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The Big Score by Michael S. Malone
Apple II, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, creative destruction, Donner party, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, lone genius, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, packet switching, plutocrats, RAND corporation, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, The Home Computer Revolution, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yom Kippur War
The KGB has chip-thief contacts in Silicon Valley. So does the People’s Republic of China. The Japanese are here, as are intelligence agents from Israel, France, and Korea. But the idea, promoted by the national press in the early 1980s, of a foreign agent behind every lamppost in Silicon Valley is highly dubious. The reality is that foreign countries, including those declared off-limits to American high technology by the U.S. Commerce Department, have no trouble finding suppliers willing, even anxious, to sell them anything they desire. This is because the Silicon Valley underground, like the Silicon Valley aboveground, is composed of numerous small businessmen, each carving out a market niche, competing for key customers and dreaming of the Big Score.
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And, of course, there are still the disturbing oddballs, like workstation maker Daisy Systems, which sounds like a feminine hygiene product. And, of course, there was still the fern-bar funky: Diablo, Durango, Digital Deli, Brut. Some took advantage of the local connection: There were a Silicon Valley Associates, a Silicon Valley Marketing, a Silicon Valley Sales, and a Silicon Valley Travel. Inevitably, given the demand and the entrepreneurial environment, at last, in 1980, someone set up a business just to give Valley high-tech companies their names. Ira Bachrach, a retired Valley advertising executive with a love of language, started Namelab as a hobby.
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The lonely I looks for solace wherever it can find it—and always beyond the tight boundaries of the engineering mind. For many it is drugs. Drugs are everywhere in Silicon Valley. Alcohol is easily the most abused. The number of alcoholics in boardrooms on executive row is shocking. But increasingly just as common, and far more apt given the local lifestyle, is cocaine. Silicon Valley has become a coke blizzard. The Drug Enforcement Agency has called Silicon Valley one of the biggest cocaine users in the United States. What could be more perfect for Silicon Valley life? Lasciviously expensive, cocaine is the Queen of Speed, a clean flash of energy for those 14 hours, for when you need to be up for that next business decision or that next crucial sale.
The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K
.,” Fast Company, April 1, 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3058227/regis-mckennas-1976-notebook-and-the-invention-of-apple-computer-inc, archived at https://perma.cc/P4JC-NWU8. CHAPTER 7: THE OLYMPICS OF CAPITALISM 1. Don C. Hoefler, “Silicon Valley, U.S.A.,” Electronic News, January 11, 1971, 1. 2. “Don C. Hoefler,” Datamation 32, no. 5 (May 15, 1986); David Laws, “Who Named Silicon Valley?” CHM, January 7, 2015, http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/who-named-silicon-valley/, archived at https://perma.cc/EMT2-KUCG. 3. James J. Mitchell, “Curtain to Fall on Valley Era,” The San Jose Mercury News, October 2, 1988, Silicon Valley Ephemera Collection, MISC 33, FF 2, SU; Regis McKenna, interview transcript, August 22, 1995, Silicon Genesis Project, SU. 4.
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John Young, Paul Ely in BusinessWeek, October 3, 1983, quoted in Thomas & Company, “Competitive Dynamics in the Microcomputer Industry.” 23. Thomas & Company, “Competitive Dynamics.” 24. Smith, “Silicon Valley Spirit”; Robert Reinhold, “Life in High-Stress Silicon Valley Takes a Toll,” The New York Times, January 13, 1984, 1. 25. Jean Hollands, The Silicon Syndrome: A Survival Handbook for Couples (Palo Alto, Calif.: Coastlight Press, 1983). 26. Reinhold, “Life in High-Stress Silicon Valley Takes a Toll”; Smith, “Silicon Valley Spirit.” 27. Thomas & Company, “Competitive Dynamics”; Paul Freiberger, “IBM Counts its Chips, Invests $250 Million in Intel,” InfoWorld 5, no. 5 (January 31, 1983): 30; Jean S.
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It also is a history of modern America: of political fracture and collective action, of extraordinary opportunity and suffocating prejudice, of shuttered factories and surging trading floors, of the marble halls of Washington and the concrete canyons of Wall Street. For these, as you shall see, were among the many things that made Silicon Valley possible, and that were remade by Silicon Valley in return. * * * — From the first moment that Silicon Valley burst into the public consciousness, it was awash in revolutionary, anti-establishment metaphors. “Start your own revolution—with a personal computer,” read an ad for the new Personal Computing magazine in 1978. “The personal computer represents the last chance for that relic of the American Revolution, our continent’s major contribution to human civilization—the entrepreneur,” proclaimed the tech industry newsletter InfoWorld in 1980.
Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang
"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits
She took the microphone: Niniane Wang, “Brainstorm Tech: Fixing Inequality in Silicon Valley,” interview by author, Fortune Brainstorm Tech Town Hall, July 18, 2017, video, 39:08, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWXw_bclArI. VCs, stop asking women entrepreneurs: Nicole Farb, at “Brainstorm Tech: Fixing Inequality in Silicon Valley.” “In Silicon Valley today”: Christa Quarles, at “Brainstorm Tech: Fixing Inequality in Silicon Valley.” “Without a doubt”: Adam Miller, at “Brainstorm Tech: Fixing Inequality in Silicon Valley.” Apple’s diversity numbers: “Inclusion and Diversity,” Apple, accessed Nov. 20, 2017, https://www.apple.com/diversity.
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“Travis can spend eight”: Chris Sacca, “Lowercase Capital Founder Chris Sacca: Studio 1.0,” interview by author, Bloomberg, June 12, 2015, video, 27:43, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-06-13/lowercase-capital-founder-chris-sacca-studio-1-0-06-12-. Women account for almost half: Dan Primack, “Wall Street Outpaces Silicon Valley on Gender Equality,” Axios, Aug. 8, 2017, https://www.axios.com/wall-street-outpaces-silicon-valley-on-gender-equality-2470698125.html. “It’s bad for shareholder value”: Megan Smith, “Former U.S. CTO on Silicon Valley’s Diversity Battle,” interview by author, Bloomberg, Aug. 7, 2017, video, 7:09, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-08-07/ex-u-s-cto-on-silicon-valley-s-diversity-battle-video. “We have a long way to go: Satya Nadella, “Satya Nadella: Bloomberg Studio 1.0 (Full Show),” interview by author, Bloomberg, Sept. 29, 2017, video, 23:40, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-09-29/satya-nadella-bloomberg-studio-1-0-full-show-video.
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To this day, Rabois believes PayPal is a “perfect validation of merit” and of Silicon Valley as a meritocracy. “None of us had any connection to anyone important in Silicon Valley,” he told me. “We went from complete misfits to the establishment in five years. We were literally nobodies. People wouldn’t talk to us. Everybody thought we were weird. One tech publication ran a story called ‘Earth to PayPal.’ Everybody thought we were insane.” The early PayPal team would go on to found some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley, including Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Yelp. Thiel funded and joined the board of Facebook.
The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator
“After decades in which the country has become less and less equal,” mourns the Palo Alto–born-and-bred George Packer, “Silicon Valley is one of the most unequal places on earth.”35 Figures from the Chapman University geographer Joel Kotkin suggest that the Valley has actually hemorrhaged jobs since the dot-com crash of 2000, losing some forty thousand jobs over the last twelve years.36 A 2013 report by Joint Venture Silicon Valley confirms Kotkin’s findings, adding that homelessness in Silicon Valley has increased by 20% between 2011 and 2013 and reliance on food stamps has reached a ten-year high.37 In Santa Clara County, the geographical heart of Silicon Valley, the poverty rate shot up from 8% in 2001 to 14% in 2013, with the food stamp population jumping from 25,000 in 2001 to 125,000 in 2013.
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At one of Paul Graham’s “Failure Central” Y Combinator startup events, Srinivasan pitched the concept of what he called “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit,” a complete withdrawal of Silicon Valley from the United States. “We need to build opt-in society, outside the US, run by technology,” is how he described a ridiculous fantasy that would turn Silicon Valley into a kind of free-floating island that Wired’s Bill Wasik satirizes as the “offshore plutocracy of Libertaristan.”75 And one group of “Libertaristanians” at the Peter Thiel–funded, Silicon Valley–based Seasteading Institute, founded by Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer and the grandson of the granddaddy of free-market economics, Milton Friedman, has even begun to plan floating utopias that would drift off the Pacific coast.76 Behind all these secession fantasies is the very concrete reality of the secession of the rich from everyone else in Silicon Valley.
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For data on Rochester’s very high 2012 murder rate, see Karyn Bower, John Klofas, and Janelle Duda, “Homicide in Rochester, NY 2012: Comparison of Rates for a Selection of United States and International Cities,” Center of Public Initiatives, January 25, 2013. 3 Rory Carroll, “Silicon Valley’s Culture of Failure . . . and the ‘Walking Dead’ It Leaves Behind,” Guardian, June 28, 2014. 4 “How I Failed,” Cultivate Conference, New York City, October 14, 2013, cultivatecon.com/cultivate2013/public/schedule/detail/31551. 5 “‘Fail Fast’ Advises LinkedIn Founder and Tech Investor Reid Hoffman,” BBC, January 11, 2011. 6 “Failure: The F-Word Silicon Valley Loves and Hates,” NPR.org, June 19, 2012, npr.org/2012/06/19/155005546/failure-the-f-word-silicon-valley-loves-and-hates. 7 Eric Markowitz, “Why Silicon Valley Loves Failure,” Inc., August 16, 2012, inc.com/eric-markowitz/brilliant-failures/why-silicon-valley-loves-failures.html/1. 8 MIT Technology Review, September/October 2013, technologyreview.com/magazine/2013/09.
How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar
The self-policing strategy of the DeepMind coalition sounds similar to the goals of another idealistic Elon Musk start-up—OpenAI, a Silicon Valley–based nonprofit research company focused on the promotion of an open-source platform for artificial intelligence technology. Musk cofounded OpenAI with Sam Altman, the thirty-one-year-old CEO of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s most successful seed investment fund. Launched in 2015 with a billion dollars raised by Silicon Valley royalty including the multi billionaires Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley–based OpenAI is run by a former Google expert on machine learning and staffed with an all-star team of computer scientists cherry-picked from top Big Tech firms.
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Whatever seductive promises their don’t be evil–style slogans make, there is no such thing as a moral for-profit company, inside or outside Silicon Valley. For better or worse, the aim of these private superpowers is to dominate markets, not share them. Their goal is their bottom line, not ethics. And yes, it’s also encouraging that powerful Silicon Valley investors like Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel have contributed significant capital to an open-source AI platform that, we are promised, won’t be owned or operated by a single data silo. But, I’m afraid, there aren’t too many people in Silicon Valley quite as responsible as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a relative paragon of civic virtue, who, during the 2016 American presidential election, promised to donate five million dollars of his own money to a veterans’ charity if Donald Trump publicly disclosed his taxes.
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“Many steps forward,” she acknowledges, “and a couple of huge steps back.” Those “huge steps,” she says, include what she calls Silicon Valley’s remarkably “self-serving” faith that it’s a “perfect meritocracy.” Nobody in Silicon Valley, she says, recognizes his own incredible luck in happening to find himself in the wealthiest bubble in human history. “A little humility would go a long way,” she says about those young, privileged men, like Sam Altman, on the other side of the Bay. There’s also a complete lack of empathy in Silicon Valley, she says. Particularly a failure of the almost exclusively white male executives to take responsibility for the “unintended consequences” of the tech boom—especially the income disparity, the homelessness, and the economic dislocation of a predominantly minority population that is transforming the San Francisco Peninsula into a nineteenth-century tableau of shockingly explicit inequality.
Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher
adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator
The first surprise was the range of types of people whom I encountered. Silicon Valley grew from a few suburban towns to encompass the cities around it, and that growth was fueled by a rather remarkable diversity. There’s no Silicon Valley ethnic type, per se. Silicon Valley is racially diverse—it is the proverbial melting pot—although it’s also true that black people are still far and few between. Women are also underrepresented, although there are many more than one might imagine. And there’s no typical age, either. Silicon Valley focuses on its young—that’s where the new ideas usually come from—but it’s also been around for a long time.
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It’s pretty clear where this new nerd culture came from—it came from the same place that the money did: Silicon Valley. And what is a culture? There’s no mystery there, either. A culture is simply the stories that define a people, a place. It’s the stories we tell each other to make sense of ourselves, where we came from, and where we are going. And here those stories are, between two covers. Together they comprise an oral history of Silicon Valley. Adam Fisher Alameda, California June 2018 Silicon Valley, Explained The story of the past, as told by the people of the future Silicon Valley is a seemingly ordinary place: a suburban idyll surrounded by a few relatively small cities.
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Bye-bye. I’m going out to Silicon Valley.” That was ’98. Ali Aydar: It was the dot-com boom, and I’m in Chicago languishing away at a bank, and I have a degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon. Why am I at a bank in Chicago? I need to be in Silicon Valley, I need to be in the dot-com boom, and be taking advantage of it in some way. So I came out to Silicon Valley in August of 1999. Jordan Ritter: I was a paid hacker. I lived in downtown Boston, which was the center of hacking in the United States at the time: It wasn’t New York, it wasn’t LA, it wasn’t even Silicon Valley. Boston was the seat of it, and I was in the middle of that.
The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin
2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional
“Should Local Government Be Run Like Silicon Valley?” Governing, April 2013, http://www.governing.com/topics/technology/gov-local-government-run-like-silicon-valley.html. 93. “Libertarian Island: A Billionaire’s Utopia,” The Week, August 18, 2011; Greg Baumann, “Rich State, Poor State: VC’s ‘Six Californias’ Divides Silicon Valley from Have-Nots,” Silicon Valley Business Journal, February 4, 2014. 94. Kevin Roose, “The Government Shutdown Has Revealed Silicon Valley’s Dysfunction Fetish,” Daily Intelligencer (blog), New York, October 16, 2013, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/silicon-valleys-dysfunction-fetish.html. 95.
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Mike Swift, “Blacks, Latinos and Women Lose Ground at Silicon Valley Tech Companies,” San Jose Mercury News, February 13, 2010. 146. Silicon Valley Index, http://www.siliconvalleyindex.org. 147. Esther Yu-Hsi Lee and Aviva Shen, “Class Divide Widens Between Low-Wage And High-Wage Workers In Silicon Valley,” ThinkProgress, October 16, 2013, http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/10/16/2779601/wage-immigrants-silicon-valley. 148. Jake Blumgart, “How Google and Silicon Valley Screw Their Non-Elite Workers,” AlterNet, June 8, 2013, http://www.alternet.org/labor/how-google-and-silicon-valley-screw-their-non-elite-workers. 149.
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Karel van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation (New York: Knopf, 1989), pp. 46–47. 64. Greg Bensinger and David Benoit, “Icahn Targets Silicon Valley Directors’ Club,” Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2014. 65. Jessica Guynn, “Silicon Valley Staff-Poaching Suit Is Granted Class-Action Status,” Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2013; Dean Baker, “Silicon Valley Billionaires Believe in the Free Market, as Long as They Benefit,” Guardian, February 3, 2014; David Streitfeld, “Engineers Allege Hiring Collusion in Silicon Valley,” New York Times, February 28, 2014; Angela Moscaritolo, “Suit Reveals Alleged Silicon Valley Anti-Poaching Scheme,” PCMag, January 30, 2012, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399555,00.asp. 66.
Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits
Despite what you may have heard, hard work in your chosen trade is absolutely the stupidest way to join the billionaires club. In Silicon Valley—that warm, inviting cradle of cutthroat entrepreneurship—the world’s most brilliant MBAs and IT professionals discovered a shortcut to fabulous riches. By harnessing the miraculous powers of the internet, it seemed, any indigent fool could transform him- or herself into the contemporary manifestation of a feudal lord. The annual Silicon Valley Index, an economic survey produced by a regional think tank and the local Community Foundation, shows precisely how well the Valley has done relative to the rest of the country. The report notes that Silicon Valley has enjoyed marked increases in overall job numbers since 2007, the prelude to the economic crash, while the United States remained, at best, stagnant.
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As I guessed somehow from his body language, he had a notably different outlook from that of the other investors and tinkerers and climbers I had met. Silicon Valley was “the most brutal capitalistic machine there is,” he said. “The strong get stronger and the weak get crushed. It’s very Darwinian.” Ghazi’s awakening as a Silicon Valley cynic followed several career shifts. Trained as an engineer, he had moved to the finance side of the tech industry, first as an analyst, then as an investor, bouncing around until his current employers from Saudi Arabia hired him as their representative in Silicon Valley. In an industry overrun with early-twentysomethings, Ghazi was a literal graybeard.
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The variable was whatever Silicon Valley was trying to sell at the time. In the early nineties, the boom was about hardware. IBM and Apple had found a way to commercialize military-funded computer research by churning out personal desktop computers and accessories. “Back then, Silicon Valley was small,” Ghazi said. “It was focused almost exclusively on the technology with very little thought on how to market it.” Then, in the late nineties, came another commercial boom, also underwritten by government research: the internet. This time, something changed. Wall Street got involved. “All of a sudden, Silicon Valley got the first taste of the big money,” Ghazi said.
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee
"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator
But following Nixon’s unsuccessful push, discussion of a UBI or GMI largely dropped out of public discourse. That is, until Silicon Valley got excited about it. Recently, the idea has captured the imagination of the Silicon Valley elite, with giants of the industry like the prestigious Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator president Sam Altman and Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes sponsoring research and funding basic income pilot programs. Whereas GMI was initially crafted as a cure for poverty in normal economic times, Silicon Valley’s surging interest in the programs sees them as solutions for widespread technological unemployment due to AI.
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The transition from expertise to data has a similar benefit, downplaying the importance of the globally elite researchers that China lacks and maximizing the value of another key resource that China has in abundance, data. Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs have earned a reputation as some of the hardest working in America, passionate young founders who pull all-nighters in a mad dash to get a product out, and then obsessively iterate that product while seeking out the next big thing. Entrepreneurs there do indeed work hard. But I’ve spent decades deeply embedded in both Silicon Valley and China’s tech scene, working at Apple, Microsoft, and Google before incubating and investing in dozens of Chinese startups. I can tell you that Silicon Valley looks downright sluggish compared to its competitor across the Pacific.
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This kind of analysis, however, is the result of a deep misunderstanding of the dynamics at play in the Chinese market, and it reveals an egocentrism that defines all internet innovation in relation to Silicon Valley. In creating his early clones of Facebook and Twitter, Wang was in fact relying entirely on the Silicon Valley playbook. This first phase of the copycat era—Chinese startups cloning Silicon Valley websites—helped build up baseline engineering and digital entrepreneurship skills that were totally absent in China at the time. But it was a second phase—Chinese startups taking inspiration from an American business model and then fiercely competing against each other to adapt and optimize that model specifically for Chinese users—that turned Wang Xing into a world-class entrepreneur.
The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin
3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits
In the popular imagination—colored by the successes that have come since, especially those of Steve Jobs—the story of the Traitorous Eight has come to represent the spirit of rebellion that is said to pervade the tech industry. When I was starting in journalism, in the mid-2000s, Silicon Valley was seen, at its core, as an antiestablishment movement. “We owe it all to the hippies,” as the futurist (and countercultural activist) Stewart Brand famously put it, positing that the “real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution.” But Silicon Valley—the real Silicon Valley—had never been about subverting the military-industrial complex. Silicon Valley, in its purest form, was the military-industrial complex. Its founders weren’t dropping LSD. They were proud squares, with politics that were closer to those of David Starr Jordan than to the radicals of Stewart Brand’s imagination.
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But even as the zeitgeist—all the way up to ambitions of the leader of the free world—celebrated the promise and potential of Silicon Valley, one of Silicon Valley’s pioneers had already turned his attention well beyond it. Over the prior two decades, Peter Thiel had accumulated billions of dollars in wealth, backing some of the biggest and most successful tech companies, including Facebook, PayPal, and SpaceX. He’d built a network that gave him access to the best entrepreneurs and the wealthiest investors in the world, and he was idolized by a generation of aspiring startup founders. But Thiel wanted more than sway in Silicon Valley—he wanted real power, political power. He was about to be handed an opportunity to seize it.
