Silicon Valley

1382 results back to index

The Big Score by Michael S. Malone

Apple II, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, creative destruction, Donner party, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, lone genius, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, packet switching, plutocrats, RAND corporation, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, The Home Computer Revolution, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yom Kippur War

The KGB has chip-thief contacts in Silicon Valley. So does the People’s Republic of China. The Japanese are here, as are intelligence agents from Israel, France, and Korea. But the idea, promoted by the national press in the early 1980s, of a foreign agent behind every lamppost in Silicon Valley is highly dubious. The reality is that foreign countries, including those declared off-limits to American high technology by the U.S. Commerce Department, have no trouble finding suppliers willing, even anxious, to sell them anything they desire. This is because the Silicon Valley underground, like the Silicon Valley aboveground, is composed of numerous small businessmen, each carving out a market niche, competing for key customers and dreaming of the Big Score.

…

And, of course, there are still the disturbing oddballs, like workstation maker Daisy Systems, which sounds like a feminine hygiene product. And, of course, there was still the fern-bar funky: Diablo, Durango, Digital Deli, Brut. Some took advantage of the local connection: There were a Silicon Valley Associates, a Silicon Valley Marketing, a Silicon Valley Sales, and a Silicon Valley Travel. Inevitably, given the demand and the entrepreneurial environment, at last, in 1980, someone set up a business just to give Valley high-tech companies their names. Ira Bachrach, a retired Valley advertising executive with a love of language, started Namelab as a hobby.

…

The lonely I looks for solace wherever it can find it—and always beyond the tight boundaries of the engineering mind. For many it is drugs. Drugs are everywhere in Silicon Valley. Alcohol is easily the most abused. The number of alcoholics in boardrooms on executive row is shocking. But increasingly just as common, and far more apt given the local lifestyle, is cocaine. Silicon Valley has become a coke blizzard. The Drug Enforcement Agency has called Silicon Valley one of the biggest cocaine users in the United States. What could be more perfect for Silicon Valley life? Lasciviously expensive, cocaine is the Queen of Speed, a clean flash of energy for those 14 hours, for when you need to be up for that next business decision or that next crucial sale.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

.,” Fast Company, April 1, 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3058227/regis-mckennas-1976-notebook-and-the-invention-of-apple-computer-inc, archived at https://perma.cc/P4JC-NWU8. CHAPTER 7: THE OLYMPICS OF CAPITALISM 1. Don C. Hoefler, “Silicon Valley, U.S.A.,” Electronic News, January 11, 1971, 1. 2. “Don C. Hoefler,” Datamation 32, no. 5 (May 15, 1986); David Laws, “Who Named Silicon Valley?” CHM, January 7, 2015, http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/who-named-silicon-valley/, archived at https://perma.cc/EMT2-KUCG. 3. James J. Mitchell, “Curtain to Fall on Valley Era,” The San Jose Mercury News, October 2, 1988, Silicon Valley Ephemera Collection, MISC 33, FF 2, SU; Regis McKenna, interview transcript, August 22, 1995, Silicon Genesis Project, SU. 4.

…

John Young, Paul Ely in BusinessWeek, October 3, 1983, quoted in Thomas & Company, “Competitive Dynamics in the Microcomputer Industry.” 23. Thomas & Company, “Competitive Dynamics.” 24. Smith, “Silicon Valley Spirit”; Robert Reinhold, “Life in High-Stress Silicon Valley Takes a Toll,” The New York Times, January 13, 1984, 1. 25. Jean Hollands, The Silicon Syndrome: A Survival Handbook for Couples (Palo Alto, Calif.: Coastlight Press, 1983). 26. Reinhold, “Life in High-Stress Silicon Valley Takes a Toll”; Smith, “Silicon Valley Spirit.” 27. Thomas & Company, “Competitive Dynamics”; Paul Freiberger, “IBM Counts its Chips, Invests $250 Million in Intel,” InfoWorld 5, no. 5 (January 31, 1983): 30; Jean S.

…

It also is a history of modern America: of political fracture and collective action, of extraordinary opportunity and suffocating prejudice, of shuttered factories and surging trading floors, of the marble halls of Washington and the concrete canyons of Wall Street. For these, as you shall see, were among the many things that made Silicon Valley possible, and that were remade by Silicon Valley in return. * * * — From the first moment that Silicon Valley burst into the public consciousness, it was awash in revolutionary, anti-establishment metaphors. “Start your own revolution—with a personal computer,” read an ad for the new Personal Computing magazine in 1978. “The personal computer represents the last chance for that relic of the American Revolution, our continent’s major contribution to human civilization—the entrepreneur,” proclaimed the tech industry newsletter InfoWorld in 1980.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

She took the microphone: Niniane Wang, “Brainstorm Tech: Fixing Inequality in Silicon Valley,” interview by author, Fortune Brainstorm Tech Town Hall, July 18, 2017, video, 39:08, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWXw_bclArI. VCs, stop asking women entrepreneurs: Nicole Farb, at “Brainstorm Tech: Fixing Inequality in Silicon Valley.” “In Silicon Valley today”: Christa Quarles, at “Brainstorm Tech: Fixing Inequality in Silicon Valley.” “Without a doubt”: Adam Miller, at “Brainstorm Tech: Fixing Inequality in Silicon Valley.” Apple’s diversity numbers: “Inclusion and Diversity,” Apple, accessed Nov. 20, 2017, https://www.apple.com/diversity.

…

“Travis can spend eight”: Chris Sacca, “Lowercase Capital Founder Chris Sacca: Studio 1.0,” interview by author, Bloomberg, June 12, 2015, video, 27:43, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-06-13/lowercase-capital-founder-chris-sacca-studio-1-0-06-12-. Women account for almost half: Dan Primack, “Wall Street Outpaces Silicon Valley on Gender Equality,” Axios, Aug. 8, 2017, https://www.axios.com/wall-street-outpaces-silicon-valley-on-gender-equality-2470698125.html. “It’s bad for shareholder value”: Megan Smith, “Former U.S. CTO on Silicon Valley’s Diversity Battle,” interview by author, Bloomberg, Aug. 7, 2017, video, 7:09, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-08-07/ex-u-s-cto-on-silicon-valley-s-diversity-battle-video. “We have a long way to go: Satya Nadella, “Satya Nadella: Bloomberg Studio 1.0 (Full Show),” interview by author, Bloomberg, Sept. 29, 2017, video, 23:40, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-09-29/satya-nadella-bloomberg-studio-1-0-full-show-video.

…

To this day, Rabois believes PayPal is a “perfect validation of merit” and of Silicon Valley as a meritocracy. “None of us had any connection to anyone important in Silicon Valley,” he told me. “We went from complete misfits to the establishment in five years. We were literally nobodies. People wouldn’t talk to us. Everybody thought we were weird. One tech publication ran a story called ‘Earth to PayPal.’ Everybody thought we were insane.” The early PayPal team would go on to found some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley, including Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Yelp. Thiel funded and joined the board of Facebook.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

“After decades in which the country has become less and less equal,” mourns the Palo Alto–born-and-bred George Packer, “Silicon Valley is one of the most unequal places on earth.”35 Figures from the Chapman University geographer Joel Kotkin suggest that the Valley has actually hemorrhaged jobs since the dot-com crash of 2000, losing some forty thousand jobs over the last twelve years.36 A 2013 report by Joint Venture Silicon Valley confirms Kotkin’s findings, adding that homelessness in Silicon Valley has increased by 20% between 2011 and 2013 and reliance on food stamps has reached a ten-year high.37 In Santa Clara County, the geographical heart of Silicon Valley, the poverty rate shot up from 8% in 2001 to 14% in 2013, with the food stamp population jumping from 25,000 in 2001 to 125,000 in 2013.

…

At one of Paul Graham’s “Failure Central” Y Combinator startup events, Srinivasan pitched the concept of what he called “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit,” a complete withdrawal of Silicon Valley from the United States. “We need to build opt-in society, outside the US, run by technology,” is how he described a ridiculous fantasy that would turn Silicon Valley into a kind of free-floating island that Wired’s Bill Wasik satirizes as the “offshore plutocracy of Libertaristan.”75 And one group of “Libertaristanians” at the Peter Thiel–funded, Silicon Valley–based Seasteading Institute, founded by Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer and the grandson of the granddaddy of free-market economics, Milton Friedman, has even begun to plan floating utopias that would drift off the Pacific coast.76 Behind all these secession fantasies is the very concrete reality of the secession of the rich from everyone else in Silicon Valley.

…

For data on Rochester’s very high 2012 murder rate, see Karyn Bower, John Klofas, and Janelle Duda, “Homicide in Rochester, NY 2012: Comparison of Rates for a Selection of United States and International Cities,” Center of Public Initiatives, January 25, 2013. 3 Rory Carroll, “Silicon Valley’s Culture of Failure . . . and the ‘Walking Dead’ It Leaves Behind,” Guardian, June 28, 2014. 4 “How I Failed,” Cultivate Conference, New York City, October 14, 2013, cultivatecon.com/cultivate2013/public/schedule/detail/31551. 5 “‘Fail Fast’ Advises LinkedIn Founder and Tech Investor Reid Hoffman,” BBC, January 11, 2011. 6 “Failure: The F-Word Silicon Valley Loves and Hates,” NPR.org, June 19, 2012, npr.org/2012/06/19/155005546/failure-the-f-word-silicon-valley-loves-and-hates. 7 Eric Markowitz, “Why Silicon Valley Loves Failure,” Inc., August 16, 2012, inc.com/eric-markowitz/brilliant-failures/why-silicon-valley-loves-failures.html/1. 8 MIT Technology Review, September/October 2013, technologyreview.com/magazine/2013/09.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

The self-policing strategy of the DeepMind coalition sounds similar to the goals of another idealistic Elon Musk start-up—OpenAI, a Silicon Valley–based nonprofit research company focused on the promotion of an open-source platform for artificial intelligence technology. Musk cofounded OpenAI with Sam Altman, the thirty-one-year-old CEO of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s most successful seed investment fund. Launched in 2015 with a billion dollars raised by Silicon Valley royalty including the multi billionaires Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley–based OpenAI is run by a former Google expert on machine learning and staffed with an all-star team of computer scientists cherry-picked from top Big Tech firms.

…

Whatever seductive promises their don’t be evil–style slogans make, there is no such thing as a moral for-profit company, inside or outside Silicon Valley. For better or worse, the aim of these private superpowers is to dominate markets, not share them. Their goal is their bottom line, not ethics. And yes, it’s also encouraging that powerful Silicon Valley investors like Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel have contributed significant capital to an open-source AI platform that, we are promised, won’t be owned or operated by a single data silo. But, I’m afraid, there aren’t too many people in Silicon Valley quite as responsible as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a relative paragon of civic virtue, who, during the 2016 American presidential election, promised to donate five million dollars of his own money to a veterans’ charity if Donald Trump publicly disclosed his taxes.

…

“Many steps forward,” she acknowledges, “and a couple of huge steps back.” Those “huge steps,” she says, include what she calls Silicon Valley’s remarkably “self-serving” faith that it’s a “perfect meritocracy.” Nobody in Silicon Valley, she says, recognizes his own incredible luck in happening to find himself in the wealthiest bubble in human history. “A little humility would go a long way,” she says about those young, privileged men, like Sam Altman, on the other side of the Bay. There’s also a complete lack of empathy in Silicon Valley, she says. Particularly a failure of the almost exclusively white male executives to take responsibility for the “unintended consequences” of the tech boom—especially the income disparity, the homelessness, and the economic dislocation of a predominantly minority population that is transforming the San Francisco Peninsula into a nineteenth-century tableau of shockingly explicit inequality.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

The first surprise was the range of types of people whom I encountered. Silicon Valley grew from a few suburban towns to encompass the cities around it, and that growth was fueled by a rather remarkable diversity. There’s no Silicon Valley ethnic type, per se. Silicon Valley is racially diverse—it is the proverbial melting pot—although it’s also true that black people are still far and few between. Women are also underrepresented, although there are many more than one might imagine. And there’s no typical age, either. Silicon Valley focuses on its young—that’s where the new ideas usually come from—but it’s also been around for a long time.

…

It’s pretty clear where this new nerd culture came from—it came from the same place that the money did: Silicon Valley. And what is a culture? There’s no mystery there, either. A culture is simply the stories that define a people, a place. It’s the stories we tell each other to make sense of ourselves, where we came from, and where we are going. And here those stories are, between two covers. Together they comprise an oral history of Silicon Valley. Adam Fisher Alameda, California June 2018 Silicon Valley, Explained The story of the past, as told by the people of the future Silicon Valley is a seemingly ordinary place: a suburban idyll surrounded by a few relatively small cities.

…

Bye-bye. I’m going out to Silicon Valley.” That was ’98. Ali Aydar: It was the dot-com boom, and I’m in Chicago languishing away at a bank, and I have a degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon. Why am I at a bank in Chicago? I need to be in Silicon Valley, I need to be in the dot-com boom, and be taking advantage of it in some way. So I came out to Silicon Valley in August of 1999. Jordan Ritter: I was a paid hacker. I lived in downtown Boston, which was the center of hacking in the United States at the time: It wasn’t New York, it wasn’t LA, it wasn’t even Silicon Valley. Boston was the seat of it, and I was in the middle of that.

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

“Should Local Government Be Run Like Silicon Valley?” Governing, April 2013, http://www.governing.com/topics/technology/gov-local-government-run-like-silicon-valley.html. 93. “Libertarian Island: A Billionaire’s Utopia,” The Week, August 18, 2011; Greg Baumann, “Rich State, Poor State: VC’s ‘Six Californias’ Divides Silicon Valley from Have-Nots,” Silicon Valley Business Journal, February 4, 2014. 94. Kevin Roose, “The Government Shutdown Has Revealed Silicon Valley’s Dysfunction Fetish,” Daily Intelligencer (blog), New York, October 16, 2013, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/silicon-valleys-dysfunction-fetish.html. 95.

…

Mike Swift, “Blacks, Latinos and Women Lose Ground at Silicon Valley Tech Companies,” San Jose Mercury News, February 13, 2010. 146. Silicon Valley Index, http://www.siliconvalleyindex.org. 147. Esther Yu-Hsi Lee and Aviva Shen, “Class Divide Widens Between Low-Wage And High-Wage Workers In Silicon Valley,” ThinkProgress, October 16, 2013, http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/10/16/2779601/wage-immigrants-silicon-valley. 148. Jake Blumgart, “How Google and Silicon Valley Screw Their Non-Elite Workers,” AlterNet, June 8, 2013, http://www.alternet.org/labor/how-google-and-silicon-valley-screw-their-non-elite-workers. 149.

…

Karel van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation (New York: Knopf, 1989), pp. 46–47. 64. Greg Bensinger and David Benoit, “Icahn Targets Silicon Valley Directors’ Club,” Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2014. 65. Jessica Guynn, “Silicon Valley Staff-Poaching Suit Is Granted Class-Action Status,” Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2013; Dean Baker, “Silicon Valley Billionaires Believe in the Free Market, as Long as They Benefit,” Guardian, February 3, 2014; David Streitfeld, “Engineers Allege Hiring Collusion in Silicon Valley,” New York Times, February 28, 2014; Angela Moscaritolo, “Suit Reveals Alleged Silicon Valley Anti-Poaching Scheme,” PCMag, January 30, 2012, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399555,00.asp. 66.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Despite what you may have heard, hard work in your chosen trade is absolutely the stupidest way to join the billionaires club. In Silicon Valley—that warm, inviting cradle of cutthroat entrepreneurship—the world’s most brilliant MBAs and IT professionals discovered a shortcut to fabulous riches. By harnessing the miraculous powers of the internet, it seemed, any indigent fool could transform him- or herself into the contemporary manifestation of a feudal lord. The annual Silicon Valley Index, an economic survey produced by a regional think tank and the local Community Foundation, shows precisely how well the Valley has done relative to the rest of the country. The report notes that Silicon Valley has enjoyed marked increases in overall job numbers since 2007, the prelude to the economic crash, while the United States remained, at best, stagnant.

…

As I guessed somehow from his body language, he had a notably different outlook from that of the other investors and tinkerers and climbers I had met. Silicon Valley was “the most brutal capitalistic machine there is,” he said. “The strong get stronger and the weak get crushed. It’s very Darwinian.” Ghazi’s awakening as a Silicon Valley cynic followed several career shifts. Trained as an engineer, he had moved to the finance side of the tech industry, first as an analyst, then as an investor, bouncing around until his current employers from Saudi Arabia hired him as their representative in Silicon Valley. In an industry overrun with early-twentysomethings, Ghazi was a literal graybeard.

…

The variable was whatever Silicon Valley was trying to sell at the time. In the early nineties, the boom was about hardware. IBM and Apple had found a way to commercialize military-funded computer research by churning out personal desktop computers and accessories. “Back then, Silicon Valley was small,” Ghazi said. “It was focused almost exclusively on the technology with very little thought on how to market it.” Then, in the late nineties, came another commercial boom, also underwritten by government research: the internet. This time, something changed. Wall Street got involved. “All of a sudden, Silicon Valley got the first taste of the big money,” Ghazi said.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

But following Nixon’s unsuccessful push, discussion of a UBI or GMI largely dropped out of public discourse. That is, until Silicon Valley got excited about it. Recently, the idea has captured the imagination of the Silicon Valley elite, with giants of the industry like the prestigious Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator president Sam Altman and Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes sponsoring research and funding basic income pilot programs. Whereas GMI was initially crafted as a cure for poverty in normal economic times, Silicon Valley’s surging interest in the programs sees them as solutions for widespread technological unemployment due to AI.

