Richard Barry is a semi-retired start-up veteran of Silicon Valley who recently moved to Southern California with his wife, Christine. Although he grew up poor in Chicago, his ceramic engineering and MBA degrees from the University of Illinois landed him a job in Mountain View with Fairchild Semiconductor in 1966. After riding the Valley’s wild ups-and-downs for over four decades, Mr. Barry has seen it all—and he has the stories to prove it.

I had decided I wanted to come to San Francisco because I hated the Chicago weather. Weather, and I thought it had a reputation for being a good party place. That was in 1966, the start of the big hippie era. I interviewed with Fairchild Semiconductor, and they were the only company from the Silicon Valley, and they were trying to hire electrical engineers. I had a ceramic engineering degree but I said, “I’ll come cheap. I’ll take less money.”

Two days after I got out of school I drove the car to San Francisco. I was a week early they said. But I was ready to go. Had a girlfriend at that time in Chicago. I said goodbye, no I was going, and left. And I had no money. When I got to San Francisco I had two dollars left.

The fact that it was Silicon Valley, I didn’t have any idea of that. Of course it was pretty small at that point anyway. It didn’t really exist in people’s minds as Silicon Valley. Hewlett Packard had been formed, and Fairchild Semiconductor, which were the two godfather companies that most of the companies eventually would be created from. So the lineage of Silicon Valley starts with HP and Fairchild. It was the era when they were just introducing integrated circuits, so it was the first true technical breakthrough of electronics.

I started working for Fairchild in June 1966 and left in June 1969. There was so much change going on at that point. Intel was created in 1969. So when I was leaving for a bike trip to Europe, I hired this engineer from Berkley to work for me, and then I left for the trip. And then he got hired by Intel about two months after that, and he ultimately became a multi-millionaire within two years because he got all these stock options. And his wife was a belly dancer. And so he quit. As far I know they went off belly dancing, never did anything more.

In the late 70’s and early 80’s, Silicon Valley started getting its identity because the stock market came back and the investment climate got hot. Everything just goes in waves. I think it’s like the oscilloscope electrical engineers look at—a sine wave; Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down. It was an exciting time. You could never tell what was going to happen.

I just randomly got into telecommunications because a guy I had met in a bar somewhere invited me to come work at his company. He thought I would be a good sales guy. So I had no intention of getting into telecommunications but ended up in it for about 25 years just because of that.

Silicon Valley allowed me to do a lot of start-ups. I probably raised well over $100 million of investment for start-ups in my career. You couldn’t do that anywhere else. It’s just the structure of the place, you know, it has all the things to support start-ups. It has all the lawyers, it has all the venture capital people who do the investment, it has all the consultants.

Somebody thinks: “How could I do a start-up in Japan?” Well, you can’t because there isn’t anything to support you. In my day, the U.S. was the only place that start-ups happened. Nobody could ever do that anywhere else. It was hot stuff. You could start-up a company and say, “Well, shit, that one didn’t work. Well, too bad we lost $40 million on that one. We’ll just have to think of another one, see if it couldn’t work better. [Laughs].” That’s what we did.

Now to become one of the successful ones like Intel or Genentech or Cisco was primarily a matter of luck. We knew in venture capital that at least 80% of start-ups fail. So no matter what you do, the odds are heavily stacked against you. Mostly, what I could see, you just had to be lucky. You’d have to somehow have something that worked . . . and happen to hit the need at the time. It’s all just a tricky equation.

As Mr. Barry sat back and pondered the enigma of Silicon Valley, I asked him why he had recently moved to Southern California for retirement and what he would miss about the area:

When you could buy a beautiful new house for one-fifth the price of what it cost you in Los Altos—if you weren’t really working anymore—there wasn’t any particular reason to exist in Silicon Valley. It’s really for people who are working. But as you come to the end of your career and you’re not as interested in the hustle and bustle, you’re not as driven by it . . .

Contributed by Steve Barry