Robert Argento

Robert Argento started out his career in technical documentation in the gaming industry, writing the first draft for the Flight of the Intruder for Spectrum-Holobyte as an independent contractor. Shortly after leaving the Alameda-headquartered startup, the great quake of 1989 completely destroyed the double-decker Interstate that Argento used to drive home on each night after finishing work.

Having narrowly survived disaster Argento went on to develop documentation for the first GUI-based SQL*Forms product at Oracle, and then moved on from there to manage the Technical Communications team for LiveWorks, a Xerox startup in San Jose. LiveWorks was a pioneer in collaboration technologies.

When Xerox failed to make a quick killing selling LiveBoards, they shut the fledgling company down, relegating collaboration to the same Hall of Failures as ethernet, GUIs, the mouse and many other PARC inventions they could not find a business model for. At that point Argento gave up on making it big in the stock-option game and moved into consulting, providing documentation services for notables such as Sony, Microsoft and VeriSign.

Today, Argento lives in North Carolina and is working in journalism and historical commentary. He is currently working on his first nonfiction feature length book about Silicon Valley: From Valley of Dreams to ... Can you guess the rest?