Sand Hill Road

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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

ISBN 9780525573920 Ebook ISBN 9780525573937 Cover design: Lucas Heinrich Cover image: (gradient) A-Star/Shutterstock v5.4 ep To my mother, Connie Guthrie, an original Alpha Girl CONTENTS Prologue PART ONE: The Valley of Dreams PART TWO: Getting in the Game PART THREE: The Outsiders Inside PART FOUR: Survival of the Fittest PART FIVE: Girl Power Photo Insert PART SIX: Marriage, Motherhood, and Moneymaking PART SEVEN: Life, Death, and Picassos PART EIGHT: The Days of Reckoning PART NINE: The Awakening Author’s Note Acknowledgments PROLOGUE SAND HILL ROAD MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA Mary Jane Elmore was giddy as she looked down at the rusted-out floorboards of her old green Ford Pinto. She could see the road rushing by below. But she wasn’t driving on just any road. She was making her way up Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, about to start a new life intent on changing the world. A pretty young woman with brown hair and brown eyes, Mary Jane had graduated from Purdue University in 1976 with a degree in mathematics.

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Her beat-up Pinto, which leaked radiator fluid and still had its original Firestone 500 tires, had taken her nearly two thousand miles, from Kansas City to northern California, where she had landed a job at an eight-year-old technology company called Intel. Although Sand Hill Road was the center of the venture capital world, no bronze statue of a charging bull, no Gilded Age architecture, and no artificial canyons towered over by gleaming skyscrapers commemorated it. At that time it was a stretch of rolling land laced with scrub brush, sprawling oak trees, big pink dahlias, and buildings that stretched long and low like an old Lincoln Continental. The midcentury modern structures, with outer skins of cedar, redwood, and masonry, featured numbers but no names. Unlike other centers of commerce, Sand Hill Road is intentionally inconspicuous; it consciously resists contemporary symbols of money and power.

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Returning home from her latest Broadway Angels meeting, she smiled when she saw the sign for the Sand Hill Road exit. She was older and wiser than when she’d first arrived in Silicon Valley and seen that sign. She was now driving a BMW X1 instead of a rusted-out Ford Pinto, and she had the latest smartphone instead of a CB radio. But she still had the spirit of that adventure-seeking girl looking at a future full of promise. As she told Sonja at the meeting, “I feel like I have something big still to do.” Whizzing by Sand Hill Road, she cranked up the music. Tim McGraw was singing “My Next Thirty Years”: I think I’ll take a moment, celebrate my age The ending of an era and the turning of a page.

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

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. Top VC firms in China are funding game-changing innovations at unicorn valuations and achieving high marks for performance. PART THREE Tech Sectors that Matter Most: China’s Grab for Superpower Status A look at key market sectors with strong potential to shake up leadership and overturn technology standards in the world as East and West vie for tech superpower status.

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part two CHINA’S SILICON DRAGON VENTURE CAPITALISTS A core group of US-China venture capital 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 MEGARIVAL 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. Top VC firms in China are funding game-changing innovations at unicorn valuations and achieving high marks for performance. Sequoia Capital China partner Glen Sun knows what it takes to get ahead in venture capital investing.

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They are chauffeured around by private drivers or Uber (Didi in China) and work in beautifully designed and spacious offices along Sand Hill Road close to Stanford University or city center towers in Beijing and Shanghai. It may sound cushy, but it takes hard work, commitment, and determination. Crosscurrents and Synergy China’s Silicon Valley owes much of its initial magic to a reliance on the United States for a cross-border flow of ideas and capital. A two-way highway runs from Beijing’s Zhongguancun Software Park to Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road, raising capital and funding startups hinged from both coasts of the Pacific Ocean. This two-way channel creates synergy and speeds up startup launches, innovation, and scale across the United States and China, as well as globally.

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

Page 101 7 Throwing Sand in Capitalist's Eyes Not long after he drew the Magic Diamond with himself at the center of the U.S. health care industry, Clark drove up to Sand Hill Road to see the venture capitalists. The venture capitalists advertised themselves as the great financial risk takers of the Valley, but you could learn everything you needed to know about their attitudes toward risk, simply by driving up Sand Hill Road. Sand Hill Road was where the venture capitalists clustered together for safety, like ducks in a park waiting for the bread crumbs to fall. Each time Clark made this trip, the ducks came out of it worse than the time before.

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It was an extraordinary performance, and it wasn't over yet. Clark's lack of nostalgia for the history beneath us was nearly complete. Actually, as we circled overhead, what he said was "They need to tear it all down and start over. It's a ridiculous waste of space." He pointed out that offices on Sand Hill Road were going for twice the rents of space in midtown Manhattan. Sand Hill Road had the most expensive commercial real estate in the United States. And they were still putting two-story buildings on it! "One day it'll all be skyscrapers," he said. The thought pleased himhe became less irritated by the crashed plane. The impermanence of the place allowed him, and it, to remain suspended in a state of pure possibility.

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Xerox PARC, birthplace of the personal computer: Clark had built his Geometry Engine there, and the Geometry Engine had changed computing. The great sprawling campuses of the old work station companies, Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems: Clark had created the former; some friends of his had created the latter. The dozens of tiny ski chalets on Sand Hill Road, for which venture capitalists now paid ninety dollars a square foot: they paid that money so that they could be near Clark, and people like Clark, when they announced the new new thing. The companies born on the Internet: Yahoo, Excite, @Home, eBay, and so on: they derived, one way or another, from Netscape, which Clark had founded after he left Silicon Graphics.

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

—Intel’s Andy Grove, addressing John Doerr Contents Introduction Unreasonable People Chapter 1 Arthur Rock and Liberation Capital Chapter 2 Finance Without Finance Chapter 3 Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Activist Capital Chapter 4 The Whispering of Apple Chapter 5 Cisco, 3Com, and the Valley Ascendant Chapter 6 Planners and Improvisers Chapter 7 Benchmark, SoftBank, and “Everyone Needs $100 Million” Chapter 8 Money for Google, Kind of for Nothing Chapter 9 Peter Thiel, Y Combinator, and the Valley’s Youth Revolt Chapter 10 To China, and Stir Chapter 11 Accel, Facebook, and the Decline of Kleiner Perkins Chapter 12 A Russian, a Tiger, and the Rise of Growth Equity Chapter 13 Sequoia’s Strength in Numbers Chapter 14 Unicorn Poker Conclusion Luck, Skill, and the Competition Among Nations Acknowledgments Appendix: Charts Notes Timeline Index Introduction Unreasonable People Not far from the headquarters of Silicon Valley’s venture-capital industry, which is clustered along Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road, Patrick Brown strode out into his yard on the Stanford University campus. Atop a little hill behind his house, Brown got down on his hands and knees, a shaggy fifty-four-year-old professor in a T-shirt, peering at the vegetation through rounded glasses. Proceeding delicately, like a detective collecting samples that might yield a vital clue, Brown began digging out the roots of some wild clover plants.[1] It might impress the ordinary gardener to know that those roots would soon yield $3 million.

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In most places and at most points in human history, Brown’s epiphany would have been inconsequential. But, as Brown himself reflected later, he had “the very good fortune of living in the epicenter of venture capital.”[3] Because Stanford sat at the heart of Silicon Valley, its golf course laid out along the edge of Sand Hill Road, Brown was digging up his yard with a clear purpose. Those clover roots contained heme, an iron-carrying molecule found in hemoglobin, which gives blood its red color. If Brown could show how this plant molecule could mimic the properties of bloody meat, there was a good chance that a venture capitalist would fund a plantburger company.

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They channel capital, talented employees, and large customers to promising startups; in this way, they replicate the team formation, resources, and strategic vision to be found in corporations.[33] But at the same time, because their network is fluid and amorphous, they have the flexibility of the market. The rainmakers of Sand Hill Road can get behind a startup with a fresh business idea or a scientific breakthrough; they can shape it, expand it, murmur its name into the right ears. But when a round of venture funding is exhausted, it is time to put the startup to a market test. If there are no enthusiastic buyers for the next tranche of the startup’s equity, the price signal will do its work: the venture capitalists will close it down, avoiding the waste of resources that comes from backing speculative R&D beyond the point at which success appears impossible.

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

For the entrepreneur, a wait so long would have been intolerable were it not for the consoling thought that the leading venture capital firm in the galaxy was saying it might invest in his company. By the time Kleiner Perkins finally got around to tendering an offer, the entrepreneur had been wooed by another venerable Sand Hill Road firm, Mohr Davidow Ventures, founded in 1983. Seeing the entrepreneur hesitate in accepting Kleiner Perkins’s offer, Mohr Davidow, in turn, contacted two other venture firms to see if either would be willing to be a co-investor. One was Benchmark, founded fewer than three years previously and chosen because Mohr Davidow viewed the Benchmark partners as a hardworking, aggressive group that would love nothing more than the opportunity to beat Kleiner Perkins in winning over the entrepreneur.

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Beige and white, constructed of glass, wood, stucco, and more glass, perched on a hillside amid sheltering oak and eucalyptus, the small office building in which Benchmark resides would look quite at home at Pebble Beach. Two stories, each flanked with flower-edged terraces on the sides and rear, create a Mediterranean effect, undisturbed by the lower parking level, which is hidden at the rear of the hill. By the late 1990s, these offices and the others like it along Sand Hill Road commanded the highest commercial rents in the country. The first venture capital firm to take up residency in that stretch had been Kleiner Perkins, in 1972, when Interstate 280 was newly opened and the nearby land behind Stanford University was still undeveloped. Since then it had become exceedingly valuable as elsewhere the last remaining orchards of Silicon Valley gave way to condominiums, offices, and strip malls.

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From his previous experience as a venture capitalist, he was at Benchmark’s formation already extremely wealthy, but material success was a garment he refused to wear. He was determined to remain unchanged, as hungry to learn, to connect with you, as he’d ever been. Benchmark’s mahogany-and-art-appointed office on Sand Hill Road was an unlikely destination for a working-class student from a single-parent household in Flint, Michigan. Like Beirne’s family in New York, Kagle’s relatives in every direction were employed by General Motors, but their careers lacked the happy ending. Kagle’s great-grandfather was killed at the age of thirty-eight in the great 1937 Buick sit-down strike.

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Which means it needs your partner—your co-founder—too. 6 Fund the Business, Part 1: Bootstrapping Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan found their first retailer for Method in February 2001, with a chain of family-owned grocery stores along the San Francisco peninsula called Mollie Stone’s Markets. The first location was in Burlingame, just off El Camino Real, which runs like an artery down the peninsula, through two of the richest counties in California and into Silicon Valley, crossing Sand Hill Road along the way. That road’s famous concentration of venture capital firms had all basically snubbed Adam and Eric when they first went out looking for investors. This was a time,  just as the dot-com bubble was preparing to burst, when if you had “.com” in the name of your business, there was a line out the door to give you money.

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But if you were doing something more analog, like trying to disrupt a stagnant consumer goods category dominated by two multibillion-dollar conglomerates—in this case, Procter & Gamble and Unilever—that door wasn’t just closed, it was locked and dead-bolted, and the lights were turned off inside.* Adam and Eric didn’t worry too much about the initial rejections they received from the Sand Hill Road guys (and make no mistake, it was almost all guys on Sand Hill back then), because they knew they wouldn’t actually need that much money to get their business off the ground. These were not dangerous industrial solvents they were try­ing to make, after all. They were creating natural, nontoxic cleaners with water, vinegar, baking soda, plant extracts, and essential oils—“very common, everyday, mild chemicals . . . that don’t require a professional lab in order to mix,” as Adam described it.

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Those first couple years, they did most everything themselves: perfecting their formula, guiding the design and manufacture of the bottles, printing Eric’s personal cell phone number on the bottle as the customer service number,* doing in-store demos to get customers (Eric even wore a lab coat), pitching investors like the Sand Hill Road firms, calling on retail accounts like Mollie Stone’s Markets. They even handled inventory management. Every day, as they expanded into more Mollie Stone’s and then into additional boutique groceries, Adam and Eric would take turns driving around to each store to check inventory levels and restock the shelves as necessary.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

No one had heard of Menlo Park, but Palo Alto was considered one of the big cities of the peninsula. But Tom kept at it and finally recruited some top venture capitalists to come work at the Sand Hill Road location. It became known as the place for venture capitalists. The press wrote it up regularly as the venture capitalist’s equivalent of Wall Street. Tom was a big success. The property is probably worth nearly $1 billion today. Walking around 3000 Sand Hill Road with Tom Ford was enlightening. He showed me around the property with great pride. Four times he bent down to pick up cigarette butts. He made mental notes of a drain that had been bent and some paint that had unwittingly covered a square centimeter of a window.

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We were the first venture capitalist to advertise, first to build a network of venture capitalist s, first Silicon Valley venture capitalist to set up outside the US, and first to focus on the Internet. When we decided to move our offices to Sand Hill Road, where most of the venture capitalist gravity was, we threw a party. We called it the “There Goes the Neighborhood Party.” We invited all our brethren and neighbors from Sand Hill Road. The party had a safari theme and we had monkeys and various other animals in cages. I rode in on an elephant. The landscape was perfectly manicured in our new location. But when I rode in on the elephant, he took a slight detour, wrapped his trunk around a nice-sized elm tree, ripped the tree out of the dirt and ate it.

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But maybe I can help you think about your journey in a new way. To better help you think about what a Startup Hero does and the impact he or she creates, whether in a success or a failure. I provide you here with a story. The Tesla Story Ian Wright came to pitch his new business, Wright Motors. We met at DFJ’s offices on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. He brought with him an invention that was strung together with tires, PVC pipes, some fabric, and magic Lithium Ion batteries. It was a new kind of electric car. He asked me to sit in the machine and get strapped in with a five-point harness. I asked why I needed to be strapped in since the only electric cars I had seen were golf carts and the original Chevy Volt that George Schultz drove, and none of them had much in the way of scary pickup.

The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur by Randy Komisar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, belly landing, discounted cash flows, estate planning, Jeff Bezos, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs

Something about using the Internet to sell items most people buy at a funeral home when someone dies, items that arouse as many varied and complex feelings as sex toys. We are seated in the Konditorei, a comfy coffee shop nestled in bucolic Portola Valley. With the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west and Palo Alto and Route 280 to the east, we are but one exit away from Sand Hill Road, the famous home to Silicon Valley venture capital. The Konditorei is where I meet people like Lenny, the pitchmen of the Internet era. Here, or in a couple of restaurants in the same rustic strip mall. This is my office. (Forget Buck's Restaurant in next-door Woodside. That's where venture capitalists prefer to meet supplicants and huddle around deals under a giant painting of Roy Rogers on Trigger rampant.

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Consequently most VCs (even if they insist otherwise) simply don't have the time to give close management attention to the companies they've funded. In addition, in contrast to the original VCs, who often gathered years of operating experience prior to becoming venture capitalists, many partners in today's firms have no executive management experience. They could be working on Wall Street as easily as on Sand Hill Road. With frenetic energy and a natural penchant for risk taking, these armies of prospectors are smart, hardworking, and aggressive. They do bring connections and contacts to the aid of the companies they fund, in addition to money. Often stereotyped as ''vulture" capitalists who drive expensive cars, drink pricey wines, collect extravagant toys, and wish they had the time to indulge in their expensive hobbies, they are reminiscent of Wall Street masters of the universe, or L.A. playersexcept for one thing: their bets build the future in remarkably tangible ways.

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On the motorcycle, I bobbed and weaved around the grumbling commuters, remembering an episode of the ''Twilight Zone" in which the character finds himself meandering through a crowd of stone-frozen people stuck fast in the middle of their daily routines. I cut up the highway one exit, fields of golden grass on both sides, fingers of fog stretching down the pleats in the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west. I scooted across Sand Hill Road to the complex at 3000, the original Sand Hill address. No spaces, so I jumped the curb and popped the stand. First up, I sat in on a deal pitch at one of the VC firms where some good friends wanted my opinion. The plan was to sell pet supplies on the Net. The would-be entrepreneurs called their venture PetUniverse.com.

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

Gary Kildall, Computer Connections: People, Places, and Events in the History of the Personal Computer Industry, unpublished manuscript in the possession of Scott and Kristen Kildall, reproduced online with permission by the Computer History Museum at http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/in-his-own-words-gary-kildall/, archived at https://perma.cc/NU3B-M47B. 6. Rinearson, “Young Students.” 7. Burt McMurtry, interview with the author, January 15, 2015; Leena Rao, “Sand Hill Road’s Consiglieres: August Capital,” TechCrunch, June 14, 2014, https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/14/sand-hill-roads-consiglieres-august-capital/, archived at https://perma.cc/6DN4-DERQ. 8. Charles Simonyi, interview with the author, October 4, 2017, Bellevue, Wash.; Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999), 194–210; Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger, Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer, 3rd ed.

