Top 165 Silicon Valley Quotes

Before I came to Silicon Valley I was in Beijing, China and I was twenty-seven. When I saw the Internet, I immediately realized that it was going to change everything.

At the end of the day, I live in Silicon Valley and L.A., and for selfish reasons, I’d love to have Los Angeles and San Francisco connected with the Hyperloop.

We founded Palantir in 2003-2004 because we perceived a giant gap between how the defense and intelligence community was harnessing technology to achieve its goals and what we had seen was possible in Silicon Valley over the last decade.

You could use many adjectives to describe Silicon Valley; I don’t think ‘normal’ is one of them.

Folks are leaving Silicon Valley, mostly because they can’t afford to stay.

The iPhone will forever be associated with the inventive genius of Steve Jobs and Silicon Valley. But the roots of innovation can be traced back – from one genius to another, at least – back to the genius who put the phone in iPhone: Alexander Graham Bell.

When I turned 50, I truly felt I was too old to work in Silicon Valley. No one said anything to my face, but when you can be the mother of some of the people you’re interviewing with, that says it all.

Silicon Valley is a great place for Bitcoin, since everyone understands computers, and there are lots of libertarians running around.

Sometimes, in Silicon Valley, there is this attitude that we know best and we can change the world. The boldness allows us to invent the future. But, we need more empathy for those who are left behind and a recognition that Silicon Valley can’t just call the shots and expect change.

I basically apply with my teams the lean startup principles I used in the private sector – go into Silicon Valley mode, work at startup speed, and attack, doing things in short amounts of time with extremely limited resources.

So a more sensible thing it seemed to me was to go to Silicon Valley and be pushing on the technology companies to accelerate the use of audio and music in computers.

I didn’t know anything about Silicon Valley.

I wouldn’t say that I know a lot about ‘Silicon Valley’. I live in Boston, for one thing. And I don’t live and breathe this stuff the way most of the guys out there do.

Look at what Silicon Valley has done – the advance of computers.

When I came to the United States in 2004 to attend university at Stanford, I was instantly inspired by the stories and advice from startup leaders in Silicon Valley and beyond, who had endeavoured to create new opportunities and improve lives around the world.

Some article called me the most feared man in Silicon Valley. Good Lord! Why? My teenage boys got a kick out of it: ‘Dad, how could this be true? You’re not even the most feared person in this house.’

Silicon Valley has been this global engine of innovation and economic growth over the last few decades, but a tidal wave of innovation that has been focused very much in the digital realm.

The real force of Silicon Valley is the mentality, the spirit. There’s no reason at all that can’t be replicated in Paris.

It’s important to dabble in things that interest you, and for me, I’m interested in the tech space that is here in Silicon Valley, fashion and golf.

If every sector of business and society will be driven by software – how does that get enabled? By highly-paid computer scientists funded by risk capital in Silicon Valley? Or by lots of engineers who can build it themselves?

One thing I want to do is get Silicon Valley to think harder about those who have been left behind by the technology revolution. It has created huge winners for those who are able to understand it and are adept at it. But it has also displaced a tremendous number of jobs.

I think governments will increasingly be tempted to rely on Silicon Valley to solve problems like obesity or climate change because Silicon Valley runs the information infrastructure through which we consume information.

There is a revolution taking place in school and college campuses in India, and particularly in Kerala, much like the one that sowed the seeds of Silicon Valley in the U.S.

Minority founders often feel like they are on the outside looking in when it comes to Silicon Valley and tech startups in general.

New York is the new Silicon Valley.

I’m coming to Silicon Valley to turn up!

A lot of people didn’t know why I went to Cal. The Bay Area, Silicon Valley, I wanted to put myself in that position where I’m not only successful on the court but off the court.

Unfortunately, a lot of Silicon Valley venture capitalists are disconnected from African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color.

In 2016, you no longer have to be in Silicon Valley to launch a successful startup. Colorado is home to many.

One of the issues we face here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley is a sense that the people all around us are as conversant in startup and tech culture as we are. But we need to remember, and remind ourselves repeatedly, that we’re a small minority in a larger population.

Some in Europe take a plane, fly to Silicon Valley, visit and look and come back and say we need to do the same thing. Well you can copy others… but if you always copy others, you never get ahead.

The energy in Silicon Valley is because of the very talented engineers immigrating from around the world, especially Indians and Chinese. They are the best engineers, and Japan doesn’t have enough of them.

