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.
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 amounts of money in Silicon Valley are staggering.
People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn’t they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines… There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.
The number of African Americans in Silicon Valley is dismal. It’s not up to one company – it’s up to the entire industry to make sure that we are moving the conversation forward. Sometimes those walls of competition need to come down so we can move the entire industry forward.
I’m coming to Silicon Valley to turn up!
What’s been missing from regions outside of Silicon Valley is a ‘playbook.’ In American football, a playbook contains a sports team’s strategies and plays. It struck me that every region needs its own industry playbook on how to compete globally.
Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon Valley.
It’s not a coincidence these two industry areas – Silicon Valley and Hollywood – use the same jargon. They share a common language, the language of the creator, of the entrepreneur.
Silicon Valley tends to be very myopic – to be focused on one or two things – which has some strengths as well as weaknesses.
Free is really, you know, the gift of Silicon Valley to the world. It’s an economic force, it’s a technical force. It’s a deflationary force, if not handled right. It is abundance, as opposed to scarcity.
I’ve always played some version of a nerdy guy or something like that. I mean, one of my story lines on ‘Silicon Valley’ is that I am very bad with women!
Something new will always be the source of growth in Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley is the engine for wealth creation. They’ve displaced energy, they’ve displaced financial services, and if we don’t start including a broader array of people in that, the same group of people is going to rise to the top.
I think like a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Failure is a great teacher. At the same time, you must remember, success will never last… Whether it’s tech or fashion, it must be for the customer.
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.
I don’t think you can look at my history and say they love me to death in Silicon Valley.
There was a point in the late ’90s where all the graduating M.B.A.’s wanted to start companies in Silicon Valley, and for the most part they were not actually qualified to do it.
I’ve been called ‘paranoid,’ ‘schizophrenic,’ ‘the wild child of Silicon Valley.’
I’ve been in a room in Silicon Valley where on the wall they have 160 industries they think blockchain can disrupt. We picked six of them to focus on.
We are seeing a new wave of young biologists that are attacking old problems with new tools and fresh ideas, leading to new types of bio startups and creating a much-needed engine to drive Silicon Valley into the next century.
To spend time in Silicon Valley in a year of political upheaval is, on one level, soothing. It is pleasant to hear talk of wearables, walled gardens, and disruptive beverages in between updates about mass deportation.
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’ve little in common with the scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I’m a New Yorker.
Seed investing is the status symbol of Silicon Valley. Most people don’t want Ferraris, they want a winning seed investment.
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.
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.
When I first came to the Bay area, I worked in Silicon Valley in the early to mid-’90s, and I think what mattered then was our ability as designers to create a vision around people’s ideas.
Inventors often don’t know how to pitch their ideas. So many people in Silicon Valley want to hear you say ‘disruptive,’ and tote a ‘platform.’ They repeat buzzwords over and over, and I think it intimidates a real inventor.
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.
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.
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 is super competitive and super expensive for talent, for office space, for everything.
There aren’t many sources of money in San Diego, apart from local partnerships and local investors. It’s pretty starkly polarized to Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley’s definition of luxury is a Tesla in every garage.
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.
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.
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.’
From Scotland to India, and from Silicon Valley to Kenya, policymakers all over the world have become interested in basic income as an answer to poverty, unemployment and the bureaucratic behemoth of the modern welfare state.
The most successful company in Silicon Valley is Apple, and they’re the most secretive.
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.
Silicon is all around but it’s tied up in rocks… with these very strong silicon-oxygen bonds that living systems would have to break in order to use silicon.
When you’re the first guy to put out the piece of silicon that’s half as expensive or twice as powerful, you bring a capability to the market that nobody else does – or can.
A lot of times when you’re an investor, it’s very easy to lean back and say, ‘Well, people should come to me in Silicon Valley.’ YC has the opposite opinion.
I came to Silicon Valley in 1997 and joined WebEx. At that time, WebEx was small, only 10 engineers and two co-founders.
The natives of Silicon Valley learned long ago that when you share your knowledge with someone else, one plus one usually equals three. You both learn each other’s ideas, and you come up with new ones.
There is no greater country on Earth for entrepreneurship than America. In every category, from the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, where I live, to University R&D labs, to countless Main Street small business owners, Americans are taking risks, embracing new ideas and – most importantly – creating jobs.
The phrase ‘change the world’ is tossed around Silicon Valley conversations and business plans as freely as talk of ‘early-stage investing’ and ‘beta tests.’
Running a successful, growing company in Silicon Valley can create an ironic sort of depression and delusion. The better you’re doing, the higher the stakes, and higher expectations for you to win. Maybe that’s why people say it’s so hard. But that doesn’t make it hard. That just makes it distracting.
Like all of us, I don’t think Facebook is 100% evil, but there are aspects of it that move towards evilness. It’s true of all the major Silicon Valley companies, that there are aspects to all of them that move towards evilness, but I don’t believe they’re 100% evil.
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.