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New York and Philadelphia may have had the capital and the big electronics makers and some of the universities as well, but these places didn’t have the relentless focus on nurturing start-ups. Nowhere else but the Valley had the entrepreneurial and opportunistic Stanford, the thrusting bulldozers and hustling law firms, and the young money men opening up shop along Sand Hill Road. Nowhere else had the people. The California Gold Rush had been over for a century, but the Golden State remained a destination for the adventurous young from elsewhere, arriving with little to lose and an appetite for reinvention. Arrivals NEW YORK HARBOR, 1965 The bill we sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” President Lyndon B.

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His name was Steve Wozniak, and his buddy’s name was Steve Jobs.4 Part swap meet, part intelligence gathering, part networking session, the biweekly Homebrew meetings quickly morphed into a local phenomenon. The second meeting moved from French’s garage to John McCarthy’s Stanford artificial-intelligence operation, then spilled out to the auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center on Sand Hill Road, attracting hundreds of people each month. Conversations that started in meetings continued over beers and burgers down the road at The Oasis (or “The O”), the well-worn college dive on El Camino Real. It took a while to settle on a name for the club. Steam Beer Computer Club, 8-Bit Byte Bangers, and Tiny Brains all got rejected before the group arrived at Homebrew.5 French ran the first two meetings, but his droning delivery wasn’t the right match for the restless crowd.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

If Thiel were to flourish in this arena, he believed his firm needed the right address, namely on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, the home of Silicon Valley’s preeminent venture capital firms. Thiel put Ken Howery on the hunt for office space—Howery’s first Thiel Capital assignment. It wasn’t an easy one. With the internet land grab underway, Sand Hill Road’s low-slung buildings had waiting lists and leased for sums higher than Manhattan offices with sweeping views of Central Park. Howery traversed Sand Hill Road by foot, hoping in-person solicitations might generate leads. After a frustrating day of rejections, he came to his final stop—3000 Sand Hill Road—where he saw an older gentleman trimming the hedges.

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And unlike other owners, Musk drove the car to work—and declined to insure it. As Musk drove Thiel up Sand Hill Road in the F1, the car was the subject of their chat. “It was like this Hitchcock movie,” Thiel remembered, “where we’re talking about the car for fifteen minutes. We’re supposed to be preparing for the meeting—and we’re talking about the car.” During their ride, Thiel looked at Musk and reportedly asked, “So, what can this thing do?” “Watch this,” Musk replied, flooring the accelerator and simultaneously initiating a lane change on Sand Hill Road. In retrospect, Musk admitted that he was outmatched by the F1. “I didn’t really know how to drive the car,” he recalled.

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“We got some metal numbers from a hardware store and nailed them to the outside wall,” Howery recalled, “so it looked a little less like a closet.” In lieu of windows to connect them to the outdoors, Ford gifted his new tenants two wildlife posters to gaze at. * * * By 1998, Thiel Capital had an associate and a Sand Hill Road “office,” and it had begun making technology investments. One of its earliest start-up bets: an investment in a company started by a promising University of Illinois graduate named Luke Nosek. Following graduation, Nosek had trekked to California and crashed on couches as he got situated. Gregarious as ever, he snagged invites to the Valley’s countless dot-com parties.

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

Apple’s initial public offering in 1980 valued the company at over $1 billion, making instant millionaires of hundreds of employees and investors and establishing Silicon Valley as the source of not just innovation but dramatic wealth. Venture capitalists looking for the next Apple began setting up shop on a winding stretch of asphalt a few miles from Stanford University called Sand Hill Road. Meanwhile, ARPANET continued to expand. By 1995 it had been replaced by the Internet, which was no longer restricted to academic and military uses. That was the year that a recent graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign named Marc Andreessen founded the Web browser company Netscape, based on the Mosaic software program he had helped develop.

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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. — NETSCAPE WAS QUICKLY overwhelmed by Microsoft, and Andreessen went from entrepreneur to venture capitalist, setting up shop on Sand Hill Road. It was clear to him and the other VCs where the next great fortunes would be made. “Software,” Andreessen wrote in a 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “is eating the world.” By allowing people to purchase computer processing and storage services remotely, over the Internet, instead of investing in expensive hardware, the “cloud” had made it incredibly cheap to start new software businesses.

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Under the elective system, the university doesn’t need to concern itself with how exactly those transactions are conducted, which courses are offered, or whether they’re any good. That’s up to the buyer and seller. The hybrid university just used the best available technology—printed books and air-conditioned lecture halls with microphones—to build a platform, and took a percentage of every sale. The money guys out on Sand Hill Road understood all of this. The hard part was bypassing all of the regulatory and public subsidy barriers that had been built around the cathedrals of learning, and overcoming the ingrained cultural belief that only colleges and universities as we know them today can provide a true higher education.

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It by Scott Kupor

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, carried interest, cloud computing, compensation consultant, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, family office, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, index fund, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Lean Startup, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Paul Graham, pets.com, power law, price stability, prudent man rule, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, VA Linux, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

It’s leading us into a fairer, more robust future, and I can’t think of a wiser person to take us there. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Introduction I am writing this book from my office on Sand Hill Road, the hallowed Silicon Valley street that holds as much promise for entrepreneurs as Hollywood Boulevard does for actors, Wall Street does for investment bankers, and Music Row does for country music artists. And, as with most of the storied streets, it’s not much to write home about—Sand Hill Road is a drab collection of modest, low-rise office buildings, upstaged by its much more famous neighbor, Stanford University. But I’m not writing it from on high.

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In Trados We Trust 14. Difficult Financings: When Bad Things Happen to Good People 15. Exit Stage Left (The Good Kind) Conclusion: The World Is Flat Appendix: Sample Term Sheet Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Author FOREWORD Scott Kupor’s Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It is motivated by the desire to democratize opportunity. It demystifies venture capital, laying out how this crucial part of the startup ecosystem works for anyone who picks it up. It examines the VC startup life cycle from every angle, including how VCs decide where to invest, how to pitch, and all the many, many legal and financial details and players involved in forming and growing a startup.

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The information about how to seek out and secure funding shouldn’t be limited to an elite club. Every startup is about a single idea, but taken together, all startups have a common purpose as well: to shape a better world for all of us. And a better world is one in which everyone is represented and served well by the companies and systems we create. That’s why Secrets of Sand Hill Road is so valuable, and so timely. It’s for people interested in venture capital, of course, but it’s also for anyone who cares about the ability of the US to remain competitive, create new jobs, and continue on the path of economic growth. Those people include policy makers, academics, government officials in the US and elsewhere, civic leaders in startup hubs around the country and globe—who are already helping to democratize startups geographically—and people who work in corporate innovation (who can look to the VC world for inspiration on how to fund and grow projects within their organizations).

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth by Eric M. Jackson

bank run, business process, call centre, creative destruction, disintermediation, Elon Musk, index fund, Internet Archive, iterative process, Joseph Schumpeter, market design, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, moral hazard, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the new new thing, Turing test

If “world domination” was to be the eventual outcome, Peter realized camaraderie and teamwork were necessary ingredients. He scheduled an afternoon for the company’s holiday offsite party so employees could relax and bond away from the office before making a final pre-holiday push. Employees caravanned over from the office to the party, held at a meeting facility on Sand Hill Road in adjacent Menlo Park. For anyone not familiar with the reference, Sand Hill is to venture capital what Wall Street is to the stock market. A broad, ambling road in the undeveloped foothills behind Stanford University, Sand Hill houses many of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms and provided four-fifths of the funds that poured into California startups during the late 1990s.

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The directors acknowledged many of the problems cited by the dissident officers, but some of them hedged on giving the Confinity side of the company effective control by returning Peter to power. Max and Peter held fast to their position, though, and after breaking for lunch the duo traveled to the Sand Hill Road offices of Peter’s hedge fund to resume the call. Upon arriving, though, they realized that the office lacked a speakerphone, prompting Max to rig Peter’s fax machine to serve as a makeshift substitute. The fax-speakerphone somehow worked, and when the call resumed Confinity’s founders continued to press their demands.

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Rafe Needleman from The Red Herring had earlier named Confinity his “catch of the day.” Now, in an article titled “Baby, You Can Crash My Car,” he mused about the delicious irony of an incident from March.14 Elon was giving Peter a ride to a meeting with Mike Moritz at Sequoia Capital’s office on Sand Hill Road in his now-famous McLaren F1. When he attempted to take a freeway off-ramp at a fast speed, his Formula One-caliber car launched into an airborne spin. It thudded to the earth adjacent to the ramp with both occupants dazed but miraculously unhurt, prompting Elon to exclaim, “Dude, that was intense!”

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bioinformatics, corporate governance, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Google Chrome, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, obamacare, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Wayback Machine

He was Elizabeth’s great-great-grandfather. Aided by the political and business connections of his wife’s wealthy family, Dr. Holmes established Cincinnati General Hospital and the University of Cincinnati’s medical school. So the case could be made—and it would in fact be made to the venture capitalists clustered on Sand Hill Road near the Stanford University campus—that Elizabeth didn’t just inherit entrepreneurial genes, but medical ones too. Elizabeth’s mother, Noel, had her own proud family background. Her father was a West Point graduate who planned and carried out the shift from a draft-based military to an all-volunteer force as a high-ranking Pentagon official in the early 1970s.

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Since she would control the foundation, she would also control the voting rights associated with the new stock, which would increase her overall voting stake. Avie didn’t think it was in other shareholders’ interest to give the founder more power. He objected. Two weeks later, he received a call from Don asking if they could meet. Avie drove to the old man’s office on Sand Hill Road. Elizabeth was really upset, Don informed him when he got there. She felt he was behaving unpleasantly during board meetings and didn’t think he should be on the board anymore. Don asked if he wanted to resign. Avie expressed surprise. He was just fulfilling his duties as a director; asking questions was one of them.

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In a way, he couldn’t afford not to: Todd was the son-in-law of one of Theranos’s investors, the venture capitalist B. J. Cassin. Cassin and Lucas were longtime friends. They had both invested in Theranos at the same time, during the startup’s Series B round in early 2006. Lucas convened an emergency meeting of the board in his office on Sand Hill Road. Elizabeth was asked to wait outside the door while the other directors—Lucas, Brodeen, Channing Robertson, and Peter Thomas, the founder of an early stage venture capital firm called ATA Ventures—conferred inside. After some discussion, the four men reached a consensus: they would remove Elizabeth as CEO.

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

They seem to believe that some magic elixir exists here, some recipe for innovation that floats in the air and can be absorbed if you drive around with your windows open, smelling the eucalyptus trees. They see people getting rich on things they don’t even understand. Blockchain? Ethereum? Initial coin offerings? So they fly out and have drinks at the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where venture capitalists hang around, as do expensive “companions,” many with Eastern European accents. They eat lunch at the Battery, a members-only private club for social-climbing parvenus in San Francisco. They wangle an invitation to a Bitcoin party and rub shoulders with the scammers, hustlers, Ponzi schemers, and obnoxious knobs who are trying to cash in on a modern-day tulip mania based around a cryptocurrency that Warren Buffett describes as “rat poison squared.”

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN KAPOR CAPITAL: CONSCIOUS CAPITALISTS Kapor Capital is based in Oakland. That one fact says a lot about what makes this venture capital firm different from all of the top VC investors in Silicon Valley. Most of the VC powerhouses have their headquarters forty-five miles away, on a two-mile stretch of Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. They are nestled into sleepy, leafy little office parks, clustered right next to one another, in dead-quiet, understated Northern California buildings. To visit them, you drive way up in the hills above Stanford University, where the parking lots are filled with Teslas, birds chirp in the eucalyptus trees, and skinny spandex-clad techies zip around on exotic carbon-fiber racing bikes that cost more than what some people pay for a car.

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For a long time black people were the biggest ethnic group in Oakland, and while demographics have shifted recently, African Americans still represent about a quarter of the population. By setting up shop here in Oakland, Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein, the husband-and-wife team behind Kapor Capital, were sending a message—they were not part of that other world. Unlike those big venture capital firms over on Sand Hill Road, the Kapors are not trying to make as much money as possible by any means necessary. Instead, they have a social mission. Some call it impact investing. Or diversity-focused investing. Or mission-driven versus money-driven investing. The Kapors call their model “gap-closing investing,” meaning they will only invest in companies that are “serving low-income communities and/or communities of color to close gaps of access, opportunity, or outcome,” Freada says.

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

Every morning on my way to work, I would drive along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. Sand Hill Road contains the largest concentration of venture capital firms in the world. All major VC firms are located there, including the mythical Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, early backers of the most iconic startups in the history of high tech: Google, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, Yahoo, YouTube, PayPal, Netscape, and Cisco. I often saw young entrepreneurs with big dreams entering one of those low-rise buildings, presumably to pitch their ideas. Those low-rises on Sand Hill Road are where venture capitalists determine the future of commercial innovation.

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Jose Luis Agell, who leads the business development of a Spanish startup called 3scale Networks, based in both Barcelona and California, says that “it is tough to get funding as a foreign company.” People have remarked for decades that one of the secrets of the success of Silicon Valley is its deep and articulated venture capital base. But what does proximity have to do with funding? Why, in a world of fast communication and cheap plane tickets, should venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road favor startups near them? Bill Draper has the answer. He is one of the most experienced venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, with forty years on the job. In his view, money is only one of many things that venture capitalists provide to startups. “There’s a lot of support, a lot of team building, a lot of organization, and relationships between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that are key in making a successful startup,” he said in a recent interview.

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

When he spoke to the founders a few days later, they had already taken his advice and been to the Zappos headquarters in Las Vegas; they’d toured the company’s tchotchke-lined offices, where employees stood in unison to warmly cheer guests, and met CEO Tony Hsieh and his COO, future Airbnb board member Alfred Lin. Amazon had acquired Zappos in June 2009, but its slightly madcap vibe remained intact. Around this time, Airbnb returned to Sand Hill Road, the seat of the venture capital industry, to raise more money. Blecharczyk’s productive Facebook and Google ads were expensive, and Chesky had to keep the coffers full. Seeing the company’s growing market opportunity, McAdoo wanted Sequoia to supply the entire round of funding itself, but Chesky had learned at Y Combinator to be wary of giving too much control to venture capitalists, and he insisted on bringing in another firm.

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Seeing the company’s growing market opportunity, McAdoo wanted Sequoia to supply the entire round of funding itself, but Chesky had learned at Y Combinator to be wary of giving too much control to venture capitalists, and he insisted on bringing in another firm. He found a willing investor in Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn and a partner at Greylock Capital. Hoffman says he was skeptical at first. Ugh, couch-surfing is not that interesting, he thought. Then Chesky met him at Greylock’s offices on Sand Hill Road over a weekend and spun a compelling vision of Airbnb as the largest hotel chain in the world but one without the expensive burden of maintaining actual buildings or hiring workers like bellhops and maids. “The idea of essentially transforming this massive illiquid asset that existed in most of our lives—the room, an apartment, a house, a unique space—into something that could actually be in an essentially peer-to-peer marketplace is just one of the killer ideas,” Hoffman said.

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Andreessen liked to say that the goal of their firm, Andreessen Horowitz, was to identify the fifteen or so tech startups every year that actually mattered and back as many of them as possible.13 The firm took a long look at Airbnb and whiffed. “Marc struggled with the idea that this would be mainstream,” Chesky says. Andreessen Horowitz would rectify the oversight the following year and lead the Series B, a less lucrative but still hugely profitable investment. Another venture capitalist that passed was across Sand Hill Road at a firm called August Capital. Howard Hartenbaum, an investor in the online video-calling service Skype, met with Chesky repeatedly that fall and took the founders to dinner at Alexander’s Steakhouse near the new office in San Francisco. Chesky impressed Hartenbaum; he seemed to have poise, intelligence, and a fierce determination to succeed.

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

By the twenty-first century, Silicon Valley venture capital was a small industry with an unofficial headquarters, Sand Hill Road, a strip of low-rise office parks across the street from the Stanford campus, where dozens of firms entertained thousands of pitches from people who wanted to start technology companies. Arthur Rock, by now retired, looked at the venture capital industry with bewilderment. Rock worked in San Francisco’s financial district, the traditional West Coast outpost of American finance; he came to work every day in a suit and tie, and often had lunch at his club. On Sand Hill Road, the style was ferociously casual, as if there were a competition for who could come across as the most low-key or the most culturally opposite to the old Organization Man.

