Yerba Buena

Halt and Catch Fire 3×5

& Donna: It’s clunky. Our users want an easy way to buy things and they’re frustrated it doesn’t exist.
    Cameron: Our users want the Police to get back together, but Sting’s not interested.

& Donna: I don’t want to slow our growth. And you keep acting like accepting credit cards is some devil’s bargain. They make people’s lives easier. That’s the whole point.
    Cameron: Okay, Mutiny is a castle. You and I built it and then we gave a little piece to Diane. And then a little piece to freakin’ Doug and Craig. But making deals with credit card companies is just lowering the drawbridge.

& Ryan: Stanford’s over here right next to Moffett. Over here is jackboot central. DoD, NORAD, the NSA. And I printed out all the directories for every mainframe on the network. And we can leverage some of the weak access points I found. Now, the Pentagon is nearly impenetrable, but some of these other guys...

& Joe: What is this right here?
    Ryan: That’s not really part of ARPANET. That’s just the new network the National Science Foundation just rolled out.
    Joe: Yeah, NSFNET. Steve Wolff’s baby.

& Joe: This city. I can’t decide if it’s beautiful or horrifying... Nothing lasts in this place. The whole city burned down seven times in the first couple years of its existence. Even its name has been reinvented. You know what San Francisco used to be called?
    Ryan: Yeah, Yerba Buena.

& Ryan: Look, that’s what makes this city so great. You can screw up, you can fail, and so what? You get another chance.

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& Bosworth: True fact... a banana peel will shine your shoes like no other. Saved me a mint in my 20s.

& Cameron: So let’s say I want to buy a, I don’t know, first Superman comic for $100. Mutiny charges my AmEx, adds five bucks.
    Donna: As a transaction fee.
    Cameron: But AmEx takes three of those dollars as their transaction fee, so Mutiny is only making two bucks. Meanwhile, I’m really pissed because yesterday I could have shelled out 100 DBs for that Superman and today I’m shelling out an extra five bucks for nothing.
    Donna: It’s not nothing. We’re providing a valuable service.
    Cameron: Oh, spoken like a true middleman.

& Donna: Okay, so what’s your solution?
    Cameron: Routing numbers. It’s how banks move money. And our subscribers pay by checks, so their account numbers are already on file.
    Donna: Okay, you sell me Superman.
    Cameron: Mutiny pulls funds directly from my bank and deposits them into your account using our own ABA routing number as a pipeline. Oh, and it’s basically free because we don’t incur a transaction fee and we don’t charge one either because our expenses haven’t skyrocketed.

& Joe: Wolff created a bottleneck, right?
    Ruan: Yeah, no support for regional networks. The guy is insane.
    Joe: The guy is brilliant. He’s sending a signal. He’s like our Gorbachev. Do you know what Glasnost is?
    Ruan: I want to say either a vodka or a satellite.

& Joe: The past... the past is a bunch of fortresses all closed off from the rest of the world. We don’t have to build a faster computer or dream up the next killer application. That’s what you do in a fortress. We are going to pave a road between them.

& Joe: Money is just a side effect. Glasnost. It means openness. And it’s always a bad idea to bet against openness.

& Joe: Just take a good look. That’s what’s next.

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