There’s a reason why Silicon Valley is the worldwide innovation center, or why this is the startup valley, because I truly believe startup companies like mine are pushing the economy forward.

The more angels we have in Silicon Valley, the better. We are funding innovation. We are funding the next Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

I called up a bunch of the CEOs of Silicon Valley companies and said, ‘Hey, can I come and see you? And I’d like to learn about what you’re doing.’ And I don’t know, most of them said yes.

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It’s the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

‘Silicon Valley’ likes being satirized. They’ve all been waiting for someone to come along and make fun of it.

Windell Oskay is the co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, a Silicon Valley company that has designed and produced specialized electronics and robotics kits since 2007.

I’ve been called ‘paranoid,’ ‘schizophrenic,’ ‘the wild child of Silicon Valley.’

Don’t let a lack of big company names on your resume get you down, but also, don’t let it feed a Silicon Valley ego. Oftentimes, the best candidates come from startups or smaller companies. It shows they are open to risk and can keep up with the long hours and occasional harsh demands.

Everybody in Hollywood has to beat the ‘no’ – and if you write code in Silicon Valley, or if you design cars in Detroit, if you manage hedge funds in Lower Manhattan, you also have to learn to beat the ‘no.’

I don’t think you can look at my history and say they love me to death in Silicon Valley.

In Silicon Valley, where I worked at companies like Facebook and Twitter for the earlier part of this decade, Cuba was generally regarded, when it was regarded at all, as a technological curiosity.

I did an internship in the Silicon Valley during the Internet boom. I couldn’t imagine sitting in a cubicle the rest of my life, so I gave acting a try. I would have been happy doing theater and making nothing.

I remember when being a ‘a company man’ was a badge of honor; today in Silicon Valley it may brand you a loser or, in the best case scenario, someone afraid to take risks. Ten years ago, if you saw a resume that had multiple jobs in ten years, you would be worried about the capability of the individual. Not so now.

The entire world is now a rival to Silicon Valley. No country, state, region, nor city has a lock on innovation in technology anymore.

In Silicon Valley, there are a lot of startups using computer vision for agriculture or shopping – there are a lot for clothes shopping. At Baidu, for example, if you find a picture of a movie star, we actually use facial recognition to identify that movie star and then tell you things like their age and hobbies.

Historically, people have flocked to Silicon Valley because of the belief that that’s where the latest innovation is happening. It’s a snowball effect.

Just the number of people – ‘Silicon Valley”s a relatively small, core cast, whereas ‘The Office’ was enormous. Also, I feel more of a sense of ownership of ‘Silicon Valley’ because I’ve been there from the get-go.

Executives are rarely comfortable speaking on the record, particularly in secretive Silicon Valley companies.

There are lots of people in the Silicon Valley who are interested in working at a fast-moving, dynamic company like Google. Not just my family members.

My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There’s a lot of that in Silicon Valley.

All the sharky elements of Hollywood are similar to sharky elements in Silicon Valley. It’s obviously different, but the deals are the same. And you get hot, then you’re not.

The pressure to take irrelevant characteristics like race and sex into account in academic science is dangerous enough. But Silicon Valley continues to remake itself in the image of the campus diversity bureaucracy.

We have a choice in Silicon Valley. We can either continue to exist as an island to ourselves, focused on wealth creation and innovation… or we can understand that we are in the middle of a software revolution and answer the nation’s call to provide economic opportunity and technology to places left behind.

The problem isn’t that Silicon Valley is keeping women down or not doing enough to encourage female entrepreneurs. The opposite is true. No, the problem is that not enough women want to become entrepreneurs.

I’ll tell you, nobody was more excited than me, in the entire world, that there is a ‘Silicon Valley’ Funko set.

Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data.

The roots of Silicon Valley are full of stories of immigrants and minority groups who experienced bigotry and made it anyway. Why should women be any different?

Observe, orient, decide, act. It’s fighter pilot terminology. If you have the faster OODA loop in a dogfight, you live. The other person dies. In Silicon Valley, the OODA loop of your decision-making is effectively what differentiates your ability to succeed.

I think the reality is that there’s a role for everybody to play in the work of social justice and that we have to organize everybody. That means that Silicon Valley has to be organized, the fashion industry has to be organized, the formerly incarcerated have to be organized, the teachers.

I had better cellular coverage on a ship in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea than I have in many parts of Silicon Valley.

By the time I was a senior in high school, I knew I wanted to move to Silicon Valley and learn more about computers and the Internet. I just fell in love with technology and the potential of everything the Internet had to offer.

In the entertainment business, everybody is desperately insecure, and the guys in Silicon Valley seem to be slightly overconfident.

I got lucky because my dad moved us to Silicon Valley before it really was known worldwide as an important tech hub.

Most of the stress we feel here in Silicon Valley is self-inflicted.

Geeks are a critical driver of America’s innovation ecosystem, from the entrepreneurs launching startups in Silicon Valley to the scientists experimenting in university research labs to the whiz kids building gadgets in their parents’ garages.

Part of the beauty of Silicon Valley is that people generally encourage you to think crazy. It’s the hypothesis that there’s nothing sacred that can’t be changed.

Silicon Valley is constantly saying that the government is irrelevant and powerless. But that’s because most people there have never seen it get serious.

I look forward to doing everything I can in my new role to help bring more and more of the best talent and best ideas from Silicon Valley and across the nation into government.

If you want to invest in early-stage technologies, putting a timeframe on it does behold you to Silicon Valley economics. You’ve got a certain time period where you have to make the money. And you have to invest that money whether you find good companies or not.

Silicon Valley has a lot of noise, a lot of hype. People are very excited about all of the Facebook stuff, Facebook applications. It’s just been a huge hype over the last year when actually… there isn’t really that much value.

I’ve spent a good part of my life in Silicon Valley, California, and I really like that place.

I do think, actually, one thing I noticed with Silicon Valley post-Trump is it kind of made them more politically aware, more aware that, like, business and philanthropy alone isn’t going to make the world a better place.

The amounts of money in Silicon Valley are staggering.

I love everyone on ‘Silicon Valley.’

One goal for Silicon Valley must be to redouble our collective efforts to make sure people of all backgrounds are aware of opportunities in tech.

The global triumph of American technology has been predicated on the implicit separation between the business interests of Silicon Valley and the political interests of Washington.

Silicon Valley does not breed great technology. Instead, the smartest people from around the world tend to move to Silicon Valley.

Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.

I’m a massive believer in brands. Silicon Valley has tried to reprogram everybody to think brands aren’t valuable. Or theirs are, but yours aren’t.

In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.

South Florida’s international connections mean there’s a different kind of innovation here. We’re able to intersect with a lot of brilliant people who are not associated with Silicon Valley.

There is a huge amount of wealth that’s generated here in Silicon Valley.

I think there are four or five interesting pockets where a lot of cool technology companies are getting started. Chicago is one of them. New York is certainly another. Silicon Valley really dominates. And you’re seeing some stuff out of Boston and Seattle and down South.

Venture capital today is clustered in just a few locations – Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, and D.C. It’s far from efficiently distributed and accessible.

Companies like Google and Facebook may offer jobs allowing or requiring imagination and creativity, but the whole of Silicon Valley accounts for only 3 percent of national income and a smaller percentage of national employment.

In Silicon Valley, I point out that many of the more successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger’s where it’s like you’re missing the imitation, socialization gene.

People tend to pay too little attention to history – the history of Silicon Valley and American business – and think they’re the first people to come across a problem.

Silicon Valley today is populated mostly by people who would consider themselves winners of the traditional race. This causes the exclusion of the voices that are vital to a round, robust society. It’s beyond gentrification.

The realization is dawning that government doesn’t work. In Silicon Valley, they already get this. And they are bright enough to be asking what we can do to solve problems.

In the Internet world, especially in Silicon Valley, everyone is at the ready all the time, and turnaround is relatively short, if not instant.

Think of everything in Seattle – Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks. Then you go down to Silicon Valley – Intel, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter. What does New York produce?

I always think it’s hilarious when the stand-ins come in for ‘Silicon Valley,’ because it’s a complete inversion of the attractiveness quotient that is supposed to exist.

A lot of the geeks in Silicon Valley will tell you they no longer believe in the ability of policymakers in Washington to accomplish anything. They don’t understand why people end up in politics; they would do much more good for the world if they worked at Google or Facebook.

I am an unabashed HBO fan. This is why being on ‘Silicon Valley’ is kind of like a dream.

Silicon Valley needs partners. You can’t do edited manufacturing just in the Valley. Why not have the DNA of manufacturing but combine it with the digital world?

As befits Silicon Valley, ‘big data’ is mostly big hype, but there is one possibility with genuine potential: that it might one day bring loans – and credit histories – to millions of people who currently lack access to them.

The perception in Silicon Valley is that if you dress well, you couldn’t possibly be smart, or you’re in P.R. but couldn’t possibly run a company. I remember briefly attempting the Adidas and jeans and sweatshirt over T-shirt look, but I realized I was trying to dress like a young tech geek, and that just wasn’t me.

Why don’t we face up to the fact that many of us in Silicon Valley are living lives that involve telling ourselves a lot of lies.

There are two great fictional TV series about technology and the computer industry that each have now had three seasons. The one everyone knows about is ‘Silicon Valley.’ The lesser-known one is ‘Halt and Catch Fire.’

For Israel to retain its amazing position as the largest concentration of high tech after Silicon Valley, we need more engineers and mathematicians. We have too many lawyers.

When I got to the Bay Area, everyone was talking about ‘Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley,’ so I just wanted to go and learn more about it.

Silicon Valley has been a technology capital like New York is a financial capital.

What auto and steel is to Ohio River Valley, refineries are to the oil regions. You wouldn’t tell Silicon Valley you’re going to put a moratorium on high-tech.

An open-minded and diverse population that readily shares information, encourages experimentation, accepts failure and dispenses with formality and hierarchy is what makes Silicon Valley the successful hub that it is.

I’m probably most proud of the fact that we are bootstrapped and that we are able to do not just the typical Silicon Valley startup thing. We are basically throwing away all the typical conventions of other startups.

The next Google or Facebook will come from somewhere other than Silicon Valley.

There’s no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there’s something about Silicon Valley.

People in Silicon Valley are starting to realize politics is not a toy.

Companies in Silicon Valley invest a lot in understanding their users and what drives user engagement.

In Silicon Valley, if you spend a lot of time thinking about the obstacles, you’ll talk yourself out of everything, because the more you look at it, the less logical something sounds, since no one has done it yet.

Silicon Valley tends to be very myopic – to be focused on one or two things – which has some strengths as well as weaknesses.

The truth is, Silicon Valley doesn’t like people who are older, and they’re not that much of a friend of the woman. I certainly was a woman, and I was older.

Here in Silicon Valley, I have taken part in hundreds of conversations trying to convince people to dive in and become entrepreneurs. All too often, innovators with good, safe, jobs are unwilling to put their family’s access to health care at risk by walking away from company-backed medical insurance.

The Sharks step right on each other’s questions, and if I ever did that in Silicon Valley, I would be considered a pariah. I literally had to learn how to interrupt.

My mom is from Cuba, my dad is from Spain, and I grew up in Miami. So there’s maybe a little more flair in me than typical Silicon Valley types.

I don’t think Silicon Valley understands the power of Wikipedia, how it works, or the opportunities it represents.

I would say Silicon Valley and New York have inflated salaries.

I think that’s exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let’s do a startup in our parents’ garage and try to create a business.

Growing up in Silicon Valley, during my time at Morgan Stanley and as a member of Stanford’s Board, I’ve had the opportunity to experience firsthand how tech companies can help people in their daily lives.

Seed investing is the status symbol of Silicon Valley. Most people don’t want Ferraris, they want a winning seed investment.

I love Silicon Valley, but there is a dominant voice of, ‘Tech is cool. Tech is geeky. Tech is a guy with a hoodie.’

We talk a lot in Silicon Valley about product pipelines and sales pipelines, but what about talent pipelines? It is, after all, talent – people – who give us products to sell.

I’ve spoken to people in Silicon Valley, and many times they have said to me, ‘X storyline, or that thing that happened in your show – pretty much verbatim has happened to me.’ And it’s either identical or similar enough to be scary.

Silicon Valley and Beijing are the leading hubs of AI, followed by the U.K. and Canada. I am seeing a lot of excitement in India, going by the number of people who are taking Coursera courses on AI.

It used to be that you had to come to Silicon Valley, walk up Sand Hill Road, network with individuals. That’s now being completely changed and turned on its head by the whole ICO thing.

The stuff coming out of Silicon Valley is dorky. Like, it’s not very sexy.

There is an often-told story that Silicon Valley is filled with women looking to cash in by marrying wealthy tech moguls. Whether there really is a significant number of such women is debatable.

Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit-driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich.

In 2014, Utah cities Salt Lake City and Provo both surpassed Silicon Valley in per-deal venture capital averages. From large, multi-campus companies to promising start-ups, Silicon Slopes offers a promising climate for businesses. The entire tech industry has its eyes on Utah.

There’s been entrepreneurs working in the Valley for probably 50-60 years. It’s not to say that you can’t create that in other places, but I think people are a little bit impatient about creating the next Silicon Valley.