…

The transition from expertise to data has a similar benefit, downplaying the importance of the globally elite researchers that China lacks and maximizing the value of another key resource that China has in abundance, data. Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs have earned a reputation as some of the hardest working in America, passionate young founders who pull all-nighters in a mad dash to get a product out, and then obsessively iterate that product while seeking out the next big thing. Entrepreneurs there do indeed work hard. But I’ve spent decades deeply embedded in both Silicon Valley and China’s tech scene, working at Apple, Microsoft, and Google before incubating and investing in dozens of Chinese startups. I can tell you that Silicon Valley looks downright sluggish compared to its competitor across the Pacific.

…

This kind of analysis, however, is the result of a deep misunderstanding of the dynamics at play in the Chinese market, and it reveals an egocentrism that defines all internet innovation in relation to Silicon Valley. In creating his early clones of Facebook and Twitter, Wang was in fact relying entirely on the Silicon Valley playbook. This first phase of the copycat era—Chinese startups cloning Silicon Valley websites—helped build up baseline engineering and digital entrepreneurship skills that were totally absent in China at the time. But it was a second phase—Chinese startups taking inspiration from an American business model and then fiercely competing against each other to adapt and optimize that model specifically for Chinese users—that turned Wang Xing into a world-class entrepreneur.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

In the popular imagination—colored by the successes that have come since, especially those of Steve Jobs—the story of the Traitorous Eight has come to represent the spirit of rebellion that is said to pervade the tech industry. When I was starting in journalism, in the mid-2000s, Silicon Valley was seen, at its core, as an antiestablishment movement. “We owe it all to the hippies,” as the futurist (and countercultural activist) Stewart Brand famously put it, positing that the “real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution.” But Silicon Valley—the real Silicon Valley—had never been about subverting the military-industrial complex. Silicon Valley, in its purest form, was the military-industrial complex. Its founders weren’t dropping LSD. They were proud squares, with politics that were closer to those of David Starr Jordan than to the radicals of Stewart Brand’s imagination.

…

But even as the zeitgeist—all the way up to ambitions of the leader of the free world—celebrated the promise and potential of Silicon Valley, one of Silicon Valley’s pioneers had already turned his attention well beyond it. Over the prior two decades, Peter Thiel had accumulated billions of dollars in wealth, backing some of the biggest and most successful tech companies, including Facebook, PayPal, and SpaceX. He’d built a network that gave him access to the best entrepreneurs and the wealthiest investors in the world, and he was idolized by a generation of aspiring startup founders. But Thiel wanted more than sway in Silicon Valley—he wanted real power, political power. He was about to be handed an opportunity to seize it.

…

GOOD TIMES Marissa Mayer used to date Larry Page. There, we said it.” This was how, in 2006, Gawker Media came to Silicon Valley, screaming about power, sex, and hypocrisy. In the article about a romantic relationship between Page (Google’s cofounder) and Mayer (the company’s top executive), the site couched a tawdry gossip item in an argument about the media’s fawning coverage of the tech industry. “The real embarrassment is that of Silicon Valley’s toothless press corps,” Gawker’s new Silicon Valley blog, Valleywag, continued. “Raised on a diet of pre-packaged anecdotes—ooh, did you know Google hired a chef who traveled with the Grateful Dead—it’s incapable of chewing on a real story.”

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Now it’s preparing to clash with Big Tech,” Washington Post, July 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/27/congress-tech-hearing/. 40 Loren DeJonge Schulman, Alexandra Sander, and Madeline Christian, “The Rocky Relationship Between Washington and Silicon Valley,” Copia, https://copia.is/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/COPIA-CNAS-Rocky-Relationship-Between-Washington-And-Silicon-Valley.pdf. 41 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 42 Amy Zegart and Kevin Childs, “The Divide Between Silicon Valley and Washington Is a National Security Threat,” The Atlantic, December 13, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/growing-gulf-between-silicon-valley-and-washington/577963/. 43 Angus Loten, “Older IT Workers Left Out Despite Tech Talent Shortage,” Wall Street Journal, November 25, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/older-it-workers-left-out-despite-tech-talent-shortage-11574683200?

…

As the Gray War reaches into every aspect of our daily lives, what will happen to our jobs, our retirement accounts, our faith in our own political leaders and system of government? Silicon Valley may be the most optimistic place in the world, but I’ve become deeply concerned. Not only because America’s adversaries have the initiative. Not only because new technologies like artificial intelligence could soon give them yet another advantage. I worry because, without a real partnership between the U.S. government and Silicon Valley, neither is fully equipped to protect democracy from the autocrats looking to pick it apart. Too many in Silicon Valley still fail to accept that the platforms they created have become a battlefield.

…

Are Western interests best served by refusing to market to consumers in China—or will that simply cede huge portions of the global marketplace to China’s tech giants and their techno-bloc? Are Silicon Valley’s behemoths American companies or global ones? These questions do not have easy answers, but we’d better start dealing with them. More than that, we’d better start dealing with them in a unified way. Especially because many of the newest weapons in the Gray War are being fashioned—as we’re about to see—by the coders and app developers of Silicon Valley, largely removed from Washington’s own Gray War calculations. Autocrats are targeting Americans, and Americans in DC and Silicon Valley are busy targeting each other. That’s a recipe for failure, and it needs to change—fast.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Ford has been hiring artificial intelligence engineers, built a tech lab in Silicon Valley, and struck a deal with a San Francisco software company whose engineers will teach Ford’s coders about Agile development. Ford wants us to know that it’s in the midst of a huge transformation, and that it’s not falling behind. Earlier, we all took turns going for rides in Ford’s prototype self-driving car, which Ford vows to have in production by 2021. Now we’ve come indoors for an event that is meant to evoke the atmosphere of a big Silicon Valley conference, or an Apple product announcement. Tim Brown, the head of IDEO, a cooler-than-thou Silicon Valley design shop, hangs out in the hallway.

…

In some tech companies black workers represent only 2 percent of the employee population; Latinos fare only slightly better. Only one-third of workers are female. There are fewer women working in Silicon Valley today than in the 1980s. In leadership ranks the imbalance is worse—management teams and boards of directors are loaded with white men. Somehow, over the past twenty years, Silicon Valley has gone backward. It’s even worse in the venture capital industry, where 1 percent of investment team members are black, and Latinos make up just over 2 percent, according to The Information, a Silicon Valley publication. Women represent only 15 percent of decision-making roles. VCs claim that they make decisions based entirely on the strength of the company’s ideas, and without any regard for race or gender.

…

They’re working at Boeing and in biotech companies, rather than the “bro culture” tech companies. The bigger issue, Campbell said, is retaining black employees. Black graduates who go to Silicon Valley often feel unwanted or out of place, so they leave. To hang on to those people, Silicon Valley needs to become a place where those young people feel welcome. “It’s about having a community, having a local church you can go to, having the chance to meet a spouse,” Campbell says. How can it be that these “innovative” tech companies in Silicon Valley seem like some of the most backward organizations in the world? This is basically segregation, only instead of taking place at the University of Alabama in 1963, it’s happening in California in 2018.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

So what secret alchemy is at work in Silicon Valley to fuel such rapid-fire growth of so many of the world’s most valuable tech companies? And if there is a secret, can it be identified, analyzed, understood, and, most important, applied elsewhere? Blitzscaling is that secret. And the reason blitzscaling matters so much is that nothing about it is inherent to Silicon Valley. There’s a common misconception that Silicon Valley is the accelerator of the world. The real story is that the world keeps getting faster—Silicon Valley is just the first place to figure out how to keep pace. While Silicon Valley certainly has many key networks and resources that make it easier to apply the techniques we’re going to lay out for you, blitzscaling is made up of basic principles that do not depend on geography.

…

But in the twenty-first century, Seattle and Los Angeles have also become home to high-tech ecosystems that are increasingly tied to Silicon Valley. In a 2017 article titled “How America’s Two Tech Hubs Are Converging,” the Economist argued that Seattle and Silicon Valley were becoming increasingly intertwined, citing as evidence the fact that most of the venture capital investment in Seattle start-ups has come from Silicon Valley VC firms, and that about thirty Silicon Valley firms had opened Seattle offices to tap into that city’s plentiful supply of computer scientists, while Seattle’s two dominant blitzscalers, Amazon and Microsoft, have thousands of employees working in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, Seattle’s Amazon Web Services has become the cloud computing platform of choice for Silicon Valley start-ups and scale-ups.

…

While we fully accept that this may change in the future, the historical and current success of Silicon Valley makes it the perfect place to examine this question: What is the most effective way to rapidly build massively valuable companies? When outsiders look at Silicon Valley, they often think that the key to this question is innovative technology. But as you’ll read, technological innovation alone doesn’t make for a thriving company. Silicon Valley insiders and well-read outsiders believe that the key is the combination of talent, capital, and entrepreneurial culture that makes it easy to start new companies. This too is wrong. Sure, Silicon Valley is the leading hub for high-tech talent and venture capital, but it didn’t start out that way.

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

Understanding our modern world means understanding Silicon Valley’s breakthrough era, and a close examination of those years makes it clear that Silicon Valley was not built by a few isolated geniuses. Anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley (or anywhere else, for that matter) knows that although the spotlight often has room for only one person, those just outside its illuminated circle are at least as responsible for the success that has given the star a moment of glory. At a party I attended a number of years ago, someone who had served as chief operating officer of a major Silicon Valley company with a superstar CEO sang a little song about this phenomenon.

…

.: 124. 23. ASK Statement of Operations for years ending June 30, 1975, and June 30, 1976, SK. Kurtzig’s salary increased from $12,000 in 1975 to $24,000 in 1976. 24. Joint Venture Silicon Valley, “Venture Capital by Industry,” Silicon Valley Index 2015; Jon Levine, “5,000 Entrepreneurs . . . and Counting,” Venture, January 1982. 25. Larry Ellison, quoted in Silicon Valley Historical Association, “Billionaires: Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs Who Made Their Fortune Without Venture Capital,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vXs6JqMu7U. 26. ASK S-1, Aug. 6, 1981. 27. Kurtzig, CEO: 152. No Idea How You Start a Company — Niels Reimers and Bob Swanson 1.

…

Stanford University pioneered a model of turning faculty research into commercial products that has since earned nearly $2 billion for the university.4 The independent software industry was born.I Xerox opened the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which would pioneer computing’s graphical user interface, icons, Ethernet, and laser printer. Upstart CEOs with an eye to the future lay the foundation for the now-tight political alliance between Silicon Valley and Washington, DC. These years marked Silicon Valley’s coming of age, the critical period when the Valley was transformed from a relatively obscure regional economy with the microchip industry at its heart into an economic engine whose rate of job growth has been double that of the country as a whole for the past five years.5 In the process, Silicon Valley has spawned countless imitators and numerous industries that together have created the modern world. Troublemakers charts these changes through the lives of the people who made them happen.

The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent by Vivek Wadhwa

card file, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Elon Musk, immigration reform, Marc Andreessen, open economy, open immigration, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, synthetic biology, the new new thing, Y2K

We found that from 1995 to 2005, Indians were key founders of 13.4% of all Silicon Valley startups, and immigrants from China and Taiwan were key founders in 12.8%. The outsized impact of Indian founders was logical. Between 1990 and 2000, the population of Indian scientists and engineers (S&E) in Silicon Valley grew by 646% (while the total foreign-born S&E workforce grew by 246% and the region’s total population of S&E, both native and foreign-born, grew by only 103%). The overall percentage of immigrant-founded companies in Silicon Valley almost perfectly matched the population at large. In Silicon Valley, 52% of the S&E workforce was foreign-born.

…

Then the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1990 nearly tripled the number of immigrant visas awarded for special occupational talents, from 54,000 to 140,000.20 In Silicon Valley, the presence of these ambitious, hardworking immigrants quickly became a poorly kept secret. Valley insiders joked that IC engineers—meaning “Indian and Chinese” rather than “integrated circuit” (which is commonly abbreviated as IC)—built the region’s tech industry. Silicon Valley legend and former Stanford engineering professor James Clark (who co-founded Netscape and later WebMD) famously sung the praises of Indian engineers in the pop-culture version of Silicon Valley history and the Internet in Michael Lewis’s book The New New Thing.

…

Few doubted that these immigrant engineers had become significant contributors to the rapid growth and cycle of innovation of Silicon Valley. But how much of a contribution had they made? Using a combination of US Census data and interviews with 175 immigrant entrepreneurs, AnnaLee Saxenian arrived at some surprising conclusions in the report “Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” published in 1999. Over a mere two decades, immigrant entrepreneurs in general, and Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs in particular, became a powerful force in Silicon Valley value creation and company formation. She found that Chinese or Indian engineers served as CEOs or leaders at roughly one-quarter of all high-technology businesses in Silicon Valley.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

Startup teams in China routinely work 12 hours per day, six days a week, or “996,” as it’s commonly referred to in US-China tech circles. It’s a reminder of Silicon Valley all-nighters during the late 1990s dotcom boom when China’s entrepreneurial boom was only percolating. “China and the US are at different points of economic development and motivation. China’s entrepreneurial culture does make Silicon Valley look sleepy,” says Hans Tung, managing partner at leading venture investment firm GGV Capital in Menlo Park. Mike Moritz, partner at top-tier Sequoia Capital, can’t help but agree. He points out that Chinese entrepreneurs who routinely work 80 hours per week are making their Silicon Valley peers look “lazy and entitled.”

…

Alibaba keeps an office in San Mateo on California byway El Camino Real, in sight of venture capitalist Tim Draper’s entrepreneurial school Draper University. Baidu has established two research and AI labs in high-tech Sunnyvale, Silicon Valley central. China’s tech titans have co-invested in the United States with many hot-shot Silicon Valley venture firms, including influential Andreessen Horowitz, whose lead partners founded once-dominant web browser Netscape, which was acquired by AOL for $4.2 billion. In their quest for California’s deep tech riches, China’s big three investors have often been regarded in Silicon Valley as premium buyers who pay more and help to provide access to huge China markets. “They can have their pick of the litter,” said David Williams, founder and CEO of Palo Alto–based investment banking firm Williams Capital Advisors.

…

Chapter 4 Few US Companies Crack the China Code It’s the rare American internet company that has succeeded behind the Great Wall of China, but Starbucks, Airbnb, WeWork, and LinkedIn keep trying harder with digitally savvy strategies borrowed from China and localized teams. PART TWO China’s Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists A core group of US-China leaders set high standards as a Silicon Dragon-style VC market rises to challenge Silicon Valley. A look at who’s scoring in China venture investing, and why. Chapter 5 Sand Hill Road Gets a Mega-Rival China’s red-hot venture capital market has risen to nearly match the US level and no longer looks to California’s Sand Hill Road for cues.

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Benchmark Capital, business climate, classic study, creative destruction, data acquisition, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, high net worth, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tech worker, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, wealth creators, Y2K

That person may not be entirely typical of our age. (Is anyone?) But he is, in this case, representative: a disruptive force. A catalyst for change and regenera- Page 16 tion. He is to Silicon Valley what Silicon Valley is to America. And he has left his fingerprints all over the backside of modern life. What I've tried to write, in a roundabout way, which is the only way I could think to write it, is a character study of a man with the gift for giving a little push to Silicon Valley, and to the whole economy. To do this I had to follow him on his search. I hope the reader will, too. At any rate, I hope he or she gets a sense of what it feels like to be so oddly, and messily, engaged.

…

They could quite easily pick up and go to America, which was paying the highest price for their talent. And, in massive numbers, that is exactly what they did. Indian engineers flooded Silicon Valley in the 1980s and 1990s. By 1996 nearly half of the 55,000 temporary visas issued by the U.S. government to high-tech workers went to Indians. In early 1999 a Berkeley sociologist named AnnaLee Saxenian discovered that nearly half of all Silicon Valley companies were founded by Indian entrepreneurs. The definitive smell inside a Silicon Valley start-up was of curry. So one day when Jim Clark had finished writing his code for the boat, he picked up the phone and called Pavan Nigam and told him about his idea for making him rich.

…

All of this caused, and was in turn caused by, a subtle but important shift in the Silicon Valley value system. And that was the last reason Jim Clark was the man of this particular moment. "Silicon Valley has more in common with Hollywood than it does with Detroit," says Vern Anderson, the first CEO of Silicon Graphics and thus the first captain of the first ship built by Jim Clark. "The venture capitalists are the studios. The managers are the directors. The ordinary engineers are the writers. And the entrepreneurs are the stars." What happened in Silicon Valley is a lot like what happened in Hollywood once the studios lost their clout.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

x José Calderón beat Murphy’s season record with a 98.1 percent season in 2008/’09, while the career record is now held by Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors. Curry not only works for Silicon Valley capitalists but has come to represent the Silicon Valley mindset, the way Tiger Woods once did. See Erik Malinowski, Betaball: How Silicon Valley and Science Built One of the Greatest Basketball Teams in History (Atria Books, 2017). Chapter 5.3 Blister in the Sun The PayPal Mafia and the Facebook Keiretsu—Immiseration 2.0—Google Bus—Roko’s Basilisk—Living in the Thielverse It’s difficult to narrativize the latest phase of Silicon Valley history. From at least the time of Aristotle’s original outline in the Poetics, narratives have had a rising and falling action.

