During a conversation with an African-American woman in Central Valley, California, I realized
that her story was a part of the rich history of African-Americans that came to Silicon
Valley in the late 1960s and early 1970s and made significant contributions to what would
become the tech center of the world.
From that conversation came the idea for the Silicon Valley Black Project, an acknowledgement
of our achievements in the technical fields we helped to create.
An African-American with a creative drive and the personal motivation to try it on his
or her own was invisible in Silicon Valley.
Meet Ernest Priestley, the Invisible Man.
Ernest started with Judith Packard, went to Zintec, and was a 25th employee at Wise Computer
U.S.
He left Wise to strike out on his own.
I asked Ernie, how many startups was he responsible for?
Over the years, probably about four or five, some were successes, some were failures, some
took a long time to fail, which is a worse guy.
You learn a lot about your customers.
I think a lot of them are talking to customers, communicating with them, sometimes you get
a right, sometimes you get a wrong, and then understanding how things are sold, whether
it's sold through distribution or sold through direct retail, whether you sell direct.
You learn a lot about that, you learn a lot about finances, of course, you learn a lot
about finance.
The old story is, whoever got to the bank first got paid, that's how it was.
You think it's all about just coming up with the design, and you realize that it's all
a whole lot more.
My very first product was called Prodeco, so I'm sitting in an apartment in Santa Clara,
and I'm saying to myself, okay, I'm working on this thing, and I finally get it to work,
and I'm working and everything, and now I say, okay, now, I'm going to buy this thing.
A couple of customers came and they were very interested, and this was also helpful to the
distributor because they could see, wow, there's a market for this, it was just helpful for
me too, because I said, finally I got a market that sells this for me too.
So I have an old Toyota Celica, and my car died, so I had to lock this computer along
with a monitor, along with a keyboard and everything else back in those days that were
pretty bulky.
So I had to catch the train to San Francisco, get there, set everything up, start the demo,
everything looks great, they're excited, and they're ready to place their order, and sure
enough, that glitch that I thought I got rid of shows up.
So quickly the pin goes away, no, you won't get any order out of us.
I get home, and there's a note on the door that says, three days are quick, and I'm
going, this can't be worse.
I then, over the door, my message machine is blinking, and it's my software developer
who's telling me that he doesn't want to do the software at the price that we agree
to, that he wants to charge me more, and I just, I just hang my hand down, and I just
say, this is too much, this is too much, I've reached the end, I can't do this.
And so I get on the phone, call one of my friends, his name is Ron Jones, and Ron comes
over, he says, Ernie, man, this is nothing, let me tell you, this is nothing, you can
do this.
And after that pep talk, I realized that I have to go through this, you know, and I
said, if I can make it through this, through this one week, I can, I can survive, and figured
out the problem, solved it, got that first order, and that was, you know, it was on like
a doggy car, and yeah, it was good.