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And nobody seemed to want to invest in anything physical anymore, like chips or computers, only in software—instruction sets. Nobody’s idea seemed to require conventional plants and equipment; or distribution systems, supply chains, or physical products. Everything happened on the Internet. The ideal that Sand Hill Road devoted itself to pursuing was a company that would turn out to be like Facebook, which had, only a few years after its founding, a total value on the stock market of more than $400 billion, with fewer than twenty-five thousand employees. General Motors by now was worth only $50 billion, and even in its reduced and post-glorious state, it still had more than two hundred thousand employees.

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Ever since the sale of PayPal, Hoffman had been actively investing in start-ups, usually as the “angel investor”—the first person to write a check and therefore the investor likely to get the highest return if the company succeeded. It was through this part of his life that he had met Zuckerberg. Just before LinkedIn went public, Hoffman joined Greylock, one of the top-tier venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road, as a partner. He began spending part of every week at Greylock and part at LinkedIn, where he worked in an office next to Jeff Weiner’s. This put him more formally in the position he’d been in informally for years, with as much access to deal flow, the lifeblood of Silicon Valley, as anybody.

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

From Apple to Google, a few public giants dominate this private-company market since they are the only potential buyers. Within this confined space, every titan is more eager to purchase his start-up rivals than to compete with them. Whitewashed and fitted out with shiny horns, the aspiring “unicorns” shuffle through the corrals of Sand Hill Road and the carrels of Cupertino, seeking sustenance from smart-set venture capitalists and international tech tycoons. With their high-calorie burn rates and weak revenues, these creatures survive on a continued boom in reveries. The tycoons swipe left or swap right, sending the nags off to the races or back to the stables—or perhaps the glue factory.

…

Main Street: The symbol of the real economy of workers paid hourly or monthly and sealed off from the circular loops of WALL STREET moneymaking. 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.

…

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.

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business by Mikkel Svane, Carlye Adler

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, credit crunch, David Heinemeier Hansson, Elon Musk, fail fast, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, remote working, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Tesla Model S, web application

I’d also read about how people passed out and how the police were called. It sounded like fun. The party had grown so big that it was now held on VC firm August Capital’s giant outdoor deck on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. I had never been to Sand Hill Road. I knew it was 69 Page 69 Svane c04.tex V3 - 10/28/2014 7:36 P.M. S TA R TU P L A N D renowned, but didn’t know what to expect. By this point I did know that I didn’t know anything about how the Valley worked. I had been in the city a few days for meetings and drove down to Sand Hill Road. This was the first time I really experienced the climate difference between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. San Francisco had been cold and foggy, but thirty minutes south on 280 it was 20 degrees warmer, and in the gardens, hummingbirds flew around.

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

Jin also lectures at a number of leading Chinese universities and life sciences conferences, providing valuable intellectual capital to Chinese scholars who, until recently, had to travel to the United States to study with professors of that caliber. Jin has recruited other expat Chinese scientists to return to their country of birth and work as researchers and scientists. Beyond Sand Hill Road Immigrant entrepreneurs now have many options besides the United States. For the report “America’s Loss Is the World’s Gain”, which was published by Kauffman Foundation in 2008, my research team surveyed 1,203 Indian and Chinese immigrants who had worked in or been educated in the United States and later returned to their home countries.22 Our inquiries found that while immigration policies had caused some returnees to depart, the most significant factors in their decision to return home were career opportunities, family ties, and quality of life.

…

Table of Contents Acknowledgments Contents Introduction Back to School The Immigrant Exodus In This Book My Commitment Chapter 1: Why the Future of America Depends on Skilled Immigrants The Economic Impact The Innovation Impact The Shifting Tide Chapter 2: The Rise and Decline of the Immigrant-Powered Startup Machine The Immigrant Entrepreneur Tide Peaks Chapter 3: The Innovator’s Dilemma: Leaving America for Greener Pastures Beyond Sand Hill Road The Decline of Silicon Valley Entrepreneurship: Why the IIT Grads Are Going Home Chapter 4: H-1B Visas and Immigration Limbo How the H-1B Harms the US Economy and Sours Immigrants on America The History of the H-1B Visa The Program Nobody Likes: Death Threats and H-1Bs Good for America, Good for Innovation First-Class Minds, Second-Class Citizens Chapter 5: How the World Is Trying to Steal Silicon Valley’s Thunder The Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent and Skilled Immigrants Chapter 6: Seven Fixes to Slow the Immigrant Exodus 1.

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

And there was no greater place to build the future than Silicon Valley. It was more than a place filled with entrepreneurs toting pitch decks: Silicon Valley was a living, breathing organism. It had a circulatory system, represented by the big name VCs in their low-rise California ranch-style office parks, lined up along nearby Sand Hill Road: first settled by Kleiner Perkins in 1972, the proverbial “Sand Hill” was now home to the likes of Sequoia, Accel, Founders Fund, and Andreessen Horowitz, to name a few. Sand Hill pumped cash into the veins of fetal startups, helping them uncurl their tiny fingers and toes. It had its vital organs, the megacompanies that had taken that lifeblood and grown viable and strong: Google, up in Mountain View, with its massive campus called the Googleplex, sixty buildings teeming with engineers and software developers and AI experts; Apple in Cupertino, on its way to becoming the most valuable company in the world, in the midst of constructing a new headquarters built to look like a massive spaceship that had crashed down to Earth; Facebook, of course, which had first opened its doors just blocks away from where Cameron was standing, and was now located at 1 Hacker Way, spitting out newly minted millionaires every week, inflating the local housing market to the top of the national charts and making the zip codes around Sand Hill the wealthiest in the United States; Intel and Tesla, and Twitter, on and on and on, each as important to the system as a liver or a kidney or a lung.

…

Tyler glanced at his brother, who seemed as focused on the salesman and his pitch as he was. This was something that neither of them had ever heard of before; not in any of the startup pitch decks they’d been sent, not during any of those Silicon Valley meetings. Not at the Oasis, not anywhere on Sand Hill Road. It wasn’t clear, yet, how this … cryptocurrency worked—or how math was involved. But a system that didn’t rely on trust, that didn’t involve an authority—it seemed too good to be true. “Tyler! Over here! I thought I saw you guys at Pacha last night! Come join us for a drink!” Tyler looked past Azar, in the direction of where the voice was coming from, and recognized a group of Americans waving at him from four daybeds down.

…

To Cameron, this introduction to Charlie and his company was part funny, part WTF. The kid was something else; he was clearly smart and scrappy but a total whirling dervish. One thing was for sure, this wasn’t some startup in the Valley looking to court seed funding from the cabal of pleated khaki pants on Sand Hill Road—this was different. “Bitcoin, the digital currency, with a lowercase b,” Voorhees said, pointing to the miniature barrel. “As Charlie implied, you send bitcoin with a lowercase b from your digital wallet to the address embedded in the QR code printed on the side of the can. It’s that simple, but that’s only a tiny part of the story.”

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Apple Newton, Big Tech, Biosphere 2, car-free, computer age, El Camino Real, Future Shock, game design, General Magic , guns versus butter model, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence

* * * unraveled brown cassette tape on the freeway Staples CK-one PIN number basketball hoop If we were machines, we'd have the gift of being eternal and I want you to understand TUESDAY Everybody's flu-ridden today except for Ethan and me. Ethan asked me to accompany him up to Electronic Arts in San Mateo, and then down to a VC meeting out at the Venture Capital mall at the corner of the 280 and Sand Hill Road - in his ruby red Ferrari. "The Ferrari is like a rite of passage here for new money. You buy one at 26, get it out of your system, flip it for a gray Lexus or Infiniti, and then you drive gray sedans the rest of your life. I keep mine because I can't afford anything else at the moment, and I can't afford the capital gains taxes if I sold it.

…

And this got me thinking of all the people at IBM, and I got to thinking about Dad and . . . * * * This is my first-ever VC meeting. Ethan has attended hundreds of them during his Valley career. Apparently, the Monday Partner's Meeting is a Silicon Valley tradition, according to Ethan. They mostly occur up at the venture capital "mall" at the corner of Sand Hill Road and Interstate 280. Monday is when partners agree to agree. And Tuesday is when the decisions are acted upon. Fifteen years in the business have loaned Ethan a rote tour-guidish quality. Humming up the 280, he further briefed me on the situation: "Initial presentations are made by capital seekers.

…

* * * Later on in the day, our lives devolved into an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon. We all decided we needed sunlight - we've all been working so hard lately and our internal clocks are somewhere in the Eastern Bloc nations - so we went for a drive in the Microbus up through Stanford, up to the linear particle accelerator that passes underneath the 280 by the Sand Hill Road exit. It was the core team from the old Redmond geek house: Karla, Michael, Todd, Bug, and Susan - as well as Ethan. Dusty didn't come because everything makes her sick these days. She's set her workstation up by the bathroom door. She craves instant "Mr. Noodles," and is constantly sending Todd out for food runs to Burger King.

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

Google networks, clouds, and server farms could be said to have already accomplished much of it. Google was never just a computer or software company. From its beginning in the late 1990s, when its founders were students at Stanford, it was the favorite child of the Stanford Computer Science Department, married to Sand Hill Road finance across the street, and its ambitions far transcended mere business. Born in the labs of the university’s newly opened (Bill) Gates Computer Science Building in 1996 and enjoying the patronage of its president, John Hennessy, the company enjoyed access to the school’s vast computer resources.

…

(Stanford had cashed in those shares for $336 million by 2005). Google moved out of Stanford in 1999 into the Menlo Park garage of Susan Wojcicki, an Intel manager soon to be CEO of YouTube and a sister of Anne, the founder of the genomic startup 23andMe. Brin’s marriage to Anne in 2007 symbolized the procreative embrace of Silicon Valley, Sand Hill Road, and Palo Alto. (They divorced in 2015.) By 2017, Google’s own computer scientists had authored more of the world’s most-cited papers in the subject than had Stanford’s own faculty.1 Google’s founders always conceived of their projects in prophetic terms. An eminent computer scientist, Page is the scion of two Ph.D.s in the subject, and no one will deny, not even his mother, that his “PageRank” paper behind Google search is better than any doctorate.2 His father, Carl, was an ardent evangelist of artificial intelligence at Michigan State and around the family dinner table in East Lansing.

…

Hence the amazing performance in 2007 and 2008. Without relying on the outsized leverage that brought down other funds, Renaissance thrives by processing more data, building larger Markov chains, ferreting out more correlations and probabilities, and executing more trades than anyone else. A venture capitalist on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto investing in an embryonic Google after acquiring intimate knowledge of its technology may make a thousand-fold return over five to seven years. A firm such as Renaissance might make a thousand trades in a day harvesting the tiniest anomalies. With modest leverage and relentless twenty-four-hour trading around the globe, Medallion could make far more money than a venture capitalist without knowing any details about the technologies and business plans behind the equities, currencies, or securities traded.

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

Musk wanted to go deep into energy physics, convinced he could make radical advances in battery technology, only to abandon his studies—two days later—ahead of the gold rush era of the late 1990s dot-com boom. Straubel listened as Musk, dressed in black with his shirt unbuttoned like he was at a European nightclub, elaborated on his origin story. He said few venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road at the time had shared his vision for the internet. The fastest way to make money, Musk had figured, would be helping existing media companies convert their content for the World Wide Web. He and his younger brother, Kimbal, founded Zip2 to do just that, eventually attracting attention for a first-of-its kind Web program that gave turn-by-turn map directions between two locations—an idea that would later become ubiquitous.

…

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. He imagined a world where a customer’s solar panels would charge their electric Tesla cars—a combination that would create a truly zero-emissions system.

…

A new start of production was targeted for 2007. They were overbudget and behind schedule. Board member Laurie Yoler was among those encouraging Musk to seek money outside his own pockets and his close network of wealthy friends. It was one thing for an eccentric rich guy to fund a vanity project. If some of the big names on Sand Hill Road bought in, it would give the company not just money but legitimacy—something it sorely needed, particularly when it came to recruiting employees and courting suppliers. Investors would want to know what was next, after the Roadster. Tesla needed to be more than just a one-off carmaker if it were to attract the kind of cash it sought.

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

Word about their startup has been circulating among angel investors and venture capitalists in advance of Demo Day. They have been spending recent days in a blurry succession of meetings with prospective investors, including some of the Valley’s leading venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road. The informality of YC’s own screening process when interviewing finalists and YC’s hacker culture, valuing technical skill above all else, does not prepare founders for the starchy culture of Sand Hill Road. Before his meetings, McCay had thought the venture capitalists would look past a rough presentation and lack of polish, and now he sees he was wrong. Appearances clearly do matter. So too does preparation.

…

There was nothing about the facilities or the location that resembled a sylvan college campus. The street happened to be named Pioneer Way and it was located in a light industrial area, a forlorn triangle bordered on two edges by highways. It was about a twenty-minute drive from where the posh offices of venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road were concentrated, near Stanford, on the leafy west side of Menlo Park. The neighborhood of Pioneer Way belonged to a separate galaxy. YC sat among small manufacturers, and auto repair and body shops. The architecture in the neighborhood was strictly no-frills utilitarian—a good setting for lean startups.