…

AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 23. 11. Glenna Matthews, Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 122; Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (New York: Penguin Press, 2020), 19. 12. Findlay, Magic Lands, 32. 13. Ibid., 147. 14. Michael S. Malone, The Valley of Heart’s Delight: A Silicon Valley Notebook 1963–2001 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 76. 15.

…

Stewart Gillmor, Fred Terman at Stanford: Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 127. 3. Malone, Bill & Dave, 89–91, 106. 4. Ibid., 97. 5. Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930–1970, Inside Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 85; Robert Sobel, The Rise and Fall of the Conglomerate Kings (Washington, DC: Beard Books, 1999), 54. 6. Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley, 87. 7. Ibid., 88. 8. Ibid., 110; Gillmor, Fred Terman at Stanford, 7. 9. Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley, 124. 10. Ibid., 109. 11. Malone, Bill & Dave, 155, 168. 12.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

They and other Big Tech firms have also offshored much of their exorbitant profit—according to one estimate done by Credit Suisse in 2019, the top ten companies offshoring the most savings, including Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), and Qualcomm, had $600 billion sitting in overseas accounts11—circumventing the laws and regulations by which ordinary citizens must abide, but which the largest corporations can legally eschew. Silicon Valley has lobbied hard to preserve the tax loopholes that allow all this, bringing to mind the words of economist Mancur Olson, who warned that a civilization declines when the moneyed interests take over its politics.12 Certainly, many public officials I spoke with echoed my concerns. Silicon Valley was, after all, built around government—that is, taxpayer—funded innovation. Everything from GPS mapping to touch screens to the Internet itself came out of research originally done or funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, and was later commercialized by Silicon Valley. Yet unlike many other countries, including a number of thriving free markets such as Finland and Israel, the U.S. taxpayer does not reap a penny of the profits these innovations yield.13 Instead, these companies were offshoring both profits and labor at the very time that tech titans were asking the government to spend more money on things like educational reform to ensure that the twenty-first-century workforce would be digitally savvy.

…

Rana Foroohar, “Why You Can Thank the Government for Your iPhone,” Time, October 27, 2015. 14. Author interview with John Battelle in 2017. 15. Rana Foroohar, “Echoes of Wall Street in Silicon Valley’s Grip on Money and Power,” Financial Times, July 3, 2017. 16. Tom Hamburger and Matea Gold, “Google, Once Disdainful of Lobbying, Now a Master of Washington,” The Washington Post, April 12, 2014. 17. Rana Foroohar, “Silicon Valley Has Too Much Power,” Financial Times, May 14, 2017; Foroohar, “Echoes of Wall Street in Silicon Valley’s Grip.” 18. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), introductory page. 19.

…

Just as, in the years before the 2008 financial crisis, the world’s top bankers dispatched surrogates to Washington, London, and Brussels to live among and lobby the legislators in charge of regulating them, so Silicon Valley faces have become the most familiar ones in these capitals over the past decade—with Google dispatching so many emissaries to Washington that they needed office space as large as the White House to hold them all.16 But despite the efforts of scores of Silicon Valley lobbyists and PR teams, the public worries about the economic and social effects of technology, and those worries are not going away.17 In fact, they are increasing, as the technology itself spreads more deeply into our economy, politics, and culture.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Visual Capitalist, June 15, 2017, http://www.visualcapitalist.com/companies-revenue-per-employee/. 31 Nikhil Swaminathan, “Inside the Growing Guest Worker Program Trapping Indian Students in Virtual Servitude,” Mother Jones, September/October 2017, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/inside-the-growing-guest-worker-program-trapping-indian-students-in-virtual-servitude. 32 Sam Levin, “Black and Latino representation in Silicon Valley has declined, study shows,” Guardian, October 3, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/03/silicon-valley-diversity-black-latino-women-decline-study. 33 Seung Lee, “‘These are poverty-level jobs in Facebook’: Silicon Valley security officers protest for better wages,” Mercury News, June 18, 2018, https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/15/these-are-poverty-level-jobs-in-facebook-silicon-valley-security-officers-protest-for-better-wages/; Julia Carrie Wong, “Silicon Valley subcontracting makes income inequality worse, report finds,” Guardian, March 30, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/30/silicon-valley-subcontracting-income-inequality-worse-report. 34 Kathleen Elkins, “Several Google employees say they’ve lived in the company parking lot—here’s why they did it,” Business Insider, October 30, 2015, https://www.businessinsider.com/why-google-employees-live-in-the-parking-lot-2015-10; Robert Johnson, “Welcome to ‘The Jungle’: The Largest Homeless Camp in Mainland USA Is Right in the Heart of Silicon Valley” Business Insider, September 7, 2013, https://www.businessinsider.com/the-jungle-largest-homeless-camp-in-us-2013-8. 35 Brenner and Pastor, Equity, Growth and Community, 168. 36 Antonio García Martínez, “How Silicon Valley Fuels an Informal Caste System,” Wired, July 9, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/how-silicon-valley-fuels-an-informal-caste-system/. 37 Ibid. 38 Jeff Daniels, “Nearly half of California’s gig economy workers struggling with poverty,” CNBC, August 28, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/28/about-half-of-californias-gig-economy-workers-struggling-with-poverty.html. 39 Nick Srnicek, “We need to nationalize Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

…

.: MIT Press, 1999), 50. 4 Luke Stangel, “Sam Altman wants Silicon Valley to sign on to a core set of common values,” Silicon Valley Business Journal, April 19, 2017, https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/04/19/sam-altman-donald-trump-silicon-valley.html. 5 Jane Wakefield, “Tomorrow’s Cities—nightmare vision of the future?” BBC, February 22, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37384152. 6 Greg Ferenstein, “Silicon Valley’s political endgame, summarized in 12 visuals,” Medium, November 5, 2015, https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/silicon-valley-s-political-endgame-summarized-1f395785f3c1. 7 Geoff Nesnow, “73 Mind-blowing Implications of Driverless Cars and Trucks,” Medium, February 9, 2018, https://medium.com/@DonotInnovate/73-mind-blowing-implications-of-a-driverless-future-58d23d1f338d; Steve Andriole, “Already Too Big to Fail—The Digital Oligarchy Is Alive, Well (& Growing),” Forbes, July 29, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveandriole/2017/07/29/already-too-big-to-fail-the-digital-oligarchy-is-alive-well-growing/#71125b7667f5. 8 Marisa Kendall, “Tech execs back California bill that aims to build more housing near transit,” Mercury News, January 25, 2018, https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/24/tech-execs-back-bill-that-aims-to-build-more-housing-near-transit/. 9 Ferenstein, “Silicon Valley’s political endgame, summarized in 12 visuals.” 10 Nellie Bowles, “Dorm Living for Professionals Comes for San Francisco,” New York Times, March 4, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/technology/dorm-living-grown-ups-san-francisco.html; Emmie Martin, “Facebook and Google are both building more affordable housing in Silicon Valley,” CNBC, July 10, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/07/facebook-and-google-are-building-affordable-housing-in-silicon-valley.html; Avery Hartmans, “Facebook is building a village that will include housing, a grocery store and a hotel,” Business Insider, July 7, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-building-employee-housing-silicon-valley-headquarters-2017-7. 11 Ben Tarnoff, “Tech’s push to teach coding isn’t about kids’ success—it’s about cutting wages,” Guardian, September 21, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/21/coding-education-teaching-silicon-valley-wages. 12 Gerard C.

…

That’s So Yesterday,” New York Times, June 12, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13sing.html; “A Timeline of Transhumanism,” The Verge, https://www.theverge.com/a/transhumanism-2015/history-of-transhumanism; Mark Piesing, “Silicon Valley’s ‘suicide pill’ for mankind,” UnHerd, August 20, 2018, https://unherd.com/2018/12/silicon-valleys-suicide-pill-mankind-2/; Michelle Quinn, “Silicon Valley’s fascination with a fountain of youth,” Mercury News, August 24, 2016, https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/08/09/silicon-valleys-fascination-with-a-fountain-of-youth/; “Measuring deep-brain neurons’ electrical signals at high speed with light instead of electrodes,” Kurzweilai, February 28, 2018, http://www.kurzweilai.net/measuring-deep-brain-neurons-electrical-signals-at-high-speed-with-light-instead-of-electrodes. 34 Antonio Regalado, “A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is ‘100 percent fatal,’” MIT Technology Review, March 13, 2018, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610456/a-startup-is-pitching-a-mind-uploading-service-that-is-100-percent-fatal/. 35 Mark Harris, “God Is a Bot, and Anthony Levandowski Is His Messenger,” Wired, September 27, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/god-is-a-bot-and-anthony-levandowski-is-his-messenger/. 36 Thomas Metzinger, “Silicon Valley evangelists sell an ancient dream of immortality,” Financial Times, August 20, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/7a89c998-828d-11e7-94e2-c5b903247afd. 37 Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, trans.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Packalan, and Kjersten Bunker Whittington, “Organizational and Institutional Genesis: The Emergence of High-Tech Clusters in the Life Sciences,” Queen’s School of Business Research Paper no. 03-10. For more on the networking role of VCs, see Michel Ferrary, “Silicon Valley: A Cluster of Venture Capitalists?,” Paris Innovation Review (blog), Oct. 26, 2017, parisinnovationreview.cn/en/2017/10/26/silicon-valley-a-cluster-of-venture-capitalists/. See also Mark Granovetter and Michel Ferrary, “The Role of Venture Capital Firms in Silicon Valley’s Complex Innovation Network,” Economy and Society 18, no. 2 (2009): 326–59. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11 Dennis Taylor, “Cradle of Venture Capital,” Silicon Valley Business Journal, April 18, 1999, bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/1999/04/19/focus1.html.

…

The underappreciated significance of venture-capital networks has become especially glaring in the past few years as the industry has expanded in three dimensions. First, it has spread beyond its historical stronghold in Silicon Valley, building thriving outposts in Asia, Israel, and Europe as well as in major U.S. cities.[34] Second, the industry has spread sectorially, colonizing new industries as venture-backed technologies reach ever more widely, touching everything from cars to the hotel business. Third, venture capital is spreading beyond the startup phase of a company’s existence as Silicon Valley has sprouted multibillion-dollar corporations that have delayed raising capital from public shareholders.

…

In Finland, not the sort of place where Bono played a lot of gigs, Linus Torvalds created the bare bones of the Linux operating system and gave it away freely. In short, there was no lack of inventiveness outside Silicon Valley, and no lack of countercultural antibusiness prejudice, either. The truth is that the distinguishing genius of the Valley lies not in its capacity for invention, countercultural or otherwise.[8] The first transistor was created in 1947, not in Silicon Valley, but at Bell Labs in New Jersey. The first personal computer was the Altair, created in New Mexico. The first precursor of the worldwide web, the network-management software Gopher, was from Minnesota.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

There are several good books about the culture in Silicon Valley. A good place to start is Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley, by Emily Chang (New York: Portfolio, 2018). Chang is the host of Bloomberg Technology, the show on which I interviewed Tristan in April 2017, after his appearance on 60 Minutes. (Emily was on maternity leave that day!) The domination of Silicon Valley by young Asian and Caucasian men seems foundational to the culture that built Facebook, YouTube, and the others. Chang cuts to the heart of the matter. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, by Antonio García Martínez (New York: Harper, 2016), is the inside story of an engineer who started a company, ran out of money, got a gig in advertising technology at Facebook, and was there during the formative years of the business practices that enabled Cambridge Analytica.

…

The libertarian era that began just after 2000 transformed the value system, culture, and business models of Silicon Valley, enabling Google, Facebook, and Amazon to create unprecedented wealth by dominating the public square on a global basis. I liked the Apollo and hippie eras because their idealism was genuine, even when it was misdirected. There are some excellent books that will unlock the mysteries of Silicon Valley’s early and middle days. Please read them! A good place to start is with semiconductors, the original business of Silicon Valley. I recommend The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, by Leslie Berlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

…

The only skin in the game for me at that time was emotional. I had been a Silicon Valley insider for more than twenty years. My fingerprints were on dozens of great companies, and I hoped that one day Facebook would be another. For me, it was a no-brainer. I did not realize then that the technology of Silicon Valley had evolved into uncharted territory, that I should no longer take for granted that it would always make the world a better place. I am pretty certain that Zuck was in the same boat; I had no doubt then of Zuck’s idealism. Silicon Valley had had its share of bad people, but the limits of the technology itself had generally prevented widespread damage.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

By the time bitcoin launched in 2009, there was a homegrown community to support it and build businesses, including Coinbase. The cypherpunks are to Brian and Fred what the semiconductor pioneers were to Jobs. “I don’t think Coinbase would have worked outside of Silicon Valley. It wasn’t an accident I met Fred here or Charlie Lee at Google. I went to Silicon Valley because that’s where the next generation of talent is,” Brian says. But for all Silicon Valley has to offer idealistic young inventors—culture, innovation, talent, and history—it still lacked one thing: deep reserves of capital and financial infrastructure required to bring inventions like bitcoin into the mainstream.

…

., 151 Patriot Act, 71 PayPal, 70–71, 206 Pelosi, Nancy, 130 Pierce, Brock, 58, 136 Pistor, Katharina, 206 pivots, 73 Pizza Day, 22 Polychain Capital, 96, 177, 223 Pomp, 208 Ponzi schemes, 141–142, 224 Popper, Nathaniel, 23 pop-up blockchain ventures, 136–138 Powell, Jesse, 97 pre-Cambrian explosion, 203 private keys, 9, 43 Project Libra, 205–207 prop shops, 192 Puertopia, 167 Qash, 138 QuarkChain, 138 Quorum, 212 R3 consortium, 104 RAPID process, 191 Reddit, 78, 151, 161 on the crash, 166 threats against Coinbase on, 158–159 Reeves, Ben, 8–9, 179 regulation, 49, 53–54, 71, 118, 121–131, 187 Binance and, 180, 209 DeFi and, 217–218 GDAX and, 114 ICOs and, 145–146 IRS and, 121–126 lobbying on, 129–131 safe harbors from, 128 regulatory arbitrage, 128–129 renminbi, 207 Ribbit Capital, 36–37 Ridenour, Andrew, 224 “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin” (Wallace), 26 Rockdale, Texas, 171–172 Romero, Dan, 157, 195–196 safe harbors, 128 SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens), 146, 169–170 San Jose, California, 3–4 Santori, Marco, 169–170 Satoshi Dice, 127 Satoshi Roundtable, 80–81, 94 Schuler, Barry, 213–214 Schumpeter, Joseph, 214 Secret Service, 49 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 145–146, 168–170 security threats, 78–80 Selkis, Ryan, 57, 58, 115–116 ShapeShift, 127 Shiller, Robert, 218 Shin, Laura, 76 shitcoins. See altcoins Shrem, Charlie, 58, 115–116 Silbert, Barry, 34–35, 54, 207, 213 Silicon Valley, 3–4, 10, 99–100, 212–213, 225 Silicon Valley (TV show), 168 Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), 68–70, 72–73 Silk Road, 31, 59–60, 107, 122, 126–127 Sirer, Emin Gün, 107, 215–216, 218 Slack, 73 smart contracts, 89–95 social media Covid-19 and, 222–223 scams involving, 143–144 See also Reddit SoftBank, 171 Solidity, 89 Son, Masayoshi, 171 South Korea, 137 SpankChain, 135 Srinivasan, Balaji, 48, 136–137, 185–190 on cap tables, 215 departure of, 198–199 Hirji and, 193–200 political skills of, 193–196 stablecoins, 203–205 Stanford Law School, 107 Starbucks, 194 startups, 5–6 failure of, 6, 9–10 moving “up and to the right,” 35–36 solitary genius versus partnerships in, 7–8 Stellar, 54 Stox, 144 Suarez, Juan, 48–49, 50, 156 on regulation, 129 on strategy, 69 super voting shares, 112–113 Suthers, Elliott, 175 SVB.

…

That’s the ordinary fate of startups, but not all of them, including two other companies in Brian’s class: one was Instacart—now a billion-dollar grocery service—and the other Soylent, a meal-replacement product that’s since built a cult following in Silicon Valley and beyond. When it was his turn to present on Demo Day, Brian stepped onto the stage with quiet confidence. He turned to the audience and shared his idea with the simple slogan: “Coinbase: The easiest way to get started with bitcoin.” It seemed so obvious—in retrospect. • • • Brian’s early insight into bitcoin would make him a billionaire. But it would cost him a friend. In that summer of 2012, Brian had not planned on going to Y Combinator alone, where one-man bands were discouraged. The startup school wanted cofounders. Plural. Despite Silicon Valley’s veneration of individual entrepreneurs, the reality is that tech startups, like so many creative endeavors, are very much a team sport—often a two-person partnership.

The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin

Apple II, Bob Noyce, book value, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, prudent man rule, Richard Feynman, rolling blackouts, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

One year later, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee issued a study that concluded, “High technology companies offer a brighter future for America but they [also] offer salvation for those regions of America that have borne the brunt of our economic decline.”17 In the mid-1980s, regions across the country and around the world began trumpeting their high quality of life and low cost of living to trafficand mortgage-weary technologists in Silicon Valley. “Remember the Silicon Valley as it was 20 Years Ago? That’s Albuquerque Today!” promised one representative advertisement in the San Jose Business Journal. By 1989, the United States boasted regions calling themselves Silicon Forest (Portland, Oregon), Silicon Gulch (Phoenix, Arizona), Bionic Valley (Salt Lake City), Silicon Valley East (Troy-Albany, New York), Silicon Prairie (Dallas, Austin), and Silicon Mountain (Colorado Springs). Several European and Asian countries also possessed technology regions named in homage to Silicon Valley.18 Arguably the most successful of the American “Silicon Elsewheres,” as they were derisively called on the San Francisco Peninsula, was Austin, Texas.

