Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts tounded a new company, Fairchild Semiconductor, from which over time several other microchip companies spun off. Among the "Fairchildren" were Intel and AMD, but so were venture companies like Kleiner Perkins. Like the "PayPal Mafia" of the late 1990s, the "traitorous eight" were fairly homogeneous in their backgrounds, their age profiles, and their management styles. And they were the grandfathers of today's Silicon Valley. The VCs who funded their endeavors were very similar people: investor and inventor spoke the same language, specifically because they shared the same generational experience.

When compared to the "traitorous eight" or even the PayPal Mafia, the generation of founders and their backers that have dominated headlines and the contemporary image of Silicon Valley appears a bit more diffuse. Still, the age cohort remains a clearly identifiable phenomenon in the Valley, in particular since so many cofounders met in college. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are the same age; Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who met at Stanford, were both born in 1973. Mark Zuckerberg and the entire original inner circle of Facebook were the same age, which is the same age as Instagram's founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. It's not really true, as is sometimes said, that through tech our world is dominated by solitary geniuses. It is dominated by cliques of people who are more or less the same age.

The botanist, eugenicist, and peace activist David Starr Jordan wrote in 1903 that the Civil War had delivered "the best" of the "race" unto death; those Americans who took their place and sired the youth of his own day, he thought genetically inferior. The wrong kinds of Americans predominated in 1903, because the right kinds of Americans had been needlessly sacrificed between 1861 and 1865. When he wrote his pamphlet, Jordan was president of Stanford, the university's first. In 1965 a Stanford professor gave a long interview to U.S. News & World Report with a similar thesis. In the United States, he claimed, the "abundant welfare state" all but insured that unfit and less intelligent people "will be multiplying at an enormously faster rate than more intelligent people do."' That professor was none other than William Shockley, who had begun teaching at the university after his company failed. And who had turned his yen for hierarchies into speculations about race, the welfare state, and intelligence.

This argument attained its modern form in Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, which was published in 1994. The two made the same argument as Shockley before them-that the welfare state subsidized "births among poor women ... who are disproportionately at the lower end of the intelligence distribution" - but this time under the banner of "group 10."* According to Quinn Slobodian, this marked the comeback of the IQ concept among American conservatives. And even during times when Silicon Valley Presented itself as far more liberal than it does today, it could still be enthusiastic about IQ.