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See also Kalvins Ries, Eric, 55, 77, 147 RocketMail, 151 RocketSpace, 136 Rolnitzky, David, 89–90, 134 Ruby, 31, 124, 148, 193 Rushkoff, Douglas, 267n1 Russell, Andy, 127–28 Sacca, Chris, 57, 61 Said Business School, 57 Salesforce.com, 31, 204 Salt Lake City, UT, 42 San Diego, CA, 20 San Francisco, CA, 41, 54 CampusCred, 111 hipsters, 36, 211 living in, 9, 35–36 Mission, 165 MobileWorks, 90 MUNI, 153 rideshare listings, 120–21 Russian Hill, 165 South of Market, 163 Standard Chartered Bank office, 90 Taylor Street, 223–24 Y Scraper, 223–24 YC founders in, 58, 71, 133–34, 141, 142, 163, 229 San Francisco Gray Line, 1 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, 41–42, 202–3 Santa Barbara, CA, 20 Sapient, 29 Say It Visually, 101–2 Schmidt, Geoff, 234 Science Exchange, 46, 163, 171–82 Scott, Riley, 51 Scribd, 166, 224, 230 Seattle, WA, 71 Securities Act of 1933, 205 Seibel, Michael, 142, 144, 228, 229 Sequoia Capital, 3, 66, 74, 86, 87, 153, 157 Seyal, Omar, 66, 151 Shah, Sagar, 110–14, 117, 136–37 Sharpie, 165 Shazam, 81 Shear, Emmett education, 15 Kan, Daniel, 229 Kan, Justin, 162–63 Kiko, 14, 16, 23 Justin.tv, 141–44 Rap Genius, 201 Twitch.tv, 144–47, 228 2005, summer batch, 14–16 YC partner, 63, 150 Shen, Jason, 68, 69, 163–64, 266n3 AnyAsq, 166 Art of Ass-Kicking blog, 9 Demo Day, 211 finalist interview, 10 Prototype Day, 120–21 Rehearsal Day, 187–88 Shirky, Clay, 105 Shpilman, Felix, 88, 222 Siberian ginseng, 134 Sift Science, 70–76, 121, 134, 138, 210 Silicon Valley Australian view of, 267n6 failure, forgiving of, 220 image, 114 merit over seniority, 60 programmers, 212 startups, 56–57, 58–59 Taggar, Harj, 58–60 tours, 1 uniqueness of, 237, 238 women in, 54 YC, 40 Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford, 57 Silver Tail, 54 Sims, Zach, 124–25, 147–49, 192–93, 194–96, 215–16, 227 Singapore, 154, 238 Skype, 17, 38, 124, 223, 265n1 Snapjoy, 43–44, 103, 130–33, 186–87, 194 Socialcam, 144, 147, 228 software is eating the world, 1–2, 6, 216, 238, 239 South Africa, 17 Spain, 238 Spanish (language), 213 Splitterbug, 123, 187, 209 Square, 91 Stamatiou, Paul, 219 Standard Chartered Bank, 90 Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, 47 Bing Nursery School, 52 computer science students, 47, 60, 66, 256n6 dorms, 52 Google, 86 graduates of, 9, 29, 68, 91, 214, 261n1, 266n3 photo books, 10 Stanford Daily, 163 students, current, 213 Start Fund, 43, 95, 137, 169, 219, 233 Andreesen Horowitz, 230 beginnings, 4, 28 Clerky, 126 Graham, Paul, 35, 87–88 Science Exchange, 179 Shpilman, Felix, 88 Tagstand, 154 Steiner, Chris, 51, 191, 208–9, 264n2 Stigsen, Alexander, 51, 103 Stripe, 64–66 Stypi, 194 Su, Andy, 52–53 Sunnyvale, CA, 125, 130, 149 SuperValu, 209 Suzman, Ted, 164–65, 224 Suzman, Tim, 164–68, 223–24 SV Angel, 137, 219, 233 Andreesen Horowitz, 230 Clerky, 126 Conway, Ron, 88–89 Lee, David, 88–89, 91 MongoHQ, 95 Science Exchange, 179 Stripe, 66 Tagstand, 154 Sweden, 168, 238 Swedish, 214 Taggar, Harj (Harjeet) AnyAsq, 166 Auctomatic, 60–63, 204 Boso, 57–58 coding, 58, 60 Kalvins/Ridejoy, 68 Rap Genius, 80–85, 127, 196 Sift Science, 71–75 Silicon Valley, 58–60 speaking style, 81 on startups, 59, 61, 66, 161–62 2007, winter, 58–61 YC partner, 62–63, 150, 166, 256–57n3, 263n13 Taggar, Kulveer, 151–60 Auctomatic, 60–62, 159, 204 Boso, 57–58 coding, 58, 60 Demo Day, 210, 264n1 Tagstand, 66 YC, 58–61, 66, 154, 160 Tagstand, 66, 151–60 Taiwan, 238 Tam, Chris, 98–100 Tamagotchi, 156 Tamplin, James, 134–36, 138 Tan, Garry Science Exchange, 171, 180–81 Tagstand, 151, 155 YC partner, 63, 64, 150 Tan, Jason, 71–76, 121, 134–36, 210 TapEngage, 187, 192, 209 Target, 169 TaskRabbit, 54 Tech Wildcatters, 41 TechCrunch, 93, 197 Codecademy, 195, 227 Snapjoy, 131 Socialcam, 147 women, 48 YC, 194 TechStars, 41, 42–44, 53, 169, 255n5–6, 255n10, 261n2 10gen, 30, 93 Thiel, Peter, 66, 140, 261n1 Thing Marks, 148 Thomas, Eric, 106, 108 TightDB, 51, 103, 223 Toontastic, 127–28 Topps, 152 Traf-O-Data, 16 Transition School, 15 Trott, Mena, 46 Tumblr, 147 Turkey, 17 Twitch.tv, 145–47, 228 Twitter, 57, 58, 91 Codecademy, 195, 227 Conway, Ron, 87 female users, 256n10 NowSpots, 168 Socialcam, 147 280 North, 64 UC Davis, 20 UCLA, 20 UC San Diego, 20 UC Santa Cruz, 20 UK, 17, 57, 59, 61, 184, 238 Union Square Ventures, 267n1 United Nations, 162, 214 University of Maryland, 39 University of Miami, 171 University of Southern California, 20, 88 University of Texas, Austin, 112 University of Washington, 15, 70, 71 U.S.

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

And by his logic the Perfect Blue can be only in our minds, never matched by a color in the real world. I’m going to take a guess that no other venture capital firm in the world sits around debating the question of what would be a Perfect Blue. They probably don’t think of blue as a technology at all. A Perfect Blue is not an investment thesis on Sand Hill Road, where the mandarins of venture capital ply their trade. Federated artificial intelligence systems might be more like it (though federated learning is a thesis of ours, too). If they had to answer the question of what makes a blue “perfect,” they’d probably ask their kid. But talking about a Perfect Blue is exactly the sort of thing that happens at our firm.

…

Sam Harris, an influential blogger, tweeted a poll on February 1, 2016: “If cultured meat is molecularly identical to beef, pork, etc. and tastes the same, will you switch to eating it?” The reply stunned me. Eighty-three percent of almost fifteen thousand people said they would. This was a turning point. Once there was some market validation, however thin, investors and scientists began to take this movement seriously. Meanwhile, I hit Sand Hill Road (the road with all the fancy VCs lined up in a row) with a presentation on the future of food so they understood what we were doing. It started with a painting of a caveman in a loincloth spearing a bear while the bear was mauling his friend. It was an important slide because it showed the importance of protein.

…

The more we stand up for free speech and try to stick it to China, the more we’ll only be sticking it to ourselves. But stick it, still, we will do. We need to do a chapter about plants. People love plants Especially trees. Maybe sediment electrogens. How the soil is electrified. I used to want to live in Woodside, surrounded by trees. Well, when you go work on Sand Hill Road, it’ll be a short commute. … is it that obvious? I got a vibe when we were at their conference. We’ve just been talking. It’s nice to be wanted. Yeah. I don’t know if I’ll do it though. Leave all this? Would you have more money to deploy? Way way more. 24 How CRISPR Will Change the World Bloomberg Let’s just get this out of the way.

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

These days, the high-tech ecosystem is fueled by capital—the availability of money for investment in new companies—which creates nearly endless opportunities for building new businesses that disrupt the old economic order. In the early days of Silicon Valley, federal funding drove the development of the semiconductor industry, which laid the foundation for the development of personal computers. But federal funding was soon replaced by venture capital as a driving force in the valley’s growth. Sand Hill Road, just up the hill from Stanford, is ground zero for some of the most storied names in venture capital, with billions of dollars at the ready to invest in the next world-changing idea of a twenty-two-year-old down the hill. Though “venture capital” might evoke the stuffy world of finance, the venture industry fueling Silicon Valley has a decidedly technical mindset.

…

The Ecosystem of Venture Capitalists and Engineers Though engineers often develop the technical breakthroughs that can serve as the seeds for the formation of world-changing companies, the growth of those seeds into blooming companies relies on access to capital, the funding necessary to hire more talent, buy equipment, secure office space, and grow the business. For many companies, venture capitalists—VCs for short—are the source of that funding. Sand Hill Road, a street roughly six miles long, is home to more than forty venture capital firms. In 1972, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers—now known as just Kleiner Perkins—opened its doors as the first VC firm on Sand Hill. In 1980, it hired John Doerr away from Intel, where he had internalized the concept of OKRs.

…

Finding such deals creates competition among VC firms to seek out and build relationships early with would-be entrepreneurs. It sometimes also leads to unexpected intrusions at lunch, as Mehran found out shortly before finishing graduate school. Out with a fellow graduate student for dim sum at a Chinese restaurant not far from Sand Hill Road, they were just finishing their meal when they were approached by a man in a suit whom neither of them recognized. He politely introduced himself and said, “I couldn’t help but overhear that the two of you were talking about search engines. If you decide to start a company, give me a call.” Then he slid his business card across the table.

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

Anybody with an idea, a laptop, and an Internet connection can give it a go, and many do, leading to an abundance of entrants, many of them still living in college dorm rooms. Although these founders do eventually need to raise money to fuel growth, they have many more sources of funding beyond the big firms with posh offices along Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road. Some need expert guidance and trusted connections as much as they need capital. VC firms have always provided a combination of all these services, but these services are increasingly becoming unbundled: as the competition among investors to back the next Facebook or Dropbox has intensified, the most promising entrepreneurs can pick and choose what they most want in an investor.

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“When I was a kid, the tech industry was really geeks selling to geeks,” Maples recalls. “Then it was geeks selling to the rest of the world because the world is connected. But what Ann and I are seeing are new types of entrepreneurs emerging,” he says. “In the last decade, to be an entrepreneur you had to raise money, and Sand Hill Road had a preconceived idea of what a tech entrepreneur looked like—they were usually an early-twenties white dude, who was an alpha-geek computer hacker. And that was kind of the canonical person you’d invest in.” In B2B ventures, companies that sell products to other companies, the prototypical entrepreneur looked a little different, but it was still typically a he.

…

In B2B ventures, companies that sell products to other companies, the prototypical entrepreneur looked a little different, but it was still typically a he. “We believe that the low cost of starting a company is democratizing entrepreneurship itself,” Maples says, “and now entrepreneurs can emerge from any location and they can be any gender and any ethnicity, and so rather than a high priest on Sand Hill Road deciding what a start-up entrepreneur is, people can just do entrepreneurship, and whoever gets traction is an entrepreneur. That’s going to fundamentally change the nature of entrepreneurship and who starts companies and succeeds.” As entrepreneurship becomes accessible to more people and more different types of people, Maples says, he and Miura-Ko want to be accelerants of that trend; even in this climate, entrepreneurs need VCs for access to capital markets.

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

Kleiner & Perkins had invested in a shoe-resoling business (Tred 2, whose founder, Rory Fuerst, would found Keen shoes three decades later), a motorcycle-cum-snowmobile (Snow Job), a medical device company (Andros Analyzers), and a nearly fail-safe minicomputer firm (Tandem Computers).VII Shortly before Swanson joined Kleiner & Perkins, the firm moved from 3000 Sand Hill Road, where Kleiner had had a private office before the partnership began, to the twenty-ninth floor of Two Embarcadero Center in San Francisco. The move had been Perkins’s idea. Other venture capital firms, such as Don Valentine’s Sequoia, were moving onto Sand Hill Road, which today is home to the largest concentration of venture capitalists in the Valley, if not the world. Perkins did not want other venture capitalists to see who he and Kleiner were taking to lunch, and, as he put it, “We didn’t want to be considered part of the flock.

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How could inventions coming from throughout Stanford together yield only $226 per year for the university? Reimers began compiling a list of ideas and another list of anyone on campus who had anything to do with patents. An attorney in the business affairs office did occasional patent work. The new SLAC Linear Accelerator Laboratory on Sand Hill Road near the southwest edge of campus employed a full-time patent counsel. An outside attorney worked one day per week for the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory.15 That was it. Reimers was not an attorney, and his knowledge of patent law was limited. But he thought Stanford could do more with its intellectual property.

…

In 1975, with the encouragement of Capital Group, Valentine spun the Sequoia fund into an independent venture capital firm of the same name and with a similar group of investors—not individuals but deep-pocketed institutions such as pension funds and universities with large endowments. (“Go where the money is,” Valentine likes to say, quoting his mentor Bob Kirby and the bank robber Willie Sutton.) The independent Sequoia Capital also retained a focus on high-risk, high-reward investments. Valentine rented an office on Sand Hill Road, near the venture firm Kleiner & Perkins, started by Fairchild cofounder Eugene Kleiner and Hewlett-Packard alumnus Tom Perkins. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner & Perkins were pioneers in a trend that would later prove an essential element of Silicon Valley’s longevity: an older generation of successful tech entrepreneurs and executives mentoring and funding later generations.

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

Thiel had lived with his parents, briefly, after returning to the Bay Area in 1995, and was now living with a roommate in a dumpy apartment near the freeway in San Mateo, eating a lot of Chinese takeout and, when he needed to blow off steam, playing chess in downtown Palo Alto. And so, one day in 1996, he and another former law clerk went into the Stanford Law Library and began researching how to start a hedge fund. He hired the Stanford Review’s editor in chief, an ambitious conservative named Jeff Giesea, as an assistant and rented a closet-sized office on Sand Hill Road that could serve as the fund’s mailing address. For the next year, Thiel would be consumed by trying to scrape together enough money for the fund from friends, the families of his friends, and really anyone he could find. On paper, perhaps, it didn’t look great—and it certainly wouldn’t have looked like much to his former colleagues at Credit Suisse, or the ambitious junior associates at Sullivan & Cromwell.

…

The partnership had been compelling to investors, who put another $100 million in venture capital into the combined operation that spring, but it proved to be awkward interpersonally. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel had trouble relating to each other. One day, while Peter was riding in Elon’s $1 million McLaren to a meeting with Mike Moritz at Sequoia, Elon, attempting to show off the car’s acceleration, crashed the car into an embankment on Sand Hill Road, sending the McLaren flying into the air. The car was totaled. As they walked away from the wreck, Elon told Peter, “You know, I had read all these stories about people who made money and bought sports cars and crashed them. But I knew it would never happen to me, so I didn’t get any insurance.”

…

Meanwhile, X had conducted a series of focus groups showing that customers disliked the brand name, because it reminded them of porn. Musk was unmoved, possibly, employees gossiped, because of sunk costs. He’d paid at least $1 million to acquire the X.com domain name, legend within the company had it. “Nothing would convince him,” said Martin, the PayPal marketer. Thiel by this point had an office on Sand Hill Road for his hedge fund, but he stayed in touch with the loyalist group, which included the former Stanford Review editors, who resented Musk’s rebranding, and Levchin, who resented the attempts to rewrite PayPal’s software. These battles paralyzed the company, and losses from fraud continued to grow.

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

These are the people who now run tech companies, who have been entrusted with huge sums of other people’s money. It would be nice to think that when everything falls apart, the only ones who get hurt will be venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. But a lot of the money being thrown at these kids originally came from pension funds. The pain, when it comes, will not be confined to Sand Hill Road. Walking around San Francisco, it strikes me that this cannot end well, that the combination of magical thinking, easy money, greedy investors, and amoral founders represents a recipe for disaster. My first response is to feel the same kind of righteous indignation that I felt back in the late 1990s.

…

In the end Doerr got nothing out of Google Glass except some publicity, but maybe that was the point all along. In the old days, Silicon Valley venture capitalists embraced a California version of clubby East Coast white-shoe culture. All of the top VC firms literally sit beside one another on the same street, a big boulevard called Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. For decades these firms resembled snooty private gentlemen’s clubs—in the British upper class sense of the word. They were almost exclusively male and were run by former engineers who shunned publicity and quietly voted Republican. Today generating hype has become a central part of the venture capital business.

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

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. 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.

…

Duplan received some money from his parents and a $15,000 grant from a summer program at the venture capital firm Highland Capital. It had become quite easy for students to raise initial funding for their startup ideas. Venture capitalists were frequently on campus, often as professors or guest lecturers. Sand Hill Road, which runs from the 280 highway right past the edge of Stanford University in Menlo Park bordering Palo Alto, is home to the world’s major venture capital firms; think of it as Wall Street for venture capital. In the summer of 2011—the same summer that Evan, Reggie, and Bobby moved in to the Spiegels’ house to start Picaboo—Lucas and ten members of team Clinkle rented a house in Palo Alto to build the company’s first product.

…

And Mark Zuckerberg would soon give him good reason to rule out working at Facebook. But most of all, Evan wanted to be a founder and a CEO—the captain of his own company that he could grow to be the next Apple. Evan’s attitude and Snapchat’s traction made the company’s next fundraising, a Series A round, the hottest deal on Sand Hill Road. There were plenty of questions surrounding Snapchat: Is this really a full-fledged company or just a feature that Facebook, Apple, Google, or someone else can copy? Isn’t every other company in the Valley moving toward collecting more data, not zero data? How will they make money? And, of course, isn’t this for sexting?

Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, Elizabeth Truss

Airbnb, banking crisis, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clockwatching, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, fail fast, fear of failure, financial engineering, glass ceiling, informal economy, James Dyson, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, long peace, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neil Kinnock, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, pension reform, price stability, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, tech worker, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

A number of other factors have been studied, including, but not limited to, a high-skilled workforce; a creative, risk-taking culture; complementary legal and financial institutions, and the high quality of life.34 So Silicon Valley benefits more than anything from a ready access to venture capital – which allows for the harnessing of risk in the interests of innovation. Sand Hill Road has become as synonymous with private 94 Britannia Unchained equity investment as Wall Street is with the stock market. Each year, billions of dollars are invested in new start-ups – capitalism in its rawest, most primordial form. Instead of the tinkering around the edges of enterprise zones, or government-subsidised green technology, we see the unrivalled power of the market in picking winners and backing innovation.