…

Peninsula Times Tribune, 21 September 1977. Port, Otis. “Bob Noyce Created Silicon Valley. Can He Save It?” Business Week, 15 August 1988, 76. Richards, Evelyn. “In Noyce’s Passing, an Era Also Ends: Electronics Pioneer Symbolized a Swashbuckling, Innovative Age.” Washington Post, 5 June 1990. Slater, Robert. “Robert Noyce: The Mayor of Silicon Valley.” In Slater, Portraits in Silicon. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. Stroud, Michael. “Intel’s Noyce Tells Silicon Valley: Don’t Blame Others for Our Mistakes.” Peninsula Times Tribune, 13 November 1985. Tedlow, Richard S. “Robert Noyce and Silicon Valley: Toward a New Business World.” Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires they Built.

…

While more than 250 THE MAN BEHIND THE MICROCHIP 1.5 million American manufacturing workers lost their jobs, high technology employment in the San Francisco Bay Area grew 77 percent from 1974 to 1980, with Santa Clara County (the county whose boundaries most closely match those of Silicon Valley), gaining an impressive 83,000 jobs in the sector. In 1979, the “help wanted” section of the San Jose Mercury News listed more than 60 pages of advertisements for technical personnel. Per capita personal income growth in Santa Clara County outpaced the rest of California by more than 10 percent.44 According to some calculations, Silicon Valley produced more millionaires in the decade of the 1970s than anywhere else in the country at any time in history. Between 1975 and 1983, more than 1,000 companies— some of them fantastically successful—were launched in Silicon Valley. In 1983, the chairman of the American Stock Exchange was excited enough about young high-technology firms that he told Time magazine, “If there is any hope for our economy, it rests with these people.

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The idea is that no matter where people live, they can share knowledge and move products at virtually no cost. According to this view, the good jobs, now concentrated in high-cost locations such as Silicon Valley and Boston, will quickly disperse to low-cost locations, both in the United States and abroad. An experienced software engineer in India makes $35,000. The same person in Silicon Valley makes $140,000. Why would U.S. firms keep hiring in Silicon Valley when they could save so much by outsourcing? By the same token, if labor costs are three times higher in Silicon Valley than in Mobile, Alabama, companies will eventually relocate to Alabama. This process of dispersion, the argument goes, will be faster than the dispersion of manufacturing jobs, because moving software codes across DSL lines is easier than moving bulky goods across borders.

…

In its heyday, the Detroit auto industry was one of the country’s most important innovation hubs, arguably the Silicon Valley of its time. Like Silicon Valley today, Detroit was full of technologically superior companies that were the envy of the world. The economist Steven Klepper has shown that to an astonishing degree, the rise of Silicon Valley has been tracking the earlier rise of Detroit in terms of population, employment, startup creation, and innovation. Thus, Detroit’s remarkable trajectory holds important lessons for the future of our current innovation hubs. Just like Silicon Valley today, Detroit used to think of its primacy as unassailable.

…

Observers predicted the end of the Valley’s global dominance. But the pessimists were by and large wrong. Silicon Valley has remained the innovation capital of the world, and it continues to lead all other metropolitan regions in the breadth and scope of its innovative activity. It accounts for more than a third of all venture capital investment, significantly more than twenty years ago. Every year hundreds of smart, ambitious innovators move their startups from Europe, Israel, and Asia to Silicon Valley. The Valley keeps its position as the world’s number-one innovation hub not because those who are born there are smarter than anyone else but because of its unparalleled power to attract great ideas and great talent from elsewhere.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Men who behaved badly were being put on notice, and many firms in Silicon Valley were hiring more women as principals and partners. That marked progress. But the real work, the heavy lifting, was more challenging. It was the deeper problem of bias. MJ knew that the “bro culture,” and stories of sexual harassment in Silicon Valley, were an everyday reality, but she also knew that was not the entire story. She had worked with ethical partners at IVP and elsewhere who looked past gender and always treated her respectfully. She had found Silicon Valley an amazing place to work. She had blazed trails and built game-changing companies.

…

MORE ADVANCE PRAISE FOR ALPHA GIRLS “An intimate and addictive homage to the fearless female pioneers who made Silicon Valley blossom. Julian’s vivid portrayals of once-hidden risk takers and mavericks will leave you heartbroken, hopeful, and hungering for more.” —Brian Keating, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and author of Losing the Nobel Prize “Finally, it’s here: a book about Silicon Valley as seen through the accomplishments of the powerful women who, against all odds, made their mark there. Alpha Girls offers an inside look at the true meaning of grit and drive and upends the myth that it is only men who create and build tech companies.

…

—Cathy Schulman, president of Welle Entertainment, Academy Award–winning producer, and women’s activist “Julian Guthrie is the best author writing about Silicon Valley today, and Alpha Girls is the book that the world needs right now. It’s the real story behind the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet. If you are a woman who works, or simply work with women, Alpha Girls is essential reading.” —Adam Fisher, author of Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) Copyright © 2019 by Julian Guthrie All rights reserved.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

Chapter 14: CULTURE WARS 132 “the crazy ones”: http://www.thecrazyones.it/spot-en.html. 132 went into the technology sector: Natalie Kitroeff and Patrick Clark, “Silicon Valley May Want MBAs More Than Wall Street Does,” Bloomberg Businessweek, March 17, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-17/silicon-valley-mba-destination. 132 nearly a quarter of them: Gina Hall, “MBAs are Increasingly Finding a Home in Silicon Valley,” Silicon Valley Business Learning, March 18, 2016, https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/03/18/mbas-are-increasingly-finding-a-home-in-silicon.html. 133 “In a meritocracy”: Uber’s list of 14 values, obtained by author. 134 Mohrer tweeted: Winston Mohrer (@WinnTheDog), “#Shittybike #lyft,” Twitter, July 11, 2018, 7:21 a.m., https://twitter.com/WinnTheDog/status/1017005971107909633. 135 designed an algorithm: Caroline O’Donovan and Priya Anand, “How Uber’s Hard-Charging Corporate Culture Left Employees Drained,” BuzzFeedNews, July 17, 2017, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/how-ubers-hard-charging-corporate-culture-left-employees#.wpdMljap9. 135 “This Safe Rides Fee supports”: “What Is the Safe Rides Fee?

…

., https://twitter.com/sarahcuda/status/502228907068641280. 121 tone-deaf response: “Statement On New Year’s Eve Accident,” Uber (blog), https://web.archive.org/web/20140103020522/http://blog.uber.com/2014/01/01/statement-on-new-years-eve-accident/. 122 read the headline: Lacy, “The Horrific Trickle Down of Asshole Culture. 122 Kalanick’s obsession with China: Erik Gordon, “Uber’s Didi Deal Dispels Chinese ‘El Dorado’ Myth Once and For All,” The Conversation, http://theconversation.com/ubers-didi-deal-dispels-chinese-el-dorado-myth-once-and-for-all-63624. 124 Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business: American Bar, “Salle Yoo,” https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/science_technology/2016/salle_yoo.authcheckdam.pdf. 126 “no fear in Silicon Valley”: Mike Isaac, “Silicon Valley Investor Warns of Bubble at SXSW,” Bits (blog), New York Times, March 15, 2015, https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/silicon-valley-investor-says-the-end-is-near/. 127 Manhattan’s Flatiron District: Johana Bhuiyan, “Uber’s Travis Kalanick Takes ‘Charm Offensive’ To New York City,” BuzzFeedNews, November 14, 2014, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johanabhuiyan/ubers-travis-kalanick-takes-charm-offensive-to-new-york-city. 128 hard-hitting news organization: Mike Isaac, “50 Million New Reasons BuzzFeed Wants to Take Its Content Far Beyond Lists,” New York Times, August 10, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/technology/a-move-to-go-beyond-lists-for-content-at-buzzfeed.html. 130 “Uber’s dirt-diggers”: Ben Smith, “Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists,” BuzzFeedNews, November 17, 2014, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-digging-up-dirt-on-journalists.

…

Uber’s rapid rise was nearly undone in 2017, as the company faced the consequences of years of Kalanick’s boundary-pushing behavior, unabashed pugnacity and, eventually, the CEO’s own personal decline. Kalanick’s story is whispered as a cautionary tale for founders and venture capitalists alike, emblematic of both the best and worst of Silicon Valley. The saga of Uber—which is, essentially, the story of Travis Kalanick—is a tale of hubris and excess set against a technological revolution, with billions of dollars and the future of transportation at stake. It’s a story that touches on the major themes of Silicon Valley in the last decade: how rapid developments in technology can crash into long-entrenched labor systems, throw urban development into upheaval, and overturn an entire industry in a matter of years.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Individual investors such as Carl Icahn, venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, and funds such as Softbank’s Vision Fund and the Collaborative Fund have dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into tech start-ups over the past decade. The Silicon Valley spirit is even bigger than the promise of its platforms to create value and success for individuals and firms, however. Silicon Valley, we’re told, is ushering in a new age—a digital age of limitless possibility. The big ideas being cultivated in Silicon Valley have been around for a while. In the early nineties scholars discussed the “New Economy” and the “network society,” predicting massive societal shifts due to advances in digital technology and internet connectivity.

…

So it’s not surprising that we are so adept at creating and indulging in digital nightmare scenarios. But this fiction-reality overlap is only a tiny part of the mistrust and weariness of the Silicon Valley worldview; it is rooted in something more concrete than our fruitful imaginations. Our disenchantment is rooted in the very real misdeeds of Silicon Valley corporations. It’s rooted in the growing realization that, like the titans of the Gilded Age, today’s titans mistake their own interests for those of society. Consider Uber, a company that perfectly embodies the Silicon Valley spirit. Uber rose from a tiny San Francisco startup, hiring its first employee in 2010, to a juggernaut in record time.

…

Angwin and Parris, “Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race”; Angwin, Tobin, and Varner, “Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race”; Tobin, “HUD Sues Facebook over Housing Discrimination.” 32. See Celia Cucalon, “The Silicon Valley Land Grab,” Community Legal Services, https://clsepa.org/media-great-silicon-valleyland-grab. Community Legal Services is a nonprofit legal aid service offering support for families in East Palo Alto, California, on issues of immigration, housing, and worker and consumer rights. 33. For an overview of Silicon Valley Rising and resources about the role of tech companies in shaping the region, see https://siliconvalleyrising.org. 34. Simmons, “How Apple—and the Rest of Silicon Valley—Avoids the Tax Man.” 35. Zucman, “How Corporations and the Wealthy Avoid Taxes (and How to Stop Them).” 36.

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

The big data applications themselves are easily scalable, can be done broadly around the world, and can be implemented whether or not there is much previous data experience—as was the case for the people in Palmerston, New Zealand, who made equipment for the region’s dairy farmers. Silicon Valley builds things that Silicon Valley wants, from nicer taxi services to more photo-sharing apps. But investors and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley don’t see the world through, say, the eyes of farmers. Thus, they are less likely than a company in the Manawatu-Wanganui region of New Zealand’s North Island to recognize the need for and develop a technology that enables greater beef and dairy production for export to China. While Marc Andreessen is as closely identified with Silicon Valley as anybody, he agrees that those fields that are early in their development can and should take root wherever there is deep knowledge about a specific area.

…

Bronk has a hybrid view, expecting dexterous start-ups to be rolled up into large companies much as the defense giants of the military-industrial complex were, but with a modern, Silicon Valley twist. “What I’ve noticed,” he says, “is that good cybersecurity comes from smart researchers, and smart researchers tend to agglomerate with one another in small groups and start-ups.” Eventually, Bronk thinks, a big company or a big defense firm bulking up their respective cyberdefenses could buy up or invest in these smart researchers. “Basically cybersecurity is going to be very similar to Silicon Valley start-up and acquisition patterns,” says Bronk. When a Silicon Valley company wants innovation, they either do the work in house or contract it out.

…

SIX THE GEOGRAPHY OF FUTURE MARKETS World leaders take notice: the 21st century is a terrible time to be a control freak. “We want to create our own Silicon Valley.” If there’s a single sentence I’ve heard in every country I’ve been to, it’s this one. Silicon Valley has been home to technology-driven innovation for a long time, but the 20-year period from 1994 to 2014 was something special. People all over the world witnessed a spectacular level of innovation and wealth creation, all emerging from a small 30-mile long, 15-mile-wide strip of Northern California. Other states and countries have been attempting to build the “next Silicon Valley” for years now. At this point, there’s even a formula.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

After nearly a decade in business, the company wasn’t profitable—or anywhere close. It was losing more than $3,000 a minute, on average, and had lost more than $1.6 billion the prior year. But Uber, Airbnb, and the mattress website Casper were all unprofitable. Losses were par for the course for buzzy Silicon Valley companies. Startups didn’t always grow and spend like this. But a decade-long deluge of money into Silicon Valley had established new cultural norms. Excess was in. For investors, it was the cost of doing business. The world was changing; entrepreneurs with giant vision needed room to grow and express themselves, they said. Rapid expansion was the goal, and these companies had plenty of that.

…

He seemed awed by the excess. As Neumann rubbed shoulders with these wealthy Silicon Valley exiles in New York, he began to talk more about how WeWork shared all sorts of the tech companies’ qualities. To Parker, he compared WeWork to Facebook, saying it was about connecting people, “but it’s in the third dimension.” Parker and many of his investor friends were skeptical. They liked Neumann but didn’t take him seriously as a businessman, much less a tech entrepreneur of their ilk. * * * — It wasn’t just Parker and his friends who offered a taste of Silicon Valley success. By 2012, tech and startups began to saturate Neumann’s circles.

…

In 2011, VC firms raised $24 billion from investors, nearly double their haul of 2009. This outpouring of money resulted in a burst of startups that would go on to reshape the Silicon Valley landscape and become household names in Americans’ daily lives. Between 2009 and 2012, VCs wrote early checks to startups like Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, and Square. Suddenly you couldn’t walk into a coffee shop in Silicon Valley without hearing talk of the next industry ripe to be “disrupted” by a startup. Amid all the optimism, there was a noticeable change in venture capital strategy that would set apart this generation of startups from their prerecession forebearers.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

On this occasion, for example, Musk’s assistant had just handed him some cookies-and-cream ice cream with sprinkles on top, and he then talked earnestly about saving humanity while a blotch of the dessert hung from his lower lip. Musk’s ready willingness to tackle impossible things has turned him into a deity in Silicon Valley, where fellow CEOs like Page speak of him in reverential awe, and budding entrepreneurs strive “to be like Elon” just as they had been striving in years past to mimic Steve Jobs. Silicon Valley, though, operates within a warped version of reality, and outside the confines of its shared fantasy, Musk often comes off as a much more polarizing figure. He’s the guy with the electric cars, solar panels, and rockets peddling false hope.

…

“Kids these days have no idea about hardware or how stuff works, but he had a PC hacker background and was not afraid to just go figure things out.” Musk found in Silicon Valley a wealth of the opportunity he’d been seeking and a place equal to his ambitions. He would return two summers in a row and then bolt west permanently after graduating with dual degrees from Penn. He initially intended to pursue a doctorate in materials science and physics at Stanford and to advance the work he’d done at Pinnacle on ultracapacitors. As the story goes, Musk dropped out of Stanford after two days, finding the Internet’s call irresistible. He talked Kimbal into moving to Silicon Valley as well, so they could conquer the Web together.

…

That same month X.com officially changed its name to PayPal, providing a harsh reminder that the company had been ripped away from Musk and given to someone else to run. The start-up life, which Musk described as akin to “eating glass and staring into the abyss,”4 had gotten old and so had Silicon Valley. It felt like Musk was living inside a trade show where everyone worked in the technology industry and talked all the time about funding, IPOs, and chasing big paydays. People liked to brag about the crazy hours they worked, and Justine would just laugh, knowing Musk had lived a more extreme version of the Silicon Valley lifestyle than they could imagine. “I had friends who complained that their husbands came home at seven or eight,” she said. “Elon would come home at eleven and work some more.

How to American: An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents by Jimmy O. Yang

call centre, do what you love, Erlich Bachman, hacker house, imposter syndrome, Jian Yang, Peter Gregory, Richard Hendricks, Silicon Valley, Uber for X, Vanguard fund

When my dad finally watched an episode of Silicon Valley he said, “I don’t think your stand-up is funny, but I think Silicon Valley is very funny. You and your big white roommate are funny together.” That’s probably the nicest thing he’d ever say about my career. In a Chinese family, we never say, “I love you.” That was his equivalent of a crying father hugging his son after winning the state championship football game. “I love you son, I’m so proud of you.” After all, Dad wasn’t a full-on hater. He didn’t understand stand-up, but the dynamic between me and T. J. Miller on Silicon Valley was like the xiang sheng that he grew up with in China, and my deadpan delivery was like the Stephen Chow movies we watched back in Hong Kong.

…

Yes! Yes!” My neighbor must have thought I was having the best sex of my life. “But there is one thing,” Jane said. “If you do this show, you can’t do Silicon Valley anymore, because Yahoo wants you exclusively on their show.” Nothing is ever perfect, is it? I wasn’t sure if I was going to be back on Silicon Valley, but if HBO called me to be back on the second season, I knew it was something I couldn’t pass up. The first season of Silicon Valley was already nominated for the Emmys and Golden Globes; it was on its way to becoming a big hit. It meant everything for my career to book my first series-regular job, but how could I turn down a possible second season of an Emmy-nominated HBO show with Mike Judge?

