Not so very long ago I was sitting across from Jack Goldman, then tech advisor to some obscure VC firm attempting to latch on to a pre dot-com bust tech company, and I was the pitching the unified theory of how $20 million would one day turn into a $1 billion windfall. The suits were questioning the company founders on why this particular tech enterprise was located in Danbury, and whether it was a good location. (It was not, but that’s a long techie digression.) I don’t think anyone else from our side caught the implications of the question, and I would have missed it were it not for the coincidence that I was reading one of the best books I ever read about the decision to locate the Xerox technology research center in Palo Alto, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age.

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