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Neville 38 PriceWaterhouseCoopers 94 private enterprise, used for social ends 26–7 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (OECD) 36, 38, 39–41, 44, 57, 105, 115 prudence 24, 27–9, 33 public services, investment in 12, 28–9, 31 ‘quants’ 44, 45, 47–8 Reagan, Ronald 38–9 reality television 75–6, 115 142 Britannia Unchained Recent Work Capability Assessments 70 The Red Paper on Scotland 26 Reich, Robert 25 Reilly, Cait 74 Reinhart, Carmen M. 21, 22 resources, running out 9 risk 99 and innovation 91–2 risk-aversion 86–8, 91, 92 see also failure Robinson, Derek (‘Red Robbo’) 8 Rogoff, Kenneth S. 21, 22, 29 Rolls Royce 8 Romer, Christina 22 Rossli, Ashraf 1 Rousseff, Dilma 101 Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts (RSA) 61 Sahami, Mehran 60 Sainsbury’s, and migrant workers 64 Samuels, Tim 64 Sand Hill Road 93–4 Saragoza, Eric 54 Sarkozy, Nicholas 66 SAT (Standard Assessment Tasks) tests 39 Save the Children 71 Scandinavia, labour market reform 4 Schleicher, Andreas 38, 39, 40, 41 Science Museum, London 56 science and technology 38–60 attitudes to 48–51 securitisation 35 Sedi 103 seed capital 84, 98 see also venture capital Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme 98 Seedrs 98 Sela, Yonatan 86 Sequoia Capital 98 Silicon Roundabout (London) 55, 97, 112 Silicon Valley 93–4, 95, 97, 554 Simon, Leslie 48 Singapore 5, 66, 113 smart phones 55 Smith, Adam 20 Snow, C.P. 46 social mobility 11, 76–7 The Social Network (film) 48 solar energy sector, subsidies 85 Songkick 98 South Korea 4–5, 113 education 43–4, 55 working hours 66 Soviet Union 86, 89, 105 collapse of 10 SpaceX 95 Spain 3, 41, 52, 66 Spotify 98 Standard & Poor’s 47 Stanford University (US) 60, 93, 97 Stephens, Philip 28 strikes 8–9, 66, 69, 114–15 Stringer, Sir Howard 58 Süddeutsche Zeitung 40 Suez crisis (1956) 8 Sugar, Alan 75, 76 Summers, Larry 25 sustainable development 4, 10 see also economic growth Sweden 30, 32 Switzerland 30, 32, 52 Tang, Jessie 72 Tata, Ratan 64 taxation 12, 28–9, 31, 37, 88, 109, 110 impact on working hours 68–9 increases under New Labour 29 taxi drivers, work ethic 61–3 Tech City (London) 97 tech industry 51–5 international collaboration 53–4 low-wage workers 54 and tech skills 54–5 Technological Incubators Program (Israel) 79, 83–4 technology see science and technology; tech industry Index Thatcher, Margaret 9, 10, 11, 114–15 Toynbee, Polly 31 trade unions 8, 9, 63, 69 Trudeau, Pierre Elliot 14–15 True Flash Filing System 81 Tug, Tuggy 72 TweetDeck 55, 98 Twitter 93 unemployment 20, 23 Canada 14, 16, 18, 34 Europe 66 UK 70, 73, 74, 77, 87 Unison union 70 United Kingdom (UK) attitudes to academic achievement 45–7, 59 debt 10, 12, 30–3, 115 and deficit 19–21, 27, 29–33 economic decline 7–11, 12–13, 115 economic growth 9–10, 12, 114, 115 education 4–5, 12, 31, 42–3, 44–8, 51–60 failure of 57–8, 115 maths teaching methods 56–7 and parental aspiration 57, 59 performance in PISA tests 40, 41, 57, 115 and science and technology 51–3, 54–60, 115 tuition fees 60 end of empire 4, 8, 10, 114 and entrepreneurship 76, 91, 97–8 and European Union 10 government subsidies 85 graduate jobs market 44–5 innovation 98, 114 intellectual capital 52, 53, 112 patent applications 95–7 pensions 3, 63, 69–70, 110 population growth 100, 107–8 productivity 61, 66–7, 77 public spending 3, 27–8, 31, 114, 115 143 regulation and red tape 5, 30, 37, 87–8, 98, 109 relationship with US 8, 10, 90 research and development 88 and risk-aversion 86–8, 91, 92 strikes 8–9, 69, 114–15 taxation 12, 28–9, 31, 37, 88, 109, 110 technology companies 97–8 trade union power 8, 9, 63, 69 universities 52–3, 57, 58, 97 rise in science and tech applicants 59–60 venture capital 94, 98 welfare policies 109, 110 and dependency 2, 67, 68, 70–1, 77, 109 unsustainability of 106 Winter of Discontent (1978) 9, 114 and work ethic 2, 61–77, 111–12 working hours 65, 66, 68, 77 young Britons 75, 108–11 and entrepreneurship 76 unemployment 74, 77 United States (US) attitude to bankruptcy 91 cost of patent process 96 and debt 22, 24, 31 Declaration of Independence 90 and economic freedom 36 education 12, 38–9, 40, 42, 46, 57 entrepreneurial spirit 90, 93–4, 96–7 and global financial crisis (2007–08) 19, 32, 37 investment in IT sector 93–4 women in tech careers 49 worker productivity 57, 67 working hours 65, 66, 68 universities non-courses 43, 46–7 see also United Kingdom (UK), universities urban riots (2011) 1, 75 USB flash drive 80–1 144 Britannia Unchained Varga, Getúlio 104 Velez, Leila 103–4 venture capital 5, 80, 84–5, 93–5, 98 see also seed capital Vietnam 54, 89 vocational training 74 Wall Street Journal 9, 14, 36, 96 Wanless report 29 Wei, Nat 59 Weizmann, Chaim 83 Wenzhou, China 95 Willetts, David 67 Wilshaw, Sir Michael 59 Wilson, Harold 114 Wolf, Martin 26 Wolley, Trevor 45 women and tech careers 48–9, 50–1 working and cost of childcare 71 Woos, Jaejoon 22 work ethic 2, 5, 13, 61–77 and entrepreneurship 67–8 Europeans 65–6 impact of childcare costs 71 impact of welfare system 68, 70–1, 74, 77 Japan 106 migrant workers 63–4 and role models 74–7 role of schools 73–4 worklessness 67 Workers’ Party (Brazil) 101 working hours 65, 66 effect of unionisation 69 impact of tax rates 68–9 World Economic Forum 35, 87 Wriston, Walter 20 X Factor 45, 75 Yes Minister 47 Yom Kippur War (1973) 83 YouTube 1, 95 Yozma programme (Israel) 83, 84–6 Zappos 98 Zhou, Biyan 42 Zuckerberg, Mark 76 Zynga 95

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 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 shopping mall is the Stanford Shopping Center, a suburban monument to upscale consumption built on land formerly occupied by Senator Leland Stanford’s vineyards.

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The particle accelerator is the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, SLAC for short. As venture capitalists and wealthy alums prefer funding Googles to winning Nobel Prizes (of which SLAC has several), the facility is funded by the US Department of Energy. The runway for its accelerated particles travels alongside Sand Hill Road, under Interstate 280, and into the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, which define the western border of Silicon Valley. Lastly, there’s a high-class brothel: the Rosewood Sand Hill, a posh restaurant and hotel complex wedged in between SLAC and the Sand Hill–Interstate 280 intersection.

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Fund-raising is an operatic drama on the order of a Latin American telenovela. Avoid the company-wide noise, and contain the pointless din of the begathon to yourself (or someone) at all costs. Sequoia was ensconced in one of the regulation two-story, poured-concrete-and-wood-trim, open-courtyard structures that dotted the manicured slopes around Sand Hill Road between Stanford and the 280. The impression was that of understated corporate efficiency, with Palo Alto’s supernaturally pleasant climate lending a certain Elysian quality. If you didn’t know the context, you might think it the bland corporate headquarters of some national insurance company, or perhaps the high school classrooms in a moderately affluent LA suburb.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

He felt that bankers and lawyers did not contribute much to society. Besides, he disliked the students he met in business classes. Instead, he was drawn to Silicon Valley. It was the decade of rational exuberance, when one could just slap a .com onto any fantasy and wait for the thunder of Porsches to descend from Sand Hill Road with venture capitalists waving checks. He got his opportunity in the summer of 1994, between his junior and senior years at Penn, when he scored two internships that allowed him to indulge his passions for electric vehicles, space, and video games. By day he worked at Pinnacle Research Institute, a twenty-person group that had modest Defense Department contracts to study a “supercapacitor” developed by its founder.

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Elon was granted a patent for the “interactive network directory service” that he had created. “The invention provides a network accessible service which integrates both a business directory and a map database,” the patent stated. For their first meeting with potential investors, they had to take a bus up Sand Hill Road because the car their dad had given them broke down. But after word spread about the company, the VCs were asking to come to them. They bought a big frame for a computer rack and put one of their small computers inside, so that visitors would think they had a giant server. They named it “The Machine That Goes Ping,” after a Monty Python sketch.

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Thiel, however, was better at reading people. “This is just an opening,” he told Levchin. “You just have to be patient with a guy like Elon.” The courtship continued through January 2000, causing Musk to postpone his honeymoon with Justine. Michael Moritz, X.com’s primary investor, arranged a meeting of the two camps in his Sand Hill Road office. Thiel got a ride with Musk in his McLaren. “So, what can this car do?” Thiel asked. “Watch this,” Musk replied, pulling into the fast lane and flooring the accelerator. The rear axle broke and the car spun around, hit an embankment, and flew in the air like a flying saucer. Parts of the body shredded.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

None of the usual humility. Andreessen was known for harshly challenging founders, but this was a different situation: BuzzFeed was hot, and he knew we were meeting with others on Sand Hill Road, that we’d have other offers. BuzzFeed’s traffic and revenue numbers clearly pointed to its becoming a “unicorn”—a billion-dollar-plus company that would make investors rich. Jonah explained to Andreessen across the long table at his office on Sand Hill Road why the company would be worth far more than the $450 million Disney had offered. BuzzFeed, he said, was learning to do what he’d been trying with LilyBoo—quantify human emotion on social media and feed it back to an audience with a combination of art and science, then capture the nearly infinite scale and perpetual motion the new media offered.

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That’s part of why Zuckerberg and his team liked Jonah. And it’s part of why Jonah found himself, two months after a buggy quiz blew up Facebook, explaining to Marc Andreessen why he’d turned down Disney’s money. It was June 23, 2014, just before noon, and I was sitting next to Jonah at the long conference table on Sand Hill Road, home of the famous Silicon Valley office park housing a set of prominent venture capital offices. We were at the Andreessen Horowitz partners meeting, dominated by Andreessen himself, who stood six foot five and had a pointy bald head like an egg (the default avatar on Twitter) and loomed over the table.

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport

adjacent possible, Apple II, bounce rate, business cycle, Byte Shop, Cal Newport, capital controls, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, deal flow, deliberate practice, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge worker, Mason jar, medical residency, new economy, passive income, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, renewable energy credits, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Bolles, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, web application, winner-take-all economy

What this story lacks in pizazz, it makes up in repeatability: There’s nothing mysterious about how Alex Berger broke into Hollywood—he simply understood the value, and difficulty, of becoming good. The Most Desirable Job in Silicon Valley Mike Jackson is a director at the Westly Group, a cleantech venture capital firm on Silicon Valley’s famous Sand Hill Road. To say that Mike has a desirable job is an understatement. “I have a friend who recently had dinner with the dean in charge of a top-tier business school,” he told me. “And at this dinner, the dean said that everyone in their graduating class right now wants to be a cleantech VC.” Mike has experienced this firsthand: He receives dozens of e-mails from business school students asking him about his path.

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This is a classic example of career capital theory in action. To get a job he loved, Alex needed to first become so good that he couldn’t be ignored. MIKE JACKSON (introduced in Rule #2) Current job: Mike is a director at the Westly Group, a cleantech venture capital firm on Silicon Valley’s famous Sand Hill Road. Why he loves what he does: Clean-energy venture capital is a hot field. It offers a way to help the world while at the same time, as Mike admitted, “You make a lot of money.” How he applied the rules described in this book to get this job: Mike didn’t start with a clear vision of what he wanted to do with his life.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

Stanford alumni Jerry Yang and David Filo had already started Yahoo, a wildly popular compilation of searchable Web pages. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Stanford graduate students fiddling with an algorithm that would soon become Google. The world’s leading venture capitalists, investors who make risky bets on unproven technology companies, nearly all had their offices on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, minutes from the Stanford campus. The proximity was no coincidence: the financiers recognized the value of staying close to the people dreaming up investable ideas at Stanford’s venerable computer science and engineering schools. This isn’t to say UCLA’s programs were an engineering backwater.

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“Then I could pay people again,” says Kalanick. And so it continued. In early 2002, Kalanick says he succeeded in attracting the interest of August Capital, which planned to invest $10 million in Red Swoosh. August was the type of firm Kalanick had long coveted. An established, pedigreed firm on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, August was best known for having made an early and extremely lucrative investment in Microsoft. Landing an investment from August would confer legitimacy on the upstart company. But August had two conditions in return for its investment. First, it wanted Red Swoosh to find another, similar firm to coinvest alongside it.

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

Callanish is the name of a Stonehenge-like structure in Scotland that some believe represents an ancient use of binary logic. Noyce established the Callanish Fund with about $1 million. Hwoschinsky rented an office on Sand Hill Road for $70 per month. The office held nothing more than a desk and chair, but it was the Sand Hill Road address that was important. Over the past few years, Sand Hill Road office complexes, a stone’s throw away from a major highway but nestled among lovely trees atop one of the highest hills rimming Silicon Valley, 240 THE MAN BEHIND THE MICROCHIP had become the epicenter of the region’s venture capital industry, which by 1975 included some 150 firms.

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By the mid-1980s, Andy Grove was calling Silicon Valley a “business machine,” implying that the region churned out companies the way that Intel churned out chips.60 Zoning laws, venture capital companies, and course offerings—unrelated as they may seem—were predicated on a common assumption in Silicon Valley: that high-tech entrepreneurship was the best way to assure personal and regional vitality. Venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road, entrepreneurs in their garages or plotting defections in their low-walled cubicles, planners in City Hall, and students picking their way through course offerings made decisions based on a faith that the cycle of success would con- Renewal 255 tinue to perpetuate itself, that the innovations would continue to flow and the markets to develop and grow.

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

Apple’s Tim Cook and others assured him that a deal to buy T-Mobile as well would pass muster with U.S. regulators, he told others. As if to announce his return to the Silicon Valley elite, Son bought one of the most expensive houses ever sold in the country, spending $117 million for a nine-acre estate in Woodside, California, a stone’s throw from the epicenter of venture capital on Sand Hill Road. His ambitions ran further still. He frequently talked about a three-hundred-year growth plan for SoftBank that would make it the world’s top technology company—at the forefront of every major shift. In one slide presentation to his investors, he charted the path over the next three decades for SoftBank and technology.

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CHAPTER 22 The $3 Trillion Triangle One by one, CEOs of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley made the pilgrimage. Some flew to Tokyo, where they waited in a hotel room for hours until they were summoned. For others, the journey was just a short Uber ride to Woodside, California, not far from Sand Hill Road. If they were lucky, the meeting would include a meal. As SoftBank started spending its $100 billion Vision Fund, the startup world took note. Never before had such a massive new spigot of funding opened on the tech sector. It was an amount more than the annual budget of Ireland, more than the value of the vast majority of tech companies, save the largest giants.

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CHAPTER 16: ONE BILLION DOLLARS PER MINUTE estimated at around $17 billion: Katia Savchuk, “Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg Are Biggest Gainers by Far on Forbes List of 100 Richest in Tech,” Forbes, Aug. 10, 2016. He’d trade the number one spot: Dan Alexander, “Here Are the 10 People Who Gained the Most Money in 2016,” Forbes, Dec. 30, 2016. “Life’s too short to think small”: Sarah McBride, Selina Wang, and Peter Elstrom, “Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and the $100 Billion Blitz on Sand Hill Road,” Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 27, 2018. The Qataris were noncommittal: Arash Massoudi, Kana Inagaki, and Leo Lewis, “SoftBank: Inside the ‘Wild West’ $100Bn Fund Shaking Up the Tech World,” Financial Times, June 20, 2018. tended to be made by consensus: Margherita Stancati and Summer Said, “Saudi Prince Shakes Royal Family with Crackdown,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 10, 2017.

Curation Nation by Rosenbaum, Steven

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, future of journalism, independent contractor, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Mary Meeker, means of production, off-the-grid, PageRank, pattern recognition, post-work, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, Yogi Berra

This would solve one problem and create a new one: no longer would public speech be limited to those who could afford a TV broadcast antenna or a printing press. The sheer increase in content made every moment would create an urgent need for both alpha organizers (curators) and curation tools. My first attempt to share this vision was hardly encouraging. I traveled up and down the infamous Sand Hill Road of Silicon Valley with a PowerPoint under my arm. I was out raising money for a curation solution, a technology-enabled human-powered series of filters. Quickly, the best and the brightest in Valley venture funds reviewed the idea and found it out of sync with the future. Curation was a bad word because it suggested humans, and the Valley isn’t about humans; it’s about using microprocessors and heavy iron to replace human behaviors with content-publishing robots.