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GOOD TIMES Marissa Mayer used to date Larry Page. There, we said it.” This was how, in 2006, Gawker Media came to Silicon Valley, screaming about power, sex, and hypocrisy. In the article about a romantic relationship between Page (Google’s cofounder) and Mayer (the company’s top executive), the site couched a tawdry gossip item in an argument about the media’s fawning coverage of the tech industry. “The real embarrassment is that of Silicon Valley’s toothless press corps,” Gawker’s new Silicon Valley blog, Valleywag, continued. “Raised on a diet of pre-packaged anecdotes—ooh, did you know Google hired a chef who traveled with the Grateful Dead—it’s incapable of chewing on a real story.”
The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game
Now it’s preparing to clash with Big Tech,” Washington Post, July 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/27/congress-tech-hearing/. 40 Loren DeJonge Schulman, Alexandra Sander, and Madeline Christian, “The Rocky Relationship Between Washington and Silicon Valley,” Copia, https://copia.is/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/COPIA-CNAS-Rocky-Relationship-Between-Washington-And-Silicon-Valley.pdf. 41 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 42 Amy Zegart and Kevin Childs, “The Divide Between Silicon Valley and Washington Is a National Security Threat,” The Atlantic, December 13, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/growing-gulf-between-silicon-valley-and-washington/577963/. 43 Angus Loten, “Older IT Workers Left Out Despite Tech Talent Shortage,” Wall Street Journal, November 25, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/older-it-workers-left-out-despite-tech-talent-shortage-11574683200?
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As the Gray War reaches into every aspect of our daily lives, what will happen to our jobs, our retirement accounts, our faith in our own political leaders and system of government? Silicon Valley may be the most optimistic place in the world, but I’ve become deeply concerned. Not only because America’s adversaries have the initiative. Not only because new technologies like artificial intelligence could soon give them yet another advantage. I worry because, without a real partnership between the U.S. government and Silicon Valley, neither is fully equipped to protect democracy from the autocrats looking to pick it apart. Too many in Silicon Valley still fail to accept that the platforms they created have become a battlefield.
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Are Western interests best served by refusing to market to consumers in China—or will that simply cede huge portions of the global marketplace to China’s tech giants and their techno-bloc? Are Silicon Valley’s behemoths American companies or global ones? These questions do not have easy answers, but we’d better start dealing with them. More than that, we’d better start dealing with them in a unified way. Especially because many of the newest weapons in the Gray War are being fashioned—as we’re about to see—by the coders and app developers of Silicon Valley, largely removed from Washington’s own Gray War calculations. Autocrats are targeting Americans, and Americans in DC and Silicon Valley are busy targeting each other. That’s a recipe for failure, and it needs to change—fast.
Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits
Ford has been hiring artificial intelligence engineers, built a tech lab in Silicon Valley, and struck a deal with a San Francisco software company whose engineers will teach Ford’s coders about Agile development. Ford wants us to know that it’s in the midst of a huge transformation, and that it’s not falling behind. Earlier, we all took turns going for rides in Ford’s prototype self-driving car, which Ford vows to have in production by 2021. Now we’ve come indoors for an event that is meant to evoke the atmosphere of a big Silicon Valley conference, or an Apple product announcement. Tim Brown, the head of IDEO, a cooler-than-thou Silicon Valley design shop, hangs out in the hallway.
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In some tech companies black workers represent only 2 percent of the employee population; Latinos fare only slightly better. Only one-third of workers are female. There are fewer women working in Silicon Valley today than in the 1980s. In leadership ranks the imbalance is worse—management teams and boards of directors are loaded with white men. Somehow, over the past twenty years, Silicon Valley has gone backward. It’s even worse in the venture capital industry, where 1 percent of investment team members are black, and Latinos make up just over 2 percent, according to The Information, a Silicon Valley publication. Women represent only 15 percent of decision-making roles. VCs claim that they make decisions based entirely on the strength of the company’s ideas, and without any regard for race or gender.
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They’re working at Boeing and in biotech companies, rather than the “bro culture” tech companies. The bigger issue, Campbell said, is retaining black employees. Black graduates who go to Silicon Valley often feel unwanted or out of place, so they leave. To hang on to those people, Silicon Valley needs to become a place where those young people feel welcome. “It’s about having a community, having a local church you can go to, having the chance to meet a spouse,” Campbell says. How can it be that these “innovative” tech companies in Silicon Valley seem like some of the most backward organizations in the world? This is basically segregation, only instead of taking place at the University of Alabama in 1963, it’s happening in California in 2018.
Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh
"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism
So what secret alchemy is at work in Silicon Valley to fuel such rapid-fire growth of so many of the world’s most valuable tech companies? And if there is a secret, can it be identified, analyzed, understood, and, most important, applied elsewhere? Blitzscaling is that secret. And the reason blitzscaling matters so much is that nothing about it is inherent to Silicon Valley. There’s a common misconception that Silicon Valley is the accelerator of the world. The real story is that the world keeps getting faster—Silicon Valley is just the first place to figure out how to keep pace. While Silicon Valley certainly has many key networks and resources that make it easier to apply the techniques we’re going to lay out for you, blitzscaling is made up of basic principles that do not depend on geography.
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But in the twenty-first century, Seattle and Los Angeles have also become home to high-tech ecosystems that are increasingly tied to Silicon Valley. In a 2017 article titled “How America’s Two Tech Hubs Are Converging,” the Economist argued that Seattle and Silicon Valley were becoming increasingly intertwined, citing as evidence the fact that most of the venture capital investment in Seattle start-ups has come from Silicon Valley VC firms, and that about thirty Silicon Valley firms had opened Seattle offices to tap into that city’s plentiful supply of computer scientists, while Seattle’s two dominant blitzscalers, Amazon and Microsoft, have thousands of employees working in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, Seattle’s Amazon Web Services has become the cloud computing platform of choice for Silicon Valley start-ups and scale-ups.
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While we fully accept that this may change in the future, the historical and current success of Silicon Valley makes it the perfect place to examine this question: What is the most effective way to rapidly build massively valuable companies? When outsiders look at Silicon Valley, they often think that the key to this question is innovative technology. But as you’ll read, technological innovation alone doesn’t make for a thriving company. Silicon Valley insiders and well-read outsiders believe that the key is the combination of talent, capital, and entrepreneurial culture that makes it easy to start new companies. This too is wrong. Sure, Silicon Valley is the leading hub for high-tech talent and venture capital, but it didn’t start out that way.
Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin
AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture
Understanding our modern world means understanding Silicon Valley’s breakthrough era, and a close examination of those years makes it clear that Silicon Valley was not built by a few isolated geniuses. Anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley (or anywhere else, for that matter) knows that although the spotlight often has room for only one person, those just outside its illuminated circle are at least as responsible for the success that has given the star a moment of glory. At a party I attended a number of years ago, someone who had served as chief operating officer of a major Silicon Valley company with a superstar CEO sang a little song about this phenomenon.
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.: 124. 23. ASK Statement of Operations for years ending June 30, 1975, and June 30, 1976, SK. Kurtzig’s salary increased from $12,000 in 1975 to $24,000 in 1976. 24. Joint Venture Silicon Valley, “Venture Capital by Industry,” Silicon Valley Index 2015; Jon Levine, “5,000 Entrepreneurs . . . and Counting,” Venture, January 1982. 25. Larry Ellison, quoted in Silicon Valley Historical Association, “Billionaires: Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs Who Made Their Fortune Without Venture Capital,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vXs6JqMu7U. 26. ASK S-1, Aug. 6, 1981. 27. Kurtzig, CEO: 152. No Idea How You Start a Company — Niels Reimers and Bob Swanson 1.
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Stanford University pioneered a model of turning faculty research into commercial products that has since earned nearly $2 billion for the university.4 The independent software industry was born.I Xerox opened the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which would pioneer computing’s graphical user interface, icons, Ethernet, and laser printer. Upstart CEOs with an eye to the future lay the foundation for the now-tight political alliance between Silicon Valley and Washington, DC. These years marked Silicon Valley’s coming of age, the critical period when the Valley was transformed from a relatively obscure regional economy with the microchip industry at its heart into an economic engine whose rate of job growth has been double that of the country as a whole for the past five years.5 In the process, Silicon Valley has spawned countless imitators and numerous industries that together have created the modern world. Troublemakers charts these changes through the lives of the people who made them happen.
The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent by Vivek Wadhwa
card file, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Elon Musk, immigration reform, Marc Andreessen, open economy, open immigration, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, synthetic biology, the new new thing, Y2K
We found that from 1995 to 2005, Indians were key founders of 13.4% of all Silicon Valley startups, and immigrants from China and Taiwan were key founders in 12.8%. The outsized impact of Indian founders was logical. Between 1990 and 2000, the population of Indian scientists and engineers (S&E) in Silicon Valley grew by 646% (while the total foreign-born S&E workforce grew by 246% and the region’s total population of S&E, both native and foreign-born, grew by only 103%). The overall percentage of immigrant-founded companies in Silicon Valley almost perfectly matched the population at large. In Silicon Valley, 52% of the S&E workforce was foreign-born.
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Then the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1990 nearly tripled the number of immigrant visas awarded for special occupational talents, from 54,000 to 140,000.20 In Silicon Valley, the presence of these ambitious, hardworking immigrants quickly became a poorly kept secret. Valley insiders joked that IC engineers—meaning “Indian and Chinese” rather than “integrated circuit” (which is commonly abbreviated as IC)—built the region’s tech industry. Silicon Valley legend and former Stanford engineering professor James Clark (who co-founded Netscape and later WebMD) famously sung the praises of Indian engineers in the pop-culture version of Silicon Valley history and the Internet in Michael Lewis’s book The New New Thing.
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Few doubted that these immigrant engineers had become significant contributors to the rapid growth and cycle of innovation of Silicon Valley. But how much of a contribution had they made? Using a combination of US Census data and interviews with 175 immigrant entrepreneurs, AnnaLee Saxenian arrived at some surprising conclusions in the report “Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” published in 1999. Over a mere two decades, immigrant entrepreneurs in general, and Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs in particular, became a powerful force in Silicon Valley value creation and company formation. She found that Chinese or Indian engineers served as CEOs or leaders at roughly one-quarter of all high-technology businesses in Silicon Valley.
Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional
Startup teams in China routinely work 12 hours per day, six days a week, or “996,” as it’s commonly referred to in US-China tech circles. It’s a reminder of Silicon Valley all-nighters during the late 1990s dotcom boom when China’s entrepreneurial boom was only percolating. “China and the US are at different points of economic development and motivation. China’s entrepreneurial culture does make Silicon Valley look sleepy,” says Hans Tung, managing partner at leading venture investment firm GGV Capital in Menlo Park. Mike Moritz, partner at top-tier Sequoia Capital, can’t help but agree. He points out that Chinese entrepreneurs who routinely work 80 hours per week are making their Silicon Valley peers look “lazy and entitled.”
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Alibaba keeps an office in San Mateo on California byway El Camino Real, in sight of venture capitalist Tim Draper’s entrepreneurial school Draper University. Baidu has established two research and AI labs in high-tech Sunnyvale, Silicon Valley central. China’s tech titans have co-invested in the United States with many hot-shot Silicon Valley venture firms, including influential Andreessen Horowitz, whose lead partners founded once-dominant web browser Netscape, which was acquired by AOL for $4.2 billion. In their quest for California’s deep tech riches, China’s big three investors have often been regarded in Silicon Valley as premium buyers who pay more and help to provide access to huge China markets. “They can have their pick of the litter,” said David Williams, founder and CEO of Palo Alto–based investment banking firm Williams Capital Advisors.
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Chapter 4 Few US Companies Crack the China Code It’s the rare American internet company that has succeeded behind the Great Wall of China, but Starbucks, Airbnb, WeWork, and LinkedIn keep trying harder with digitally savvy strategies borrowed from China and localized teams. PART TWO China’s Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists A core group of US-China leaders set high standards as a Silicon Dragon-style VC market rises to challenge Silicon Valley. A look at who’s scoring in China venture investing, and why. Chapter 5 Sand Hill Road Gets a Mega-Rival China’s red-hot venture capital market has risen to nearly match the US level and no longer looks to California’s Sand Hill Road for cues.
The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis
Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Benchmark Capital, business climate, classic study, creative destruction, data acquisition, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, high net worth, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tech worker, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, wealth creators, Y2K
That person may not be entirely typical of our age. (Is anyone?) But he is, in this case, representative: a disruptive force. A catalyst for change and regenera- Page 16 tion. He is to Silicon Valley what Silicon Valley is to America. And he has left his fingerprints all over the backside of modern life. What I've tried to write, in a roundabout way, which is the only way I could think to write it, is a character study of a man with the gift for giving a little push to Silicon Valley, and to the whole economy. To do this I had to follow him on his search. I hope the reader will, too. At any rate, I hope he or she gets a sense of what it feels like to be so oddly, and messily, engaged.
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They could quite easily pick up and go to America, which was paying the highest price for their talent. And, in massive numbers, that is exactly what they did. Indian engineers flooded Silicon Valley in the 1980s and 1990s. By 1996 nearly half of the 55,000 temporary visas issued by the U.S. government to high-tech workers went to Indians. In early 1999 a Berkeley sociologist named AnnaLee Saxenian discovered that nearly half of all Silicon Valley companies were founded by Indian entrepreneurs. The definitive smell inside a Silicon Valley start-up was of curry. So one day when Jim Clark had finished writing his code for the boat, he picked up the phone and called Pavan Nigam and told him about his idea for making him rich.
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All of this caused, and was in turn caused by, a subtle but important shift in the Silicon Valley value system. And that was the last reason Jim Clark was the man of this particular moment. "Silicon Valley has more in common with Hollywood than it does with Detroit," says Vern Anderson, the first CEO of Silicon Graphics and thus the first captain of the first ship built by Jim Clark. "The venture capitalists are the studios. The managers are the directors. The ordinary engineers are the writers. And the entrepreneurs are the stars." What happened in Silicon Valley is a lot like what happened in Hollywood once the studios lost their clout.
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris
2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise
x José Calderón beat Murphy’s season record with a 98.1 percent season in 2008/’09, while the career record is now held by Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors. Curry not only works for Silicon Valley capitalists but has come to represent the Silicon Valley mindset, the way Tiger Woods once did. See Erik Malinowski, Betaball: How Silicon Valley and Science Built One of the Greatest Basketball Teams in History (Atria Books, 2017). Chapter 5.3 Blister in the Sun The PayPal Mafia and the Facebook Keiretsu—Immiseration 2.0—Google Bus—Roko’s Basilisk—Living in the Thielverse It’s difficult to narrativize the latest phase of Silicon Valley history. From at least the time of Aristotle’s original outline in the Poetics, narratives have had a rising and falling action.
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AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 23. 11. Glenna Matthews, Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 122; Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (New York: Penguin Press, 2020), 19. 12. Findlay, Magic Lands, 32. 13. Ibid., 147. 14. Michael S. Malone, The Valley of Heart’s Delight: A Silicon Valley Notebook 1963–2001 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 76. 15.
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Stewart Gillmor, Fred Terman at Stanford: Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 127. 3. Malone, Bill & Dave, 89–91, 106. 4. Ibid., 97. 5. Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930–1970, Inside Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 85; Robert Sobel, The Rise and Fall of the Conglomerate Kings (Washington, DC: Beard Books, 1999), 54. 6. Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley, 87. 7. Ibid., 88. 8. Ibid., 110; Gillmor, Fred Terman at Stanford, 7. 9. Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley, 124. 10. Ibid., 109. 11. Malone, Bill & Dave, 155, 168. 12.
Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar
"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game
They and other Big Tech firms have also offshored much of their exorbitant profit—according to one estimate done by Credit Suisse in 2019, the top ten companies offshoring the most savings, including Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), and Qualcomm, had $600 billion sitting in overseas accounts11—circumventing the laws and regulations by which ordinary citizens must abide, but which the largest corporations can legally eschew. Silicon Valley has lobbied hard to preserve the tax loopholes that allow all this, bringing to mind the words of economist Mancur Olson, who warned that a civilization declines when the moneyed interests take over its politics.12 Certainly, many public officials I spoke with echoed my concerns. Silicon Valley was, after all, built around government—that is, taxpayer—funded innovation. Everything from GPS mapping to touch screens to the Internet itself came out of research originally done or funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, and was later commercialized by Silicon Valley. Yet unlike many other countries, including a number of thriving free markets such as Finland and Israel, the U.S. taxpayer does not reap a penny of the profits these innovations yield.13 Instead, these companies were offshoring both profits and labor at the very time that tech titans were asking the government to spend more money on things like educational reform to ensure that the twenty-first-century workforce would be digitally savvy.
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Rana Foroohar, “Why You Can Thank the Government for Your iPhone,” Time, October 27, 2015. 14. Author interview with John Battelle in 2017. 15. Rana Foroohar, “Echoes of Wall Street in Silicon Valley’s Grip on Money and Power,” Financial Times, July 3, 2017. 16. Tom Hamburger and Matea Gold, “Google, Once Disdainful of Lobbying, Now a Master of Washington,” The Washington Post, April 12, 2014. 17. Rana Foroohar, “Silicon Valley Has Too Much Power,” Financial Times, May 14, 2017; Foroohar, “Echoes of Wall Street in Silicon Valley’s Grip.” 18. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), introductory page. 19.
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Just as, in the years before the 2008 financial crisis, the world’s top bankers dispatched surrogates to Washington, London, and Brussels to live among and lobby the legislators in charge of regulating them, so Silicon Valley faces have become the most familiar ones in these capitals over the past decade—with Google dispatching so many emissaries to Washington that they needed office space as large as the White House to hold them all.16 But despite the efforts of scores of Silicon Valley lobbyists and PR teams, the public worries about the economic and social effects of technology, and those worries are not going away.17 In fact, they are increasing, as the technology itself spreads more deeply into our economy, politics, and culture.