…

I knew I’d make at least twenty times more money as a series regular on Sin City Saints than the union minimum nine hundred dollars guest starring on Silicon Valley. And trust me, I cared about the money. My economics degree told me, Take the series-regular money, go to Caesars Palace. But I ignored that econ degree the same way I did when I left Smith Barney to do stand-up. I followed my gut. “Jane, I’d rather be a small part of a great show than a big part of an unknown show.” I put my foot down. “I really want to do Sin City Saints, but they need to let me do Silicon Valley.” I didn’t know much about the business, but I knew I couldn’t give up on Silicon Valley. Jane’s joyous tone suddenly turned heavy, but she knew I was making the right decision.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

All were tough-minded professionals. Some had accrued sterling reputations in Washington DC, in fields such as counterterrorism or cybersecurity, before joining the Silicon Valley gold rush. Others had impressive backgrounds in human rights or politics. They were hardly the basement hackers and starry-eyed dropouts who had once governed the platforms—although it would later become clear that the dorm-room ideologies and biases from Silicon Valley’s early days were still held with near-religious conviction on their campuses, and remained baked into the very technology that pushed those same ideals into the wider world.

…

University research departments usually toil, at least in theory, on behalf of the greater good. Stanford blurred the line between academic and for-profit work, a development that became core to the Silicon Valley worldview, absorbed and propagated by countless companies cycling through the Research Park. Hitting it big in the tech business and advancing human welfare, the thinking went, were not only compatible, they were one and the same. These conditions made 1950s Santa Clara what Margaret O’Mara, a prominent historian of Silicon Valley, has called a silicon Galápagos. Much as those islands’ peculiar geology and extreme isolation produced one-of-a-kind bird and lizard species, the Valley’s peculiar conditions produced ways of doing business and of seeing the world that could not have flourished anywhere else—and led ultimately to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

…

A supporting but highly visible player in the country’s opening, welcomed by both Myanmar and American leaders, was Silicon Valley. Rapidly bringing the country online would, they promised, modernize its economy and empower its 50 million citizens, effectively locking in the transition to democracy. A few months after Obama’s visit, Schmidt, acting as the Valley’s ambassador-at-large, landed in Yangon, Myanmar’s historic capital, to announce big tech’s arrival. Flanked by the American ambassador, he told the student audience, “The internet, once in place, guarantees that communication and empowerment become the law and the practice of your country.” Myanmar’s leaders believed in Silicon Valley’s vision as well.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Rubin was a member of a unique “Band of Brothers” who passed through Apple Computer in the 1980s, a generation of young computer engineers who came of age in Silicon Valley as disciples of Steve Jobs. Captivated by Jobs’s charisma and his dedication to using good design and computing technology as levers to “change the world,” they set out independently on their own technology quests. The Band of Brothers reflected the tremendous influence Jobs’s Macintosh project had on an entire Silicon Valley generation, and many stayed friends for years afterward. Silicon Valley’s best and brightest believed deeply in bringing the Next Big Thing to millions of people. Rubin’s robot obsession, however, was extraordinary, even by the standards of his technology-obsessed engineering friends.

…

“Baby Boomers Retire,” Pew Research Center, December 29, 2010 http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/baby-boomers-retire. 4|THE RISE, FALL, AND RESURRECTION OF AI 1.David C. Brock, “How William Shockley’s Robot Dream Helped Launch Silicon Valley,” IEEE Spectrum, November 29, 2013, http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/how-william-shockleys-robot-dream-helped-launch-silicon-valley. 2.David C. Brock, “From Automation to Silicon Valley: The Automation Movement of the 1950s, Arnold Beckman, and William Shockley,” History and Technology 28, no. 4 (2012), http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07341512.2012.756236#.VQTPKCbHi_A. 3.Ibid. 4.John Markoff, “Robotic Vehicles Race, but Innovation Wins,” New York Times, September 14, 2005. 5.John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005). 6.Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence, 2nd ed.

…

Examples range from machine vision and pattern recognition essential in improving quality in semiconductor design and so-called rational drug discovery algorithms, which systematize the creation of new pharmaceuticals, to government surveillance and social media companies whose business model is invading privacy for profit. The optimists hope that potential abuses will be minimized if the applications remain human-focused rather than algorithm-centric. The reality is that, until now, Silicon Valley has not had a track record that is morally superior to any earlier industries. It will be truly remarkable if any Silicon Valley company actually rejects a profitable technology for ethical reasons. Setting aside the philosophical discussion about self-aware machines, and in spite of Gordon’s pessimism about productivity increases, it is clearly becoming increasingly possible and “rational” to design humans out of systems for both performance and cost reasons.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

Once, at a private meeting for big donors from the entertainment industry, one of the guests asked Obama why he had sided with Silicon Valley over Hollywood during a fierce regulatory battle over copyright law in 2011 and 2012: Hollywood, the makers of content, was for stricter protections, and Silicon Valley, whose business was to distribute as much material as it could for free, was against them. Silicon Valley won. (In this instance, and others, one of Silicon Valley’s lobbying techniques was to mobilize its vast user base in support of its political goals.) It’s simple, Obama told his Hollywood supporters: they do a lot more to help me than you guys do.

…

Was there another organizing principle, beyond institutions and transactions? If you went looking for one, you might well wind up in Silicon Valley, the narrow band of territory that ran along the western edge of the San Francisco Bay and was home to suddenly enormous companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook. Silicon Valley was primarily a business site, but—just as the people who built the great industrial corporations of the early twentieth century also had a social vision in which they themselves occupied a central position—the leaders of Silicon Valley considered themselves to be far more than merely economically successful. They also knew how the world should work in the new century.

…

Successes like these were exceedingly rare. One study of Silicon Valley start-ups found that almost three-quarters of company founders who got funding from venture capital firms—and these were the lucky ones, representing a small minority of those who pitched to the venture firms—wound up making nothing. The common wisdom in Silicon Valley had it that one start-up a year, of perhaps thirty thousand, would wind up being as valuable as all the others combined, and that the ten most successful would account for more than 95 percent of the value of all of them. Silicon Valley has created an amazingly effective mechanism for drawing talent and money into a game that almost all the players will lose, and for generating a handful of companies that make useful products, grow very large very quickly, and make their founders astonishingly rich—obviously not the basis of a successful social system.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

James Temple, “Airbnb Victim Describes Crime and Aftermath,” SFGate, July 30, 2011, http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Airbnb-victim-describes-crime-and-aftermath-2352693.php. 21. Claire Cain Miller, “In Silicon Valley, the Night Is Still Young,” New York Times, August 20, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/technology/silicon-valley-booms-but-worries-about-a-new-bust.html. 22. Jim Wilson, “Good Times in Silicon Valley, for Now,” New York Times, August 13, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/08/13/technology/20110821-VALLEY-5.html; Geoffrey Fowler, “The Perk Bubble Is Growing as Tech Booms Again,” Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2011, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303763404576419803997423690. 23.

…

How did they maneuver past entrenched, politically savvy incumbents to succeed where others had failed and build large companies in a staggeringly short amount of time? How much of their success was luck? What does it take to survive and thrive in modern Silicon Valley? These were questions, I judged back in 2014, that were ripe for exploration in a book. But the practical question was this: Would the startups cooperate with such an in-depth project? At most Silicon Valley tech companies, the time and public images of the top executives are obsessively guarded. Uber and Airbnb had graduated into this secretive sanctum. The only way to find out was to ask. Living up to its mission to foster hospitality, Airbnb promptly invited me to discuss the project.

…

All these investors had concerns about the size of the market, about the absence of any real users, and about the founders themselves, who didn’t resemble the wonky innovators who’d created great Silicon Valley companies, people like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. Design students seemed risky; Stanford computer science dropouts were considered a much better bet. And, frankly, the idea itself seemed small. “We made the classic mistake that all investors make,” wrote Fred Wilson, a Twitter backer, a few years later. “We focused too much on what they were doing at the time and not enough on what they could do, would do, and did do.”11 The year 2008 was also an anxious time in Silicon Valley. The tech industry had recovered from the devastation of the dot-com bust a few years before and had been buoyed by the Google IPO in 2004 and the budding success of Facebook.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Meanwhile, these delusions of omnipotence have not prevented the eclipse of its initial public offering market, the antitrust tribulations of its champion companies led by Google, and the profitless prosperity of its hungry herds of “unicorns,” as they call private companies worth more than one billion dollars. Capping these setbacks is Silicon Valley’s loss of entrepreneurial edge in IPOs and increasingly in venture capital to nominal communists in China. In defense, Silicon Valley seems to have adopted what can best be described as a neo-Marxist political ideology and technological vision. You may wonder how I can depict as “neo-Marxists” those who on the surface seem to be the most avid and successful capitalists on the planet.

…

All this is temporal provincialism and myopia, exaggerating the significance of the attainments of their own era, of their own companies, of their own special philosophies and chimeras—of themselves, really. Assuming that in some way their “Go” machine and climate theories are the consummation of history, they imagine that it’s “winner take all for all time.” Strangely enough, this delusion is shared by Silicon Valley’s critics. The dystopians join the utopians in imagining a supremely competent and visionary Silicon Valley, led by Google with its monopoly of information and intelligence. AI is believed to be redefining what it means to be human, much as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species did in its time. While Darwin made man just another animal, a precariously risen ape, Google-Marxism sees men as inferior intellectually to the company’s own algorithmic machines.

…

They offer the still-remote promise of new computer architectures such as quantum computers that can actually model physical reality and thus may finally yield some real intelligence. The current generation in Silicon Valley has yet to come to terms with the findings of von Neumann and Gödel early in the last century or with the breakthroughs in information theory of Claude Shannon, Gregory Chaitin, Anton Kolmogorov, and John R. Pierce. In a series of powerful arguments, Chaitin, the inventor of algorithmic information theory, has translated Gödel into modern terms. When Silicon Valley’s AI theorists push the logic of their case to explosive extremes, they defy the most crucial findings of twentieth-century mathematics and computer science.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

In the 1980s Silicon Valley technology companies were boring places where engineers worked in drab office parks writing software or designing semiconductors and circuit boards and network routers. There weren’t any celebrities, other than Steve Jobs at Apple, and even he wasn’t such a big deal back then. In the early 1990s the Internet era began, and Silicon Valley changed. The new companies were flimsy, based on hype and grandiose rhetoric and the promise of making a fortune overnight. The dotcom boom of the late 1990s was followed by the dotcom bust, and then came a period when Silicon Valley felt like a ghost town.

…

Some people were afraid to talk to me at all. At the time I thought their concerns were silly. But as things turned out, those people may have been right to be afraid. Regarding terminology: When I use the term Silicon Valley I do not mean to denote an actual geographic region—the sixty-mile peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose, where the original technology companies were built. Instead, like Hollywood, or Wall Street, Silicon Valley has become a metaphorical name for an industry, one that exists in Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Boston, and countless other places, as well as the San Francisco Bay Area. The term bubble, as I use it, refers not only to the economic bubble in which the valuation of some tech start-ups went crazy but also to the mindset of the people working inside technology companies, the true believers and Kool-Aid drinkers, the people who live inside their own filter bubble, brimming with self-confidence and self-regard, impervious to criticism, immunized against reality, unaware of how ridiculous they appear to the outside world.

…

In 2012 Congress passed the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act, which relaxes the rules on private company investing and allows regular folks to pour money into start-ups, usually by pooling their money into syndicates on websites like AngelList. Silicon Valley companies lobbied for the JOBS Act, arguing it would give ordinary people—doctors, lawyers, retirees—the chance to catch the next Facebook or Google. But some Wall Street veterans are worried: “We are talking about companies that in all likelihood are not going to be winners, being invested in by people who clearly don’t have the expertise and financial smarts of venture capitalists,” former SEC chief accountant Lynn Turner tells Bloomberg, adding that the rule change creates “a real opportunity for scams and fraud and significant losses.” The denizens of Silicon Valley see no such problem.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

It was coupled with an alternative vision of society, a vision of amateurs producing knowledge for the joy of it, a faith in the wisdom of crowds. Silicon Valley views its role in history as that of the disruptive agent that shatters the grip of the sclerotic, self-perpetuating mediocrity that constitutes the American elite. On the surface, the tech companies seem aware of the danger that they might repeat the sins of the very cohort they critique. After Silicon Valley supplies its users with tools to make decisions for themselves, it claims to step out of the way and recede unassumingly. This ostentatious humility serves an important purpose. It obscures the nature of its power. Silicon Valley routinely trashes cultural and economic gatekeepers—while its own companies are the most imposing gatekeepers in human history.

…

They believe that they have the opportunity to complete the long merger between man and machine—to redirect the trajectory of human evolution. How do I know this? Such suggestions are fairly commonplace in Silicon Valley, even if much of the tech press is too obsessed with covering the latest product launch to take much notice of them. In annual addresses and townhall meetings, the founding fathers of these companies often make big, bold pronouncements about human nature—a view of human nature that they intend to impose on the rest of us. There’s an oft-used shorthand for the technologist’s view of the world. It is assumed that libertarianism dominates Silicon Valley, which isn’t wholly wrong. High-profile devotees of Ayn Rand can be found there.

…

Brand would come to inspire a revolution in computing. Engineers across Silicon Valley revered Brand for explaining the profound potential of their work in ways they couldn’t always see or articulate. Brand gathered a devoted following because he brought to technology a rousing sense of idealism. Where politics failed to transform humanity, computers just might. That dream of transformation—a world healed by technology, brought together into a peaceful model of collaboration—carries a charming innocence. In Silicon Valley, this naive belief has been handed down through ages. Even the most hard-nosed corporations have internalized it.

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

Many find our solutions to common problems surprising. By studying these structures, we can find new tools that are valuable in a corporate context. And although I refer throughout this chapter to “Silicon Valley” and “Silicon Valley–style startups,” I am not referring literally to the roughly fifty square miles around my house. Increasingly, Silicon Valley is a state of mind, a shared set of beliefs and practices that have taken hold in dozens of startup hubs around the world. I use “Silicon Valley” only as a convenient shorthand for these beliefs. (For one example, see organizations like Rise of the Rest, founded by Steve Case, which works with entrepreneurs in emerging startup cities.2) So let’s dive in.

…

The only way to win in this world is to take more shots on goal. Try more radical things. Pay close attention to what works and what doesn’t. And double down on the winners. A STARTUP IS MISSION—AND VISION—DRIVEN Outside of Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg’s declaration that “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services”20 was met with eye rolls. But in Silicon Valley, we really believe it. Silicon Valley is obsessed with vision and the visionary founder who can uniquely execute it. This focus has been a source of some controversy as Lean Startup has become more popular. Because of our emphasis on science, metrics, and experimentation, it’s a common (but misguided) criticism that Lean Startup seeks to replace vision or, in some ways, de-emphasize it.

…

When established organizations first started asking me to work as a consultant, I thought my primary task would be to bring the “Silicon Valley way of working” to them. And, to some extent, I have. But the biggest surprise has been the extent to which my Silicon Valley colleagues have been interested in learning from my war stories of working to implement Lean Startup techniques in corporate settings. It’s what led to my realization that the Startup Way requires reforms and changes on both sides of the traditional “startup” and “enterprise” divide. A modern company isn’t about working just one way—the Silicon Valley way—or the other—the current corporate management way.

To Pixar and Beyond by Lawrence Levy

Apollo 13, computerized trading, index card, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, spice trade, Steve Jobs, Wall-E

If there was one person I could turn to for that, it was my old boss and mentor, Larry Sonsini. 10 On Board Larry Sonsini was the managing partner at my old law firm, Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati. He was a legend in Silicon Valley, and with good reason. Larry was Silicon Valley’s resident guru on start-ups and IPOs; he had built the firm advising many if not most of Silicon Valley’s most famous start-ups, guiding them and advising them through their initial public offerings and beyond. He was chief legal adviser to Silicon Valley’s most prominent CEOs and boards of directors. If Silicon Valley had a consigliere, it was Larry. Within the law firm, Larry inspired a combination of admiration and awe. He was a brilliant lawyer—efficient, effective, and intensely focused on client service.

…

The only viable path for a little company like Pixar to raise the kind of money we needed was to take it public. It was simply too much money, and too much risk given Pixar’s track record, for traditional banks or other financing sources to consider. If there is a holy grail in Silicon Valley, it is the initial public offering, or IPO, of a company’s stock. This is Silicon Valley’s payday, the moment of arrival, when paper money becomes real. Every start-up in Silicon Valley harbored dreams of going public. Only a tiny percentage made it. Of those that didn’t make it, some would be acquired by larger companies, even fewer would manage on their own; the rest would shut down.

…

I especially admired the pride he took in the firm and its role in Silicon Valley. On one occasion in his office, when we had a few minutes to talk, he compared running the firm to building a start-up: “Our mission is simple,” he said. “We serve Silicon Valley companies with as fine a legal counsel as they could get anywhere in the world. They don’t need to go anywhere else.” With that goal, Larry had steadily increased the quality of legal services of the firm until it did, indeed, compete with, and in some cases exceed, the very best in the world. As Silicon Valley grew, the firm grew. If Pixar was to go public, it could not be in better hands than Larry’s.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

You have to understand the market dynamics, timing of each of the regions, and the talent and capabilities that each region has.” DO THEY ALL START IN SILICON VALLEY? Fadell is right that location matters. Startups thrive in the right context, which includes the place where they began and the region they serve. Although Silicon Valley has historically been the “right” location for technology startups, that doesn’t mean all billion-dollar startups need to come out of Silicon Valley, and it certainly doesn’t mean things are going to remain the same in the future, especially with the ever-growing shift to remote work. It’s true that Silicon Valley is home to the largest number of billion-dollar startups in the United States.

