gets suppressed by societies, the gifted child mired in poverty. But there may also be a kind of talent that gets suppressed by time, a talent diffused within the human gene pool, which lies dormant awaiting its technological moment. One of the fathers of computer science, Donald E. Knuth, speculates that this was the case with computer programming. In a series of interviews published in
Companion to the Papers of Donald Knuth,
he is quoted as saying:
I’ve noticed that one out of every fifty people, more or less, has the peculiar way of thinking that makes them resonate with computers. Long ago, such people were scattered among many other disciplines, which didn’t quite suit their abilities, but they discovered each other when computer science was established as a separate field.
    I mean, I think it’s likely that one out of every fifty people who built the pyramids, ages ago, would probably have been a great programmer if computers had existed in ancient Egypt.
    In another conversation, Knuth refers to these born programmers as “geeks.” This used to be the name for carnival performers portraying wild men, but it had long since been reapplied to denote socially graceless eccentrics who might also be dedicated to a special field. More recently, it had also become a term of proud self-mockery. Knuth used it that way:
For simplicity, let me say that people like me are “geeks,” and that geeks comprise about 2% of the world’s population. I know of no explanation for the rapid rise of academic computer science departments—which went from zero to one at virtually every college and university between 1965 and 1975—except that they provided a long-needed home where geeks could work together. Similarly, I know of no good explanation for the failure of many unsuccessful software projects that I’ve witnessed over the years, except for the hypothesis that they were not entrusted to geeks.
    In 2015, Knuth was a professor emeritus at Stanford. Oddly enough, way back in 1990, he had abandoned his public email address. There were several other ways of reaching him, which he had described on the Stanford University Computer Science website. You could use “good ol’ snail mail,” which he would deal with collectively, “in batch mode—like, one day every three months.” You could also fax him. “But be warned that I look at incoming fax mail
last,
perhaps only once every six months instead of three.” And you could
try
emailing him, via a couple of special impersonal addresses, but he would not answer any unsolicited emails, except for those that reported errors in his books.
    All this suggested a most antisocial fellow, a Dickensian character who informs his public, “You can reach me by carrier pigeon, or, less reliably, by messages in bottles.” But one could sympathize. He was in his seventies now and trying to finish
The Art of Computer Programming,
a work of seven volumes. He had begun to write it in 1962. In 2015, he was living on one of Stanford’s quiet residential streets, in a