The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin
"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator
Visual Capitalist, June 15, 2017, http://www.visualcapitalist.com/companies-revenue-per-employee/. 31 Nikhil Swaminathan, “Inside the Growing Guest Worker Program Trapping Indian Students in Virtual Servitude,” Mother Jones, September/October 2017, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/inside-the-growing-guest-worker-program-trapping-indian-students-in-virtual-servitude. 32 Sam Levin, “Black and Latino representation in Silicon Valley has declined, study shows,” Guardian, October 3, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/03/silicon-valley-diversity-black-latino-women-decline-study. 33 Seung Lee, “‘These are poverty-level jobs in Facebook’: Silicon Valley security officers protest for better wages,” Mercury News, June 18, 2018, https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/15/these-are-poverty-level-jobs-in-facebook-silicon-valley-security-officers-protest-for-better-wages/; Julia Carrie Wong, “Silicon Valley subcontracting makes income inequality worse, report finds,” Guardian, March 30, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/30/silicon-valley-subcontracting-income-inequality-worse-report. 34 Kathleen Elkins, “Several Google employees say they’ve lived in the company parking lot—here’s why they did it,” Business Insider, October 30, 2015, https://www.businessinsider.com/why-google-employees-live-in-the-parking-lot-2015-10; Robert Johnson, “Welcome to ‘The Jungle’: The Largest Homeless Camp in Mainland USA Is Right in the Heart of Silicon Valley” Business Insider, September 7, 2013, https://www.businessinsider.com/the-jungle-largest-homeless-camp-in-us-2013-8. 35 Brenner and Pastor, Equity, Growth and Community, 168. 36 Antonio García Martínez, “How Silicon Valley Fuels an Informal Caste System,” Wired, July 9, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/how-silicon-valley-fuels-an-informal-caste-system/. 37 Ibid. 38 Jeff Daniels, “Nearly half of California’s gig economy workers struggling with poverty,” CNBC, August 28, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/28/about-half-of-californias-gig-economy-workers-struggling-with-poverty.html. 39 Nick Srnicek, “We need to nationalize Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
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.: MIT Press, 1999), 50. 4 Luke Stangel, “Sam Altman wants Silicon Valley to sign on to a core set of common values,” Silicon Valley Business Journal, April 19, 2017, https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/04/19/sam-altman-donald-trump-silicon-valley.html. 5 Jane Wakefield, “Tomorrow’s Cities—nightmare vision of the future?” BBC, February 22, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37384152. 6 Greg Ferenstein, “Silicon Valley’s political endgame, summarized in 12 visuals,” Medium, November 5, 2015, https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/silicon-valley-s-political-endgame-summarized-1f395785f3c1. 7 Geoff Nesnow, “73 Mind-blowing Implications of Driverless Cars and Trucks,” Medium, February 9, 2018, https://medium.com/@DonotInnovate/73-mind-blowing-implications-of-a-driverless-future-58d23d1f338d; Steve Andriole, “Already Too Big to Fail—The Digital Oligarchy Is Alive, Well (& Growing),” Forbes, July 29, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveandriole/2017/07/29/already-too-big-to-fail-the-digital-oligarchy-is-alive-well-growing/#71125b7667f5. 8 Marisa Kendall, “Tech execs back California bill that aims to build more housing near transit,” Mercury News, January 25, 2018, https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/24/tech-execs-back-bill-that-aims-to-build-more-housing-near-transit/. 9 Ferenstein, “Silicon Valley’s political endgame, summarized in 12 visuals.” 10 Nellie Bowles, “Dorm Living for Professionals Comes for San Francisco,” New York Times, March 4, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/technology/dorm-living-grown-ups-san-francisco.html; Emmie Martin, “Facebook and Google are both building more affordable housing in Silicon Valley,” CNBC, July 10, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/07/facebook-and-google-are-building-affordable-housing-in-silicon-valley.html; Avery Hartmans, “Facebook is building a village that will include housing, a grocery store and a hotel,” Business Insider, July 7, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-building-employee-housing-silicon-valley-headquarters-2017-7. 11 Ben Tarnoff, “Tech’s push to teach coding isn’t about kids’ success—it’s about cutting wages,” Guardian, September 21, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/21/coding-education-teaching-silicon-valley-wages. 12 Gerard C.
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That’s So Yesterday,” New York Times, June 12, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13sing.html; “A Timeline of Transhumanism,” The Verge, https://www.theverge.com/a/transhumanism-2015/history-of-transhumanism; Mark Piesing, “Silicon Valley’s ‘suicide pill’ for mankind,” UnHerd, August 20, 2018, https://unherd.com/2018/12/silicon-valleys-suicide-pill-mankind-2/; Michelle Quinn, “Silicon Valley’s fascination with a fountain of youth,” Mercury News, August 24, 2016, https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/08/09/silicon-valleys-fascination-with-a-fountain-of-youth/; “Measuring deep-brain neurons’ electrical signals at high speed with light instead of electrodes,” Kurzweilai, February 28, 2018, http://www.kurzweilai.net/measuring-deep-brain-neurons-electrical-signals-at-high-speed-with-light-instead-of-electrodes. 34 Antonio Regalado, “A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is ‘100 percent fatal,’” MIT Technology Review, March 13, 2018, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610456/a-startup-is-pitching-a-mind-uploading-service-that-is-100-percent-fatal/. 35 Mark Harris, “God Is a Bot, and Anthony Levandowski Is His Messenger,” Wired, September 27, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/god-is-a-bot-and-anthony-levandowski-is-his-messenger/. 36 Thomas Metzinger, “Silicon Valley evangelists sell an ancient dream of immortality,” Financial Times, August 20, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/7a89c998-828d-11e7-94e2-c5b903247afd. 37 Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, trans.
The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby
"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits
Packalan, and Kjersten Bunker Whittington, “Organizational and Institutional Genesis: The Emergence of High-Tech Clusters in the Life Sciences,” Queen’s School of Business Research Paper no. 03-10. For more on the networking role of VCs, see Michel Ferrary, “Silicon Valley: A Cluster of Venture Capitalists?,” Paris Innovation Review (blog), Oct. 26, 2017, parisinnovationreview.cn/en/2017/10/26/silicon-valley-a-cluster-of-venture-capitalists/. See also Mark Granovetter and Michel Ferrary, “The Role of Venture Capital Firms in Silicon Valley’s Complex Innovation Network,” Economy and Society 18, no. 2 (2009): 326–59. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11 Dennis Taylor, “Cradle of Venture Capital,” Silicon Valley Business Journal, April 18, 1999, bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/1999/04/19/focus1.html.
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The underappreciated significance of venture-capital networks has become especially glaring in the past few years as the industry has expanded in three dimensions. First, it has spread beyond its historical stronghold in Silicon Valley, building thriving outposts in Asia, Israel, and Europe as well as in major U.S. cities.[34] Second, the industry has spread sectorially, colonizing new industries as venture-backed technologies reach ever more widely, touching everything from cars to the hotel business. Third, venture capital is spreading beyond the startup phase of a company’s existence as Silicon Valley has sprouted multibillion-dollar corporations that have delayed raising capital from public shareholders.
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In Finland, not the sort of place where Bono played a lot of gigs, Linus Torvalds created the bare bones of the Linux operating system and gave it away freely. In short, there was no lack of inventiveness outside Silicon Valley, and no lack of countercultural antibusiness prejudice, either. The truth is that the distinguishing genius of the Valley lies not in its capacity for invention, countercultural or otherwise.[8] The first transistor was created in 1947, not in Silicon Valley, but at Bell Labs in New Jersey. The first personal computer was the Altair, created in New Mexico. The first precursor of the worldwide web, the network-management software Gopher, was from Minnesota.
Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee
"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War
There are several good books about the culture in Silicon Valley. A good place to start is Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley, by Emily Chang (New York: Portfolio, 2018). Chang is the host of Bloomberg Technology, the show on which I interviewed Tristan in April 2017, after his appearance on 60 Minutes. (Emily was on maternity leave that day!) The domination of Silicon Valley by young Asian and Caucasian men seems foundational to the culture that built Facebook, YouTube, and the others. Chang cuts to the heart of the matter. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, by Antonio García Martínez (New York: Harper, 2016), is the inside story of an engineer who started a company, ran out of money, got a gig in advertising technology at Facebook, and was there during the formative years of the business practices that enabled Cambridge Analytica.
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The libertarian era that began just after 2000 transformed the value system, culture, and business models of Silicon Valley, enabling Google, Facebook, and Amazon to create unprecedented wealth by dominating the public square on a global basis. I liked the Apollo and hippie eras because their idealism was genuine, even when it was misdirected. There are some excellent books that will unlock the mysteries of Silicon Valley’s early and middle days. Please read them! A good place to start is with semiconductors, the original business of Silicon Valley. I recommend The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, by Leslie Berlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
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The only skin in the game for me at that time was emotional. I had been a Silicon Valley insider for more than twenty years. My fingerprints were on dozens of great companies, and I hoped that one day Facebook would be another. For me, it was a no-brainer. I did not realize then that the technology of Silicon Valley had evolved into uncharted territory, that I should no longer take for granted that it would always make the world a better place. I am pretty certain that Zuck was in the same boat; I had no doubt then of Zuck’s idealism. Silicon Valley had had its share of bad people, but the limits of the technology itself had generally prevented widespread damage.
Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts
4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game
By the time bitcoin launched in 2009, there was a homegrown community to support it and build businesses, including Coinbase. The cypherpunks are to Brian and Fred what the semiconductor pioneers were to Jobs. “I don’t think Coinbase would have worked outside of Silicon Valley. It wasn’t an accident I met Fred here or Charlie Lee at Google. I went to Silicon Valley because that’s where the next generation of talent is,” Brian says. But for all Silicon Valley has to offer idealistic young inventors—culture, innovation, talent, and history—it still lacked one thing: deep reserves of capital and financial infrastructure required to bring inventions like bitcoin into the mainstream.
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., 151 Patriot Act, 71 PayPal, 70–71, 206 Pelosi, Nancy, 130 Pierce, Brock, 58, 136 Pistor, Katharina, 206 pivots, 73 Pizza Day, 22 Polychain Capital, 96, 177, 223 Pomp, 208 Ponzi schemes, 141–142, 224 Popper, Nathaniel, 23 pop-up blockchain ventures, 136–138 Powell, Jesse, 97 pre-Cambrian explosion, 203 private keys, 9, 43 Project Libra, 205–207 prop shops, 192 Puertopia, 167 Qash, 138 QuarkChain, 138 Quorum, 212 R3 consortium, 104 RAPID process, 191 Reddit, 78, 151, 161 on the crash, 166 threats against Coinbase on, 158–159 Reeves, Ben, 8–9, 179 regulation, 49, 53–54, 71, 118, 121–131, 187 Binance and, 180, 209 DeFi and, 217–218 GDAX and, 114 ICOs and, 145–146 IRS and, 121–126 lobbying on, 129–131 safe harbors from, 128 regulatory arbitrage, 128–129 renminbi, 207 Ribbit Capital, 36–37 Ridenour, Andrew, 224 “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin” (Wallace), 26 Rockdale, Texas, 171–172 Romero, Dan, 157, 195–196 safe harbors, 128 SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens), 146, 169–170 San Jose, California, 3–4 Santori, Marco, 169–170 Satoshi Dice, 127 Satoshi Roundtable, 80–81, 94 Schuler, Barry, 213–214 Schumpeter, Joseph, 214 Secret Service, 49 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 145–146, 168–170 security threats, 78–80 Selkis, Ryan, 57, 58, 115–116 ShapeShift, 127 Shiller, Robert, 218 Shin, Laura, 76 shitcoins. See altcoins Shrem, Charlie, 58, 115–116 Silbert, Barry, 34–35, 54, 207, 213 Silicon Valley, 3–4, 10, 99–100, 212–213, 225 Silicon Valley (TV show), 168 Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), 68–70, 72–73 Silk Road, 31, 59–60, 107, 122, 126–127 Sirer, Emin Gün, 107, 215–216, 218 Slack, 73 smart contracts, 89–95 social media Covid-19 and, 222–223 scams involving, 143–144 See also Reddit SoftBank, 171 Solidity, 89 Son, Masayoshi, 171 South Korea, 137 SpankChain, 135 Srinivasan, Balaji, 48, 136–137, 185–190 on cap tables, 215 departure of, 198–199 Hirji and, 193–200 political skills of, 193–196 stablecoins, 203–205 Stanford Law School, 107 Starbucks, 194 startups, 5–6 failure of, 6, 9–10 moving “up and to the right,” 35–36 solitary genius versus partnerships in, 7–8 Stellar, 54 Stox, 144 Suarez, Juan, 48–49, 50, 156 on regulation, 129 on strategy, 69 super voting shares, 112–113 Suthers, Elliott, 175 SVB.
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That’s the ordinary fate of startups, but not all of them, including two other companies in Brian’s class: one was Instacart—now a billion-dollar grocery service—and the other Soylent, a meal-replacement product that’s since built a cult following in Silicon Valley and beyond. When it was his turn to present on Demo Day, Brian stepped onto the stage with quiet confidence. He turned to the audience and shared his idea with the simple slogan: “Coinbase: The easiest way to get started with bitcoin.” It seemed so obvious—in retrospect. • • • Brian’s early insight into bitcoin would make him a billionaire. But it would cost him a friend. In that summer of 2012, Brian had not planned on going to Y Combinator alone, where one-man bands were discouraged. The startup school wanted cofounders. Plural. Despite Silicon Valley’s veneration of individual entrepreneurs, the reality is that tech startups, like so many creative endeavors, are very much a team sport—often a two-person partnership.
The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin
Apple II, Bob Noyce, book value, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, prudent man rule, Richard Feynman, rolling blackouts, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War
One year later, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee issued a study that concluded, “High technology companies offer a brighter future for America but they [also] offer salvation for those regions of America that have borne the brunt of our economic decline.”17 In the mid-1980s, regions across the country and around the world began trumpeting their high quality of life and low cost of living to trafficand mortgage-weary technologists in Silicon Valley. “Remember the Silicon Valley as it was 20 Years Ago? That’s Albuquerque Today!” promised one representative advertisement in the San Jose Business Journal. By 1989, the United States boasted regions calling themselves Silicon Forest (Portland, Oregon), Silicon Gulch (Phoenix, Arizona), Bionic Valley (Salt Lake City), Silicon Valley East (Troy-Albany, New York), Silicon Prairie (Dallas, Austin), and Silicon Mountain (Colorado Springs). Several European and Asian countries also possessed technology regions named in homage to Silicon Valley.18 Arguably the most successful of the American “Silicon Elsewheres,” as they were derisively called on the San Francisco Peninsula, was Austin, Texas.
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Peninsula Times Tribune, 21 September 1977. Port, Otis. “Bob Noyce Created Silicon Valley. Can He Save It?” Business Week, 15 August 1988, 76. Richards, Evelyn. “In Noyce’s Passing, an Era Also Ends: Electronics Pioneer Symbolized a Swashbuckling, Innovative Age.” Washington Post, 5 June 1990. Slater, Robert. “Robert Noyce: The Mayor of Silicon Valley.” In Slater, Portraits in Silicon. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. Stroud, Michael. “Intel’s Noyce Tells Silicon Valley: Don’t Blame Others for Our Mistakes.” Peninsula Times Tribune, 13 November 1985. Tedlow, Richard S. “Robert Noyce and Silicon Valley: Toward a New Business World.” Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires they Built.
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While more than 250 THE MAN BEHIND THE MICROCHIP 1.5 million American manufacturing workers lost their jobs, high technology employment in the San Francisco Bay Area grew 77 percent from 1974 to 1980, with Santa Clara County (the county whose boundaries most closely match those of Silicon Valley), gaining an impressive 83,000 jobs in the sector. In 1979, the “help wanted” section of the San Jose Mercury News listed more than 60 pages of advertisements for technical personnel. Per capita personal income growth in Santa Clara County outpaced the rest of California by more than 10 percent.44 According to some calculations, Silicon Valley produced more millionaires in the decade of the 1970s than anywhere else in the country at any time in history. Between 1975 and 1983, more than 1,000 companies— some of them fantastically successful—were launched in Silicon Valley. In 1983, the chairman of the American Stock Exchange was excited enough about young high-technology firms that he told Time magazine, “If there is any hope for our economy, it rests with these people.
The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti
assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game
The idea is that no matter where people live, they can share knowledge and move products at virtually no cost. According to this view, the good jobs, now concentrated in high-cost locations such as Silicon Valley and Boston, will quickly disperse to low-cost locations, both in the United States and abroad. An experienced software engineer in India makes $35,000. The same person in Silicon Valley makes $140,000. Why would U.S. firms keep hiring in Silicon Valley when they could save so much by outsourcing? By the same token, if labor costs are three times higher in Silicon Valley than in Mobile, Alabama, companies will eventually relocate to Alabama. This process of dispersion, the argument goes, will be faster than the dispersion of manufacturing jobs, because moving software codes across DSL lines is easier than moving bulky goods across borders.
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In its heyday, the Detroit auto industry was one of the country’s most important innovation hubs, arguably the Silicon Valley of its time. Like Silicon Valley today, Detroit was full of technologically superior companies that were the envy of the world. The economist Steven Klepper has shown that to an astonishing degree, the rise of Silicon Valley has been tracking the earlier rise of Detroit in terms of population, employment, startup creation, and innovation. Thus, Detroit’s remarkable trajectory holds important lessons for the future of our current innovation hubs. Just like Silicon Valley today, Detroit used to think of its primacy as unassailable.
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Observers predicted the end of the Valley’s global dominance. But the pessimists were by and large wrong. Silicon Valley has remained the innovation capital of the world, and it continues to lead all other metropolitan regions in the breadth and scope of its innovative activity. It accounts for more than a third of all venture capital investment, significantly more than twenty years ago. Every year hundreds of smart, ambitious innovators move their startups from Europe, Israel, and Asia to Silicon Valley. The Valley keeps its position as the world’s number-one innovation hub not because those who are born there are smarter than anyone else but because of its unparalleled power to attract great ideas and great talent from elsewhere.
Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie
"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce
Men who behaved badly were being put on notice, and many firms in Silicon Valley were hiring more women as principals and partners. That marked progress. But the real work, the heavy lifting, was more challenging. It was the deeper problem of bias. MJ knew that the “bro culture,” and stories of sexual harassment in Silicon Valley, were an everyday reality, but she also knew that was not the entire story. She had worked with ethical partners at IVP and elsewhere who looked past gender and always treated her respectfully. She had found Silicon Valley an amazing place to work. She had blazed trails and built game-changing companies.
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MORE ADVANCE PRAISE FOR ALPHA GIRLS “An intimate and addictive homage to the fearless female pioneers who made Silicon Valley blossom. Julian’s vivid portrayals of once-hidden risk takers and mavericks will leave you heartbroken, hopeful, and hungering for more.” —Brian Keating, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and author of Losing the Nobel Prize “Finally, it’s here: a book about Silicon Valley as seen through the accomplishments of the powerful women who, against all odds, made their mark there. Alpha Girls offers an inside look at the true meaning of grit and drive and upends the myth that it is only men who create and build tech companies.
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—Cathy Schulman, president of Welle Entertainment, Academy Award–winning producer, and women’s activist “Julian Guthrie is the best author writing about Silicon Valley today, and Alpha Girls is the book that the world needs right now. It’s the real story behind the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet. If you are a woman who works, or simply work with women, Alpha Girls is essential reading.” —Adam Fisher, author of Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) Copyright © 2019 by Julian Guthrie All rights reserved.
Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac
"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator
Chapter 14: CULTURE WARS 132 “the crazy ones”: http://www.thecrazyones.it/spot-en.html. 132 went into the technology sector: Natalie Kitroeff and Patrick Clark, “Silicon Valley May Want MBAs More Than Wall Street Does,” Bloomberg Businessweek, March 17, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-17/silicon-valley-mba-destination. 132 nearly a quarter of them: Gina Hall, “MBAs are Increasingly Finding a Home in Silicon Valley,” Silicon Valley Business Learning, March 18, 2016, https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/03/18/mbas-are-increasingly-finding-a-home-in-silicon.html. 133 “In a meritocracy”: Uber’s list of 14 values, obtained by author. 134 Mohrer tweeted: Winston Mohrer (@WinnTheDog), “#Shittybike #lyft,” Twitter, July 11, 2018, 7:21 a.m., https://twitter.com/WinnTheDog/status/1017005971107909633. 135 designed an algorithm: Caroline O’Donovan and Priya Anand, “How Uber’s Hard-Charging Corporate Culture Left Employees Drained,” BuzzFeedNews, July 17, 2017, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/how-ubers-hard-charging-corporate-culture-left-employees#.wpdMljap9. 135 “This Safe Rides Fee supports”: “What Is the Safe Rides Fee?
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., https://twitter.com/sarahcuda/status/502228907068641280. 121 tone-deaf response: “Statement On New Year’s Eve Accident,” Uber (blog), https://web.archive.org/web/20140103020522/http://blog.uber.com/2014/01/01/statement-on-new-years-eve-accident/. 122 read the headline: Lacy, “The Horrific Trickle Down of Asshole Culture. 122 Kalanick’s obsession with China: Erik Gordon, “Uber’s Didi Deal Dispels Chinese ‘El Dorado’ Myth Once and For All,” The Conversation, http://theconversation.com/ubers-didi-deal-dispels-chinese-el-dorado-myth-once-and-for-all-63624. 124 Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business: American Bar, “Salle Yoo,” https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/science_technology/2016/salle_yoo.authcheckdam.pdf. 126 “no fear in Silicon Valley”: Mike Isaac, “Silicon Valley Investor Warns of Bubble at SXSW,” Bits (blog), New York Times, March 15, 2015, https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/silicon-valley-investor-says-the-end-is-near/. 127 Manhattan’s Flatiron District: Johana Bhuiyan, “Uber’s Travis Kalanick Takes ‘Charm Offensive’ To New York City,” BuzzFeedNews, November 14, 2014, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johanabhuiyan/ubers-travis-kalanick-takes-charm-offensive-to-new-york-city. 128 hard-hitting news organization: Mike Isaac, “50 Million New Reasons BuzzFeed Wants to Take Its Content Far Beyond Lists,” New York Times, August 10, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/technology/a-move-to-go-beyond-lists-for-content-at-buzzfeed.html. 130 “Uber’s dirt-diggers”: Ben Smith, “Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists,” BuzzFeedNews, November 17, 2014, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-digging-up-dirt-on-journalists.