…

This may suggest historically higher odds of reaching billion-dollar valuations for Silicon Valley–based companies. One big caveat, however, is that some companies moved to Silicon Valley after they were able to raise money and see initial success; raising money helped them afford the exorbitant costs of running a business and living there. Dropbox’s founders, for example, moved from Boston to San Francisco after Y Combinator. So that might account for some of Silicon Valley’s success. And it’s no doubt that Silicon Valley startups had easier access to large pools of venture capital and a dense pool of talent, further contributing to their success.

…

Guild, which has raised over $200 million from investors like General Catalyst, Felicis Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures, was last valued at over $1 billion. Many startups have moved from other cities to Silicon Valley after raising money, but Carlson and Stich moved their company out of Silicon Valley to Denver after having raised their first round of funding. It was an unusual choice. Far from Silicon Valley, Denver is not even considered one of the top tech or startup hubs, like New York or Boston. I sat down with Carlson to learn more about her journey and why she decided to base the company in Denver.

The Gated City (Kindle Single) by Ryan Avent

big-box store, carbon footprint, company town, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, income inequality, industrial cluster, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, offshore financial centre, profit maximization, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, Thorstein Veblen, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Veblen good, white picket fence, zero-sum game

And from the late 1990s to the early 2000s -- after the bust -- Silicon Valley’s rate of high-tech entrepreneurship actually increased. How can this be? How is it that during the first great boom of the Internet era, Silicon Valley was less of a hotbed for new firm formation than the country as a whole?[10] The authors of the analysis cited above, economists Robert Fairlie and Aaron Chatterji, suggest that the answer lies in the extremely tight labor market conditions that prevailed at the time. The tech boom was remarkably good for Silicon Valley workers. Average earnings rose by nearly 40% from 1997 to 2000 -- more than twice as fast as the increase for the country as a whole.

…

That, in turn, made it more attractive to be a worker than an entrepreneur. And this brings us to the crux of the matter: why was the Silicon Valley labor market so tight? If the unemployment rate was so much lower than it was elsewhere in the country, and if compensation was rising so much more rapidly than elsewhere in the country, why weren’t people pouring into Silicon Valley from elsewhere in the country? More remarkably, why were people moving in the opposite direction? If you can believe it, Silicon Valley’s main metropolitan centers were losing residents to other parts of the country during the Dot Com boom. From 1998 to 1999, for instance, San Francisco and San Mateo counties each lost a net of about 10,000 residents to other parts of the country.

…

Instead, the data seem to suggest that most movement has been driven by housing costs. There obviously are big differences in nominal wages across these cities; as we've seen, people in places like Silicon Valley make much more than workers elsewhere. The factor that drives people away from Silicon Valley despite this high wage is the cost of a place to live. Figure 3. Source: Census Bureau For a well educated, middle-class worker, the $80,000 average pay at a Silicon Valley job looks quite nice relative to the $49,000 or so one earns, on average, in Dallas. It’s almost twice as much money! The chart above reveals why even that apparently significant salary gap is basically irrelevant to the typical household.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

“You noticed!” I don’t quite know the best way to convey this side of 1980s Silicon Valley, but women served as the impresarios of organic social networking before there was an Internet. Commercial headhunters were irrelevant to the real Silicon Valley; they were nothing but small-time scammers who preyed upon newbies like me. The way the Valley really worked was that a tiny number of unofficial, supersocial, superpowered women connected everyone, creating companies, even whole technological movements. Histories of Silicon Valley always mention captains of industry like Steve Jobs, as they should, but you never see the names of the women who probably did as much to design the place.

…

Maybe we can make VR rides for theme parks, or who knows what.” “Are you serious? VR systems need these giant computers and all this fancy equipment. Just tell people to come up to Silicon Valley for demos. It’s a short flight.” “This is Hollywood. People come to us.” “Silicon Valley will change that, just wait.” “Maybe so, but in the meantime, we’ll pay you to come … a lot!” “Um, okay…” Thus was launched Reality on Wheels, a big ol’ 18-wheeler loaded with millions of dollars of VR demos that traveled from Silicon Valley to Hollywood. (Similar demos can be had for mere hundreds of dollars today.) It parked for a week at a time at all the major studios.

…

“Can you give me a couple of days to think about it?” “No time for slowpokes in Silicon Valley.” “Right.”2 Peanut Sauce Gallery Fate was caught on a knife’s edge and I was given just a moment when I could prod it to fall one way or the other. Should I dive in and start a Silicon Valley company? There was no beaten path. No startup incubators, no young entrepreneur awards, no crowdfunding sites. Furthermore, I had not grown up in a topiary world where one’s cousin is a lawyer who knows a banker. I knew none of the right people and was clueless. Today’s Silicon Valley looks wild and “emergent” from a distance but is actually rather structured and formal.

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

You’d develop yourself, and your success would be manifest in societal status, material rewards, and spiritual attainment. All these would be of a piece. It’s hard to overstate how influential this movement was in Silicon Valley. Not est specifically, for there were hundreds more like it. In the 1980s the Silicon Valley elite were often found at a successor institution called simply “the Forum.” The Global Business Network was a key, highly influential institution in the history of Silicon Valley. It has advised almost all the companies, and almost everyone who was anyone had something to do with it. Stewart Brand, who coined the phrases “personal computer” and “information wants to be free,” was one of the founders.

…

If this all sounds a little grandiose, understand that in the context of the community in which I function my presentation is practically self-deprecating. It is commonplace in Silicon Valley for very young people with a startup in a garage to announce that their goal is to change human culture globally and profoundly, within a few years, and that they aren’t ready yet to worry about money, because acquiring a great fortune is a petty matter that will take care of itself. Furthermore, these bright little young bands succeed regularly. This is just Silicon Valley’s version of normal. Our idealisms and dreams often turn out to find fulfillment in events in the real world.

…

If only we could live for free and get whatever we want without any worry that politics might be messy, that some political process might not make the best decision on our behalves, that cartels would never form around what isn’t perfectly free or automated . . . if only we could carelessly let our levees melt away and throw ourselves into the waiting arms of utopia. I imagine that the academics from top technical schools will do fine. Honestly, there’s no way Silicon Valley would stand to see MIT fall. That wouldn’t be a danger anyway because the top technical schools make money from technology. Stanford sometimes seems like one of the Silicon Valley companies. What about liberal arts professors at a state college? Some academics will hang on, but the prospects are grim if education is seduced by the Siren song. A decade or two from now, if nothing changes, the outlook will recall the present state of recorded music.

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

There were fewer than half as many IPOs as in 2000, and they were focused on a few large deals. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, venturers ruminate on an incursion of “unicorns”—some 130 private companies now with official valuations close to a billion dollars apiece, for a total market cap approaching half a trillion dollars. In the ordinary history of Silicon Valley, no private company but Apple obtained anything close to a billion-dollar market cap. Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, and other Silicon Valley stars only reached that level through IPOs that led into long years of appreciation of their stocks as public companies.

…

Perhaps the street where you live, Main Street is the site of local businesses and jobs. Silicon Valley: A symbol of the high-tech entrepreneurial economy, centered in Santa Clara County, California, and largely funded by venture capital from SAND HILL ROAD in Palo Alto and Menlo Park. The high-tech economy is increasingly based on INFORMATION THEORY, which governs its infrastructure of communications and computing, particularly software. Silicon Valley sustains both MAIN STREET and WALL STREET by supplying them with new technology. Through Wall Street, Silicon Valley provides Main Street with opportunities for sharing in the equity of the ascendant sectors of the world economy.

…

Through Wall Street, Silicon Valley provides Main Street with opportunities for sharing in the equity of the ascendant sectors of the world economy. In recent years, Silicon Valley has suffered from the HYPERTROPHY OF FINANCE, become bloated with MONOPOLY MONEY, and been bent by controls from the Wall Street–Washington axis. Like Wall Street, Silicon Valley has bypassed Main Street, which has remained trapped in its pedestrian time-based compensation and mindless index fund investments. Sand Hill Road: The arboreal abode of California venture capitalists and their “unicorns,” stretching from the Camino Real near Stanford to Route 280 and into the clouds and wealth of Woodside and SILICON VALLEY. Expansionary fiscal and monetary policy: The attempt by central banks to stimulate economic activity by selling government securities to pay for a governmental deficit.

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

Art Levinson, Chairman and former CEO of Genentech and Chairman of Apple, will be Chief Executive Officer.” The moment the blog hit the wires, press, pundits, geeks, researchers, venture capitalists—everyone in Silicon Valley—jumped as if they had been shocked with a cattle prod. Phones and emails started lunging around the Valley like great, arcing live wires ripped from the moorings of the main line. Here was one of Silicon Valley’s grand pillars of entrepreneurial achievement, and Arthur Levinson, a bona fide Silicon Valley heavyweight, joining forces to run this crazy new operation funded with bushels of Googlebucks. The combination of the two immediately and fundamentally changed the entire landscape of longevity research.

…

“We’re tackling aging,” was the way the company put it, “one of life’s great mysteries.” Google? Now that was worth looking into. And just as intriguing was the news that Arthur D. Levinson had been asked to lead the company. Most people wouldn’t have known Levinson if they tripped over him, but he was a force in Silicon Valley. He was the chairman of Apple, and just a year earlier had chaired Genentech, two of Silicon Valley’s most storied early start-ups. When news of Calico hit the wires, the media snapped to. “Google vs. Death”—that was how Time magazine put it. There is always a watershed moment that precedes any truly fundamental change in the human story. Calico’s founding, I felt, might mark that moment.

…

Byers knew this because his father, Brook, was one of the original founders of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers (KPCB), arguably Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firm. KPCB had been an early investor in Apple, Google, Amazon, and Genentech. Genentech not only went on to revolutionize medicine and the pharmaceutical industry; it also became one of the inspirations for Michael Crichton’s best-selling novel Jurassic Park. Everyone in Silicon Valley knew what a force Genentech had become in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and that made Levinson a particularly appealing candidate. Nevertheless, Byers was also pretty sure Levinson would never be interested in getting involved in Maris’s idea.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

That model is one which is very familiar to our programmers and for us because we were all in those offices too, and we know it’s a very productive environment.” Over the years these perks and oddities have been so widely imitated by other corporations that it is now impossible to explain Silicon Valley without mentioning them. Google’s company bus fleet is arguably driving an entire reconfiguration of work-life patterns in the Bay Area. Most big Silicon Valley companies now offer such buses. The one downside of working in Silicon Valley after college used to be living in suburban Mountain View, Palo Alto, or Sunnyvale. City life in San Francisco wasn’t worth the more than two hours of driving it required to live there.

…

To them, it wasn’t just that Rubin had started Android or built the Sidekick, it was that he probably knew more about the mobile phone business than anyone else at Google, maybe all of Silicon Valley. Then forty-four, he’d been building cutting-edge mobile products in Silicon Valley since the early 1990s. It was his vocation and his avocation. People describe his home as something akin to Tony Stark’s basement laboratory in Iron Man—a space jammed with robotic arms, the latest computers and electronics, and prototypes of various projects. Like many electronics whizzes in Silicon Valley, he had Tony Stark’s respect for authority too. At Apple in the late 1980s he got in trouble for reprogramming the corporate phone system to make it seem as if CEO John Sculley were leaving his colleagues messages about stock grants, according to John Markoff’s 2007 profile in The New York Times.

…

What this means is that the Apple/Google fight is not just a story about the future of Silicon Valley. It is about the future of media and communications in New York and Hollywood as well. Hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue are at stake, and for at least the next two years, and probably the next five, these companies, their allies, and their hangers-on will be going at it full bore. * * * In many ways what is happening now is what media, communications, and software moguls have been predicting for a generation: The fruits of Silicon Valley’s labor and those of New York and Hollywood are converging. This is as close to tragic irony in business as one ever gets.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

CHAPTER 6: 10X, ROCK STARS, AND THE MYTH OF MERITOCRACY a frenzy of programming: This section on Max Levchin draws from several sources, including Adam Penenberg, Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves (New York: Hyperion, 2009), 158–275, Kindle; Sarah Lacy, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 (New York: Penguin, 2008), 17–41, Kindle; Jessica Livingston, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (New York: Apress, 2008), locations 200–605 of 12266, Kindle; Krissy Clark, “What Does Meritocracy Really Mean in Silicon Valley?,” Marketplace, October 4, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.marketplace.org/2013/10/04/wealth-poverty/what-does-meritocracy-really-mean-silicon-valley; Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2014). “perfect validation of merit”: Emily Chang, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley (New York: Penguin, 2018), 60. “People wouldn’t talk to us”: Chang, Brotopia, 48. “it is in Silicon Valley”: Jodi Kantor, “A Brand New World in Which Men Ruled,” New York Times, December 23, 2014, accessed August 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/23/us/gender-gaps-stanford-94.html.

…

Ferenstein, and Neil Malhotra, “The Political Behavior of Wealthy Americans: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs,” Stanford Graduate School of Business, Working Paper No. 3581, December 9, 2017, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/political-behavior-wealthy-americans-evidence-technology. than to Donald Trump: Ari Levy, “Silicon Valley Donated 60 Times More to Clinton Than to Trump,” CNBC, November 7, 2016, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-election-day/silicon-valley-donated-60-times-more-clinton-trump-n679156. philosopher and technologist Ian Bogost says: Alexis C. Madrigal, “What Should We Call Silicon Valley’s Unique Politics?,” The Atlantic, September 7, 2017, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/what-to-call-silicon-valleys-anti-regulation-pro-redistribution-politics/539043. civic goods like public libraries: Susan Stamberg, “How Andrew Carnegie Turned His Fortune into a Library Legacy,” NPR, August 1, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2013/08/01/207272849/how-andrew-carnegie-turned-his-fortune-into-a-library-legacy.

…

Stanford, Harvard, or MIT: Sarah McBride, “Insight: In Silicon Valley Start-up World, Pedigree Counts,” Reuters, September 12, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-startup-connections-insight/insight-in-silicon-valley-start-up-world-pedigree-counts-idUSBRE98B15U20130912. cascade of good fortune downstream: Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us (New York: Virgin Books, 2010). “you start acting like one”: Antonio García Martínez, Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 490.

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve

American Enterprise Institute scholar Bret Swanson has noted that the “market value of seven American technology firms—Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, Intel, and Microsoft—totals $2.3 trillion, more than the entire stock markets of Germany or Australia.”14 Five of those seven are based in Silicon Valley. To be clear, Silicon Valley doesn’t have a money-supply problem. So aggressively is money chasing all the innovative production in northern California that even the chefs that work at high-flying tech companies are in play.15 Money follows production, and at least for now, Silicon Valley is one of the more popular destinations for the money that can command real economic resources. If the Fed were to drain money out of every bank in Silicon Valley, the money supply siphoned away by the Fed would return to this thriving area south of San Francisco almost as quickly as the first batch departed.

…

If regulations reduce them, so will they reduce the quality of talent that migrates to banking. At present, some of the world’s brightest minds are taking their talents to Silicon Valley. The passion to innovate certainly factors into this decision, but the potential to achieve staggering wealth can’t be minimized as a major driver of this modern gold rush. What is notable here is that the frequency of failure in Silicon Valley also means the sky is the limit in terms of potential wealth gains. For the sake of comparison, consider Detroit. It was the Silicon Valley of the first half of the twentieth century, based on how failure was the norm. That its carmakers now largely owe their existence to government is a signal that not a lot of staggering wealth is being created there.

…

At a first glance, the obvious answer is that Silicon Valley start-ups generally don’t have $85-million budgets to lose. Assuming Town & Country had cost $10 million, it’s fair to say that Warren Beatty’s reputation in the eyes of film financiers wouldn’t have suffered so much. Second, and of much greater importance, tech has a higher upside than film does. The number of movies that can claim box-office receipts of more than $1 billion can generally be counted on one hand in a very good year. By contrast, companies valued at $1 billion or more are increasingly the norm in Silicon Valley. The term used to refer to these billion-dollar companies is “unicorn.”

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

But the ad also expressed and perpetuated a conviction that Californians—and Silicon Valley in particular—could change the world. It’s easy to ridicule Silicon Valley’s “change the world” pretensions, and many have made sport of doing so. HBO’s Silicon Valley, for instance, has been one of the most effective (“I don’t want to live in a world where someone else is making the world a better place better than we are,” says a chakra-channeling CEO in the show’s second season). But while unselfconsciously dweebish, the “change the world” mentality is not entirely delusional, or is, at minimum, a useful article of faith. Silicon Valley has produced numerous world-changing products and services.

…

Social networks. All of these things, if not created in Silicon Valley, were at least perfected there. The same will likely be true for virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and self-driving cars—all of which stand to have seismic effects on the way humans live. Essential to the drumbeat of innovation in Silicon Valley is the idea that one can “make a little dent in the universe,” as Jobs said in a 1985 interview with Playboy magazine. Even if these beliefs are in many cases mistaken, they at least help build a supply chain of brains that makes Silicon Valley unusual. Fed on a diet of inspirational quotes from their tech heroes (“Remembering that you are going to die,” said Jobs, “is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose”), the best developers and software-minded entrepreneurs stream into the Valley to make an impact, get a view of history in the making, make a chunk of money, or all of the above.

