SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Bill Joy is a fix-it kind of guy. He improved UNIX to make it more stable because, as an admin, he got tired of driving to the computer lab to reboot the machines. He helped James Gosling perfect Java. Now, he wants to fix the Silicon Valley economy by pushing it toward renewable energy.
In an onstage discussion with journalist Brent Schlender, Joy outlined his vision of how the talent pool and manufacturing infrastructure that brought the world the PC and the Internet can help solve the world’s energy problems — problems the tech industry has contributed to with dirty manufacturing and energy-slurping data centers. The Wednesday night event was sponsored by the Churchill Club, a business and technology forum.
Cynics might say there’s a sense of staleness in the Valley, with every Internet company using the same boring business model of delivering pay-per-click ads, but Joy says the local semiconductor industry has a vital role to play in renewable energy.
“There are direct applications to the green revolution of what we’ve learned to do in Silicon Valley,” he said. Moreover, the skills its entrepreneurs and programmers have could be easily translated.
Early in his career, Joy was one of the main authors of the Berkeley version of the Unix (BSD) operating system, which was a key component behind the creation of the backbone of the Internet and led to other open source operating systems.
“In the 1980s, the tech literature said that TCP/IP wouldn’t work, that Ethernet wouldn’t work — they weren’t the right technical underpinnings for the Internet,” Joy said. “What was wrong weren’t the protocols, but the implementation of the software.”
Suddenly the Internet had protocols that really worked. Joy calls this the “It works” option. But it takes at least 10 times as much effort to get software to really work than it does to get it to sort of work, Joy said.
Sun and the green revolution
Co-founding Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) in 1983, he played a key role in the design of Solaris, SPARC and Java, as well as revamping chip architectures to make them more efficient. He left Sun in 2003, but two years later, he missed the Valley’s high-powered culture. In 2005, Joy became a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and began looking into technology that could solve energy and resource problems.
Asked what role Sun should play in the green revolution, Joy said he no longer followed the company, but it should continue its work on more efficient microprocessors. “Sun had some good research on building data centers that are much more energy-efficient, and some things I was working on still haven’t shipped,” he said. “I hope they take advantage of some of that technology to reduce the energy usage of some of these cloud computing centers.”
Next page: Ideas that make things 10x better
Page 2 of 2
At Kleiner Perkins, Joy said he focuses on finding ideas that could make things ten times better. “If we’re not trying to get the 10x, if we settle for 10 or 20 percent, there’s no chance we’ll achieve what we need to in the next 20 or 30 years,” he said. He expects three out of four of these investments to fail.
Acknowledging that oil and coal are so cheap that they out-compete renewable energy in today’s market, he said we have to make a societal decision to protect innovators from the cyclical nature of commodities. A drop in the price of petroleum “can wipe out a whole generation of startups trying to bring us renewable fuels. The government can help by creating a standard that some percentage of fuel must come from renewable energy,” Joy said.
He believes that advanced fuels made from plants that don’t compete with food production and can be blended with gasoline will be important in the near term, if manufacturers can invent the chemical processes to do it reliably and to scale. Wind and geothermal energy using advanced drilling technologies could combine to give us all the energy we need.
World-changing ideas
While Silicon Valley may have run on greed in the ’80s and ’90s, Joy doesn’t think the next wave of innovation will be motivated by money. Today’s entrepreneurs are passionate about dealing with the carbon footprint and health of the ocean, he said. “They have world-changing ideas.
“The last percentage point of ownership in the company isn’t the decision,” he said. “The decision is, how do we make this dream come alive?”