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Uber’s rapid rise was nearly undone in 2017, as the company faced the consequences of years of Kalanick’s boundary-pushing behavior, unabashed pugnacity and, eventually, the CEO’s own personal decline. Kalanick’s story is whispered as a cautionary tale for founders and venture capitalists alike, emblematic of both the best and worst of Silicon Valley. The saga of Uber—which is, essentially, the story of Travis Kalanick—is a tale of hubris and excess set against a technological revolution, with billions of dollars and the future of transportation at stake. It’s a story that touches on the major themes of Silicon Valley in the last decade: how rapid developments in technology can crash into long-entrenched labor systems, throw urban development into upheaval, and overturn an entire industry in a matter of years.
The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff
"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte
Individual investors such as Carl Icahn, venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, and funds such as Softbank’s Vision Fund and the Collaborative Fund have dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into tech start-ups over the past decade. The Silicon Valley spirit is even bigger than the promise of its platforms to create value and success for individuals and firms, however. Silicon Valley, we’re told, is ushering in a new age—a digital age of limitless possibility. The big ideas being cultivated in Silicon Valley have been around for a while. In the early nineties scholars discussed the “New Economy” and the “network society,” predicting massive societal shifts due to advances in digital technology and internet connectivity.
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So it’s not surprising that we are so adept at creating and indulging in digital nightmare scenarios. But this fiction-reality overlap is only a tiny part of the mistrust and weariness of the Silicon Valley worldview; it is rooted in something more concrete than our fruitful imaginations. Our disenchantment is rooted in the very real misdeeds of Silicon Valley corporations. It’s rooted in the growing realization that, like the titans of the Gilded Age, today’s titans mistake their own interests for those of society. Consider Uber, a company that perfectly embodies the Silicon Valley spirit. Uber rose from a tiny San Francisco startup, hiring its first employee in 2010, to a juggernaut in record time.
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Angwin and Parris, “Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race”; Angwin, Tobin, and Varner, “Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race”; Tobin, “HUD Sues Facebook over Housing Discrimination.” 32. See Celia Cucalon, “The Silicon Valley Land Grab,” Community Legal Services, https://clsepa.org/media-great-silicon-valleyland-grab. Community Legal Services is a nonprofit legal aid service offering support for families in East Palo Alto, California, on issues of immigration, housing, and worker and consumer rights. 33. For an overview of Silicon Valley Rising and resources about the role of tech companies in shaping the region, see https://siliconvalleyrising.org. 34. Simmons, “How Apple—and the Rest of Silicon Valley—Avoids the Tax Man.” 35. Zucman, “How Corporations and the Wealthy Avoid Taxes (and How to Stop Them).” 36.
The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional
The big data applications themselves are easily scalable, can be done broadly around the world, and can be implemented whether or not there is much previous data experience—as was the case for the people in Palmerston, New Zealand, who made equipment for the region’s dairy farmers. Silicon Valley builds things that Silicon Valley wants, from nicer taxi services to more photo-sharing apps. But investors and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley don’t see the world through, say, the eyes of farmers. Thus, they are less likely than a company in the Manawatu-Wanganui region of New Zealand’s North Island to recognize the need for and develop a technology that enables greater beef and dairy production for export to China. While Marc Andreessen is as closely identified with Silicon Valley as anybody, he agrees that those fields that are early in their development can and should take root wherever there is deep knowledge about a specific area.
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Bronk has a hybrid view, expecting dexterous start-ups to be rolled up into large companies much as the defense giants of the military-industrial complex were, but with a modern, Silicon Valley twist. “What I’ve noticed,” he says, “is that good cybersecurity comes from smart researchers, and smart researchers tend to agglomerate with one another in small groups and start-ups.” Eventually, Bronk thinks, a big company or a big defense firm bulking up their respective cyberdefenses could buy up or invest in these smart researchers. “Basically cybersecurity is going to be very similar to Silicon Valley start-up and acquisition patterns,” says Bronk. When a Silicon Valley company wants innovation, they either do the work in house or contract it out.
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SIX THE GEOGRAPHY OF FUTURE MARKETS World leaders take notice: the 21st century is a terrible time to be a control freak. “We want to create our own Silicon Valley.” If there’s a single sentence I’ve heard in every country I’ve been to, it’s this one. Silicon Valley has been home to technology-driven innovation for a long time, but the 20-year period from 1994 to 2014 was something special. People all over the world witnessed a spectacular level of innovation and wealth creation, all emerging from a small 30-mile long, 15-mile-wide strip of Northern California. Other states and countries have been attempting to build the “next Silicon Valley” for years now. At this point, there’s even a formula.
The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell
"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar
After nearly a decade in business, the company wasn’t profitable—or anywhere close. It was losing more than $3,000 a minute, on average, and had lost more than $1.6 billion the prior year. But Uber, Airbnb, and the mattress website Casper were all unprofitable. Losses were par for the course for buzzy Silicon Valley companies. Startups didn’t always grow and spend like this. But a decade-long deluge of money into Silicon Valley had established new cultural norms. Excess was in. For investors, it was the cost of doing business. The world was changing; entrepreneurs with giant vision needed room to grow and express themselves, they said. Rapid expansion was the goal, and these companies had plenty of that.
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He seemed awed by the excess. As Neumann rubbed shoulders with these wealthy Silicon Valley exiles in New York, he began to talk more about how WeWork shared all sorts of the tech companies’ qualities. To Parker, he compared WeWork to Facebook, saying it was about connecting people, “but it’s in the third dimension.” Parker and many of his investor friends were skeptical. They liked Neumann but didn’t take him seriously as a businessman, much less a tech entrepreneur of their ilk. * * * — It wasn’t just Parker and his friends who offered a taste of Silicon Valley success. By 2012, tech and startups began to saturate Neumann’s circles.
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In 2011, VC firms raised $24 billion from investors, nearly double their haul of 2009. This outpouring of money resulted in a burst of startups that would go on to reshape the Silicon Valley landscape and become household names in Americans’ daily lives. Between 2009 and 2012, VCs wrote early checks to startups like Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, and Square. Suddenly you couldn’t walk into a coffee shop in Silicon Valley without hearing talk of the next industry ripe to be “disrupted” by a startup. Amid all the optimism, there was a noticeable change in venture capital strategy that would set apart this generation of startups from their prerecession forebearers.
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance
addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize
On this occasion, for example, Musk’s assistant had just handed him some cookies-and-cream ice cream with sprinkles on top, and he then talked earnestly about saving humanity while a blotch of the dessert hung from his lower lip. Musk’s ready willingness to tackle impossible things has turned him into a deity in Silicon Valley, where fellow CEOs like Page speak of him in reverential awe, and budding entrepreneurs strive “to be like Elon” just as they had been striving in years past to mimic Steve Jobs. Silicon Valley, though, operates within a warped version of reality, and outside the confines of its shared fantasy, Musk often comes off as a much more polarizing figure. He’s the guy with the electric cars, solar panels, and rockets peddling false hope.
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“Kids these days have no idea about hardware or how stuff works, but he had a PC hacker background and was not afraid to just go figure things out.” Musk found in Silicon Valley a wealth of the opportunity he’d been seeking and a place equal to his ambitions. He would return two summers in a row and then bolt west permanently after graduating with dual degrees from Penn. He initially intended to pursue a doctorate in materials science and physics at Stanford and to advance the work he’d done at Pinnacle on ultracapacitors. As the story goes, Musk dropped out of Stanford after two days, finding the Internet’s call irresistible. He talked Kimbal into moving to Silicon Valley as well, so they could conquer the Web together.
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That same month X.com officially changed its name to PayPal, providing a harsh reminder that the company had been ripped away from Musk and given to someone else to run. The start-up life, which Musk described as akin to “eating glass and staring into the abyss,”4 had gotten old and so had Silicon Valley. It felt like Musk was living inside a trade show where everyone worked in the technology industry and talked all the time about funding, IPOs, and chasing big paydays. People liked to brag about the crazy hours they worked, and Justine would just laugh, knowing Musk had lived a more extreme version of the Silicon Valley lifestyle than they could imagine. “I had friends who complained that their husbands came home at seven or eight,” she said. “Elon would come home at eleven and work some more.
How to American: An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents by Jimmy O. Yang
call centre, do what you love, Erlich Bachman, hacker house, imposter syndrome, Jian Yang, Peter Gregory, Richard Hendricks, Silicon Valley, Uber for X, Vanguard fund
When my dad finally watched an episode of Silicon Valley he said, “I don’t think your stand-up is funny, but I think Silicon Valley is very funny. You and your big white roommate are funny together.” That’s probably the nicest thing he’d ever say about my career. In a Chinese family, we never say, “I love you.” That was his equivalent of a crying father hugging his son after winning the state championship football game. “I love you son, I’m so proud of you.” After all, Dad wasn’t a full-on hater. He didn’t understand stand-up, but the dynamic between me and T. J. Miller on Silicon Valley was like the xiang sheng that he grew up with in China, and my deadpan delivery was like the Stephen Chow movies we watched back in Hong Kong.
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Yes! Yes!” My neighbor must have thought I was having the best sex of my life. “But there is one thing,” Jane said. “If you do this show, you can’t do Silicon Valley anymore, because Yahoo wants you exclusively on their show.” Nothing is ever perfect, is it? I wasn’t sure if I was going to be back on Silicon Valley, but if HBO called me to be back on the second season, I knew it was something I couldn’t pass up. The first season of Silicon Valley was already nominated for the Emmys and Golden Globes; it was on its way to becoming a big hit. It meant everything for my career to book my first series-regular job, but how could I turn down a possible second season of an Emmy-nominated HBO show with Mike Judge?
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I knew I’d make at least twenty times more money as a series regular on Sin City Saints than the union minimum nine hundred dollars guest starring on Silicon Valley. And trust me, I cared about the money. My economics degree told me, Take the series-regular money, go to Caesars Palace. But I ignored that econ degree the same way I did when I left Smith Barney to do stand-up. I followed my gut. “Jane, I’d rather be a small part of a great show than a big part of an unknown show.” I put my foot down. “I really want to do Sin City Saints, but they need to let me do Silicon Valley.” I didn’t know much about the business, but I knew I couldn’t give up on Silicon Valley. Jane’s joyous tone suddenly turned heavy, but she knew I was making the right decision.
The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher
2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator
All were tough-minded professionals. Some had accrued sterling reputations in Washington DC, in fields such as counterterrorism or cybersecurity, before joining the Silicon Valley gold rush. Others had impressive backgrounds in human rights or politics. They were hardly the basement hackers and starry-eyed dropouts who had once governed the platforms—although it would later become clear that the dorm-room ideologies and biases from Silicon Valley’s early days were still held with near-religious conviction on their campuses, and remained baked into the very technology that pushed those same ideals into the wider world.
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University research departments usually toil, at least in theory, on behalf of the greater good. Stanford blurred the line between academic and for-profit work, a development that became core to the Silicon Valley worldview, absorbed and propagated by countless companies cycling through the Research Park. Hitting it big in the tech business and advancing human welfare, the thinking went, were not only compatible, they were one and the same. These conditions made 1950s Santa Clara what Margaret O’Mara, a prominent historian of Silicon Valley, has called a silicon Galápagos. Much as those islands’ peculiar geology and extreme isolation produced one-of-a-kind bird and lizard species, the Valley’s peculiar conditions produced ways of doing business and of seeing the world that could not have flourished anywhere else—and led ultimately to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
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A supporting but highly visible player in the country’s opening, welcomed by both Myanmar and American leaders, was Silicon Valley. Rapidly bringing the country online would, they promised, modernize its economy and empower its 50 million citizens, effectively locking in the transition to democracy. A few months after Obama’s visit, Schmidt, acting as the Valley’s ambassador-at-large, landed in Yangon, Myanmar’s historic capital, to announce big tech’s arrival. Flanked by the American ambassador, he told the student audience, “The internet, once in place, guarantees that communication and empowerment become the law and the practice of your country.” Myanmar’s leaders believed in Silicon Valley’s vision as well.
Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game
Rubin was a member of a unique “Band of Brothers” who passed through Apple Computer in the 1980s, a generation of young computer engineers who came of age in Silicon Valley as disciples of Steve Jobs. Captivated by Jobs’s charisma and his dedication to using good design and computing technology as levers to “change the world,” they set out independently on their own technology quests. The Band of Brothers reflected the tremendous influence Jobs’s Macintosh project had on an entire Silicon Valley generation, and many stayed friends for years afterward. Silicon Valley’s best and brightest believed deeply in bringing the Next Big Thing to millions of people. Rubin’s robot obsession, however, was extraordinary, even by the standards of his technology-obsessed engineering friends.
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“Baby Boomers Retire,” Pew Research Center, December 29, 2010 http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/baby-boomers-retire. 4|THE RISE, FALL, AND RESURRECTION OF AI 1.David C. Brock, “How William Shockley’s Robot Dream Helped Launch Silicon Valley,” IEEE Spectrum, November 29, 2013, http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/how-william-shockleys-robot-dream-helped-launch-silicon-valley. 2.David C. Brock, “From Automation to Silicon Valley: The Automation Movement of the 1950s, Arnold Beckman, and William Shockley,” History and Technology 28, no. 4 (2012), http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07341512.2012.756236#.VQTPKCbHi_A. 3.Ibid. 4.John Markoff, “Robotic Vehicles Race, but Innovation Wins,” New York Times, September 14, 2005. 5.John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005). 6.Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence, 2nd ed.
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Examples range from machine vision and pattern recognition essential in improving quality in semiconductor design and so-called rational drug discovery algorithms, which systematize the creation of new pharmaceuticals, to government surveillance and social media companies whose business model is invading privacy for profit. The optimists hope that potential abuses will be minimized if the applications remain human-focused rather than algorithm-centric. The reality is that, until now, Silicon Valley has not had a track record that is morally superior to any earlier industries. It will be truly remarkable if any Silicon Valley company actually rejects a profitable technology for ethical reasons. Setting aside the philosophical discussion about self-aware machines, and in spite of Gordon’s pessimism about productivity increases, it is clearly becoming increasingly possible and “rational” to design humans out of systems for both performance and cost reasons.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor
Once, at a private meeting for big donors from the entertainment industry, one of the guests asked Obama why he had sided with Silicon Valley over Hollywood during a fierce regulatory battle over copyright law in 2011 and 2012: Hollywood, the makers of content, was for stricter protections, and Silicon Valley, whose business was to distribute as much material as it could for free, was against them. Silicon Valley won. (In this instance, and others, one of Silicon Valley’s lobbying techniques was to mobilize its vast user base in support of its political goals.) It’s simple, Obama told his Hollywood supporters: they do a lot more to help me than you guys do.
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Was there another organizing principle, beyond institutions and transactions? If you went looking for one, you might well wind up in Silicon Valley, the narrow band of territory that ran along the western edge of the San Francisco Bay and was home to suddenly enormous companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook. Silicon Valley was primarily a business site, but—just as the people who built the great industrial corporations of the early twentieth century also had a social vision in which they themselves occupied a central position—the leaders of Silicon Valley considered themselves to be far more than merely economically successful. They also knew how the world should work in the new century.
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Successes like these were exceedingly rare. One study of Silicon Valley start-ups found that almost three-quarters of company founders who got funding from venture capital firms—and these were the lucky ones, representing a small minority of those who pitched to the venture firms—wound up making nothing. The common wisdom in Silicon Valley had it that one start-up a year, of perhaps thirty thousand, would wind up being as valuable as all the others combined, and that the ten most successful would account for more than 95 percent of the value of all of them. Silicon Valley has created an amazingly effective mechanism for drawing talent and money into a game that almost all the players will lose, and for generating a handful of companies that make useful products, grow very large very quickly, and make their founders astonishingly rich—obviously not the basis of a successful social system.
The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar
James Temple, “Airbnb Victim Describes Crime and Aftermath,” SFGate, July 30, 2011, http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Airbnb-victim-describes-crime-and-aftermath-2352693.php. 21. Claire Cain Miller, “In Silicon Valley, the Night Is Still Young,” New York Times, August 20, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/technology/silicon-valley-booms-but-worries-about-a-new-bust.html. 22. Jim Wilson, “Good Times in Silicon Valley, for Now,” New York Times, August 13, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/08/13/technology/20110821-VALLEY-5.html; Geoffrey Fowler, “The Perk Bubble Is Growing as Tech Booms Again,” Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2011, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303763404576419803997423690. 23.
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How did they maneuver past entrenched, politically savvy incumbents to succeed where others had failed and build large companies in a staggeringly short amount of time? How much of their success was luck? What does it take to survive and thrive in modern Silicon Valley? These were questions, I judged back in 2014, that were ripe for exploration in a book. But the practical question was this: Would the startups cooperate with such an in-depth project? At most Silicon Valley tech companies, the time and public images of the top executives are obsessively guarded. Uber and Airbnb had graduated into this secretive sanctum. The only way to find out was to ask. Living up to its mission to foster hospitality, Airbnb promptly invited me to discuss the project.
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All these investors had concerns about the size of the market, about the absence of any real users, and about the founders themselves, who didn’t resemble the wonky innovators who’d created great Silicon Valley companies, people like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. Design students seemed risky; Stanford computer science dropouts were considered a much better bet. And, frankly, the idea itself seemed small. “We made the classic mistake that all investors make,” wrote Fred Wilson, a Twitter backer, a few years later. “We focused too much on what they were doing at the time and not enough on what they could do, would do, and did do.”11 The year 2008 was also an anxious time in Silicon Valley. The tech industry had recovered from the devastation of the dot-com bust a few years before and had been buoyed by the Google IPO in 2004 and the budding success of Facebook.
Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder
23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game
Meanwhile, these delusions of omnipotence have not prevented the eclipse of its initial public offering market, the antitrust tribulations of its champion companies led by Google, and the profitless prosperity of its hungry herds of “unicorns,” as they call private companies worth more than one billion dollars. Capping these setbacks is Silicon Valley’s loss of entrepreneurial edge in IPOs and increasingly in venture capital to nominal communists in China. In defense, Silicon Valley seems to have adopted what can best be described as a neo-Marxist political ideology and technological vision. You may wonder how I can depict as “neo-Marxists” those who on the surface seem to be the most avid and successful capitalists on the planet.
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All this is temporal provincialism and myopia, exaggerating the significance of the attainments of their own era, of their own companies, of their own special philosophies and chimeras—of themselves, really. Assuming that in some way their “Go” machine and climate theories are the consummation of history, they imagine that it’s “winner take all for all time.” Strangely enough, this delusion is shared by Silicon Valley’s critics. The dystopians join the utopians in imagining a supremely competent and visionary Silicon Valley, led by Google with its monopoly of information and intelligence. AI is believed to be redefining what it means to be human, much as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species did in its time. While Darwin made man just another animal, a precariously risen ape, Google-Marxism sees men as inferior intellectually to the company’s own algorithmic machines.
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They offer the still-remote promise of new computer architectures such as quantum computers that can actually model physical reality and thus may finally yield some real intelligence. The current generation in Silicon Valley has yet to come to terms with the findings of von Neumann and Gödel early in the last century or with the breakthroughs in information theory of Claude Shannon, Gregory Chaitin, Anton Kolmogorov, and John R. Pierce. In a series of powerful arguments, Chaitin, the inventor of algorithmic information theory, has translated Gödel into modern terms. When Silicon Valley’s AI theorists push the logic of their case to explosive extremes, they defy the most crucial findings of twentieth-century mathematics and computer science.
Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise
In the 1980s Silicon Valley technology companies were boring places where engineers worked in drab office parks writing software or designing semiconductors and circuit boards and network routers. There weren’t any celebrities, other than Steve Jobs at Apple, and even he wasn’t such a big deal back then. In the early 1990s the Internet era began, and Silicon Valley changed. The new companies were flimsy, based on hype and grandiose rhetoric and the promise of making a fortune overnight. The dotcom boom of the late 1990s was followed by the dotcom bust, and then came a period when Silicon Valley felt like a ghost town.
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Some people were afraid to talk to me at all. At the time I thought their concerns were silly. But as things turned out, those people may have been right to be afraid. Regarding terminology: When I use the term Silicon Valley I do not mean to denote an actual geographic region—the sixty-mile peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose, where the original technology companies were built. Instead, like Hollywood, or Wall Street, Silicon Valley has become a metaphorical name for an industry, one that exists in Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Boston, and countless other places, as well as the San Francisco Bay Area. The term bubble, as I use it, refers not only to the economic bubble in which the valuation of some tech start-ups went crazy but also to the mindset of the people working inside technology companies, the true believers and Kool-Aid drinkers, the people who live inside their own filter bubble, brimming with self-confidence and self-regard, impervious to criticism, immunized against reality, unaware of how ridiculous they appear to the outside world.
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In 2012 Congress passed the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act, which relaxes the rules on private company investing and allows regular folks to pour money into start-ups, usually by pooling their money into syndicates on websites like AngelList. Silicon Valley companies lobbied for the JOBS Act, arguing it would give ordinary people—doctors, lawyers, retirees—the chance to catch the next Facebook or Google. But some Wall Street veterans are worried: “We are talking about companies that in all likelihood are not going to be winners, being invested in by people who clearly don’t have the expertise and financial smarts of venture capitalists,” former SEC chief accountant Lynn Turner tells Bloomberg, adding that the rule change creates “a real opportunity for scams and fraud and significant losses.” The denizens of Silicon Valley see no such problem.
World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer
artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism
It was coupled with an alternative vision of society, a vision of amateurs producing knowledge for the joy of it, a faith in the wisdom of crowds. Silicon Valley views its role in history as that of the disruptive agent that shatters the grip of the sclerotic, self-perpetuating mediocrity that constitutes the American elite. On the surface, the tech companies seem aware of the danger that they might repeat the sins of the very cohort they critique. After Silicon Valley supplies its users with tools to make decisions for themselves, it claims to step out of the way and recede unassumingly. This ostentatious humility serves an important purpose. It obscures the nature of its power. Silicon Valley routinely trashes cultural and economic gatekeepers—while its own companies are the most imposing gatekeepers in human history.
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They believe that they have the opportunity to complete the long merger between man and machine—to redirect the trajectory of human evolution. How do I know this? Such suggestions are fairly commonplace in Silicon Valley, even if much of the tech press is too obsessed with covering the latest product launch to take much notice of them. In annual addresses and townhall meetings, the founding fathers of these companies often make big, bold pronouncements about human nature—a view of human nature that they intend to impose on the rest of us. There’s an oft-used shorthand for the technologist’s view of the world. It is assumed that libertarianism dominates Silicon Valley, which isn’t wholly wrong. High-profile devotees of Ayn Rand can be found there.
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Brand would come to inspire a revolution in computing. Engineers across Silicon Valley revered Brand for explaining the profound potential of their work in ways they couldn’t always see or articulate. Brand gathered a devoted following because he brought to technology a rousing sense of idealism. Where politics failed to transform humanity, computers just might. That dream of transformation—a world healed by technology, brought together into a peaceful model of collaboration—carries a charming innocence. In Silicon Valley, this naive belief has been handed down through ages. Even the most hard-nosed corporations have internalized it.
The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator
Many find our solutions to common problems surprising. By studying these structures, we can find new tools that are valuable in a corporate context. And although I refer throughout this chapter to “Silicon Valley” and “Silicon Valley–style startups,” I am not referring literally to the roughly fifty square miles around my house. Increasingly, Silicon Valley is a state of mind, a shared set of beliefs and practices that have taken hold in dozens of startup hubs around the world. I use “Silicon Valley” only as a convenient shorthand for these beliefs. (For one example, see organizations like Rise of the Rest, founded by Steve Case, which works with entrepreneurs in emerging startup cities.2) So let’s dive in.
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The only way to win in this world is to take more shots on goal. Try more radical things. Pay close attention to what works and what doesn’t. And double down on the winners. A STARTUP IS MISSION—AND VISION—DRIVEN Outside of Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg’s declaration that “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services”20 was met with eye rolls. But in Silicon Valley, we really believe it. Silicon Valley is obsessed with vision and the visionary founder who can uniquely execute it. This focus has been a source of some controversy as Lean Startup has become more popular. Because of our emphasis on science, metrics, and experimentation, it’s a common (but misguided) criticism that Lean Startup seeks to replace vision or, in some ways, de-emphasize it.
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When established organizations first started asking me to work as a consultant, I thought my primary task would be to bring the “Silicon Valley way of working” to them. And, to some extent, I have. But the biggest surprise has been the extent to which my Silicon Valley colleagues have been interested in learning from my war stories of working to implement Lean Startup techniques in corporate settings. It’s what led to my realization that the Startup Way requires reforms and changes on both sides of the traditional “startup” and “enterprise” divide. A modern company isn’t about working just one way—the Silicon Valley way—or the other—the current corporate management way.
To Pixar and Beyond by Lawrence Levy
Apollo 13, computerized trading, index card, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, spice trade, Steve Jobs, Wall-E
If there was one person I could turn to for that, it was my old boss and mentor, Larry Sonsini. 10 On Board Larry Sonsini was the managing partner at my old law firm, Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati. He was a legend in Silicon Valley, and with good reason. Larry was Silicon Valley’s resident guru on start-ups and IPOs; he had built the firm advising many if not most of Silicon Valley’s most famous start-ups, guiding them and advising them through their initial public offerings and beyond. He was chief legal adviser to Silicon Valley’s most prominent CEOs and boards of directors. If Silicon Valley had a consigliere, it was Larry. Within the law firm, Larry inspired a combination of admiration and awe. He was a brilliant lawyer—efficient, effective, and intensely focused on client service.
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The only viable path for a little company like Pixar to raise the kind of money we needed was to take it public. It was simply too much money, and too much risk given Pixar’s track record, for traditional banks or other financing sources to consider. If there is a holy grail in Silicon Valley, it is the initial public offering, or IPO, of a company’s stock. This is Silicon Valley’s payday, the moment of arrival, when paper money becomes real. Every start-up in Silicon Valley harbored dreams of going public. Only a tiny percentage made it. Of those that didn’t make it, some would be acquired by larger companies, even fewer would manage on their own; the rest would shut down.
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I especially admired the pride he took in the firm and its role in Silicon Valley. On one occasion in his office, when we had a few minutes to talk, he compared running the firm to building a start-up: “Our mission is simple,” he said. “We serve Silicon Valley companies with as fine a legal counsel as they could get anywhere in the world. They don’t need to go anywhere else.” With that goal, Larry had steadily increased the quality of legal services of the firm until it did, indeed, compete with, and in some cases exceed, the very best in the world. As Silicon Valley grew, the firm grew. If Pixar was to go public, it could not be in better hands than Larry’s.
Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator
You have to understand the market dynamics, timing of each of the regions, and the talent and capabilities that each region has.” DO THEY ALL START IN SILICON VALLEY? Fadell is right that location matters. Startups thrive in the right context, which includes the place where they began and the region they serve. Although Silicon Valley has historically been the “right” location for technology startups, that doesn’t mean all billion-dollar startups need to come out of Silicon Valley, and it certainly doesn’t mean things are going to remain the same in the future, especially with the ever-growing shift to remote work. It’s true that Silicon Valley is home to the largest number of billion-dollar startups in the United States.
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This may suggest historically higher odds of reaching billion-dollar valuations for Silicon Valley–based companies. One big caveat, however, is that some companies moved to Silicon Valley after they were able to raise money and see initial success; raising money helped them afford the exorbitant costs of running a business and living there. Dropbox’s founders, for example, moved from Boston to San Francisco after Y Combinator. So that might account for some of Silicon Valley’s success. And it’s no doubt that Silicon Valley startups had easier access to large pools of venture capital and a dense pool of talent, further contributing to their success.
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Guild, which has raised over $200 million from investors like General Catalyst, Felicis Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures, was last valued at over $1 billion. Many startups have moved from other cities to Silicon Valley after raising money, but Carlson and Stich moved their company out of Silicon Valley to Denver after having raised their first round of funding. It was an unusual choice. Far from Silicon Valley, Denver is not even considered one of the top tech or startup hubs, like New York or Boston. I sat down with Carlson to learn more about her journey and why she decided to base the company in Denver.
The Gated City (Kindle Single) by Ryan Avent
big-box store, carbon footprint, company town, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, income inequality, industrial cluster, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, offshore financial centre, profit maximization, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, Thorstein Veblen, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Veblen good, white picket fence, zero-sum game
And from the late 1990s to the early 2000s -- after the bust -- Silicon Valley’s rate of high-tech entrepreneurship actually increased. How can this be? How is it that during the first great boom of the Internet era, Silicon Valley was less of a hotbed for new firm formation than the country as a whole?[10] The authors of the analysis cited above, economists Robert Fairlie and Aaron Chatterji, suggest that the answer lies in the extremely tight labor market conditions that prevailed at the time. The tech boom was remarkably good for Silicon Valley workers. Average earnings rose by nearly 40% from 1997 to 2000 -- more than twice as fast as the increase for the country as a whole.
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That, in turn, made it more attractive to be a worker than an entrepreneur. And this brings us to the crux of the matter: why was the Silicon Valley labor market so tight? If the unemployment rate was so much lower than it was elsewhere in the country, and if compensation was rising so much more rapidly than elsewhere in the country, why weren’t people pouring into Silicon Valley from elsewhere in the country? More remarkably, why were people moving in the opposite direction? If you can believe it, Silicon Valley’s main metropolitan centers were losing residents to other parts of the country during the Dot Com boom. From 1998 to 1999, for instance, San Francisco and San Mateo counties each lost a net of about 10,000 residents to other parts of the country.
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Instead, the data seem to suggest that most movement has been driven by housing costs. There obviously are big differences in nominal wages across these cities; as we've seen, people in places like Silicon Valley make much more than workers elsewhere. The factor that drives people away from Silicon Valley despite this high wage is the cost of a place to live. Figure 3. Source: Census Bureau For a well educated, middle-class worker, the $80,000 average pay at a Silicon Valley job looks quite nice relative to the $49,000 or so one earns, on average, in Dallas. It’s almost twice as much money! The chart above reveals why even that apparently significant salary gap is basically irrelevant to the typical household.
Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier
4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons
“You noticed!” I don’t quite know the best way to convey this side of 1980s Silicon Valley, but women served as the impresarios of organic social networking before there was an Internet. Commercial headhunters were irrelevant to the real Silicon Valley; they were nothing but small-time scammers who preyed upon newbies like me. The way the Valley really worked was that a tiny number of unofficial, supersocial, superpowered women connected everyone, creating companies, even whole technological movements. Histories of Silicon Valley always mention captains of industry like Steve Jobs, as they should, but you never see the names of the women who probably did as much to design the place.
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Maybe we can make VR rides for theme parks, or who knows what.” “Are you serious? VR systems need these giant computers and all this fancy equipment. Just tell people to come up to Silicon Valley for demos. It’s a short flight.” “This is Hollywood. People come to us.” “Silicon Valley will change that, just wait.” “Maybe so, but in the meantime, we’ll pay you to come … a lot!” “Um, okay…” Thus was launched Reality on Wheels, a big ol’ 18-wheeler loaded with millions of dollars of VR demos that traveled from Silicon Valley to Hollywood. (Similar demos can be had for mere hundreds of dollars today.) It parked for a week at a time at all the major studios.
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“Can you give me a couple of days to think about it?” “No time for slowpokes in Silicon Valley.” “Right.”2 Peanut Sauce Gallery Fate was caught on a knife’s edge and I was given just a moment when I could prod it to fall one way or the other. Should I dive in and start a Silicon Valley company? There was no beaten path. No startup incubators, no young entrepreneur awards, no crowdfunding sites. Furthermore, I had not grown up in a topiary world where one’s cousin is a lawyer who knows a banker. I knew none of the right people and was clueless. Today’s Silicon Valley looks wild and “emergent” from a distance but is actually rather structured and formal.
Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier
3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game
You’d develop yourself, and your success would be manifest in societal status, material rewards, and spiritual attainment. All these would be of a piece. It’s hard to overstate how influential this movement was in Silicon Valley. Not est specifically, for there were hundreds more like it. In the 1980s the Silicon Valley elite were often found at a successor institution called simply “the Forum.” The Global Business Network was a key, highly influential institution in the history of Silicon Valley. It has advised almost all the companies, and almost everyone who was anyone had something to do with it. Stewart Brand, who coined the phrases “personal computer” and “information wants to be free,” was one of the founders.
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If this all sounds a little grandiose, understand that in the context of the community in which I function my presentation is practically self-deprecating. It is commonplace in Silicon Valley for very young people with a startup in a garage to announce that their goal is to change human culture globally and profoundly, within a few years, and that they aren’t ready yet to worry about money, because acquiring a great fortune is a petty matter that will take care of itself. Furthermore, these bright little young bands succeed regularly. This is just Silicon Valley’s version of normal. Our idealisms and dreams often turn out to find fulfillment in events in the real world.
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If only we could live for free and get whatever we want without any worry that politics might be messy, that some political process might not make the best decision on our behalves, that cartels would never form around what isn’t perfectly free or automated . . . if only we could carelessly let our levees melt away and throw ourselves into the waiting arms of utopia. I imagine that the academics from top technical schools will do fine. Honestly, there’s no way Silicon Valley would stand to see MIT fall. That wouldn’t be a danger anyway because the top technical schools make money from technology. Stanford sometimes seems like one of the Silicon Valley companies. What about liberal arts professors at a state college? Some academics will hang on, but the prospects are grim if education is seduced by the Siren song. A decade or two from now, if nothing changes, the outlook will recall the present state of recorded music.
The Scandal of Money by George Gilder
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game
There were fewer than half as many IPOs as in 2000, and they were focused on a few large deals. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, venturers ruminate on an incursion of “unicorns”—some 130 private companies now with official valuations close to a billion dollars apiece, for a total market cap approaching half a trillion dollars. In the ordinary history of Silicon Valley, no private company but Apple obtained anything close to a billion-dollar market cap. Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, and other Silicon Valley stars only reached that level through IPOs that led into long years of appreciation of their stocks as public companies.
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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.
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Through Wall Street, Silicon Valley provides Main Street with opportunities for sharing in the equity of the ascendant sectors of the world economy. In recent years, Silicon Valley has suffered from the HYPERTROPHY OF FINANCE, become bloated with MONOPOLY MONEY, and been bent by controls from the Wall Street–Washington axis. Like Wall Street, Silicon Valley has bypassed Main Street, which has remained trapped in its pedestrian time-based compensation and mindless index fund investments. Sand Hill Road: The arboreal abode of California venture capitalists and their “unicorns,” stretching from the Camino Real near Stanford to Route 280 and into the clouds and wealth of Woodside and SILICON VALLEY. Expansionary fiscal and monetary policy: The attempt by central banks to stimulate economic activity by selling government securities to pay for a governmental deficit.
Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter
23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day
Art Levinson, Chairman and former CEO of Genentech and Chairman of Apple, will be Chief Executive Officer.” The moment the blog hit the wires, press, pundits, geeks, researchers, venture capitalists—everyone in Silicon Valley—jumped as if they had been shocked with a cattle prod. Phones and emails started lunging around the Valley like great, arcing live wires ripped from the moorings of the main line. Here was one of Silicon Valley’s grand pillars of entrepreneurial achievement, and Arthur Levinson, a bona fide Silicon Valley heavyweight, joining forces to run this crazy new operation funded with bushels of Googlebucks. The combination of the two immediately and fundamentally changed the entire landscape of longevity research.
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“We’re tackling aging,” was the way the company put it, “one of life’s great mysteries.” Google? Now that was worth looking into. And just as intriguing was the news that Arthur D. Levinson had been asked to lead the company. Most people wouldn’t have known Levinson if they tripped over him, but he was a force in Silicon Valley. He was the chairman of Apple, and just a year earlier had chaired Genentech, two of Silicon Valley’s most storied early start-ups. When news of Calico hit the wires, the media snapped to. “Google vs. Death”—that was how Time magazine put it. There is always a watershed moment that precedes any truly fundamental change in the human story. Calico’s founding, I felt, might mark that moment.
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Byers knew this because his father, Brook, was one of the original founders of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers (KPCB), arguably Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firm. KPCB had been an early investor in Apple, Google, Amazon, and Genentech. Genentech not only went on to revolutionize medicine and the pharmaceutical industry; it also became one of the inspirations for Michael Crichton’s best-selling novel Jurassic Park. Everyone in Silicon Valley knew what a force Genentech had become in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and that made Levinson a particularly appealing candidate. Nevertheless, Byers was also pretty sure Levinson would never be interested in getting involved in Maris’s idea.
Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game
That model is one which is very familiar to our programmers and for us because we were all in those offices too, and we know it’s a very productive environment.” Over the years these perks and oddities have been so widely imitated by other corporations that it is now impossible to explain Silicon Valley without mentioning them. Google’s company bus fleet is arguably driving an entire reconfiguration of work-life patterns in the Bay Area. Most big Silicon Valley companies now offer such buses. The one downside of working in Silicon Valley after college used to be living in suburban Mountain View, Palo Alto, or Sunnyvale. City life in San Francisco wasn’t worth the more than two hours of driving it required to live there.
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To them, it wasn’t just that Rubin had started Android or built the Sidekick, it was that he probably knew more about the mobile phone business than anyone else at Google, maybe all of Silicon Valley. Then forty-four, he’d been building cutting-edge mobile products in Silicon Valley since the early 1990s. It was his vocation and his avocation. People describe his home as something akin to Tony Stark’s basement laboratory in Iron Man—a space jammed with robotic arms, the latest computers and electronics, and prototypes of various projects. Like many electronics whizzes in Silicon Valley, he had Tony Stark’s respect for authority too. At Apple in the late 1980s he got in trouble for reprogramming the corporate phone system to make it seem as if CEO John Sculley were leaving his colleagues messages about stock grants, according to John Markoff’s 2007 profile in The New York Times.
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What this means is that the Apple/Google fight is not just a story about the future of Silicon Valley. It is about the future of media and communications in New York and Hollywood as well. Hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue are at stake, and for at least the next two years, and probably the next five, these companies, their allies, and their hangers-on will be going at it full bore. * * * In many ways what is happening now is what media, communications, and software moguls have been predicting for a generation: The fruits of Silicon Valley’s labor and those of New York and Hollywood are converging. This is as close to tragic irony in business as one ever gets.
Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson
"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise
CHAPTER 6: 10X, ROCK STARS, AND THE MYTH OF MERITOCRACY a frenzy of programming: This section on Max Levchin draws from several sources, including Adam Penenberg, Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves (New York: Hyperion, 2009), 158–275, Kindle; Sarah Lacy, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 (New York: Penguin, 2008), 17–41, Kindle; Jessica Livingston, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (New York: Apress, 2008), locations 200–605 of 12266, Kindle; Krissy Clark, “What Does Meritocracy Really Mean in Silicon Valley?,” Marketplace, October 4, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.marketplace.org/2013/10/04/wealth-poverty/what-does-meritocracy-really-mean-silicon-valley; Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2014). “perfect validation of merit”: Emily Chang, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley (New York: Penguin, 2018), 60. “People wouldn’t talk to us”: Chang, Brotopia, 48. “it is in Silicon Valley”: Jodi Kantor, “A Brand New World in Which Men Ruled,” New York Times, December 23, 2014, accessed August 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/23/us/gender-gaps-stanford-94.html.