…

Tesla is also partly responsible for the emergence of an automotive ecosystem on the other side of the bay, in Silicon Valley. The companies there are almost exclusively focused on software. “For a hundred years, automobiles have been a mechanical engineering industry. Now, there is the shift to software—and the mecca of software is Silicon Valley,” Dragos Maciuca, director of Ford’s Palo Alto research and innovation center, told the Los Angeles Times in late 2015. Ford, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, GM, Nissan—they’ve all established Silicon Valley–based research centers to work on autonomous driving and connectivity.

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins

air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration

It left him in a state of mind that had him re-evaluating the meaning of his life. With his new bride, Musk decamped to Los Angeles—to escape Silicon Valley and for a fresh start. There, the idea of SpaceX would take root in his conviction that he could create reusable rockets and cut the cost of space travel to a fraction of what the industry was spending. Musk threw himself into the world of aeronautics, developing a reputation as a fantastically wealthy eccentric willing to put his money on unusual bets, the kinds that the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley’s famed Sand Hill Road shied away from. Beyond SpaceX and Tesla, Musk would later encourage his cousins, Lyndon and Pete Rive, to create a company to sell solar panels, an idea that melded well with his idea of where he thought Tesla might go.

…

Months earlier, he had sat across from Bill Smythe, who had a lifetime of automobile experience as the owner of a successful Mercedes dealership. As Tesla began exploring the complexities of the dealership model, Smythe’s name had come up as somebody to seek out for advice. Eberhard had sought out the longtime Silicon Valley car dealer to learn more about the retail side of the auto industry. Eberhard’s original business plan depended upon using select franchise dealerships in wealthy enclaves to sell their Roadster—places like Silicon Valley, Beverly Hills, probably New York City, maybe even Miami. They wanted to use exotic car dealerships that already had experience with ultra-expensive brands such as Bentley and Lotus.

…

Unlike those engineers recruited by Peter Rawlinson, he wasn’t someone who had spent a career at a traditional automaker and was looking to escape for a fresh start with a small startup. Nor was he a recent Stanford grad looking to jump-start a career in Silicon Valley, as Straubel and much of his team had been. Field was a seasoned corporate warrior, one who oversaw thousands of people at Apple and was responsible for carrying out the iconic Mac computer’s engineering. Field’s hiring would be a statement to Silicon Valley that Tesla could play with—and poach from—the big boys. Field was the right guy to usher Tesla into a new, more professional era. He had cut his engineering teeth at Ford Motor after graduating from Purdue University in 1987, then departed in frustration with the automaker’s culture.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Lawrence, Nathan Bomey, and Kristi Tanner, “Death on Foot: America’s Love of SUVs Is Killing Pedestrians,” Detroit Free Press, June 28, 2019, Freep.com. 40 Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, Viking, 2016, p. 29. 41 Alexa Delbosca, “Dehumanization of Cyclists Predicts Self-reported Aggressive Behaviour toward Them: A Pilot Study,” Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour 62, 2019, p. 685. 42 Gorz, “The Social Ideology of the Motorcar.” 43 John Urry, “The ‘System’ of Automobility,” Theory, Culture & Society 21:4–5, 2004, p. 28. 44 Gorz, “The Social Ideology of the Motorcar.” 45 Gartman, “Three Ages of the Automobile,” p. 192. 46 Ibid. 2. Understanding the Silicon Valley Worldview 1 Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Penguin Books, 2020, p. 7. 2 Ibid., p. 15. 3 AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, Harvard University Press, 1996. 4 O’Mara, The Code, pp. 75–6. 5 Tom Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce,” Esquire, December 1983, Classic.esquire.com. 6 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 31. 7 Ibid., p. 73. 8 Ibid., p. 76. 9 Ibid., p. 14. 10 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6:1, 1996, imaginaryfutures.net. 11 Saxenian, Regional Advantage, p. 90. 12 O’Mara, The Code, p. 214. 13 Ibid., p. 226. 14 Peter Thiel, “The End of the Future,” National Review, October 3, 2011, Nationalreview.com. 15 Tom Simonite, “Technology Stalled in 1970,” MIT Technology Review, September 18, 2014, Technologyreview.com. 16 David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” The Baffler 19, March 2012, Thebaffler.com. 17 O’Mara, The Code, pp. 90–1. 18 Tim Maughan, “The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand,” OneZero, November 30, 2020, Onezero.medium.com. 19 Ibid. 20 Senator Gore, speaking on S. 1067, 101st Congress, 1st sess., Congressional Record 135, May 18, 1989, S 9887. 21 Daniel Greene, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, MIT Press, 2011. 22 Madeline Carr, US Power and the Internet in International Relations: The Irony of the Information Age, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 58 (author’s emphasis). 23 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 194. 24 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996, Eff.org. 25 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 209. 26 Ibid., p. 222. 27 Ibid. 28 Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs.

…

We cannot allow them to determine our future. 2 Understanding the Silicon Valley Worldview On August 13, 1980, Apple Computer placed an ad in the Wall Street Journal that compared the personal computer to the automobile. It was the first in a three-part series where co-founder Steve Jobs ostensibly set out to explain “the personal computer, and the effects it will have on society,” but it might be better seen as one fragment of a much larger attempt to set the narrative of this new technology. Jobs and other key figures in Silicon Valley’s computing industry had high hopes for the kind of society personal computers might usher in, and they wanted as many people as possible—especially the influential and wealthy readers of the Wall Street Journal—to buy into their vision.

…

As technology historian Margaret O’Mara described: The whole enterprise rested on a foundation of massive government investment during and after World War II, from space-age defense contracts to university research grants to public schools and roads and tax regimes. Silicon Valley hasn’t been a sideshow to the main thrust of modern American history. It has been right at the center, all along.1 Due to the public funds that flowed into the Bay Area to make it the research hub that modern Silicon Valley companies would profit from, O’Mara called the US government “the Valley’s first, and perhaps its greatest, venture capitalist”2—a position it held for decades. During World War II, the civilian and military arms of the US government spent immense amounts of money to develop new military and communications technologies to keep up with and defeat Nazi Germany.

Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

Hey, maybe this guy wasn’t so bad after all. I wasn’t sure anyone read my drivel. We talked and talked. This guy knew more about Silicon Valley than I did. I was so used to getting stuck next to some brainless Meeting Mr. Zed 41 investment banker from Robertson or Goldman talking about some boring-ass disk drive company. It was nice to talk to someone without an altitude problem. “So, what do you think it is?” “What what is?” I asked. “What it is that makes Silicon Valley so special?” he asked. “I don’t know. I’ve been coming out here for years—on these stupid American Airlines flights, I’m so sick of them.

…

“Ironworkers?” “Are you asking me or telling me?” “Both?” This was not going well. “Does Silicon Valley provide the greatest silicon to the world?” “No.” “So, find out what sucked up that horsepower. Why did they need so much of it? Find the scale.” “But where?” I asked. “Everywhere. Underwear.” And then he hung up. I think he’d seen this movie before too. > > > Object Lesson FREMONT, CALIFORNIA—JANUARY 1997 OK, enough of the history lesson—it’s time to find some stocks that go up. Shouldn’t be too hard—this is Silicon Valley, not Shropshire. “What are we going to ask these guys?” I asked Fred. We were headed in to see one of the recent IPOs, Versant.

…

Auto companies?” “Well, no.” “The Industrial Revolution is dead.” “But there are lessons there.” “Of course, you didn’t waste your time. But don’t think like an industrialist. Silicon Valley isn’t an industry, it’s a giant design shop, as far as I can tell.” “That’s true,” I said. “So, go figure that out. Your numbers for your first year are pretty good.” “Thanks, but—” “But 25%? That’s nothing. How is it that Silicon Valley can generate all that wealth but hardly even make anything themselves? Can we invest in that model or is that same little quirk? Teach me—I’m not sure myself.” All of the names that were working in our fund really didn’t 100 Running Money make anything themselves—they just designed stuff made elsewhere.

The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, centralized clearinghouse, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, pre–internet, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, Steve Jobs

Getting Value from Entrepreneurial Talent We three authors come from a business environment where the employment alliance has already taken root—the high-tech start-up community of Silicon Valley. It’s the best place in the world for adaptation and innovation, as demonstrated by its economic growth over the past decade. If you want your organization to be able to survive and thrive in an environment where change is rapid and disruptive innovation rampant, you need to develop the adaptability that is the hallmark of this ecosystem. Obviously, not every industry works like Silicon Valley, nor should many established companies attempt wholesale adoption of start-up strategies. The question is which lessons from Silicon Valley are generally applicable.

…

The question is which lessons from Silicon Valley are generally applicable. Mainstream media’s coverage of Silicon Valley tends to focus on flashy details. But attributing the valley’s success to four-star meals in cafeterias, Foosball tables, or even stock options is like attributing a Ferrari’s power to its bright red paint job. The real secret of Silicon Valley is that it’s really all about the people. Sure, there are plenty of stories in the press about the industry’s young geniuses, but surprisingly few about its management practices. What the mainstream press misses is that Silicon Valley’s success comes from the way its companies build alliances with their employees.

…

It gives a valued employee concrete and compelling reasons to “stick it out” and finish a tour. Most importantly, a realistic tour of duty lets both sides be honest, which is a necessity for trust. We recognize the irony of looking to Silicon Valley for lessons on building long-term relationships. After all, Silicon Valley is where an engineer can update her LinkedIn profile in the morning and have five job offers by lunchtime. But this is precisely why you can learn from Silicon Valley. This is one of the fastest-moving, most competitive economies on the planet. It’s immensely difficult to retain quality employees, so the companies and managers that convince their people to stay must be doing something extraordinary.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The partners at those funds were John Johnston at August, whose comically WASPy name matched his appearance and pedigree. At Mayfield, it was Yogen Dalal, the usual cocktail of the Indian Institute of Technology and Stanford that populated many a Silicon Valley boardroom. We had leverage over such Silicon Valley players thanks to funding trends that were then seizing Silicon Valley, and are now so commonplace as to scarcely merit mention. Here’s why: Traditionally, early-stage startup funding was the exclusive province of either the entrepreneur’s personal wealth, friends and family, or business “angels.” In their original form, angel investors were wealthy individuals, often former entrepreneurs themselves, who for fun or profit punted around in embryonic companies.

…

* While raised in the cradle of the Cuban exile in Miami, I was born in Southern California, making me more Californian than most Silicon Valley denizens. * Marketers use “conversion” to indicate a sale, the way Mormons refer to souls saved. * CrunchBase is the database of people and companies that’s the who’s who (if I can use that phrase without puking) of Silicon Valley. The parent publication of CrunchBase, TechCrunch (hence the name), is the day-to-day news and gossip rag of the Silicon Valley carnival. † The origin of the term “dogfooding” is supposedly found in eighties Microsoft, which coined the phrase from Alpo dog food commercials at the time wherein Lorne Greene assured a perhaps dubious public that he fed his own dogs Alpo.

…

Locked behind the ghetto’s walls at night, the Jews plied their moneylending trade during the day, with Christians traveling to the otherwise rancid part of the city to borrow cash. The modern-day Silicon Valley ghetto, though sadly without the moneymen living behind locked gates as in erstwhile Venice, is Sand Hill Road. A meandering stretch of two-lane blacktop that wends its way from Palo Alto to Menlo Park, this uninspiring piece of suburban scenery is swarmed by aspiring entrepreneurs with a laptop in hand and a sly pitch in mind. In New York, the old joke is that Wall Street starts in a graveyard and ends in the river. In Silicon Valley, just as symbolically, Sand Hill Road starts in a shopping mall and ends at a particle accelerator.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha

Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

In these far-flung places he spoke about his own experiences and simultaneously observed and learned about the aspirations and attitudes of the talented local people. The remarkable thing he noticed was that entrepreneurship—in the broad sense of the word—was everywhere: thousands of miles from Silicon Valley, in the hearts and minds of people not necessarily starting companies. While they may not have considered themselves entrepreneurs, their approach to life seemed every bit the Silicon Valley way: they were self-reliant in spirit, resourceful, ambitious, adaptive, and networked with one another. From these experiences he arrived separately at the same conclusion that I did: entrepreneurship is a life idea, not a strictly business one; a global idea, not a strictly American one.

…

Fortunately, there is another path—both metaphorically and physically thousands of miles away from Detroit. Silicon Valley has become the twenty-first-century model for entrepreneurship and progress and has had multiple generations of entrepreneurial companies over the decades: from Hewlett Packard’s founding in 1939 to Intel, Apple, Adobe, Genentech, AMD, Intuit, Oracle, Electronic Arts, Pixar, and Cisco, and then to Google, eBay, Yahoo, Seagate, and Salesforce, and then more recently to PayPal, Facebook, YouTube, Craigslist, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In each passing decade, Silicon Valley has kept and intensified its entrepreneurial mojo, with dozens of companies creating the future and adapting to the evolution of the global market.

…

What do these companies have in common? The principles of Silicon Valley are the principles in this book. Take intelligent and bold risks to accomplish something great. Build a network of alliances to help you with intelligence, resources, and collective action. Pivot to a breakout opportunity. You can think like a start-up, whoever you are and whatever you do. Anyone can apply this entrepreneurial skill set to his or her career. This is a book about how to do just that. It’s about keeping Detroit from happening to you and making the Silicon Valley way work for you. THE PATH TO THE FUTURE In 1997 Reed Hastings, a software entrepreneur living in the hills of Silicon Valley, was faced with a problem.

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City by Brad Feld

barriers to entry, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, deal flow, fail fast, G4S, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, minimum viable product, Network effects, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, place-making, pre–internet, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Jobs, text mining, vertical integration, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In particular, in her seminal book Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (1994) Saxenian noted that two hotbeds for high-tech activity—Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128—looked very similar in the mid-1980s. Each area enjoyed agglomeration economies associated with the nation’s two high-tech regions. Yet just a decade later, Silicon Valley gained a dominant advantage over Route 128. External economies alone did not provide an answer. Saxenian set out to resolve the puzzle of why Silicon Valley far outpaced Route 128 from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. Saxenian persuasively argues that a culture of openness and information exchange fueled Silicon Valley’s ascent over Route 128.

…

Saxenian persuasively argues that a culture of openness and information exchange fueled Silicon Valley’s ascent over Route 128. This argument is tied to network effects, which are better leveraged by a community with a culture of information sharing across companies and industries. Saxenian observed that the porous boundaries between Silicon Valley companies, such as Sun Microsystems and HP, stood in stark contrast to the closed-loop and autarkic companies of Route 128, such as DEC and Apollo. More broadly, Silicon Valley culture embraced a horizontal exchange of information across and between companies. Rapid technological disruption played perfectly to Silicon Valley’s culture of open information exchange and labor mobility.

…

Although these myths are similar to some of the classical problems we discussed earlier, Paul brings a new perspective to the mix and hammers home a number of points made earlier. We’ll begin with one of my favorite myths: “We Need to Be Like Silicon Valley.” WE NEED TO BE LIKE SILICON VALLEY It is usually among the first questions I get asked as I travel around the world researching and talking about entrepreneurship, innovation, and venture capital. The question is, of course, how can we create our own Silicon Valley? To save time, here is the answer to the Silicon Valley question: You can’t—you only think you want to. Granted, everyone thinks they do. It has become a cliché, but there is a Silicon pretty much everywhere as you travel around, to the point that it is meaningless.

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Facebook cofounder and philanthropist Chris Hughes dedicated his intellectual thought leadership to promoting a universal basic income,15 and Mark Zuckerberg, his former roommate, mentioned it in the commencement speech he gave at Harvard.16 This quasi-moral solution to income inequality—and to expanding the definition of equality for this generation—finds its strongest American proponents in Silicon Valley. Home to the billion-dollar titans of industry, who form a slightly reluctant political elite in the New Economy, Silicon Valley and the culture of technology radiate influence across the business, political, and media culture of major American cities. And Silicon Valley has a strong stake in national debates over whether automation technology, such as self-driving cars, will take all our jobs. Universal basic income is one form of “automation alimony” that is proposed to relieve the rising inequality often attributed to automation.

…

In 2014, Uber’s own newsroom stated, “Our powerful technology platform delivers turnkey entrepreneurship to drivers across the country and around the world.”7 The idea that Uber can deliver entrepreneurship to the masses through technology is a compelling anthem for a society eager to reap the benefits of technology that come especially from Silicon Valley kingmakers. Drivers, however, aren’t the web 2.0 tech entrepreneurs who emerged from Silicon Valley with a heady array of self-branding marketing skills in the early years of the twenty-first century. They don’t game search-engine-optimization results to boost their presence on the Internet, and they don’t have Google alerts set to their names to inform them when they are mentioned somewhere (with the possible exception of a few drivers who run forums and blogs). Drivers aren’t “happiness engineers” or “code ninjas.”8 THE LEGEND OF SILICON VALLEY It shouldn’t be surprising that Uber has adopted the myth of tech entrepreneurship: after all, the company was started by such entrepreneurs.