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And we added a “freemium” solution, so you could start at free and then grow into pro. Today we’ve got more than 83,000 channels on the platform. And amazing choices of channels for the arts, music, theater, computer, and created-by-content curators around the world. There’s a sweet pleasure in being able to look back on those meetings on Sand Hill Road and know that I was right and they were wrong. Computers will win in data processing and e-commerce and lots of things. But for content creation and content curation, humans will win. It will be a man-and-machine partnership for sure. Magnify makes it possible for channel creators to be alerted whenever a video appears on the Web that could be appropriate for your site.

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

We could raise money and probably do it at a really good valuation, and would that be good for the company. It seemed prudent to at least investigate and see what that could mean. And if we could get an adequate valuation, then maybe that would make sense. We could grow faster, we could tackle the enterprise more effectively, we could do marketing. We never went down to Sand Hill Road [in Silicon Valley, where several VC offices are located]. Never. The VCs always came to us. With some perspective now, I see that it was a pretty unusual experience. We decided to take the money because we saw the opportunity and had started seeing competitors. Bitbucket had come up and was doing exactly what we were doing, but trailing behind by a year or so.

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About Hudson’s failed startups that preceded Honey, he said, “Nothing had ever clicked, but to have something consumers clearly loved that was growing organically by word of mouth because people actually loved the product, I knew that there was something there.” Hudson and Ruan continued trying to drum up interest from investors, but they kept hearing no on Sand Hill Road from Silicon Valley investors. “It became clear that VCs weren’t ready to write a check for what we were building,” Hudson said.1 Some investors didn’t like the founders’ background, some didn’t like the fact that they were building a browser extension versus an app, and some didn’t buy into the monetization plan—earning money through affiliate marketing.

The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (And Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor by Andy Kessler

airport security, Andy Kessler, Bear Stearns, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Dean Kamen, digital divide, El Camino Real, employer provided health coverage, full employment, George Gilder, global rebalancing, Law of Accelerating Returns, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, Network effects, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration

Meanwhile, with high blood pressure and high cholesterol, according to the literature, anyway, I needed to get my heart pumping, to flush all that crap out of me, I supposed. From what I know, those looking for a good outdoor cardio workout on the mid-Peninsula south of San Francisco usually do one of two things. The first is get on a bike and do The Loop—a fierce 28-mile climb and descent on Sand Hill Road, Alpine Road and Skyline Boulevard, finishing with a wild downhill dash on curvy La Honda–Woodside Road. If your tires don’t blow out, sending you over a cliff, there is a better than even chance you’ll be run over by a Ferrari 360 Modena taking the same turns faster than you. I thought I’d pass.

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You half expect some New Age tingly music to be piped in, gently mixing with the breeze, and to find lots of cross-legged folks chanting “ommmmm, ommmmmmm.” It’s kinda dull. You could hardly guess that there is maybe $30 billion buried in the surrounding offices just itching to get out and fund something worthy. This is Sand Hill Road, the de facto capital of venture capital. Across the street, the Stanford Linear Accelerator is busy smashing atoms day and night, but here, there is that mellowness that drives entrepreneurs crazy. So maybe this wasn’t the best place to meet with Dr. Gary Glazer, but he insisted, maybe hoping that some of his excitement would rub off on someone around here, or at least his view on where medicine was going could gently mix in the breeze with all the money around here and something, anything might happen.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Y Combinator would be not your standard startup incubator. It would start tiny, intended to help a handful of little companies get their legal framework set up, get a product established, and then introduce the founders to bigger, real investors. It would focus on very, very early-stage companies, typically ignored by Sand Hill Road’s investment firms, giving them just $6,000 per founder for the summer—enough for rent and pizza, not enough to bloat them or bog them down. It would be a friend and an inspiration, allowing the founders autonomy all week, not chaining them to desks. The founders would gather each Tuesday for a supportive social dinnertime meet-up session.

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The tour wrapped in Lexington, Kentucky, where team Reddit hosted a big event along with their buddy Drew Curtis, the founder of the weird-news aggregation website Fark. Thanks to this massive road trip, Ohanian had collected inspiring stories of the Internet, and entrepreneurship, having changed the lives of individuals who never graduated from an Ivy League school nor pitched an investor on Sand Hill Road. Now he had another idea: a book. He’d taken it to literary agents, and a year after the tour, he would publish a hardcover book about the democratizing force of the World Wide Web, and how to start a startup, all inspired by his own story of founding Reddit. * * * A couple years earlier, a junior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the world’s largest and most established venture capital firms, which had backed 850 startups with hundreds of millions in funding, had reached out to Wong.

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After she’d left Kleiner, she began formally advising him on transforming Reddit into a profitable company. She was one of several experienced executives whom Wong brought on initially as contractors. Members of the Reddit team were still irked that Wong had been hired without their consent; they saw Pao, with her Harvard degrees and her Sand Hill Road pedigree, as extremely buttoned-up and overly professional. To them she wasn’t a real Redditor, she was a poseur. Pao read the employees as passionate—they were youthfully enthusiastic, but wildly stubborn. They seemed simply unwilling to change the way they’d been doing things. This was a team that had exerted so much of their energy putting out fires that it seemed they’d lost the bigger picture: They were unable to focus their attention on something new, such as building new products.

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

I prefer to say that there are a bunch of nobodies in the deal.” I should have been offended at that, but oddly I wasn’t. This was white-guy trash talk—you gotta take it to be able to dish it out. Plus, we were struggling and not destined to be top-tier venture capitalists with an A-list of portfolio companies and fancy offices on Sand Hill Road. But you don’t have to be a so-called player to make money in Silicon Valley, just smart enough to find a few good companies and avoid the fashionable ones. Like public investors, VCs are notorious momentum investors—each one often investing in two or three companies in the same market, hoping something works.

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We met with a company there yesterday—passing the bag lady sitting on a bench at the bus stop in front of our building. 152 Running Money Palo Alto is a strange town. Not much is over two stories tall, so it feels like a middle-American town: drugstore, stationery store, Chinese restaurant. Except there are subtle clues that something is different. Stanford University is next door. Sand Hill Road, home to almost every venture capital firm, is a few miles away. A typical walk down the block finds a beat-up old Volkswagen Beetle parked behind a brand-new Ferrari F355. Next to a frozen yogurt store is a bike shop with selections that start at $1,299. There is money infused in the sinews of Palo Alto, although the place is by no means glitzy.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

And then there is Sand Hill Road, which slides down the western edge of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. On one side of the road is Stanford’s Linear Accelerator, used for advanced nuclear experiments. On the other, partly hidden by leafy trees, is a series of mostly three- or four-story buildings that discreetly descend the hillside. The name Sand Hill may not be as widely resonant as those other streets, but to those who do know it, Sand Hill Road is synonymous with Silicon Valley and the innovation and technology that are changing the world. For it is on Sand Hill Road that are headquartered many VCs—venture capitalists—that are the ignition switch for new business formation, formerly mainly for Silicon Valley but now for the whole world.

…

Out of which came Hewlett-Packard, eventually HP, the largest computer company in the world.12 From Terman’s vision emerged the distinctive and highly interconnected ecosystem of Silicon Valley that encompasses Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley; the venture capitalists of Sand Hill Road and University Avenue and San Francisco; and the scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs who surround them. One of the first venture capital firms that shaped the Silicon Valley system was Kleiner Perkins (later Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), which was founded in 1972. The original partners were Eugene Kleiner, who had fled Vienna with his family to escape the Nazis and later joined an early Silicon Valley start-up, and Tom Perkins, an MIT engineering and Harvard Business School graduate and a Hewlett-Packard veteran, who had been a student in Georges Doriot’s Manufacturing class at the Harvard Business School.

…

They should be analyzed and assessed in terms of impact and scale and cost-benefit analysis, assuring access to energy, with appropriate environmental safeguards. The whole sweep of Carnot’s great revolution—from the steam engine start-up of James Watt in the eighteenth century and the oil start-up of Colonel Edwin Drake in the nineteenth century to the latest cleantech start-ups to be spun out of Sand Hill Road and whatever is currently bubbling in the lab—demonstrates that the advances of energy are the result of innovation and conviction. Developing new knowledge and “applying science” come with a price tag. But without sustained long-term support for the entire innovation chain, the world will pay a much larger price.

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

We are children of the Enlightenment, after all, so we want to know what goes on inside the machines. We want them, at least, to be accountable to us. This tension is one reason why places such as Silicon Valley often leave a visitor with an uneasy feeling. Go drive along the anodyne strip of asphalt that runs in front of Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, home of the greatest venture capital funds of our age. Inside those offices, revolutions are dreamed up, debated, and funded. You might expect to see, as a result, something as magnificent as the Vatican for these high priests of technology. But what you pass in that two-mile strip resembles nothing so much as a row of mildly prosperous dental practices.

…

What the Seventh Sense reveals as it feels our new power arrangements is gates. Everywhere. The world is not one big, flat equally connected topology. It is filled with closed and gated worlds. Facebook. Bitcoin users. Doctors with privileged access to genetic databases. Members of the New Caste. Those revolutionary investors disguised as dentists’ offices on Sand Hill Road. These are all are gated, in-or-out worlds. Look around and see how many gates enclose you or your family or your company. The Internet. The FTSE 100. Your Apple or Android operating system. In our connected age, the act of drawing lines between points is also an act of drawing a line around those points.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

No one had yet tried to claim that real estate might be subject to network effects or that you could build a moat in a business where even the largest players control only a fraction of a percentage of the market. But Adam and Miguel flew to San Francisco armed with their new slogan and a pitch deck to make their case at Benchmark headquarters on Sand Hill Road, the heart of Silicon Valley’s venture capital world. This was a more intimidating experience than pitching Joel Schreiber. Adam and Miguel stood at the head of a conference room table watching nervously as Gurley sat at the opposite end, flipping through the business model they had been working off of for the past year.

…

What if WeWork could break that mold? A global brand known for providing the kinds of offices that people actually wanted to work in had huge potential alongside anonymous building operators like Brookfield and Vornado. Two percent of the market could make Amazon’s revenues look like a pittance. Investors from Wall Street to Sand Hill Road were also primed to hope. The post-recession era ushered in an age of hypergrowth, where one well-timed hit could make a career. Low interest rates enabled speculative investors to fund risky bets that could produce outsize returns. Individual investors were putting more of their money into index funds, which broadly tracked the economy, leaving mutual fund managers seeking alternatives to prove they could beat a market that was already booming.

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum by Camila Russo

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, altcoin, always be closing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asian financial crisis, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Cody Wilson, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, East Village, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hacker house, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, mobile money, new economy, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Turing complete, Two Sigma, Uber for X, Vitalik Buterin

There was no shortage of people wanting to be a part of it, and Vitalik was happy to bring everyone in. Vitalik wasn’t thinking about impressing VCs. He wasn’t thinking about company equity, either. In this brave new world of token sales, Ethereum could ditch startups’ mandatory trek to Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road. Ethereum didn’t need VC money because they could access investors from all over the world without them. Vitalik didn’t want VC money because, to him, Ethereum should be free and open for anyone to use, not owned by anyone. Post-Miami, the team’s priority was deciding where to set up either a company or a foundation.

…

After college, they wanted to try their own hand at running a company, and between 2005 and 2011 they, together with other cofounders, built two startups geared toward smartphone games, Mytopia and Particle Code, and sold them both. After that, Galia worked as an entrepreneur in residence at Trinity Ventures, one of the oldest VC firms in Sand Hill Road, and became a venture partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. In 2012 Galia moved to Tel Aviv to be a bridge for Founders Fund and the technology that was coming out of Israel. There she discovered Bitcoin and how developers were starting to think about building different layers and applications on top of it.

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

And still three people have died from crashes stemming from the software, with at least ten other nonfatal crashes also under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.52 Still, it’s no coincidence that, alongside a disregard for local laws, the vast majority of wealth created over the last few decades has been concentrated in the tech industry, starting with the rise of Silicon Valley venture capital that set the stage for today’s obscene IPOs. These days venture capital is centered around Sand Hill Road, the main thoroughfare connecting Palo Alto and Menlo Park, which might as well be paved in gold. These investment groups act as a sort of way station for big money with no particular place to be, like pension funds, endowments, and trust funds, even as economic inequality in the US continues to rise to untenable levels.

…

“These guys are very incentivized to deploy large amounts of capital, and the faster they can get it out the door and the faster they can mark it up on paper, the easier it is for them to go raise their next round. And a lot of them are charging three and thirty, and when you think about 3 percent on a billion-dollar fund, that’s $30 million a year for a group of twenty-five, thirty people on Sand Hill Road. They’re complicit because they don’t want to do hard work and blow up any of their investments. Who wants to be the VC firm that calls bullshit on Theranos? You’re not incentivized to. The incentivization is to get this thing where it’s ready to go public as fast as possible. Take it public and exit.”

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

WARNING: Do not try this at home until you have mastered the math that makes it possible. CHAPTER 9 INNOVATION ACCOUNTING In the early days of IMVU, the company I co-founded in 2004, we were attempting to raise money from some of the top venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. As we traveled up and down Sand Hill Road, we brought a pitch deck that summarized our progress to date. It included a few of the graphs I mentioned back in Chapter 3, when I told the story about how we were embarrassed by our very small numbers in spite of the fact that they showed clear progress, but we still earned the trust and investments of the VCs who not only understood our thinking as a team (it’s all about the team) but also knew how to read into those tiny numbers in a more sophisticated way.

…

Few of the policy makers I’ve been privileged to meet—both politicians and civil servants alike—think of themselves as entrepreneurs; I hope those who have read the preceding chapters will challenge this self-assessment. One recurring theme of this book has been the importance of seeing entrepreneurship as a tool for developing business ecosystems. Within a company, this means setting up structures and incentives to grow the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders. On Sand Hill Road, this means building a community of investing professionals who can identify and mentor the next generation of technology startup founders. In the preceding pages, I’ve argued that these two ecosystems are not as different as they seem. Now I’d like to add one more ecosystem to the mix: that of public policy.

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

It was excellent training for a path that would ultimately lead Tesler directly to the modern personal computer. Lying west of Stanford are the Santa Cruz Mountains, which are frequently shrouded in fog and covered with a redwood forest that, though spotty, still wanders down to the coast in places. To reach the ocean, it was necessary only to drive past the university out Sand Hill Road to La Honda Road, a winding artery that makes its way from the elite Woodside mansions into a more rustic and rugged world, peopled by a mix of urban refugees thrown together with a rural community of artists, farmers, and bohemians. Anyone driving to the coast in August 1966 would have been surprised to see a large banner reading “Welcome Beatles!”

…

In fact, the idea that the codes were intellectual property was actually laughable to the experimenters. The instructions were simply necessary to imbue the machines with life. Eventually, the Homebrew meetings settled at the Stanford Linear Accelerator auditorium, located west of the university along Sand Hill Road, where at roughly the same time Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists were beginning to take up residence. The meetings just grew and grew until routinely as many as four hundred people showed up for each one. For the first six meetings, Fred Moore sat up front, took notes, and afterward sent out the club newsletter.

That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea by Marc Randolph

Airbnb, Apollo 13, crowdsourcing, digital rights, high net worth, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, late fees, loose coupling, Mason jar, pets.com, recommendation engine, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech worker, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, Travis Kalanick

Probably the most notable piece of décor—and the place is packed to the gills with stuff—is a motorless car suspended from the ceiling. Remember Soap Box Derby? Home-built wooden cars that you roll down a hill to race, in Boy Scouts? Well, consider this Silicon Valley’s version. Every year, there was a motorless car race on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, with multimillion-dollar VC firms fighting for bragging rights. Instead of wooden cars, these were spaceships on wheels. Their sponsors had sought out cutting-edge, hi-tech, carbon-fiber composite materials. They had used their connections to get time in the Lockheed Martin wind tunnels.

…

We weren’t approaching friends and family this time. We were approaching professional investors. Real venture capitalists. And they would need more than a sincere look communicating how hungry I was. They needed data. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Flash-forward to my Volvo station wagon idling in a parking space in front of the Sand Hill Road offices of Institutional Venture Partners, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm. In just twenty minutes, we will be ushered into an opulent conference room, where we’ll make the case for why IVP should invest in us. We’re asking for $4 million. I’m freaking out, and even Reed, who normally isn’t one to show emotion, is visibly concerned.