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Ferenstein, and Neil Malhotra, “The Political Behavior of Wealthy Americans: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs,” Stanford Graduate School of Business, Working Paper No. 3581, December 9, 2017, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/political-behavior-wealthy-americans-evidence-technology. than to Donald Trump: Ari Levy, “Silicon Valley Donated 60 Times More to Clinton Than to Trump,” CNBC, November 7, 2016, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-election-day/silicon-valley-donated-60-times-more-clinton-trump-n679156. philosopher and technologist Ian Bogost says: Alexis C. Madrigal, “What Should We Call Silicon Valley’s Unique Politics?,” The Atlantic, September 7, 2017, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/what-to-call-silicon-valleys-anti-regulation-pro-redistribution-politics/539043. civic goods like public libraries: Susan Stamberg, “How Andrew Carnegie Turned His Fortune into a Library Legacy,” NPR, August 1, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2013/08/01/207272849/how-andrew-carnegie-turned-his-fortune-into-a-library-legacy.
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Stanford, Harvard, or MIT: Sarah McBride, “Insight: In Silicon Valley Start-up World, Pedigree Counts,” Reuters, September 12, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-startup-connections-insight/insight-in-silicon-valley-start-up-world-pedigree-counts-idUSBRE98B15U20130912. cascade of good fortune downstream: Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us (New York: Virgin Books, 2010). “you start acting like one”: Antonio García Martínez, Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 490.
Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny
Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve
American Enterprise Institute scholar Bret Swanson has noted that the “market value of seven American technology firms—Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, Intel, and Microsoft—totals $2.3 trillion, more than the entire stock markets of Germany or Australia.”14 Five of those seven are based in Silicon Valley. To be clear, Silicon Valley doesn’t have a money-supply problem. So aggressively is money chasing all the innovative production in northern California that even the chefs that work at high-flying tech companies are in play.15 Money follows production, and at least for now, Silicon Valley is one of the more popular destinations for the money that can command real economic resources. If the Fed were to drain money out of every bank in Silicon Valley, the money supply siphoned away by the Fed would return to this thriving area south of San Francisco almost as quickly as the first batch departed.
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If regulations reduce them, so will they reduce the quality of talent that migrates to banking. At present, some of the world’s brightest minds are taking their talents to Silicon Valley. The passion to innovate certainly factors into this decision, but the potential to achieve staggering wealth can’t be minimized as a major driver of this modern gold rush. What is notable here is that the frequency of failure in Silicon Valley also means the sky is the limit in terms of potential wealth gains. For the sake of comparison, consider Detroit. It was the Silicon Valley of the first half of the twentieth century, based on how failure was the norm. That its carmakers now largely owe their existence to government is a signal that not a lot of staggering wealth is being created there.
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At a first glance, the obvious answer is that Silicon Valley start-ups generally don’t have $85-million budgets to lose. Assuming Town & Country had cost $10 million, it’s fair to say that Warren Beatty’s reputation in the eyes of film financiers wouldn’t have suffered so much. Second, and of much greater importance, tech has a higher upside than film does. The number of movies that can claim box-office receipts of more than $1 billion can generally be counted on one hand in a very good year. By contrast, companies valued at $1 billion or more are increasingly the norm in Silicon Valley. The term used to refer to these billion-dollar companies is “unicorn.”
Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie
Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar
But the ad also expressed and perpetuated a conviction that Californians—and Silicon Valley in particular—could change the world. It’s easy to ridicule Silicon Valley’s “change the world” pretensions, and many have made sport of doing so. HBO’s Silicon Valley, for instance, has been one of the most effective (“I don’t want to live in a world where someone else is making the world a better place better than we are,” says a chakra-channeling CEO in the show’s second season). But while unselfconsciously dweebish, the “change the world” mentality is not entirely delusional, or is, at minimum, a useful article of faith. Silicon Valley has produced numerous world-changing products and services.
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Social networks. All of these things, if not created in Silicon Valley, were at least perfected there. The same will likely be true for virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and self-driving cars—all of which stand to have seismic effects on the way humans live. Essential to the drumbeat of innovation in Silicon Valley is the idea that one can “make a little dent in the universe,” as Jobs said in a 1985 interview with Playboy magazine. Even if these beliefs are in many cases mistaken, they at least help build a supply chain of brains that makes Silicon Valley unusual. Fed on a diet of inspirational quotes from their tech heroes (“Remembering that you are going to die,” said Jobs, “is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose”), the best developers and software-minded entrepreneurs stream into the Valley to make an impact, get a view of history in the making, make a chunk of money, or all of the above.
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Tesla is also partly responsible for the emergence of an automotive ecosystem on the other side of the bay, in Silicon Valley. The companies there are almost exclusively focused on software. “For a hundred years, automobiles have been a mechanical engineering industry. Now, there is the shift to software—and the mecca of software is Silicon Valley,” Dragos Maciuca, director of Ford’s Palo Alto research and innovation center, told the Los Angeles Times in late 2015. Ford, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, GM, Nissan—they’ve all established Silicon Valley–based research centers to work on autonomous driving and connectivity.
Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins
air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration
It left him in a state of mind that had him re-evaluating the meaning of his life. With his new bride, Musk decamped to Los Angeles—to escape Silicon Valley and for a fresh start. There, the idea of SpaceX would take root in his conviction that he could create reusable rockets and cut the cost of space travel to a fraction of what the industry was spending. Musk threw himself into the world of aeronautics, developing a reputation as a fantastically wealthy eccentric willing to put his money on unusual bets, the kinds that the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley’s famed Sand Hill Road shied away from. Beyond SpaceX and Tesla, Musk would later encourage his cousins, Lyndon and Pete Rive, to create a company to sell solar panels, an idea that melded well with his idea of where he thought Tesla might go.
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Months earlier, he had sat across from Bill Smythe, who had a lifetime of automobile experience as the owner of a successful Mercedes dealership. As Tesla began exploring the complexities of the dealership model, Smythe’s name had come up as somebody to seek out for advice. Eberhard had sought out the longtime Silicon Valley car dealer to learn more about the retail side of the auto industry. Eberhard’s original business plan depended upon using select franchise dealerships in wealthy enclaves to sell their Roadster—places like Silicon Valley, Beverly Hills, probably New York City, maybe even Miami. They wanted to use exotic car dealerships that already had experience with ultra-expensive brands such as Bentley and Lotus.
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Unlike those engineers recruited by Peter Rawlinson, he wasn’t someone who had spent a career at a traditional automaker and was looking to escape for a fresh start with a small startup. Nor was he a recent Stanford grad looking to jump-start a career in Silicon Valley, as Straubel and much of his team had been. Field was a seasoned corporate warrior, one who oversaw thousands of people at Apple and was responsible for carrying out the iconic Mac computer’s engineering. Field’s hiring would be a statement to Silicon Valley that Tesla could play with—and poach from—the big boys. Field was the right guy to usher Tesla into a new, more professional era. He had cut his engineering teeth at Ford Motor after graduating from Purdue University in 1987, then departed in frustration with the automaker’s culture.
Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx
2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional
Lawrence, Nathan Bomey, and Kristi Tanner, “Death on Foot: America’s Love of SUVs Is Killing Pedestrians,” Detroit Free Press, June 28, 2019, Freep.com. 40 Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, Viking, 2016, p. 29. 41 Alexa Delbosca, “Dehumanization of Cyclists Predicts Self-reported Aggressive Behaviour toward Them: A Pilot Study,” Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour 62, 2019, p. 685. 42 Gorz, “The Social Ideology of the Motorcar.” 43 John Urry, “The ‘System’ of Automobility,” Theory, Culture & Society 21:4–5, 2004, p. 28. 44 Gorz, “The Social Ideology of the Motorcar.” 45 Gartman, “Three Ages of the Automobile,” p. 192. 46 Ibid. 2. Understanding the Silicon Valley Worldview 1 Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Penguin Books, 2020, p. 7. 2 Ibid., p. 15. 3 AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, Harvard University Press, 1996. 4 O’Mara, The Code, pp. 75–6. 5 Tom Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce,” Esquire, December 1983, Classic.esquire.com. 6 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 31. 7 Ibid., p. 73. 8 Ibid., p. 76. 9 Ibid., p. 14. 10 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6:1, 1996, imaginaryfutures.net. 11 Saxenian, Regional Advantage, p. 90. 12 O’Mara, The Code, p. 214. 13 Ibid., p. 226. 14 Peter Thiel, “The End of the Future,” National Review, October 3, 2011, Nationalreview.com. 15 Tom Simonite, “Technology Stalled in 1970,” MIT Technology Review, September 18, 2014, Technologyreview.com. 16 David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” The Baffler 19, March 2012, Thebaffler.com. 17 O’Mara, The Code, pp. 90–1. 18 Tim Maughan, “The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand,” OneZero, November 30, 2020, Onezero.medium.com. 19 Ibid. 20 Senator Gore, speaking on S. 1067, 101st Congress, 1st sess., Congressional Record 135, May 18, 1989, S 9887. 21 Daniel Greene, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, MIT Press, 2011. 22 Madeline Carr, US Power and the Internet in International Relations: The Irony of the Information Age, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 58 (author’s emphasis). 23 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 194. 24 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996, Eff.org. 25 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 209. 26 Ibid., p. 222. 27 Ibid. 28 Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs.
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We cannot allow them to determine our future. 2 Understanding the Silicon Valley Worldview On August 13, 1980, Apple Computer placed an ad in the Wall Street Journal that compared the personal computer to the automobile. It was the first in a three-part series where co-founder Steve Jobs ostensibly set out to explain “the personal computer, and the effects it will have on society,” but it might be better seen as one fragment of a much larger attempt to set the narrative of this new technology. Jobs and other key figures in Silicon Valley’s computing industry had high hopes for the kind of society personal computers might usher in, and they wanted as many people as possible—especially the influential and wealthy readers of the Wall Street Journal—to buy into their vision.
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As technology historian Margaret O’Mara described: The whole enterprise rested on a foundation of massive government investment during and after World War II, from space-age defense contracts to university research grants to public schools and roads and tax regimes. Silicon Valley hasn’t been a sideshow to the main thrust of modern American history. It has been right at the center, all along.1 Due to the public funds that flowed into the Bay Area to make it the research hub that modern Silicon Valley companies would profit from, O’Mara called the US government “the Valley’s first, and perhaps its greatest, venture capitalist”2—a position it held for decades. During World War II, the civilian and military arms of the US government spent immense amounts of money to develop new military and communications technologies to keep up with and defeat Nazi Germany.
Running Money by Andy Kessler
Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game
Hey, maybe this guy wasn’t so bad after all. I wasn’t sure anyone read my drivel. We talked and talked. This guy knew more about Silicon Valley than I did. I was so used to getting stuck next to some brainless Meeting Mr. Zed 41 investment banker from Robertson or Goldman talking about some boring-ass disk drive company. It was nice to talk to someone without an altitude problem. “So, what do you think it is?” “What what is?” I asked. “What it is that makes Silicon Valley so special?” he asked. “I don’t know. I’ve been coming out here for years—on these stupid American Airlines flights, I’m so sick of them.
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“Ironworkers?” “Are you asking me or telling me?” “Both?” This was not going well. “Does Silicon Valley provide the greatest silicon to the world?” “No.” “So, find out what sucked up that horsepower. Why did they need so much of it? Find the scale.” “But where?” I asked. “Everywhere. Underwear.” And then he hung up. I think he’d seen this movie before too. > > > Object Lesson FREMONT, CALIFORNIA—JANUARY 1997 OK, enough of the history lesson—it’s time to find some stocks that go up. Shouldn’t be too hard—this is Silicon Valley, not Shropshire. “What are we going to ask these guys?” I asked Fred. We were headed in to see one of the recent IPOs, Versant.
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Auto companies?” “Well, no.” “The Industrial Revolution is dead.” “But there are lessons there.” “Of course, you didn’t waste your time. But don’t think like an industrialist. Silicon Valley isn’t an industry, it’s a giant design shop, as far as I can tell.” “That’s true,” I said. “So, go figure that out. Your numbers for your first year are pretty good.” “Thanks, but—” “But 25%? That’s nothing. How is it that Silicon Valley can generate all that wealth but hardly even make anything themselves? Can we invest in that model or is that same little quirk? Teach me—I’m not sure myself.” All of the names that were working in our fund really didn’t 100 Running Money make anything themselves—they just designed stuff made elsewhere.
The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh
Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, centralized clearinghouse, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, pre–internet, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, Steve Jobs
Getting Value from Entrepreneurial Talent We three authors come from a business environment where the employment alliance has already taken root—the high-tech start-up community of Silicon Valley. It’s the best place in the world for adaptation and innovation, as demonstrated by its economic growth over the past decade. If you want your organization to be able to survive and thrive in an environment where change is rapid and disruptive innovation rampant, you need to develop the adaptability that is the hallmark of this ecosystem. Obviously, not every industry works like Silicon Valley, nor should many established companies attempt wholesale adoption of start-up strategies. The question is which lessons from Silicon Valley are generally applicable.
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The question is which lessons from Silicon Valley are generally applicable. Mainstream media’s coverage of Silicon Valley tends to focus on flashy details. But attributing the valley’s success to four-star meals in cafeterias, Foosball tables, or even stock options is like attributing a Ferrari’s power to its bright red paint job. The real secret of Silicon Valley is that it’s really all about the people. Sure, there are plenty of stories in the press about the industry’s young geniuses, but surprisingly few about its management practices. What the mainstream press misses is that Silicon Valley’s success comes from the way its companies build alliances with their employees.
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It gives a valued employee concrete and compelling reasons to “stick it out” and finish a tour. Most importantly, a realistic tour of duty lets both sides be honest, which is a necessity for trust. We recognize the irony of looking to Silicon Valley for lessons on building long-term relationships. After all, Silicon Valley is where an engineer can update her LinkedIn profile in the morning and have five job offers by lunchtime. But this is precisely why you can learn from Silicon Valley. This is one of the fastest-moving, most competitive economies on the planet. It’s immensely difficult to retain quality employees, so the companies and managers that convince their people to stay must be doing something extraordinary.
Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez
Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise
The partners at those funds were John Johnston at August, whose comically WASPy name matched his appearance and pedigree. At Mayfield, it was Yogen Dalal, the usual cocktail of the Indian Institute of Technology and Stanford that populated many a Silicon Valley boardroom. We had leverage over such Silicon Valley players thanks to funding trends that were then seizing Silicon Valley, and are now so commonplace as to scarcely merit mention. Here’s why: Traditionally, early-stage startup funding was the exclusive province of either the entrepreneur’s personal wealth, friends and family, or business “angels.” In their original form, angel investors were wealthy individuals, often former entrepreneurs themselves, who for fun or profit punted around in embryonic companies.
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* While raised in the cradle of the Cuban exile in Miami, I was born in Southern California, making me more Californian than most Silicon Valley denizens. * Marketers use “conversion” to indicate a sale, the way Mormons refer to souls saved. * CrunchBase is the database of people and companies that’s the who’s who (if I can use that phrase without puking) of Silicon Valley. The parent publication of CrunchBase, TechCrunch (hence the name), is the day-to-day news and gossip rag of the Silicon Valley carnival. † The origin of the term “dogfooding” is supposedly found in eighties Microsoft, which coined the phrase from Alpo dog food commercials at the time wherein Lorne Greene assured a perhaps dubious public that he fed his own dogs Alpo.
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Locked behind the ghetto’s walls at night, the Jews plied their moneylending trade during the day, with Christians traveling to the otherwise rancid part of the city to borrow cash. The modern-day Silicon Valley ghetto, though sadly without the moneymen living behind locked gates as in erstwhile Venice, is Sand Hill Road. A meandering stretch of two-lane blacktop that wends its way from Palo Alto to Menlo Park, this uninspiring piece of suburban scenery is swarmed by aspiring entrepreneurs with a laptop in hand and a sly pitch in mind. In New York, the old joke is that Wall Street starts in a graveyard and ends in the river. In Silicon Valley, just as symbolically, Sand Hill Road starts in a shopping mall and ends at a particle accelerator.
The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha
Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen
In these far-flung places he spoke about his own experiences and simultaneously observed and learned about the aspirations and attitudes of the talented local people. The remarkable thing he noticed was that entrepreneurship—in the broad sense of the word—was everywhere: thousands of miles from Silicon Valley, in the hearts and minds of people not necessarily starting companies. While they may not have considered themselves entrepreneurs, their approach to life seemed every bit the Silicon Valley way: they were self-reliant in spirit, resourceful, ambitious, adaptive, and networked with one another. From these experiences he arrived separately at the same conclusion that I did: entrepreneurship is a life idea, not a strictly business one; a global idea, not a strictly American one.
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Fortunately, there is another path—both metaphorically and physically thousands of miles away from Detroit. Silicon Valley has become the twenty-first-century model for entrepreneurship and progress and has had multiple generations of entrepreneurial companies over the decades: from Hewlett Packard’s founding in 1939 to Intel, Apple, Adobe, Genentech, AMD, Intuit, Oracle, Electronic Arts, Pixar, and Cisco, and then to Google, eBay, Yahoo, Seagate, and Salesforce, and then more recently to PayPal, Facebook, YouTube, Craigslist, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In each passing decade, Silicon Valley has kept and intensified its entrepreneurial mojo, with dozens of companies creating the future and adapting to the evolution of the global market.
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What do these companies have in common? The principles of Silicon Valley are the principles in this book. Take intelligent and bold risks to accomplish something great. Build a network of alliances to help you with intelligence, resources, and collective action. Pivot to a breakout opportunity. You can think like a start-up, whoever you are and whatever you do. Anyone can apply this entrepreneurial skill set to his or her career. This is a book about how to do just that. It’s about keeping Detroit from happening to you and making the Silicon Valley way work for you. THE PATH TO THE FUTURE In 1997 Reed Hastings, a software entrepreneur living in the hills of Silicon Valley, was faced with a problem.
Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City by Brad Feld
barriers to entry, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, deal flow, fail fast, G4S, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, minimum viable product, Network effects, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, place-making, pre–internet, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Jobs, text mining, vertical integration, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar
In particular, in her seminal book Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (1994) Saxenian noted that two hotbeds for high-tech activity—Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128—looked very similar in the mid-1980s. Each area enjoyed agglomeration economies associated with the nation’s two high-tech regions. Yet just a decade later, Silicon Valley gained a dominant advantage over Route 128. External economies alone did not provide an answer. Saxenian set out to resolve the puzzle of why Silicon Valley far outpaced Route 128 from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. Saxenian persuasively argues that a culture of openness and information exchange fueled Silicon Valley’s ascent over Route 128.
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Saxenian persuasively argues that a culture of openness and information exchange fueled Silicon Valley’s ascent over Route 128. This argument is tied to network effects, which are better leveraged by a community with a culture of information sharing across companies and industries. Saxenian observed that the porous boundaries between Silicon Valley companies, such as Sun Microsystems and HP, stood in stark contrast to the closed-loop and autarkic companies of Route 128, such as DEC and Apollo. More broadly, Silicon Valley culture embraced a horizontal exchange of information across and between companies. Rapid technological disruption played perfectly to Silicon Valley’s culture of open information exchange and labor mobility.
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Although these myths are similar to some of the classical problems we discussed earlier, Paul brings a new perspective to the mix and hammers home a number of points made earlier. We’ll begin with one of my favorite myths: “We Need to Be Like Silicon Valley.” WE NEED TO BE LIKE SILICON VALLEY It is usually among the first questions I get asked as I travel around the world researching and talking about entrepreneurship, innovation, and venture capital. The question is, of course, how can we create our own Silicon Valley? To save time, here is the answer to the Silicon Valley question: You can’t—you only think you want to. Granted, everyone thinks they do. It has become a cliché, but there is a Silicon pretty much everywhere as you travel around, to the point that it is meaningless.
Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat
"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar
Facebook cofounder and philanthropist Chris Hughes dedicated his intellectual thought leadership to promoting a universal basic income,15 and Mark Zuckerberg, his former roommate, mentioned it in the commencement speech he gave at Harvard.16 This quasi-moral solution to income inequality—and to expanding the definition of equality for this generation—finds its strongest American proponents in Silicon Valley. Home to the billion-dollar titans of industry, who form a slightly reluctant political elite in the New Economy, Silicon Valley and the culture of technology radiate influence across the business, political, and media culture of major American cities. And Silicon Valley has a strong stake in national debates over whether automation technology, such as self-driving cars, will take all our jobs. Universal basic income is one form of “automation alimony” that is proposed to relieve the rising inequality often attributed to automation.
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In 2014, Uber’s own newsroom stated, “Our powerful technology platform delivers turnkey entrepreneurship to drivers across the country and around the world.”7 The idea that Uber can deliver entrepreneurship to the masses through technology is a compelling anthem for a society eager to reap the benefits of technology that come especially from Silicon Valley kingmakers. Drivers, however, aren’t the web 2.0 tech entrepreneurs who emerged from Silicon Valley with a heady array of self-branding marketing skills in the early years of the twenty-first century. They don’t game search-engine-optimization results to boost their presence on the Internet, and they don’t have Google alerts set to their names to inform them when they are mentioned somewhere (with the possible exception of a few drivers who run forums and blogs). Drivers aren’t “happiness engineers” or “code ninjas.”8 THE LEGEND OF SILICON VALLEY It shouldn’t be surprising that Uber has adopted the myth of tech entrepreneurship: after all, the company was started by such entrepreneurs.
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Drivers aren’t “happiness engineers” or “code ninjas.”8 THE LEGEND OF SILICON VALLEY It shouldn’t be surprising that Uber has adopted the myth of tech entrepreneurship: after all, the company was started by such entrepreneurs. Travis Kalanick, the most visible cofounder of Uber, is hailed as one of Silicon Valley’s “Great Men.” The Great Man theory of success celebrates America’s technology founder-heroes for their business acumen and their passion, like Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg. The Silicon Valley “Great Men” typically celebrated are white men. Equally accomplished founders who are not white men tend to get less play—like Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, according to longtime Silicon Valley journalist, Sarah Lacy.9 The meritocratic theory of success has crossed class lines and entered the culture of work embraced by most people in the United States.
Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine
23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks
In 1956, he returned to his hometown of Palo Alto to start Shockley Semiconductor inside the university’s Stanford Industrial Park.17 His company spawned several other microchip companies, including Intel, and gave Silicon Valley its name. Hewlett-Packard, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, Xerox PARC, and Lockheed Martin also set up shop inside Stanford’s Industrial Park around the same time. There was so much military work going on in Silicon Valley that, throughout the 1960s, Lockheed was the biggest employer in the Bay Area. ARPA had a huge presence on campus, too. The Stanford Research Institute did counterinsurgency and chemical warfare work for the agency as part of William Godel’s Project Agile.
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Journalists and criminologists blasted PredPol, in particular for making claims that it simply could not back up.75 Despite these knocks, PredPol had supporters and backers in Silicon Valley. Its board of directors and advisory board included serious heavy hitters: executives from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay, as well as a former managing director of In-Q-Tel, the CIA venture capital outfit operating in Silicon Valley.76 Back in his office, Brantingham offers little about the company’s ties to these Internet giants. Another PredPol executive informed me that, behind the scenes, Google was one of PredPol’s biggest boosters and collaborators.
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It was a groundbreaking product that allowed anyone with an Internet connection to virtually fly over anywhere in the world. The only problem was Keyhole’s timing; it was a bit off. It launched just as the dot-com bubble blew up in Silicon Valley’s face. Funding dried up, and Keyhole found itself struggling to survive.97 Luckily, the company was saved just in time by the very entity that inspired it: the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, the CIA had launched In-Q-Tel, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund whose mission was to invest in start-ups that aligned with the agency’s intelligence needs.98 Keyhole seemed a perfect fit.99 The CIA poured an unknown amount of money into Keyhole; the exact number remains classified.
Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip
"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K
Thus, it matters for a company’s labor and gender relations whether it is, like IBM, located in Swabia with its more skill-conscious workforce influenced by the teachings of Catholic social ethics, or in Berlin, the emerging hub for IT startups in Germany today with a more individualized professional workforce.32 Likewise, the United States has different local labor cultures in the more unionized north and the union-free south, and between bureaucratized companies of the East Coast like Xerox and IBM, and the venture-capital-driven startups of Silicon Valley. It is no coincidence that foreign automobile manufacturers such as Mercedes, Volkswagen, and Toyota have not located their US manufacturing plants in the Detroit area, where they would have had access to local talent and suppliers; rather, they opted for the union-free south. The same is true for tech companies. Silicon Valley provides them with a professional workforce that believes in meritocratic advancement based on individual skills rather collective improvement through solidarity. If Silicon Valley is to have a more diverse, collectively oriented workforce, employees will need to challenge corporate rhetoric that suggest differences do not exist, whether they come in the form of an egalitarian “family” ideal or believing in professional meritocracy.
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,” press release (June 17, 2014), https://www.prlog.org/12337721-black-mark-zuckerberg-hackathon-empowers-youth-to-transform-nola-into-their-own-silicon-valley.html. 58. “Van Jones: Giving Black Geniuses Tools to Win with #Yeswecode,” Essence (May 2, 2014), https://www.essence.com/festival/2014-essence-festival/tk-van-jones/. 59. Terry Collins, “They’re Changing the Face of Silicon Valley,” CNET (August 16, 2017), https://www.cnet.com/news/changing-the-face-of-technology-women-in-technology/. 60. Guðrun í Jákupsstovu, “Silicon Valley Has Diversity Problems, Now Let’s Focus on a Fix,” TNW (February 20, 2018), https://thenextweb.com/us/2018/02/20/1108399/. 61.
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Gender discrimination, in particular, is a major stumbling block for the high-tech industry—so much so that even some of the most powerful, white women feel they need to admonish themselves and their peers to “lean in” to combat sexism and break through the glass ceiling.1 This belief in the promise of a more equal future, if only women would try harder, seems alluring if one takes it on faith that Silicon Valley’s goal is to measurably improve itself. But a culture of rampant sexual harassment, persistent racial inequalities in positions of power, and pay and promotion inequalities industry-wide shows that Silicon Valley culture is mired firmly in the past, even as companies claim to be building a better future.2 From sexist manifestos on how women’s supposed intellectual inferiority disqualifies them from tech careers, to golden parachutes for serial sexual harassers at corporations that simultaneously choose not to cooperate with federal equal pay investigations, to platforms that position misogynist and racist hate speech and threats of sexual assault as just a normal part of online discourse, it is no surprise that women workers in the tech industry might internalize sexism and blame themselves—particularly because when they speak out they tend to lose their jobs.3 Online, Black women, and particularly Black trans women, are targeted with inordinate amounts of hatred, yet the platforms that enable it refuse to seriously address the harms they are causing.
Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger
1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers
→ John Perry Barlow Peripheral Visionary executive vice president; Algae Systems cofounder; and rocking chair, Electronic Frontier Foundation This must-read classic tale of the origins of the personal computer and its role in the evolution of Silicon Valley continues to evolve and inform. In an era when we take the personal computer for granted, we tend to forget the risk-taking and ambition that was required to shift from a hobbyist plaything to a thriving industry. The authors focus on the people and culture that helped to change the world—and continue to change the world through offshoots like smartphones and the Internet. The fire continues to grow. → John Hagel Co-chairman, Center for the Edge, and coauthor, The Power of Pull Fire in the Valley is the seminal story of Silicon Valley. It is the first and only biography of the place that made and continues to make innovation history.
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→ Roger McNamee Cofounder of Elevation Partners, Silver Lake Partners, and Integral Capital Partners Silicon Valley suffers from an extreme case of historical amnesia. Whatever its virtues, remembering its roots isn’t one. The best remedy—especially for those who treasure understanding the origins of the world’s top innovation cluster—is to read Fire in the Valley. Swaine and Freiberger brilliantly capture a bygone time, a forgotten creation story that, when first encountered, greatly enhances your appreciation of the technological marvel that Silicon Valley was, is, and likely shall remain. This is an essential volume in any reading list on the digital age
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Felsenstein read about the upcoming meeting and resolved not to miss it. He collared Bob Marsh, and they drove Felsenstein’s pickup truck through the rain across the Bay Bridge to the peninsula that stretches from San Francisco south to Silicon Valley. French’s garage was in suburban Menlo Park, a town jogging distance from Stanford University and perched on the edge of Silicon Valley. At the club’s first meeting, Steve Dompier reported on his visit to Albuquerque. It was the headquarters of MITS. MITS, he told them, had shipped 1,500 Altairs and expected to ship 1,100 more that month. The company was staggering under the weight of the orders and couldn’t possibly fill all of them.
How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher
Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional
With a $17 billion endowment, Stanford has the resources to provide students an incredible education inside the classroom, with accomplished scholars ranging from Nobel Prize winners to former secretaries of state teaching undergraduates. The Silicon Valley ecosystem ensures that students have ample opportunity outside the classroom as well. Mark Zuckerberg gives a guest lecture in the introductory computer science class. Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey spoke on campus to convince students to join his companies. The guest speaker lineups at the myriad entrepreneurship and technology-related classes each quarter rival those of multithousand-dollar business conferences. Even geographically, Stanford is smack in the middle of Silicon Valley. Facebook sits just north of the school. Apple is a little farther south.
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Apple is a little farther south. Google is to the east. And just west, right next to campus, is Sand Hill Road, the Wall Street of venture capital. Silicon Valley has always had an influence on Stanford, and vice versa. But starting in the late 2000s, tech started to dominate the university. In the fall of 2010, as Evan began his junior year, I arrived on campus as a freshman. Coming from the East Coast, I knew that Stanford and Silicon Valley were closely linked and that tech companies were a big deal out there on the West Coast. I just didn’t realize how big. One of the guys in my freshman dorm made a new social networking app that he was trying to get this tech blog called TechCrunch to write about.
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All told, close to sixty people and institutions invested a sum of $30 million in Clinkle before the company even told the world what they were doing. The company had at this point been in “stealth mode,” a sexy term meaning they weren’t telling anyone what they were working on. Stanford has been intertwined with Silicon Valley for more than a century. In 1909, a Stanford graduate founded one of the earliest big Silicon Valley startups, Federal Telegraph. David Starr Jordan, Stanford’s first president, was an angel investor. But Clinkle made students, faculty, and alumni uneasy. Should the university president be advising a company that is recruiting students to drop out of school?
The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross
affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, always be closing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Elon Musk, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, inventory management, John Markoff, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, medical residency, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Morris worm, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, transaction costs, Y Combinator
It offers tours of San Francisco, of Muir Woods and Sausalito or the wine country north of the city, but it no longer offers a tour of Silicon Valley, immediately south. From a bus seat, there just isn’t much to be seen.1 Silicon Valley’s past is more accessible than its present. There’s the Computer History Museum, and Intel has a museum of its own. And there are the garages, of course, beginning with Hewlett and Packard’s, then Steve Jobs’s parents’, and then the rented garage that served as Google’s first off-campus office space. But these are ghostly places, the uninteresting physical vestiges of startups that have long since departed. To glimpse what comes next in Silicon Valley, you need to see the most promising startups, not museums and historic garages.
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It would have been more difficult to convince YC applicants of the desirability of moving to where YC was had it stayed where it started, in Cambridge. But after the first YC batch had finished in August 2005, Graham decided it would be a good idea to plant the flag in Silicon Valley. He expected that other seed funds would pop up and copy the Y Combinator model, and he didn’t want to leave open an opportunity for someone to come along and say, “We’re the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley.” He wanted Y Combinator to be the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley. He and Livingston planned to move out to the Bay Area for the next batch, in winter 2006, and then alternate, running a summer batch in Cambridge and a winter one in the Valley.
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Founder Nikki Durkin, twenty, is Australian and her mention of being accepted into YC on Facebook was picked up by the Sydney Morning Herald, which described Australian entrepreneurs seeking to go to Silicon Valley as “like religious fanatics trying to get to their mecca.” Asher Moses, “Aussie Nikki Joins Silicon Valley Millionaire Factory,” November 18, 2011, www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/aussie-nikki-joins-silicon-valley-millionaire-factory-20111118-1nlud.html. At the first dinner, PG was in the middle of his standard spiel for technical founders when he remembered 99dresses, so different from the many companies whose founders sell developer tools to fellow developers.
Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener
autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional
“To be clear, I agree with the critiques,” Patrick said, refilling my water glass suggestively. “I also want Silicon Valley to be better. More inclusive, more ambitious, more significant, more serious. More optimistic.” On this we agreed, though I suspected we might have different ideas about how it could manifest. “I think it’s really striking that there is only one Silicon Valley, and I worry a lot about that flame being extinguished. Maybe one question is whether you would want two Silicon Valleys, or none. For me, that answer is really clear.” I swirled a piece of chicken skin around my plate. I did not want two Silicon Valleys. I was starting to think the one we already had was doing enough damage.
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I was starting to think the one we already had was doing enough damage. Or, maybe I did want two, but only if the second one was completely different, an evil twin: Matriarchal Silicon Valley. Separatist-feminist Silicon Valley. Small-scale, well-researched, slow-motion, regulated Silicon Valley—men could hold leadership roles in that one, but only if they never used the word “blitzscale” or referred to business as war. I knew my ideas were contradictions in terms. “Progress is so unusual and so rare, and we’re all out hunting, trying to find El Dorado,” Patrick said. “Almost everyone’s going to return empty-handed. Sober, responsible adults aren’t going to quit their jobs and lives to build companies that, in the end, may not even be worth it.
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It wasn’t just about leisure, the easy access to nice food and private transportation and abundant personal entertainment. It was the work culture, too: what Silicon Valley got right, how it felt to be there. The energy of being surrounded by people who so easily articulated, and satisfied, their desires. The feeling that everything was just within reach. Was I trying too hard to make this mean something? I asked Leah. Was that just buying into the industry’s own narratives about itself? I tried to summarize the frantic, self-important work culture in Silicon Valley, how everyone was optimizing their bodies for longer lives, which could then be spent productively; how it was frowned upon to acknowledge that a tech job was a transaction rather than a noble mission or a seat on a rocket ship.
Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz
AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator
In the end, his main objection was not that the company was overly ambitious but that it was based in London. It would be harder to keep an eye on his investment, a typical concern for Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Nevertheless, he invested £1.4 million of the initial £2 million in seed funding that gave rise to DeepMind. In the coming months and years, other big-name investors joined in, including Elon Musk, the Silicon Valley kingpin who helped build PayPal alongside Thiel before building the rocket company SpaceX and the electric-car company Tesla. “There’s a certain community,” Legg says. “He was one of the billionaires who decided to put some money in.”
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He and several other academics were building a deep learning start-up they called Madbits, and he resolved to see it through. Six months later, before this tiny new company had even come close to releasing its first product, it was acquired by Twitter, Silicon Valley’s other social networking giant. The battle for talent, already so heated, was only getting hotter. * * * — FACEBOOK’S Silicon Valley headquarters is the corporate campus that feels like Disneyland. Thanks to a rotating team of muralists, sculptors, silk-screeners, and other artists-in-residence, each building, room, hallway, and foyer is carefully decorated with its own colorful extravagance, and in between, the eateries advertise themselves with just as much gusto.
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Mike Schroepfer had joined Facebook five years earlier as its head of engineering, after Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommate, company cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, stepped down from the role. He wore black-rimmed glasses and a short, Caesar-like haircut that matched the one worn by Zuckerberg. Almost ten years older than the Facebook CEO, Schrep was a Silicon Valley veteran who’d studied at Stanford alongside a who’s who of Silicon Valley veterans. He cut his teeth as the chief technology officer at Mozilla, the company that challenged the monopoly of Microsoft and its Internet Explorer Web browser in the early 2000s. When he moved to Facebook, his primary job was to ensure that the hardware and software supporting the world’s largest social network could handle the load as it expanded from a hundred million people to one billion and beyond.
The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey
Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush
The consonance with the theory and culture of Silicon Valley is obvious, which is why Christensen was cited ad nauseam by everyone we met. Companies built for such disruption, Maples said, are like thunder lizards. They lay radioactive eggs, breathe fire, pick up and consume trains. They also grow at a terrifying rate. Silicon Valley is a breeding ground for thunder lizards, companies that go from $0 to incredibly valuable, in the many billions of dollars, in very short periods of time. That’s why Godzilla was sitting on the conference table. It’s also a good example of how Silicon Valley is dominated by metaphor.
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They became an essential part of how people interacted with one another in everyday life—a social network. Mobile, social, and cloud, each driven by venture-backed technology companies in Silicon Valley. Decades of increasingly powerful technology married to capital and the best minds of the research university had created a distinct and powerful culture in the converted industrial buildings south of Market Street in San Francisco and the storefronts and garages around the academic and industrial giants of Silicon Valley. It was a belief system in which people were not just augmented but liberated by technology—a place where people could discard the compromises and confusions of human living and build something more rational and enlightened in their place
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Yet, while education dwarfed them all in size, it is still, in terms of how money is spent, almost entirely an analog business. Now the moneymen in Silicon Valley were looking at the big yellow circle and seeing a tremendous business opportunity. Venture capital investment in education technology companies increased from less than $200 million in 2008 to over $1.2 billion in 2013. There is, of course, a great deal of complexity sitting inside of the big yellow $4.6 trillion circle—thousands of potential business models and strategies for getting a piece of the pie. As Staton and I drove around Silicon Valley from one new business to another, certain broad categories of start-up became clear.
Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer
autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar
Ultimately the strategy was defined by the technology: because lithium-ion batteries were still relatively new and incredibly expensive, Tesla had little choice but to start with a high-end electric sports car and move down-market as battery technology matured. This was also the classic Silicon Valley game plan for marketing new technologies, and Eberhard and Tarpenning were a classic Silicon Valley “hardware-software” team. Eberhard, a tall, bearded engineer whose charismatic charm barely conceals a smoldering intensity, had cut his teeth designing computer terminals at Wyse computers. Tarpenning, the more laid-back and humorous of the two men, had made a name for himself developing software and firmware at companies like Seagate and Packet Design.
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Tarpenning’s research found that buyers of the earliest green cars tended to be wealthy enough to afford almost any car they wanted, as was evidenced by the Priuses sharing driveways with high-end sports and luxury cars around Silicon Valley. Having identified both a technological and commercial opportunity, Eberhard and Tarpenning incorporated Tesla Motors in 2003, fatefully naming it after the brilliant electrical engineer who never reaped the financial rewards of his breakthrough inventions. According to Elon Musk, electric cars were what had first brought him to Silicon Valley. While obtaining bachelor’s degrees in physics and business from Wharton, Musk claims to have become fascinated with the opportunity to power cars with ultracapacitors.
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CHAPTER 4 THE STARTUP TRAP Raising venture capital is the easiest thing a startup founder is ever going to do. Marc Andreessen By 2006, Silicon Valley had fully shaken off its post-dot-com-bubble hangover and was entering a new golden age. The “Web 2.0” wave had already made companies like Skype, Pandora, and Yelp into household names, Facebook and Twitter were just starting their rise to ubiquity, and Apple was putting the final touches on the world’s first smartphone. The venture capitalist Paul Graham captured the mood in a speech he gave that year called “How to Be Silicon Valley.” Between deriding the stifling effects of bureaucracy and celebrating the valley’s “rich people and nerds,” Graham argued, “a place that tolerates oddness in the search for the new is exactly what you want in a startup hub, because economically that’s what startups are.
Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper
4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks
That made it less threatening to governments and banks and more attractive to people like Andreessen and Thiel, who both offered small seed investments. But both of these key Silicon Valley figures were also getting more comfortable with Bitcoin itself. The investment firm that Thiel had helped create with some of his PayPal riches, the Founders Fund, began talking with an engineer at Facebook who had founded an e-mail list for Silicon Valley insiders, dedicated to Bitcoin, about joining the firm to look for virtual currency investments. The growing openness to Bitcoin was helped along by Silicon Valley’s ballooning sense of self-importance in early 2013. With the Nasdaq composite stock index soaring, shares of Google at an all-time high, and startups selling for mind-boggling sums, many in the tech industry believed that they were going to be able to revolutionize and improve every element of modern life.