If you want to go and build a company that exists in Silicon Valley, then you should go and do it there. But if you want to build a company that is Australian, that represents your culture and your being, then you should do it in Sydney.

In most parts of the world, starting a company that goes bust is dubbed a ‘failure.’ In Silicon Valley, we call this ‘gaining experience.’ We are willing to take the risks that are inherent for innovation.

The thing we should all be looking for are people who want to make a difference. I’m a big believer in the Silicon Valley religion of the power of markets. But I also believe in our obligation to give back, and to give back in the way we do business, to create more value than we capture for ourselves.

I was in Bangalore, India, the Silicon Valley of India, when I realized that the world was flat.

I moved to San Francisco when I was 20 years old. I couldn’t even drink yet. My friends in college thought I was so stupid for missing out on the four best years of my life. But I was so ready to start living my own life and absorb Silicon Valley culture.

Graduating business school, I had $150,000 of debt. An investment firm offered me a steady job, but it didn’t feel right. It was 2007 in Silicon Valley, and I dreamed of starting an Internet company.

Running a real business is exacting, daunting, repetitive work. Even in Silicon Valley.

The idea that there is a meritocracy where anyone from any background really might have the social and economic mobility to rise to the top in Silicon Valley, those are antithetical to a lot of the principles that the Trump administration apparently stands for.

Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.

People are still very focused on the startup story: Risk-taking founders, with a bold idea, some capital and a network supportive environment, go out and take the shot on goal. But the problem is, this is no longer the truth about what makes Silicon Valley so special.

I think that Silicon Valley and technology can play a huge role in redefining what community looks like and how people come together and what authentic relationships look like, but that is not only their burden.

I really like the ‘Silicon Valley’ show. It’s good to do a little rib-poking and not take yourself too seriously, so I think it’s awesome the show does that.

China just banned ICO fundraising. They did Silicon Valley and the U.S. a favor – now we get first dibs.

One of the nice things about living in Silicon Valley is that I end up at all these conferences and things, and I get to listen in on the zeitgeist.

It had not yet been named Silicon Valley, but you had the defense industry, you had Hewlett-Packard. But you also had the counter-culture, the Bay Area. That entire brew came together in Steve Jobs.

Sometimes it feels hard to remember that Silicon Valley is an actual place, a collage of parched suburbs, and not just the collective noun for information-technology companies.

As a community, Silicon Valley must adopt principles that reflect our abhorrence toward sexual harassment – and it is these principles that must guide our collective behavior.

Introverts listen better, they assess risks more carefully, they can be wiser managers. It’s not for nothing that the Silicon Valley billionaires are so often the retiring types.

What I Iove about Y Combinator is that it is a level playing field. If you get in, you immediately become a Silicon Valley insider.

For all the billions of dollars created here, Silicon Valley is remarkably stingy when it comes to giving.

Even Silicon Valley investors have put well over a $1 billion in new energy technologies.

The most successful company in Silicon Valley is Apple, and they’re the most secretive.

Not everybody wants to be Mark Zuckerberg, but everybody wants to create a little piece of the American dream, the Silicon Valley version. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

There’s this myopia among American venture capitalists to not go anywhere beyond Silicon Valley and New York.

Mexico is very well positioned in the IT sector, thanks to our closeness to North America and how things are being developed in Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley has been developing as a startup community for over 60-70 years. This notion that you can create something in two or five years is foolish.

Mozilla has one foot in the Valley, Silicon Valley product technology, and partly one foot in the social enterprise space.

The reason why Silicon Valley is a worldwide innovation center is because it is a open culture that embraces diversity. You see people from all over the world. When you have many people from different backgrounds gathered together, that is where innovation comes from.

If you look at where the tried and true of Silicon Valley VC’s are investing, it’s in people who understand what it takes, who’ve been through it and have a network of people they can tap and resources to pull together.

What people often ask me is, ‘What are the ingredients of Silicon Valley?’ While the answer to that is complex, some of the ingredients I talk about are celebrating entrepreneurship, accepting failure, and embracing a mobile and diverse workforce.

The show is not really about finding love in Silicon Valley, and it never really claimed be so.

There’s no better place in the world for technology start-ups than Silicon Valley; there’s such an incredible well of talent and capital and resources. The whole system is set up to foster the creation of new companies.

If you think ‘Game of Thrones’ throws around some erroneous, unnecessary nudity, wait til you see ‘Silicon Valley.’