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

Remnants of a hippie counterculture synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley. In some circles the small city—population near 70,000, as of this writing—has acquired the mythical reputation of a postmodern El Dorado, where money flows by the billions from the investors on Sand Hill Road to hundreds of garages where scrappy coders are changing the way we do everything, from driving around to eating food. On per-capita terms, the Valley ranks with the planet’s wealthiest spots: Qatar, Macao, Luxembourg. A few people seem convinced that Palo Alto is in fact the center of the world.

…

The huge capital-gains tax cut—more than 50 percent—and pension-investment deregulation helped turn venture capital from something small groups of well-connected buddies did in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Bay Area into a national growth strategy. Money raced from all over the world to Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road, capital’s new capital, and into the hundreds of venture funds springing up like apricot trees. Capital in the funds quadrupled in the early 1980s, from $1 billion at the close of the 1970s to $4 billion in 1983.17 With Hoover goons at the national levers, Silicon Valley capitalism came into its own.

…

Dolores’s mother, Ramona Marine, was, too, and she was buried at Yuki Kutsuimi Šaatoš Inūxw, the Ohlone Indian cemetery, in 1921.9 These ancestral burial grounds were located under and around Leland’s stock farm, birthplace of the Palo Alto System. At the time of Ramona Marine Sanchez’s death, the land was owned by Stanford University, and Herbert Hoover was already on his way to the executive branch. Now the burial grounds cross the edge of campus, where the school is bordered by Sand Hill Road, the district that houses the highest concentration of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and (based on pure conjecture) one of the highest concentrations of capital of any kind in world history.ii As you’ve seen, that sounds like a longer time than it is. When we talk about indigenous ancestors in California whose resting places have been displaced and disturbed by Leland Stanford’s capitalist eugenics project, we can do so in the sense of living people’s proximate relatives.

Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent by Joel Spolsky

AOL-Time Warner, Build a better mousetrap, David Heinemeier Hansson, functional programming, knowledge worker, linear programming, no silver bullet, nuclear winter, off-by-one error, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, Superbowl ad, the scientific method, type inference, unpaid internship

As soon as your team consists of more than one person, you’re going to have different people with different agendas. They want different things than you want. If you’re a startup founder, you might want to make a lot of money quickly so you can retire early and spend the next couple of decades going to conferences for women bloggers. So you might spend most of your time driving around Sand Hill Road talking to VCs who might buy the company and flip it to Yahoo!. But Janice the Programmer, one of your employees, doesn’t care about selling out to Yahoo!, because she’s not going to make any money that way. What she cares about is writing code in the latest coolest new programming language, because it’s fun to learn a new thing.

With a Little Help by Cory Efram Doctorow, Jonathan Coulton, Russell Galen

autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, death of newspapers, don't be evil, game design, Google Earth, high net worth, lifelogging, lolcat, margin call, Mark Shuttleworth, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, sensible shoes, skunkworks, Skype, traffic fines, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban planning, Y2K

Time to think was critical to her brand of functional sculpture, and reflection was the scarcest commodity of all in 2027. 506 Which is why she was hoping that the venture capitalist would just leave her alone. He wasn't a paying customer, he wasn't a fellow artist -- he wanted to buy her, and he was thirty years too late. 507 "You know, I pitched you guys in 1999. On Sand Hill Road. One of the founding partners. Kleiner, I think. The guy ate a salad all through my slide-deck. When I was done, he wiped his mouth, looked over my shoulder, and told me he didn't think I'd scale. That was it. He didn't even pick up my business card. When I looked back as I was going out the door, I saw him sweep it into the trash with the wrapper from his sandwich." 508 The VC -- young, with the waxy, sweaty look of someone who ate a lot of GM yogurt to try to patch his biochemistry -- shook his head.

…

509 Gretl tossed her tablet with a crash on top of an overflowing barrel of primo plastics and wiped her hands on the cunningly stitched dress quilted from back pockets of vintage bootleg Levis, their frayed, misspelled red tags on proud display. "Son, that was 1999. Within a year, VCs weren't writing term-sheets. They were doing cram-downs on anything halfway decent in their portfolios, forcing out the founders, trying to flip them before the market cratered. But it wasn't that pitch that soured me on Sand Hill Road --" 510 "We're in Inglewood." 511 "Yes, you said." What the hell, it was Wednesday and she had all her week's commissions done already. The VC was at least pretty, if you liked them young. He had good teeth -- they all had good teeth now -- and a cute bump in the bridge of his nose that spoke of a little bit of brawling before his B-school days.

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

The previous spring Jobs had acquired Siri, a tiny developer of a natural language software application that was designed to act as a virtual assistant, in effect a software assistant, on the iPhone. The acquisition had drawn a great deal of attention in Silicon Valley. Apple acquisitions, particularly large ones, are extremely rare. When word circulated that the firm had been acquired, possibly for more than $200 million, it sent shock waves up and down Sand Hill Road and within the burgeoning “app economy” that the iPhone had spawned. After Apple acquired Siri, the program was immediately pulled from the App Store, the iPhone service through which programs were screened and sold, and the small team of programmers who had designed Siri vanished back into “stealth mode” inside the Cupertino campus.

…

In the past, this had been an onerous chore for Gruber, since it required countless visits to venture capitalists who were often uninterested, arrogant, or both. This time their connection to SRI opened the doors to the Valley’s blue-chip venture firms. Dag Kittlaus was a master showman, and on their tour of the venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road, he developed a witty and charming pitch. He would take Cheyer and Gruber in tow to each fund-raising meeting. The men would then be escorted into a conference room and after they introduced themselves, Kittlaus innocently asked the VCs, “Hey, do any of you have one of those newfangled smartphones?”

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

Jim Clark, another billionaire who liked fast things, caught wind of the proposal and told a friend that he needed to rush over to the local Ferrari dealership to buy something that could compete. Musk had joined the big boys’ club. “Elon was super-excited about all of this,” said George Zachary, a venture capitalist and close friend of Musk’s. “He showed me the correspondence with Larry.” The next year, while driving down Sand Hill Road to meet with an investor, Musk turned to a friend in the car and said, “Watch this.” He floored the car, did a lane change, spun out, and hit an embankment, which started the car spinning in midair like a Frisbee. The windows and wheels were blown to smithereens, and the body of the car damaged.

…

After talking to a number of people in the car dealership business, the Tesla team decided to avoid selling their cars through partners and sell direct. With these basics of a plan in place, the three men went hunting for some venture capital funding in January 2004. To make things feel more real for the investors, the Tesla founders borrowed a tzero from AC Propulsion and drove it to the venture capital corridor of Sand Hill Road. The car accelerated faster than a Ferrari, and this translated into visceral excitement for the investors. The downside, though, was that venture capitalists are not a terribly imaginative bunch, and they struggled to see past the crappy plastic finish of this glorified kit car. The only venture capitalists that bit were Compass Technology Partners and SDL Ventures, and they didn’t sound altogether thrilled.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

The owners were friends: Susan Wojcicki, an engineer at Intel, and her husband Dennis Troper, a product manager at a tech company. The newly constituted Google had found its way to them because Sergey had dated Susan’s roommate at Stanford Business School. The house was not located in the upscale sections of Menlo Park, near the Sand Hill Road offices made famous by the venture capitalists whose offices are there, or in nearby Atherton, where many of these venture capitalists live and in 2008 an acre of land could sell for $3 million. Rather, it was on a dreary flag lot at 232 Santa Margarita Avenue. A concrete driveway led up to the garage, where a whiteboard had been attached with the legend, “Google Worldwide Headquarters.”

…

They set out to recruit two of the most prominent VC firms in the Valley, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, whose senior partner John Doerr was a trained engineer who had helped fund such start-ups as Amazon, Netscape, and AOL, and Sequoia Capital, where Oxford-educated former Time magazine reporter Michael Moritz was a partner and an early backer of Yahoo and PayPal. Doerr remembers the meeting vividly. They met in the conference room next to his glassed office on Sand Hill Road. Page and Brin made a brief PowerPoint presentation to establish the most telling facts: by the end of 1998 they had indexed twenty-six million Web pages and were now doing half a million searches a day. Doerr was impressed. Instead of a long-winded explanation of their mission, Page and Brin made a high-concept pitch consisting of eight words: “We deliver the world’s information in one click.”

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

As had been the case when Jobs and Steve “Woz” Wozniak imagined the first Apple computer in their garage, the next great revolution in computing could come from anywhere, not just big publishers like Microsoft, Adobe—or even Apple. Hundreds of millions of dollars began to flow outward across San Francisco from the dozens of VC firms that lined the well-known stretch of Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road. Armchair computer enthusiasts began to look at California with riches in their eyes. Venture funds began throwing money at twentysomethings, hoping to stumble into funding the next killer app. Doerr called it “the appification of the economy,” an era beyond the web and desktop that focused on mobility and independent creation, afforded by all the possibilities the iPhone had to offer.

…

Kalanick said, noting the steps his iPhone pedometer had tracked across the city. Levandowski would eventually create a separate company, Otto, right after leaving Google, as if he were interested in pursuing his own trucking startup. Then he would take venture investment meetings up and down Sand Hill Road—the famed home of top-tier Silicon Valley venture capitalists, including Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins—to drum up money for the endeavor. But he would shrug those meetings off, opting instead to raise no outside capital. (Since they were operating independently mostly for appearance’s sake, it made no sense to fork over equity to outside investors.)

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Decades before the western exit from campus led to the roost of Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists and the world’s most expensive real estate, Sand Hill Road offered the quickest route from Stanford to the Pacific Ocean and the California coast. It was a gateway to the fog-shrouded Santa Cruz Mountains and a way out through La Honda and the ribbon of Highway 1 running along the luminescent coastline down to Big Sur and Slates Hot Springs. This was a California that offered everything Brand hadn’t found in midwestern Illinois or even at Higgins Lake. Sand Hill Road became his get-out-of-jail pass. He first discovered Big Sur at an IIR foreign policy retreat held at Slates Hot Springs (now more commonly known simply as Big Sur Hot Springs).

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Venture capitalist John Doerr (2006 net worth: $1 billion) describes the Valley as the site responsible for the “greatest legal accumulation of wealth in the history of the planet.” Aside from its stunning scenery, the Valley does not advertise its riches. With the country’s top venture-capital firms and its thriving high-tech companies, Sand Hill Road, the Valley’s main strip, is a sort of New Economy version of Wall Street. The four-lane highway runs through a hilly landscape from the town of Menlo Park past the mission-style buildings of Stanford University’s campus to the edge of Palo Alto. There are no iconic financial towers dominating the surrounding landscape; nor are there legions of briefcase-toting workers rushing by.

…

Sergey Brin Larry Page August 1, 1973 December 1,1972 Google 2004 The Google guys weren’t rich enough to make the Forbes list when they were 30, but at 31 and 32, respectively, they were each worth $4 billion. In 2006, Brin, 33, and Page, 34, were each worth $14.1 billion. * * * Before long, everyone at Stanford was Googling. And it was not much longer before the venture capitalists, many of whom were headquartered just a few miles up the road from Stanford on Sand Hill Road, came knocking with proposals in hand. One of them, Vinod Khosla50 of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, showed up with an offer from Excite, a company in which he was invested, to buy Google for $750,000. But Brin and Page held out for $1.6 million, and the deal fell through. In 1998, however, they got $100,00051 in start-up capital from another Silicon Valley investor, Andreas von Bechtolsheim, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, and moved their company from Brin’s dorm room into a bedroom that they rented in a friend’s house.

Bleeding Edge: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon

addicted to oil, AltaVista, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Burning Man, carried interest, deal flow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, eternal september, false flag, fixed-gear, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, index card, invisible hand, jitney, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, margin call, messenger bag, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, Y2K

Kept running into each other within a tight radius of Margaret Jacks Hall, which in that day housed the Computer Science department and was affectionately known as Marginal Hacks. They primal-screamed their way together through one finals week after another, and by the time they graduated, they’d already put in weeks of pilgrimage up and down Sand Hill Road, pitching to the venture-capital firms which lined that soon-to-be legendary thoroughfare, arguing recreationally, trembling in performance anxiety, or, resolved to be Zenlike, just sitting in the traffic jams typical of that era, admiring the vegetation. One day they took a wrong turn and wound up caught in the annual Sand Hill soapbox derby.

…

They thought what they needed was a grim unforgiving workplace where the summer actually ended once in a while and discipline was a given daily condition. By the time they found out the truth, that the Alley was as much of a nut ward as the Valley, it was too late to go back. Having managed to score not only seed and angel money but also a series-A round from the venerable Sand Hill Road firm of Voorhees, Krueger, the boys, like American greenhorns of a century ago venturing into the history-haunted Old World, lost no time back east in paying the necessary calls, setting up shop around early ’97 in a couple of rooms sublet from a Website developer who welcomed the cash, down in the then still enchanted country between the Flatiron Building and the East Village.

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

Bertelsmann bought Napster out of the ensuing bankruptcy, a pattern that was followed by other music giants, like Universal, who slayed MP3.com in the courts, then brought home the corpse on the cheap, running it as an internal project. After that, the record companies had a field day: practically every venture-funded P2P company went down, and millions of dollars were funneled from the tech venture capital firms to Sand Hill Road to the RIAA's members, using P2P companies and the courts as conduits. But the record companies weren't ready to replace these services with equally compelling alternatives. Instead, they fielded inferior replacements like PressPlay, with limited catalog, high prices, and anti-copying technology (digital rights management, or DRM) that alienated users by the millions by treating them like crooks instead of customers.

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, cloud computing, El Camino Real, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PalmPilot, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple

Venture firms often have “entrepreneurs in residence,” bright, usually young, technologists who work at the firms while they noodle over their next big idea. Why not have an executive in residence, John thought, someone who was seasoned in operations and strategy, to help the firm’s startups through the ups and downs of growth (or lack thereof)? Bill agreed and settled into life on Sand Hill Road. THE GOOGLE COACH One day in 2001 a local startup, run by a couple of brash kids from Stanford, decided to bring in a “professional” CEO: Eric Schmidt. Eric built the software operations at Sun Microsystems and served as CEO and chairman at Novell. John Doerr advised Eric that he needed Bill Campbell as his coach.

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

(I also received “Most Likely to Be U.S. President,” but who cares about that?) CHAPTER 5.0 First Meeting with a VC (It’s All About the Network) My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can. RALPH WALDO EMERSON For entrepreneurs, getting a meeting with a venture capitalist on the fabled Sand Hill Road, which runs through Menlo Park, and along the northern edge of the Stanford University campus, is a worthy accomplishment. If you don’t know a VC personally, it can take dozens of calls and emails to secure a meeting with someone who could fund your start-up. And dozens of calls and emails are no guarantee of an audience.

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms by Jeffrey Bussgang

business cycle, business process, carried interest, deal flow, digital map, discounted cash flows, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pets.com, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds

After graduating from Harvard Business School, John went to work for Intel in 1974, just as the company was bringing out the 8080 Microprocessor (essentially the first microchip). He went on to become an amazingly successful VC, investing at an early stage in Amazon, Google, Sun, and Intuit, among others. I was excited to meet this Silicon Valley legend. It was not my first time visiting the nondescript low-rise office buildings on famous Sand Hill Road in the heart of Silicon Valley, but it was my first time doing it with hat in hand, trying to raise money and delivering the pitch. When we arrived, the receptionist and support staff made us feel at home offering cold drinks, fresh fruit, magazines, and newspapers—all with warm smiles and welcoming words.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

When the two men got to Palo Alto in June, they ran into Parker, who was essentially homeless, having been thrown out of his latest company, Plaxo, an online address-book application. It is a tribute to Zuckerberg’s naive trust that he invited Parker to live in the house he and Moskovitz had rented. Parker promised to teach them about the shark tank known as Sand Hill Road—the center of the Valley’s venture capital business. In that role he did two important things. First, he kept Zuckerberg centered on Facebook, even though the young coder was spending a lot of time writing another program called Wirehog, which was essentially a version of Napster. Parker convinced him that it would be nothing but trouble in the form of lawsuits from the content community.