…

Drivers aren’t “happiness engineers” or “code ninjas.”8 THE LEGEND OF SILICON VALLEY It shouldn’t be surprising that Uber has adopted the myth of tech entrepreneurship: after all, the company was started by such entrepreneurs. Travis Kalanick, the most visible cofounder of Uber, is hailed as one of Silicon Valley’s “Great Men.” The Great Man theory of success celebrates America’s technology founder-heroes for their business acumen and their passion, like Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg. The Silicon Valley “Great Men” typically celebrated are white men. Equally accomplished founders who are not white men tend to get less play—like Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, according to longtime Silicon Valley journalist, Sarah Lacy.9 The meritocratic theory of success has crossed class lines and entered the culture of work embraced by most people in the United States.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

In 1956, he returned to his hometown of Palo Alto to start Shockley Semiconductor inside the university’s Stanford Industrial Park.17 His company spawned several other microchip companies, including Intel, and gave Silicon Valley its name. Hewlett-Packard, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, Xerox PARC, and Lockheed Martin also set up shop inside Stanford’s Industrial Park around the same time. There was so much military work going on in Silicon Valley that, throughout the 1960s, Lockheed was the biggest employer in the Bay Area. ARPA had a huge presence on campus, too. The Stanford Research Institute did counterinsurgency and chemical warfare work for the agency as part of William Godel’s Project Agile.

…

Journalists and criminologists blasted PredPol, in particular for making claims that it simply could not back up.75 Despite these knocks, PredPol had supporters and backers in Silicon Valley. Its board of directors and advisory board included serious heavy hitters: executives from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay, as well as a former managing director of In-Q-Tel, the CIA venture capital outfit operating in Silicon Valley.76 Back in his office, Brantingham offers little about the company’s ties to these Internet giants. Another PredPol executive informed me that, behind the scenes, Google was one of PredPol’s biggest boosters and collaborators.

…

It was a groundbreaking product that allowed anyone with an Internet connection to virtually fly over anywhere in the world. The only problem was Keyhole’s timing; it was a bit off. It launched just as the dot-com bubble blew up in Silicon Valley’s face. Funding dried up, and Keyhole found itself struggling to survive.97 Luckily, the company was saved just in time by the very entity that inspired it: the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, the CIA had launched In-Q-Tel, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund whose mission was to invest in start-ups that aligned with the agency’s intelligence needs.98 Keyhole seemed a perfect fit.99 The CIA poured an unknown amount of money into Keyhole; the exact number remains classified.

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Thus, it matters for a company’s labor and gender relations whether it is, like IBM, located in Swabia with its more skill-conscious workforce influenced by the teachings of Catholic social ethics, or in Berlin, the emerging hub for IT startups in Germany today with a more individualized professional workforce.32 Likewise, the United States has different local labor cultures in the more unionized north and the union-free south, and between bureaucratized companies of the East Coast like Xerox and IBM, and the venture-capital-driven startups of Silicon Valley. It is no coincidence that foreign automobile manufacturers such as Mercedes, Volkswagen, and Toyota have not located their US manufacturing plants in the Detroit area, where they would have had access to local talent and suppliers; rather, they opted for the union-free south. The same is true for tech companies. Silicon Valley provides them with a professional workforce that believes in meritocratic advancement based on individual skills rather collective improvement through solidarity. If Silicon Valley is to have a more diverse, collectively oriented workforce, employees will need to challenge corporate rhetoric that suggest differences do not exist, whether they come in the form of an egalitarian “family” ideal or believing in professional meritocracy.

…

,” press release (June 17, 2014), https://www.prlog.org/12337721-black-mark-zuckerberg-hackathon-empowers-youth-to-transform-nola-into-their-own-silicon-valley.html. 58. “Van Jones: Giving Black Geniuses Tools to Win with #Yeswecode,” Essence (May 2, 2014), https://www.essence.com/festival/2014-essence-festival/tk-van-jones/. 59. Terry Collins, “They’re Changing the Face of Silicon Valley,” CNET (August 16, 2017), https://www.cnet.com/news/changing-the-face-of-technology-women-in-technology/. 60. Guðrun í Jákupsstovu, “Silicon Valley Has Diversity Problems, Now Let’s Focus on a Fix,” TNW (February 20, 2018), https://thenextweb.com/us/2018/02/20/1108399/. 61.

…

Gender discrimination, in particular, is a major stumbling block for the high-tech industry—so much so that even some of the most powerful, white women feel they need to admonish themselves and their peers to “lean in” to combat sexism and break through the glass ceiling.1 This belief in the promise of a more equal future, if only women would try harder, seems alluring if one takes it on faith that Silicon Valley’s goal is to measurably improve itself. But a culture of rampant sexual harassment, persistent racial inequalities in positions of power, and pay and promotion inequalities industry-wide shows that Silicon Valley culture is mired firmly in the past, even as companies claim to be building a better future.2 From sexist manifestos on how women’s supposed intellectual inferiority disqualifies them from tech careers, to golden parachutes for serial sexual harassers at corporations that simultaneously choose not to cooperate with federal equal pay investigations, to platforms that position misogynist and racist hate speech and threats of sexual assault as just a normal part of online discourse, it is no surprise that women workers in the tech industry might internalize sexism and blame themselves—particularly because when they speak out they tend to lose their jobs.3 Online, Black women, and particularly Black trans women, are targeted with inordinate amounts of hatred, yet the platforms that enable it refuse to seriously address the harms they are causing.

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

→ John Perry Barlow Peripheral Visionary executive vice president; Algae Systems cofounder; and rocking chair, Electronic Frontier Foundation This must-read classic tale of the origins of the personal computer and its role in the evolution of Silicon Valley continues to evolve and inform. In an era when we take the personal computer for granted, we tend to forget the risk-taking and ambition that was required to shift from a hobbyist plaything to a thriving industry. The authors focus on the people and culture that helped to change the world—and continue to change the world through offshoots like smartphones and the Internet. The fire continues to grow. → John Hagel Co-chairman, Center for the Edge, and coauthor, The Power of Pull Fire in the Valley is the seminal story of Silicon Valley. It is the first and only biography of the place that made and continues to make innovation history.

…

→ Roger McNamee Cofounder of Elevation Partners, Silver Lake Partners, and Integral Capital Partners Silicon Valley suffers from an extreme case of historical amnesia. Whatever its virtues, remembering its roots isn’t one. The best remedy—especially for those who treasure understanding the origins of the world’s top innovation cluster—is to read Fire in the Valley. Swaine and Freiberger brilliantly capture a bygone time, a forgotten creation story that, when first encountered, greatly enhances your appreciation of the technological marvel that Silicon Valley was, is, and likely shall remain. This is an essential volume in any reading list on the digital age

…

Felsenstein read about the upcoming meeting and resolved not to miss it. He collared Bob Marsh, and they drove Felsenstein’s pickup truck through the rain across the Bay Bridge to the peninsula that stretches from San Francisco south to Silicon Valley. French’s garage was in suburban Menlo Park, a town jogging distance from Stanford University and perched on the edge of Silicon Valley. At the club’s first meeting, Steve Dompier reported on his visit to Albuquerque. It was the headquarters of MITS. MITS, he told them, had shipped 1,500 Altairs and expected to ship 1,100 more that month. The company was staggering under the weight of the orders and couldn’t possibly fill all of them.

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

With a $17 billion endowment, Stanford has the resources to provide students an incredible education inside the classroom, with accomplished scholars ranging from Nobel Prize winners to former secretaries of state teaching undergraduates. The Silicon Valley ecosystem ensures that students have ample opportunity outside the classroom as well. Mark Zuckerberg gives a guest lecture in the introductory computer science class. Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey spoke on campus to convince students to join his companies. The guest speaker lineups at the myriad entrepreneurship and technology-related classes each quarter rival those of multithousand-dollar business conferences. Even geographically, Stanford is smack in the middle of Silicon Valley. Facebook sits just north of the school. Apple is a little farther south.

…

Apple is a little farther south. Google is to the east. And just west, right next to campus, is Sand Hill Road, the Wall Street of venture capital. Silicon Valley has always had an influence on Stanford, and vice versa. But starting in the late 2000s, tech started to dominate the university. In the fall of 2010, as Evan began his junior year, I arrived on campus as a freshman. Coming from the East Coast, I knew that Stanford and Silicon Valley were closely linked and that tech companies were a big deal out there on the West Coast. I just didn’t realize how big. One of the guys in my freshman dorm made a new social networking app that he was trying to get this tech blog called TechCrunch to write about.

…

All told, close to sixty people and institutions invested a sum of $30 million in Clinkle before the company even told the world what they were doing. The company had at this point been in “stealth mode,” a sexy term meaning they weren’t telling anyone what they were working on. Stanford has been intertwined with Silicon Valley for more than a century. In 1909, a Stanford graduate founded one of the earliest big Silicon Valley startups, Federal Telegraph. David Starr Jordan, Stanford’s first president, was an angel investor. But Clinkle made students, faculty, and alumni uneasy. Should the university president be advising a company that is recruiting students to drop out of school?

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross

affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, always be closing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Elon Musk, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, inventory management, John Markoff, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, medical residency, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Morris worm, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, transaction costs, Y Combinator

It offers tours of San Francisco, of Muir Woods and Sausalito or the wine country north of the city, but it no longer offers a tour of Silicon Valley, immediately south. From a bus seat, there just isn’t much to be seen.1 Silicon Valley’s past is more accessible than its present. There’s the Computer History Museum, and Intel has a museum of its own. And there are the garages, of course, beginning with Hewlett and Packard’s, then Steve Jobs’s parents’, and then the rented garage that served as Google’s first off-campus office space. But these are ghostly places, the uninteresting physical vestiges of startups that have long since departed. To glimpse what comes next in Silicon Valley, you need to see the most promising startups, not museums and historic garages.

…

It would have been more difficult to convince YC applicants of the desirability of moving to where YC was had it stayed where it started, in Cambridge. But after the first YC batch had finished in August 2005, Graham decided it would be a good idea to plant the flag in Silicon Valley. He expected that other seed funds would pop up and copy the Y Combinator model, and he didn’t want to leave open an opportunity for someone to come along and say, “We’re the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley.” He wanted Y Combinator to be the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley. He and Livingston planned to move out to the Bay Area for the next batch, in winter 2006, and then alternate, running a summer batch in Cambridge and a winter one in the Valley.

…

Founder Nikki Durkin, twenty, is Australian and her mention of being accepted into YC on Facebook was picked up by the Sydney Morning Herald, which described Australian entrepreneurs seeking to go to Silicon Valley as “like religious fanatics trying to get to their mecca.” Asher Moses, “Aussie Nikki Joins Silicon Valley Millionaire Factory,” November 18, 2011, www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/aussie-nikki-joins-silicon-valley-millionaire-factory-20111118-1nlud.html. At the first dinner, PG was in the middle of his standard spiel for technical founders when he remembered 99dresses, so different from the many companies whose founders sell developer tools to fellow developers.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

“To be clear, I agree with the critiques,” Patrick said, refilling my water glass suggestively. “I also want Silicon Valley to be better. More inclusive, more ambitious, more significant, more serious. More optimistic.” On this we agreed, though I suspected we might have different ideas about how it could manifest. “I think it’s really striking that there is only one Silicon Valley, and I worry a lot about that flame being extinguished. Maybe one question is whether you would want two Silicon Valleys, or none. For me, that answer is really clear.” I swirled a piece of chicken skin around my plate. I did not want two Silicon Valleys. I was starting to think the one we already had was doing enough damage.

…

I was starting to think the one we already had was doing enough damage. Or, maybe I did want two, but only if the second one was completely different, an evil twin: Matriarchal Silicon Valley. Separatist-feminist Silicon Valley. Small-scale, well-researched, slow-motion, regulated Silicon Valley—men could hold leadership roles in that one, but only if they never used the word “blitzscale” or referred to business as war. I knew my ideas were contradictions in terms. “Progress is so unusual and so rare, and we’re all out hunting, trying to find El Dorado,” Patrick said. “Almost everyone’s going to return empty-handed. Sober, responsible adults aren’t going to quit their jobs and lives to build companies that, in the end, may not even be worth it.

…

It wasn’t just about leisure, the easy access to nice food and private transportation and abundant personal entertainment. It was the work culture, too: what Silicon Valley got right, how it felt to be there. The energy of being surrounded by people who so easily articulated, and satisfied, their desires. The feeling that everything was just within reach. Was I trying too hard to make this mean something? I asked Leah. Was that just buying into the industry’s own narratives about itself? I tried to summarize the frantic, self-important work culture in Silicon Valley, how everyone was optimizing their bodies for longer lives, which could then be spent productively; how it was frowned upon to acknowledge that a tech job was a transaction rather than a noble mission or a seat on a rocket ship.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

In the end, his main objection was not that the company was overly ambitious but that it was based in London. It would be harder to keep an eye on his investment, a typical concern for Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Nevertheless, he invested £1.4 million of the initial £2 million in seed funding that gave rise to DeepMind. In the coming months and years, other big-name investors joined in, including Elon Musk, the Silicon Valley kingpin who helped build PayPal alongside Thiel before building the rocket company SpaceX and the electric-car company Tesla. “There’s a certain community,” Legg says. “He was one of the billionaires who decided to put some money in.”

…

He and several other academics were building a deep learning start-up they called Madbits, and he resolved to see it through. Six months later, before this tiny new company had even come close to releasing its first product, it was acquired by Twitter, Silicon Valley’s other social networking giant. The battle for talent, already so heated, was only getting hotter. * * * — FACEBOOK’S Silicon Valley headquarters is the corporate campus that feels like Disneyland. Thanks to a rotating team of muralists, sculptors, silk-screeners, and other artists-in-residence, each building, room, hallway, and foyer is carefully decorated with its own colorful extravagance, and in between, the eateries advertise themselves with just as much gusto.

…

Mike Schroepfer had joined Facebook five years earlier as its head of engineering, after Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommate, company cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, stepped down from the role. He wore black-rimmed glasses and a short, Caesar-like haircut that matched the one worn by Zuckerberg. Almost ten years older than the Facebook CEO, Schrep was a Silicon Valley veteran who’d studied at Stanford alongside a who’s who of Silicon Valley veterans. He cut his teeth as the chief technology officer at Mozilla, the company that challenged the monopoly of Microsoft and its Internet Explorer Web browser in the early 2000s. When he moved to Facebook, his primary job was to ensure that the hardware and software supporting the world’s largest social network could handle the load as it expanded from a hundred million people to one billion and beyond.

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

The consonance with the theory and culture of Silicon Valley is obvious, which is why Christensen was cited ad nauseam by everyone we met. Companies built for such disruption, Maples said, are like thunder lizards. They lay radioactive eggs, breathe fire, pick up and consume trains. They also grow at a terrifying rate. Silicon Valley is a breeding ground for thunder lizards, companies that go from $0 to incredibly valuable, in the many billions of dollars, in very short periods of time. That’s why Godzilla was sitting on the conference table. It’s also a good example of how Silicon Valley is dominated by metaphor.

…

They became an essential part of how people interacted with one another in everyday life—a social network. Mobile, social, and cloud, each driven by venture-backed technology companies in Silicon Valley. Decades of increasingly powerful technology married to capital and the best minds of the research university had created a distinct and powerful culture in the converted industrial buildings south of Market Street in San Francisco and the storefronts and garages around the academic and industrial giants of Silicon Valley. It was a belief system in which people were not just augmented but liberated by technology—a place where people could discard the compromises and confusions of human living and build something more rational and enlightened in their place

…

Yet, while education dwarfed them all in size, it is still, in terms of how money is spent, almost entirely an analog business. Now the moneymen in Silicon Valley were looking at the big yellow circle and seeing a tremendous business opportunity. Venture capital investment in education technology companies increased from less than $200 million in 2008 to over $1.2 billion in 2013. There is, of course, a great deal of complexity sitting inside of the big yellow $4.6 trillion circle—thousands of potential business models and strategies for getting a piece of the pie. As Staton and I drove around Silicon Valley from one new business to another, certain broad categories of start-up became clear.

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

Ultimately the strategy was defined by the technology: because lithium-ion batteries were still relatively new and incredibly expensive, Tesla had little choice but to start with a high-end electric sports car and move down-market as battery technology matured. This was also the classic Silicon Valley game plan for marketing new technologies, and Eberhard and Tarpenning were a classic Silicon Valley “hardware-software” team. Eberhard, a tall, bearded engineer whose charismatic charm barely conceals a smoldering intensity, had cut his teeth designing computer terminals at Wyse computers. Tarpenning, the more laid-back and humorous of the two men, had made a name for himself developing software and firmware at companies like Seagate and Packet Design.

…

Tarpenning’s research found that buyers of the earliest green cars tended to be wealthy enough to afford almost any car they wanted, as was evidenced by the Priuses sharing driveways with high-end sports and luxury cars around Silicon Valley. Having identified both a technological and commercial opportunity, Eberhard and Tarpenning incorporated Tesla Motors in 2003, fatefully naming it after the brilliant electrical engineer who never reaped the financial rewards of his breakthrough inventions. According to Elon Musk, electric cars were what had first brought him to Silicon Valley. While obtaining bachelor’s degrees in physics and business from Wharton, Musk claims to have become fascinated with the opportunity to power cars with ultracapacitors.

…

CHAPTER 4 THE STARTUP TRAP Raising venture capital is the easiest thing a startup founder is ever going to do. Marc Andreessen By 2006, Silicon Valley had fully shaken off its post-dot-com-bubble hangover and was entering a new golden age. The “Web 2.0” wave had already made companies like Skype, Pandora, and Yelp into household names, Facebook and Twitter were just starting their rise to ubiquity, and Apple was putting the final touches on the world’s first smartphone. The venture capitalist Paul Graham captured the mood in a speech he gave that year called “How to Be Silicon Valley.” Between deriding the stifling effects of bureaucracy and celebrating the valley’s “rich people and nerds,” Graham argued, “a place that tolerates oddness in the search for the new is exactly what you want in a startup hub, because economically that’s what startups are.

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks