Jacob Goldstein
Podcast host and author who spent more than a decade as co-host of the Planet Money podcast.
“You can get away with a lot if you're managing a team of engineers. But there is one thing, if they're ambitious and talented, that you cannot get away with. And that is becoming less ambitious, scaling back the vision.”
What's Your Problem? · October 2026
Goldstein on William Shockley, the Nobel-winning transistor pioneer whose management drove away the young engineers who went on to found Fairchild. The last straw was Shockley dropping the general-purpose silicon transistor to make switches for telephone exchanges instead.
Transcript
He's won the prize. Like, take the win, William Shockley.
Unbelievable.
And then he does one more thing. And, you know, you can get away with a lot if you're managing a team of engineers. But there is one thing, if they're ambitious and talented, that you cannot get away with. And that is becoming less ambitious, scaling back the vision. And that is what he does around this time. He decides that rather than making a silicon transistor that can be used for anything, but that's quite hard to make that they haven't really figured out yet. Instead of doing that, he decides that they're going to make something that has a clear, defined, limited use case. And that is a semiconductor that can do mechanical switching in telephone exchanges.
Oh, he wants to revolutionize the phone company?
Yeah, like Come on, man, right? Like, we came out here to the apricot warehouse to change the world.
And you want to make calls clearer. Okay.
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