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win by Chris Kuenne, John Danner

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset light, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, business climate, business logic, call centre, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, pattern recognition, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sugar pill, super pumped, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, work culture , zero-sum game

Product narcissism is the equivalent of the innovator’s dilemma for startups and can lead some Drivers to be one-hit wonders.3 A tendency to overreach with investors and customers: One of the Drivers we interviewed told us, “I will go to the end of the earth to get the money I need on the terms I deserve. I’ve told plenty of people on Sand Hill Road [the favored address for many Silicon Valley VCs] to f— off.” Your early market momentum can lead to an arrogance with investors—arrogance that can push your own valuation expectation so far above market you may not get the funding you need to continue to realize your dream of scale. Likewise, as growth and scale require expanding your customer base from tolerant and inventive innovators and early adopters to later-stage customers, you may have a hard time putting up with customers who aren’t as imaginative but who are far more demanding on pedestrian issues that may not inspire you.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

Growth across the entire industry was flat or down—the 2001 crash wiped out a decade of gains, and there was talk of a “Software Nuclear Winter.” Multibillion-dollar companies like Siebel were being acquired or went out of business. Venture capitalists refused to fund new software start-ups. Tumbleweeds were rolling down Sand Hill Road (metaphorically, anyway). Wall Street declared that the industry had permanently matured and that firms should start paying out dividends like (gasp!) regular old utilities. Financial analysts argued that the software industry should be viewed as an area of “discretionary” spending that businesses would seek to minimize if the economy took another southward turn.

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

Before long, the venture capital world began pouring money into an emerging crypto industry already awash in cash. For the VCs, bets on crypto were a hedge of sorts. If Balaji was right, the forthcoming token economy was poised to upend the Valley’s longtime role as kingmaker of the startup scene. Better then to try and get an inside track on the emerging industry that could make Sand Hill Road—the famous strip of Palo Alto and Menlo Park that houses the most prestigious venture capital offices—irrelevant. Americans were glomming onto the growing crypto mania but it was nothing compared to what was happening across the Pacific. In South Korea, investing in crypto became as common as buying mutual funds, and by late 2017, one-third of the country’s workers owned some sort of digital currency.

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

So they create consortiums among themselves swapping information at the monthly WAVC meetings or in the Sun Deck cafeteria at 3000 Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, the home of more than a dozen venture capital firms and the center of the business on the West Coast. Nevertheless, “you can’t really call us a cabal because sometimes we work together and sometimes we compete,” says Thomas Perkins, Kleiner Perkins’s general partner. In the eighties, the venture capital industry has changed, a victim of its own success. Though the old fraternal feelings survive on Sand Hill Road, the venture capital “family” of a decade ago is becoming a memory. There were a number of reasons for this change, among them the new investment laws adopted after the 1974 recession, which made venture capital more appealing to outsiders.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Pérez

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, distributed generation, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, full employment, Hyman Minsky, informal economy, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, new economy, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, post-industrial society, profit motive, railway mania, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, technological determinism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

Among the proposals signaling the direction of change, see Chris Freeman’s (2001b) brief and powerful essay ‘If I ruled the world,’ Richard Jolly’s (2002) measures to confront inequality, the Sagasti and Bezanson report on Global Public Goods, Radosevic (1999) and Ostry (1992) on harmonizing global regulation of foreign investment and the reports of the UNU-WIDER Research Programme (http://www.wider.unu) to help overcome world poverty. Ambitious proposals to reform the global financial and trade institutions are George Soros (2002) and Stiglitz (1992:1997 and 2002). Bibliography 173 Bibliography Abraham, Paul and Daniels, Caroline (2001), ‘A Desert Wind Blows Over Sand Hill Road’, Financial Times, IT Review, October 3, p. 1. Abramovitz, Moses (1986), ‘Catching Up, Forging Ahead and Falling Behind’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 46, pp. 385–406. Aglietta, Michel (1976:1979), A Theory of Capitalist Regulation, London: New Left Books. Altshuler, Alan, Anderson, Martin, Jones, Daniel, Roos, Daniel and Womack, James (1984), The Future of the Automobile, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wall Street Meat by Andy Kessler

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, automated trading system, banking crisis, Bob Noyce, George Gilder, index fund, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Pepto Bismol, pets.com, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, undersea cable, Y2K

Not five years earlier, Morgan Stanley had four technology 187 Wall Street Meat analysts with Frank Quattrone and a small crew as technology investment bankers. Now they had over fifty analysts covering every technology industry segment, including “periph-reeals,” and over one hundred investment bankers in their Sand Hill Road office in Menlo Park, California, alone. I struggled with what made this whole system tick. I had friends who had growth funds with $10 billion, $20 billion, even $40 billion in assets. They did absolutely no fundamental research. No Hank Hermann-like Piranha tactics to figure out what analysts were saying and how the market would react to the next piece of news.

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Airbnb, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Burning Man, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, context collapse, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, full employment, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, Minecraft, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Port of Oakland, Results Only Work Environment, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Snapchat, source of truth, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, union organizing, white flight, Works Progress Administration

* * * — GIVEN MY INSISTENCE on attending to the local and present, it’s important that this book is rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I grew up and where I currently live. This place is known for two things: technology companies and natural splendor. Here, you can drive directly west from venture-capitalist offices on Sand Hill Road to a redwood forest overlooking the sea, or walk out of the Facebook campus into a salt marsh full of shorebirds. When I was growing up in Cupertino, my mom would sometimes take me to her office at Hewlett-Packard, where I once tried on a very early version of a VR headset. To be sure, I spent a lot of time inside on the computer.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

Nowhere is this more obvious than in San Francisco, where some of the hottest tech start-ups are forgoing Silicon Valley for the city itself. Twitter, Zynga, Airbnb, Dropbox, Uber, Pinterest, and Yelp are among those that have opted to build new headquarters in San Franciscos proper instead of the stretch of suburbs that make up the Bay Area peninsula. Several venture capital firms, too, longtime fixtures of Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road, have recently announced plans to either relocate or open satellite offices in San Francisco. In the mornings, the traffic on the 101, the main commuting freeway out of San Francisco toward the Valley, is now heavier heading out of the city than the reverse. One of the more interesting company relocations these days is happening in Las Vegas, where Zappos, the online shoe giant, is getting ready to move from a cookie-cutter suburban office park off a highway interchange in Henderson, Nevada, to a brand-new headquarters in Las Vegas’s old city hall.

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

The word “disruption” proliferated, and everything was ripe for or vulnerable to it: sheet music, tuxedo rentals, home cooking, home buying, wedding planning, banking, shaving, credit lines, dry cleaning, the rhythm method. A website that allowed people to rent out their unused driveways raised four million dollars from elite firms on Sand Hill Road. A website taking on the kennel market—a pet-sitting and dog-walking app that disrupted neighborhood twelve-year-olds—raised ten million. An app for coupon-clipping enabled an untold number of bored and curious urbanites to pay for services they never knew they needed, and for a while people were mainlining antiwrinkle toxins, taking trapeze lessons, and bleaching their assholes, just because they could do it at a discount.

Genentech The Beginnings of Biotech (Synthesis) -University Of Chicago Press (2011) by Sally Smith Hughes

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, barriers to entry, creative destruction, full employment, industrial research laboratory, invention of the wheel, Joseph Schumpeter, mass immigration, Menlo Park, power law, prudent man rule, Recombinant DNA, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley

Serving on the board of the failing company, he met Eugene Kleiner, who with Thomas Perkins in 1972 had founded Kleiner & Perkins, a venture capital partnership with offices in San Francisco.8 Taking a measure of Swanson, Kleiner was impressed, according to Perkins, with the young man’s ability “to think straight and get things done.” 9 When Swanson decided to leave Citibank and seek a new position, Kleiner recommended him to Perkins to fi ll a vacancy at the partnership. Perkins, a former Hewlett-Packard engineer with a Harvard MBA, respected Kleiner’s ability to assess individual character and motivation. Late in 1974 Swanson joined Kleiner & Perkins as a junior partner in its Menlo Park office on Sand Hill Road. He was twenty-six. One of Swanson’s assignments was to monitor the partnership’s substantial investment in Cetus Corporation, the company about to acquire Stan Cohen as scientific adviser.10 Kleiner and Perkins worried that Cetus was not focused on product development and feared their equity stake was turning sour.

The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Exploited the System by Philip Augar

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, deal flow, equity risk premium, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, information retrieval, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, new economy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk free rate, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, systematic bias, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, yield curve

Hard-bitten private equity firms have a hand in most IPOs and like other sellers, such as corporations spinning off divisions or governments privatizing companies, are regular users of the capital markets and should be able to use their experience and muscle to drive a hard bargain. But although a few in San Francisco’s Sand Hill Road venture capital community grumbled during the bubble, on the whole issuers were as quiescent about the money left on the table as they were about the 7 per cent spread. Academics use prospect theory to explain why vendors are prepared to accept underpricing. People and organizations on the point of selling something for tens, hundreds even thousands of million dollars appear reluctant to jeopardize the whole process by upsetting the advisers on price.

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

As a favor of sorts, I sent Kyle an email letting him know that even though he had apparently blown off his Friday afternoon commitments, I would still be open to the possibility of an investment from Greylock. Funny enough, he never wrote back. Perhaps I would have better luck establishing relationships with monied techies in a more intimate, well-lubricated, convivial setting? Acting on a tip, I ventured out to Sand Hill Road for what was described to me as the hottest night out in Menlo Park: Cougar Night. This, I learned, was a tradition at the Stanford University–owned Rosewood Hotel, dating to 2009, with several interruptions related to public accusations of prostitution. The men who showed up were too old to be classified as cougar bait, but I can confirm that the debauchery of Cougar Night lived up to the legend, with all the fervid groping of last call at a British nightclub combined with the hyperpreppy attire of a velvet-rope club in New York’s Meatpacking District and the tangible awkwardness of any Silicon Valley social event.

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

When people think of Silicon Valley, the first things that spring to mind—after the HBO television show, of course—are the names of famous start-ups and their equally glamorized founders: Apple, Google, Facebook; Jobs/Wozniak, Page/Brin, Zuckerberg. The success narrative of these hallowed names has become so universally familiar that people from countries around the world can tell it just as well as Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. It goes something like this: A brilliant entrepreneur discovers an incredible opportunity. After dropping out of college, he or she gathers a small team who are happy to work for equity, sets up shop in a humble garage, plays foosball, raises money from sage venture capitalists, and proceeds to change the world—after which, of course, the founders and early employees live happily ever after, using the wealth they’ve amassed to fund both a new generation of entrepreneurs and a set of eponymous buildings for Stanford University’s Computer Science Department.

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

For the employees of those start-ups that do go public, the promise of riches and the imprimatur of success can become a reality. This is why Silicon Valley was, in large measure, built around the promise of the IPO. Out of a hundred start-ups spawned by the plush venture capital firms that lined Silicon Valley’s famed Sand Hill Road, only a very few would be fit enough to make the rare but game-changing leap from being a private to a public corporation. Corporations are owned through pieces of paper called stock certificates. Stock is simply a share of a corporation. The ownership of a corporation can be divided into as many shares as the corporation wants.

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 discussion focused on how local players could barge their way onto the global Plattform-Kapitalismus. But many of the American attendees at DLD, particularly those from Silicon Valley, remained pessimistic about Germany’s ability to turn around its poor first-half performance. One investor from Sand Hill Road, the Palo Alto street adjacent to Stanford University that has become a synonym for venture capital firms, told me that Germany lacked the angel investment networks and the cultural acceptance of failure to “do digital” successfully. Others complained about the conservative nature of German corporations, particularly the absence of a risk-taking ethic among senior executives.

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, antiwork, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, call centre, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, eat what you kill, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, late capitalism, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, place-making, proprietary trading, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty

The gift was designated to fund the construction of a new home for the business school, part of a $6.3 billion project to create a new Columbia campus in West Harlem.2 Kravis told me he’s opted to focus his philanthropy on groups tied to education, culture, and medicine, three categories that obviously give him a huge set of options. He’s increasingly interested in applying lessons learned in his day job to charity. “I love starting something new or fixing something,” he said. KKR’s Menlo Park office sits in a tidy low-rise building along Sand Hill Road, the thoroughfare where the world’s best-known venture capital firms are tucked into similarly unassuming structures, minutes from Stanford University, and less than an hour’s drive from San Francisco. The echoes of 9 West are unmistakable throughout, the office itself feels like the more relaxed California cousin to its New York counterpart.

Please Report Your Bug Here: A Novel by Josh Riedel

Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, invisible hand, Joan Didion, Mason jar, Menlo Park, messenger bag, off-the-grid, Port of Oakland, pre–internet, risk/return, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, tech bro, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

“I want to show you the pitch deck.” The deck was for our Series A investment, the first major infusion of capital into DateDate since our launch. While the angel investors from our pre-launch seed round had contributed money on the basis of their faith in the Founder’s idea, the venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road expected a plan. The Founder scrolled through slides too fast for me to analyze, but slow enough for me to see that he was proposing several options for monetization. Advertisements, premium accounts, paid add-ons. Regardless of the method, user growth was paramount. The Founder paused on a slide titled “Our Growing Community.”

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

“The first person who told me about them pitched the business badly,” he says, adding that that person was “a little bit of a doofus when it came to these businesses.” But Jeremy Stoppelman, the cofounder of Yelp and an early Airbnb angel investor, told Hoffman it was an exciting idea and said he really needed to meet with its founders. Ten days later, the Airbnb founders drove down to the Greylock offices on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park—the mecca for venture capital—to meet with Hoffman. Within a few minutes, Hoffman says, it became clear to him that the concept was not Couchsurfing at all; it was eBay for space, which he saw as an infinitely bigger and far more original idea. He stopped them midway and told them there was no need to keep pitching.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

After all, VC is a form of financing that developed alongside some of the world’s fastest growing intangible-intensive businesses. Most of the intangible-rich businesses of Silicon Valley, and many high-growth businesses beyond, got their earliest investments from the venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road. This form of financing has evolved together with businesses like Intel, Google, Genentech, and Uber, whose competitive advantages depend on intangibles: valuable R&D, novel product design, software, and organizational development. Indeed, like the beaks of Darwin’s Galapagos finches that evolved to feed on particular cacti, many of the distinctive features of venture capital relate directly to the unusual characteristics of intangible investments that VC-funded businesses tend to make.

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness by Steven Levy

Apple II, Bill Atkinson, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, en.wikipedia.org, General Magic , Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, technology bubble, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell

In March 1999, I wrote a column for Newsweek outlining the threat to the established order it represented, as well as the possibilities for glory if the music industry embraced the model. One of my readers showed the piece to her husband. He was Hank Barry, a copyright lawyer who was also a venture capitalist at Hummer, Winblad, one of the alpha dogs of Sand Hill Road, where Silicon Valley s top VC firms were located. Barry was so intrigued that he not only got Hummer to invest in Napster but became its CEO. Barry's job was to make Napster legit, first offering, then begging the record labels to help the company shift to selling songs legally. "We're trying to build a bridge to everybody involved in Napster, from music educators and users to record companies," he told me in 2000 after thanking me for cluing him in to the company.

More Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Build a better mousetrap, business process, call centre, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, Dennis Ritchie, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, functional programming, George Gilder, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, lolcat, low cost airline, Mars Rover, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Oldenburg, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, The Great Good Place, The Soul of a New Machine, Tragedy of the Commons, type inference, unpaid internship, wage slave, web application, Y Combinator

As soon as your team consists of more than one person, you’re going to have different people with different agendas. They want different things than you want. If you’re a startup founder, you might want to make a lot of money quickly so you can retire early and spend the next couple of decades going to conferences for women bloggers. So you might spend most of your time driving around Sand Hill Road talking to VCs who might buy the company and flip it to Yahoo!. But Janice the Programmer, one of your employees, doesn’t care about selling out to Yahoo!, because she’s not going to make any money that way. What she cares about is writing code in the latest coolest new programming language, because it’s fun to learn a new thing.

The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World by Steve Levine

colonial rule, Elon Musk, energy security, Higgs boson, oil shale / tar sands, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Yom Kippur War

He could approach VCs and say, “Look, here is a new opportunity. I don’t have the license deal yet, but you have to act fast. Here are the terms we’ve agreed on with Argonne.” “And, bang,” Chamberlain said, “you have three million dollars. He got it immediately.” By comparison, Chamberlain had crawled Sand Hill Road just a couple of years before. When asked about his prior experience, Chamberlain replied that he “absolutely” had built a business from scratch—at Cabot. But venture capitalists felt differently about achievements within a big corporate setting. It wasn’t the same as success on a tight budget with a small staff and the risk on your own shoulders.

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor