Atari's Nolan Bushnell: "I started tinkering in third grade and never stopped"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 2 November 2019

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, to talk about growing up in Utah (0:45), setting up his first business at age 10 (3:00), managing the games department (4:20), coming to Silicon Valley (7:10), working at Ampex (8:30), playing Space War (9:30), starting a gaming company with $500 (12:30), creating Pong (16:20), running on a shoestring (19:15), selling to Warner (23:30), the Atari culture (24:40), hiring Steve Jobs (27:00), making more than all of Hollywood combined (32:00), turning down an offer to be the first investor in Apple (34:40), his worst day of work (38:15), why the tech industry took root in Silicon Valley (39:00), why he’s excited about tech in 2019 (41:00), his other ventures (45:20), what Steve Jobs got right (48:25).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm always up before the birds and the kids.
0:02.9	Good thing Costa Express is always up too.
0:07.0	Early starts are easier with great coffee.
0:09.7	And if I grab one for Bob, I might even get some decent company.
0:14.5	Large cappuccino for the bloc who's half asleep.
0:17.2	Oh, you legend.
0:19.6	Now that's a proper coffee.
0:21.3	Should kick in Justin Samfut to remember which end of the screwdriver to use.
0:25.1	Hmm.
0:26.3	Costa Express.
0:27.8	Quality coffee every time.
0:32.3	Yo.
0:34.0	Technology.
0:35.2	What is it all about?
0:36.6	We were the only company that had all young executives.
0:42.3	And I've often thought that I basically paved the way for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, some of those guys,
0:49.3	because all of a sudden people said, well, hey, maybe this works.
0:58.6	Hello and welcome to your second episode of Danny in the Valley this week,
1:00.2	as you may have already heard.
1:05.1	The other interview I did this week was with Ben Horowitz,
1:07.4	co-founder of Andresen Horowitz.
1:14.6	And it was all about company culture in Silicon Valley. So I thought as a sister pod to that conversation, it would make sense to run my interview with Nolan Bushnell, who is one of
	...

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