There’s so many people who’ve built America, much greater in sacrifice and contributions than Silicon Valley. There are people who’ve died for this country. There are people who have marched for civil rights in this country.
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.
Silicon Valley,’ I mean, the comedy is amazing, and it’s one of the best-written shows with some of the best talent. I’m really happy to be a part of it.
Silicon Valley loves a good origin story.
I got lucky because my dad moved us to Silicon Valley before it really was known worldwide as an important tech hub.
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.
There is a huge amount of wealth that’s generated here in Silicon Valley.
At MIT, in Professor Rodney Brooks’ lab, I was involved in a project, led by Anita Flynn, to build robots using techniques similar to those used in building silicon chips. We got some silicon micro-machined motors to move a bit, but this didn’t lead to an actual product.
Silicon Valley has been a technology capital like New York is a financial capital.
Silicon Valley is a great place for Bitcoin, since everyone understands computers, and there are lots of libertarians running around.
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.
Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure – the law firms, the real estate, all that – that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.
In many parts of the world, being able to download information on a smartphone, tablet, or laptop in a few seconds is the norm. In Silicon Valley, wireless high-speed Internet connections are more ubiquitous than Starbucks.
I remember going out to raise my Series A and ending up with multiple term sheets when I had gone to Silicon Valley probably four times at that point and coming back with nothing.
At the end of the day, what makes Silicon Valley work is technology and the outcome of making money. Those two things have to be healthy. It has to matter a lot more than who is the celebrity and who is famous and who goes to the best parties.
The convertible note is a useful and common financing structure in Silicon Valley. It’s a form of debt that is really more a type of equity – one where the valuation hasn’t been determined yet.
The next Google or Facebook will come from somewhere other than Silicon Valley.
The way life manages information involves a logical structure that differs fundamentally from mere complex chemistry. Therefore chemistry alone will not explain life’s origin, any more than a study of silicon, copper and plastic will explain how a computer can execute a program.
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.
‘Silicon Valley’ likes being satirized. They’ve all been waiting for someone to come along and make fun of it.
Look at what Silicon Valley has done – the advance of computers.
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.
Obviously, everything that has been built in Silicon Valley is something that a lot of places are trying to mimic, and rightfully so. There’s been a lot of amazing companies that have come out of there.
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.
Silicon Valley is actually a prime target for an ICBM missile strike. It occurred to me as I has touring Apple Park that if I was concerned about Americans’ safety and the symbol of America’s future I would think that those is Silicon Valley as the most vulnerable. That’s where you would be attacking the future economy.
I think there is this very nice, if at times dangerous, untethered optimism that exists in Silicon Valley.
The days when you needed amazing Silicon Graphics machines to run animation software are gone now.
It’s often lost in most Silicon Valley startups, the importance of storytelling when most people are thinking about they assemble their team and the critical functions that the team needs to be successful. Storytelling is normally not on the list.
What makes Silicon Valley really work? It’s a unique combination of great educational institutions – especially at Stanford – that generate engineers and a culture that starts companies.
We who work in technology have nurtured an especially rare gift: the opportunity to effect change at an unprecedented scale and rate. Technology, community, and capitalism combine to make Silicon Valley the potential epicenter of vast positive change.
Folks are leaving Silicon Valley, mostly because they can’t afford to stay.
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.
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.
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 first thing that any city that’s trying to create a startup community or an entrepreneurial ecosystem that’s vibrant should do is get rid of the idea that they’re trying to be like Silicon Valley.
I had this attitude, that Silicon Valley obnoxious attitude, that I know what I’m doing, and the rest was going to be pretty easy.
America tends to assume Silicon Valley-style innovators can drive quick and transformative changes, but even Silicon Valley’s would-be masters of the universe have discovered that energy transitions are subject to time spans and technical constraints that defy their reach.
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.
China just banned ICO fundraising. They did Silicon Valley and the U.S. a favor – now we get first dibs.
If I had to pick three of my favorite magazines, they would be ‘Fast Company’, ‘Silicon India’, and ‘Smithsonian.’
Even by Silicon Valley standards, PayPal’s vision was massively ambitious.
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.
Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.
The power in Washington, D.C., is centered on the status quo – outdated systems, models, and programs built for a previous century. With more silicon and less concrete, we can open up those models to return power and independence to every man, woman, and child.
The point of Silicon Valley, at least when I moved here, was we’re all trying to do stuff, and none of us quite felt like we fit in anywhere else. But we were all trying to do good things. And the money was just the byproduct of good things.
There’s no more silicon in Silicon Valley. It’s all iPhone apps.
One of the reasons I think Y Combinator is so powerful is because it creates a new social norm, especially for those who come from outside Silicon Valley.
I don’t think Silicon Valley understands the power of Wikipedia, how it works, or the opportunities it represents.
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.
For me, seed investing isn’t just a good return area but a big part of how we network in Silicon Valley. A lot of our best deals have come from being active in the seed stage.
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.
New York is the new Silicon Valley.
Who do you think made the first stone spears? The Asperger guy. If you were to get rid of all the autism genetics, there would be no more Silicon Valley.
I think that when the left found out that Facebook, a tool built by Silicon Valley, helped elect President Trump, they weren’t very happy.
I’ve probably failed more often than anybody else in Silicon Valley. Those don’t matter. I don’t remember the failures. You remember the big successes.
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.