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That is very different from a traditional bank, in which every account is tied to a specific person or organization. Coinbase had to repeatedly convince Silicon Valley Bank that it knew where the Bitcoins leaving Coinbase were going. Even with all these steps, on several days in March Coinbase hit up against transaction limits set by Silicon Valley Bank and had to shut down until the next day. At the end of the month, an item was posted on SVBitcoin, an invite-only e-mail list for the Silicon Valley Bitcoin community: “The Time Has Come for the Bitcoin Community to Own a U.S. Based Federally Chartered Bank.” The author, an investor named David Johnston, wrote that the skepticism of traditional banks toward virtual currencies was the biggest roadblock facing Bitcoin’s growth.
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The new limits and restrictions imposed took it further and further from its ambitious original goals. Thiel and Levchin left PayPal soon afterward. This had scared much of Silicon Valley away from tinkering with finance, which was seen as largely resistant to new technology because of all the regulations. But the PayPal experience also explained why there was a hunger for the idea of a virtual currency. There was a lingering memory of this unfulfilled dream of Silicon Valley. While the Internet had freed information and communication from the postal service and the publishing industry, the Internet had essentially never disrupted money, and dollars remained bound by the old networks run by the credit card companies and the banks.
Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food by Chase Purdy
"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Big Tech, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Donald Trump, gig economy, global supply chain, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs
“If not for him, the company wouldn’t have started,” Tetrick says. “He had the initial idea, the concept, pushing me, all of it,” he said. Tetrick did what a lot of Silicon Valley’s nervous first-time entrepreneurs do. He assembled a small team to begin working on early-stage products and spent his own time wooing potential investors for seed money to help his new business grow. And for a while it was enough. The company’s work and mission elicited a lot of attention from Silicon Valley venture capital firms. The company would ultimately attract notice—and some measure of notoriety—for its suite of vegan condiments and cookie dough.
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And how soon would these new food technologies be in a position to threaten entrenched animal agriculture operations that had long commanded space in the food chain? In time, so much buzz around JUST made it Silicon Valley’s first and only food technology unicorn. Tetrick had found a direction, and for now he was committed to walking that walk. But not everyone was excited about him or his new company’s mission to eagerly and loudly attempt to disrupt the animal agriculture system. 7 THE ART OF WAR In the most Silicon Valley of stories, JUST was first headquartered in the garage of an unassuming little house at 371 Tenth Street in San Francisco—a short drive from the company’s current headquarters.
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Angry, she demanded Tetrick fire the woman he’d slept with, something he refused to do, texting that “Khosla would hang me—it is a huge lawsuit.” Khosla is, of course, Vinod Khosla, the prolific Silicon Valley venture capitalist and major early investor in JUST. In some ways, Tetrick’s entrepreneurial original sin might have been courting Khosla. It enabled growth, but the growing pains were difficult. When Tetrick first approached the firm, he knew very little about how to run a proper business, to say nothing of how to navigate a landscape of Silicon Valley investment titans. He says he had less than $3,000 in his bank account and a burning desire to make his and Balk’s idea work.
The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett
Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product
Having something to protect and a stake in society, this group is repeatedly found in studies to value individual freedom, property rights and democratic accountability more than other groups.11 The emergence of middle-class societies, especially in Europe and America increased the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a political system in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.12 To see what happens when tech-fuelled inequality takes off, there’s no better place to start than the home of it all, Silicon Valley and its increasingly put-upon neighbour, San Francisco. There are two worlds in Silicon Valley, and they barely ever meet. There’s the exciting start-up open-plan offices, with beanbags, table football, TED Talks and flip-flops, where the region’s half a million tech workers can expect to earn on average well over a hundred thousand dollars a year. (For the biggest companies, the median salary is higher still.) Mostly under 40, they want to live in nearby bustling San Francisco, since Silicon Valley can resemble The Stepford Wives. Each morning, thousands of tech workers hop on private, Wi-Fi-enabled coaches from one of the dozens of pick-up points in San Fran’s increasingly gentrified streets, and head down Highway 101 into Menlo Park (for Facebook), Sunnyvale (for Yahoo) or Mountain View (for Google).
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Steve Jobs – at once the acid-dropping hippy and the ruthless businessman – was this Californian Ideology incarnate. This is the secret behind the digital revolution. The reason that start-ups flock to Silicon Valley is not just the promise of building a better world – it’s because that’s where the venture capital is. Money and ideas in Silicon Valley have a very complicated relationship. Even start-up visionaries and wide-eyed socially minded inventors need money to survive, to pay extortionate Bay Area rent and to hire the best programmers. Silicon Valley runs according to a Faustian pact: money in exchange for world-changing ideas. But investment brings with it new responsibilities, and suddenly there are profit margins, quarterlies and growth targets.
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On iTunes, for example, 0.00001 per cent of tracks accounts for a sixth of all sales, while the bottom 94 per cent sell fewer than one hundred copies each.3 I suppose that’s technically a long tail, but it’s a very thin one.* Everyone in Silicon Valley knows all this, of course. They talk about the benefits of free markets, while at the same time betting the venture capital on monopolies. Peter Thiel – the founder of PayPal and probably the most influential of all the Silicon Valley tech investors – says he only puts money in companies that have monopoly potential. Some tech firms run at short-term loss, kept afloat by venture capital on a ‘growth before profit’ philosophy, as they chase market domination.
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier
4chan, Abraham Maslow, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, context collapse, corporate governance, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, Network effects, peak TV, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, theory of mind, WikiLeaks, you are the product, zero-sum game
Plenty of critics like me have been warning that bad stuff was happening for a while now, but to hear this from the people who did the stuff is progress, a step forward. For years, I had to endure quite painful criticism from friends in Silicon Valley because I was perceived as a traitor for criticizing what we were doing. Lately I have the opposite problem. I argue that Silicon Valley people are for the most part decent, and I ask that we not be villainized; I take a lot of fresh heat for that. Whether I’ve been too hard or too soft on my community is hard to know. The more important question now is whether anyone’s criticism will matter.
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When people get a flattering response in exchange for posting something on social media, they get in the habit of posting more. That sounds innocent enough, but it can be the first stage of an addiction that becomes a problem both for individuals and society. Even though Silicon Valley types have a sanitized name for this phase, “engagement,” we fear it enough to keep our own children away from it. Many of the Silicon Valley kids I know attend Waldorf schools, which generally forbid electronics. Back to the surprising phenomenon: it’s not that positive and negative feedback work, but that somewhat random or unpredictable feedback can be more engaging than perfect feedback.
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To avoid being left out, journalists had to create stories that emphasized clickbait and were detachable from context. They were forced to become BUMMER in order to not be annihilated by BUMMER. BUMMER has not only darkened the ethics of Silicon Valley; it has made the rest of the economy crazy. The economic side of BUMMER will be explored in Argument Nine. * * * Before moving on to Component F, I must explain the special role Component E plays in providing the financial incentives that keep the whole BUMMER machine in motion. If you hang out in Silicon Valley, you’ll hear a lot of chatter about how money is becoming obsolete, how we’re creating forms of power and influence that transcend money.
App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream by Michael Sayman
airport security, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, data science, Day of the Dead, fake news, Frank Gehry, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Googley, hacker house, imposter syndrome, Khan Academy, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, microaggression, move fast and break things, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, the High Line, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple
In Miami, you rarely saw people living on the street. It was just too hot. I’d heard that California had more unsheltered people than any other state. San Francisco and all of Silicon Valley had a particularly large homeless population, thanks to a housing shortage and the wealth bubble created by the rise of big tech over the last two decades. The average tech engineer here spent 40 to 50 percent of their salary on rent, not leaving much for savings, buying a house of their own, or eating out off campus. Some Silicon Valley CEOs, like Marc Benioff of Salesforce, had begun stepping up with their billions to fund hospitals and shelters, but obviously, it wasn’t enough.
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It felt like a place where everyone was filled with ideas and no one was just sitting around, waiting for luck to strike. They say in Los Angeles, everyone is working on a screenplay. In Silicon Valley in the mid-2010s, everyone was working on an app. Ask any Uber driver or barista or dog walker under thirty about their life, and they’d tell you about the million-dollar app idea they were going to make happen just as soon as they could afford to take the time. Ask any software engineer if they thought tech was going to save the world, and they’d tell you, Duh, of course. I wasn’t sure if that was true, but even still, Silicon Valley brought out the optimist in me. * * * — When you join Facebook as a full-time employee, you go straight to boot camp.
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I think this was all deliberate—they’d built Area 120 with the hopes that we’d be more creative outside of the Google bubble. It might have helped a little. But there was no escaping the fact that we lived and worked within the larger bubble of Silicon Valley, the greatest echo chamber of opinions and ideas that’s probably ever existed. In Silicon Valley, there was a lot of cheering on of ideas, even when those ideas were not necessarily ones people outside our bubble would agree with or even care about. I sensed that this was why my manager was so open to me spending so much time outside of California.
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
Or, perhaps in the case of Jack Dolan, as Lenny saw him, work, then retireassuming you live long enough to retireand then devote your time to your passion. The Deferred Life Plan certainly dominates Silicon Valley. Most people think getting rich fast provides the quickest way to get past the first stepand where can you get rich faster than Silicon Valley? The problem is that, despite the undisguised affluence, the verdant hills, and media-generated mythos, the vast majority of people in Silicon Valley will not get rich. Most business ideas do not find funding. Even the majority of those that are fundedthat is, vetted by very smart people who think enough of the ideas to invest in themultimately fail.
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So we'll use the dead tree version." Here it comes. The pitch. People present ideas for new businesses to me two or three times a week. If I chose to, I could hear a pitch every dayall day, every day. Just as everyone in L.A. has a screenplay, everyone in Silicon Valley has a business planmost of them nowadays for Internet businesses. I've been around Silicon Valley and involved with young companies since the early '80sstartups, spinouts, spin-ins, what have you. I'm not in the phone book or listed in any professional directory. If you don't know someone I know, you can't find me. I wonder what Frank had in mind when he set me up with Lenny.
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But I'm no angel. This was a point of confusion for Lenny. He'd assumed I was just some kind of newfangled Silicon Valley investor. "But your VC analysis suggests that Funerals.com is worth a closer look," he protested when I declined his invitation. "That's what you're telling Frank. Why wouldn't you do the same?" "I don't necessarily look at things the way a VC does," I Page 46 said, seeing that my comments were tripping him up. I've worked in Silicon Valley since the early '80s. I understand how it functions and thinks, but I don't necessarily see things the same way.
Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees by Patrick Dillon, Carl M. Cannon
"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collective bargaining, Columbine, company town, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, desegregation, energy security, estate planning, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, index fund, John Markoff, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, margin call, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, power law, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, the High Line, the market place, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game
I may be rancid butter, but you know I’m on your side of the bread.” Naturally, he had made enemies—in competing law firms, on Capitol Hill, and especially in boardrooms from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, where he existed in a parallel corporate subconscious as a modern Vandal or Visigoth. Buttoned-down and otherwise sober executives would vehemently denounce Lerach as a “bloodsucking scumbag,” or an “economic pirate.” (One Silicon Valley executive went so far as to publicly wish him out of human existence.) A verb had even been given his name. In boardrooms, to be “Lerached” meant being threatened with having to surrender more than a million documents and risk testimony from CEOs on down to the lowliest document clerks in order to fend off a $100 million lawsuit.
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Lerach publicly made note of the market volatility of these highly capitalized start-ups, as well as the pressure on corporate officers to lure investors. It was a recipe for fraud, he often warned, adding ominously that the flight from San Diego to San Jose, the gateway to Silicon Valley, would take just over one hour. In Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley, a small law firm, McCloskey, Wilson & Mosher, was launched in 1961 by three partners. Paul N. “Pete” McCloskey, Jr., a Marine Corps Korean War hero, would later enter Congress as a maverick Republican, come out in early opposition to the war in Vietnam, and be the first House member to publicly broach the idea of impeaching Richard Nixon.* Prior to all that drama, however, McCloskey and his partners had quietly discovered a recipe for rapid growth: help build the companies you represent.
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For one particular prize, however, there would always be room, and Lerach would point it out to visitors with irreverent glee. It commemorated a multimillion-dollar settlement in 1984 that got Silicon Valley’s goat to start bleating. It began on December 7, 1984, Pearl Harbor Day, when Lerach’s legal team served a securities fraud complaint against Seagate Technology and its flamboyant CEO Alan F. Shugart, an entrepreneurial engineer who helped invent the floppy disk and was considered in Silicon Valley not just a pioneer but an example of all that the New Economy made possible, technologically and personally. Born with a clubfoot in 1930 in Los Angeles and raised by a single mother, Shugart majored in engineering physics at the University of Red-lands and took a job at IBM in 1951.
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
After that incident Thiel had stated, “Valleywag is the Silicon Valley equivalent of al-Qaida.” Nine years later he got his revenge, telling the New York Times, “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.” The revelation quickly exposed the battle lines between Silicon Valley and the media. Mark Zuckerberg had publicly stated that privacy norms were evolving and his board member Thiel had backed him up. But with Gawker, Thiel was reasserting his right to privacy, even though it was general knowledge in Silicon Valley that he was gay.
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Grover Norquist, the libertarian antitax advocate who vowed to “shrink the government to the size that he could drown it in a bathtub,” told Vox’s Ezra Klein that the only things keeping Silicon Valley money in the Democratic Party were cultural issues. With “gay marriage off the table,” he said, “it could be a very easy case” to persuade the big Silicon Valley players to give money and support to the Republicans, who oppose teachers’ unions, oppose regulating the sharing economy, and are wholeheartedly in favor of free trade. 5. The unreality of the world of tech billionaires came home to me when I spent two days in 2015 at an invitation-only conference with Graydon Carter, editor in chief of Vanity Fair, and the swells of Silicon Valley in San Francisco.
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The original mission of the Internet was hijacked by a small group of right-wing radicals to whom the ideas of democracy and decentralization were anathema. By the late 1980s, starting with eventual PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s class at Stanford University, the dominant philosophy of Silicon Valley would be based far more heavily on the radical libertarian ideology of Ayn Rand than the commune-based principles of Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand. Thiel, who was also an early investor in Facebook and is the godfather of what he proudly calls the PayPal Mafia, which currently rules Silicon Valley, has been clear about his credo, stating, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” More important, Thiel says that if you want to create and capture lasting value, you should look to build a monopoly.
European Founders at Work by Pedro Gairifo Santos
business intelligence, clean tech, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, deal flow, do what you love, fail fast, fear of failure, full text search, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, information retrieval, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, natural language processing, pattern recognition, pre–internet, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, technology bubble, TED Talk, web application, Y Combinator
Because there is this Silicon Valley vs. the rest mentality. What's your opinion on that? Klein: I think I really don't like that notion. I think it's a very cheap idea that is only sort of useful for getting re-tweets and blog headlines. I think the reality is that it's not about Europe vs. Silicon Valley. The best entrepreneurs in Europe understand Silicon Valley very well. They have spent time in Silicon Valley and developed relationships in Silicon Valley. Take all of that and all of the value that comes from that because you're a fool if you think that Silicon Valley isn't the most sophisticated, vibrant place for technology start-ups on the planet.
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And the ecosystem is so profound there and keeps on getting stronger with Zynga, with Twitter, with Facebook, etc. I think any European entrepreneur or any entrepreneur in this space that doesn't want to spend time or learn from Silicon Valley is foolish. But I think there's a lot of things that you can learn and be aware of as an entrepreneur if you're not in Silicon Valley, that you can use to your advantage. I think many times there is a groupthink that emerges in Silicon Valley. The main argument is that there are many people in Europe who have fundamentally changed industries. From Niklas and Janus in the telecom space, to Daniel Ek in music, to Martin Mickos in enterprise software, to the guys who reinvented anti-virus software at Message Labs and AVG, Ventee Privee, Wonga—the list goes on.
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I think it’s an interesting question. Maybe I phrased the question wrong because the point of it is how different is it to be in the US because everyone has that idea of Silicon Valley and so on. Everything happens there. Then in Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, whatever, it’s viewed as an old business thing and it doesn’t have the same, let’s say “sugar” around it. Guilizzoni: Well, that I think is not true. You can be on the internet from wherever. In fact, I like not being in Silicon Valley. Every time I go back there I feel so stressed out. Everybody’s always running and running and running, and the next opportunity is always around the corner.
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
In the meantime, I had to find a place for Jim—and all the rest of us—to work. We needed an office. I had strong feelings about being a Santa Cruz company—of bucking the prevailing norms of Silicon Valley and not moving to a cookie-cutter office park in Sunnyvale or San Jose. Santa Cruz spoke to me. It’s a beach town, a surf town. A whiff of the sixties still clings to it. There are probably more Volkswagen vans than there are people. Its prevailing ethos, as a city, is the opposite of Silicon Valley’s “growth at all costs” model. People in Santa Cruz are typically against development. They’ve opposed widening the roads. They don’t want it to grow.
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By the time we were starting to raise money, I was actively recruiting him, and I started buying him lunch at Buck’s. Buck’s is one of the temples of Silicon Valley. So many companies have been birthed there—conceived, funded, or otherwise organized—that the owners should probably start demanding a cut. The food is very good, elevated comfort-food diner fare, but the atmosphere is what you go for. 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.
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The napkins there have felt the imprints of thousands of pens, sketching out improbable ideas that just might work. In a way, it’s the VSDA of Silicon Valley—a crazy, slightly hallucinogenic place that seems engineered to confound outsiders. That’s exactly why I took Mitch there. I was gathering intelligence at those lunches. I’d float possible solutions to problems Christina and Te and I had discussed, and just by hearing Mitch shoot them down, I’d learn something. He had the perfect combination of content knowledge and industry knowledge—he loved movies as much as he loved the logistics of renting them. Mitch wasn’t—and even now, he isn’t—a Silicon Valley guy. He was a down-to-earth business owner with incredibly progressive ideas.
The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game
Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=992272. 69. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Walmart-closures-leaving-small-towns-broken-residents/story?id=36559225. Chapter 4: Squeezing the Worker 1. “Silicon Valley,” American Experience PBS Series, Season 25, Episode 3. http://www.pbs.org/video/american-experience-silicon-valley/. 2. Alex Tabarrok, “Non Compete Clauses Reduce Innovation,” June 9, 2014, http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/06/non-compete-clauses.html. 3. Mike McPhate, “California Today: Silicon Valley's Secret Sauce,” May 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/us/california-today-silicon-valley.html. 4. https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2011/1212/Robert-Noyce-Why-Steve-Jobs-idolized-Noyce. 5.
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It is also now home to roughly one-third of the nation's welfare recipients, roughly three times its share as a percentage of the population.7 In the old days, the state's tech sector produced industrial jobs that sparked prosperity not only in Silicon Valley, but also in working class towns like San Jose. The iPhone is a metaphor for Silicon Valley. Today, when you buy an iPhone, it says designed in California, but it is manufactured in China. The manufacturing jobs for the working class are long gone. The tech monopolies are making billions of dollars of profit, but the Silicon Valley growth engine appears to be going in reverse. In 2017 job growth began to roll over, as the Bay Area lost more jobs than it created throughout much of the year.8 Housing costs have become prohibitively high and commutes to cheaper housing are becoming longer.
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Table of Contents Cover Introduction Chapter One: Where Buffett and Silicon Valley Billionaires Agree Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Two: Dividing Up the Turf Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Three: What Monopolies and King Kong Have in Common Lower Wages and Greater Income Inequality Higher Prices Fewer Startups and Jobs Lower Productivity Lower Investment Localism and Diversity Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Four: Squeezing the Worker Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Five: Silicon Valley Throws Some Shade Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Six: Toll Roads and Robber Barons Monopolies (and Local Monopolies) Duopolies Oligopolies Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Seven: What Trusts and Nazis Had in Common Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Eight: Regulation and Chemotherapy Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Nine: Morganizing America Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Ten: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle Key Thoughts from the Chapter Conclusion: Economic and Political Freedom Principles for Reform Solutions and Remedies And Finally, What You Can Do … Notes Introduction Chapter 1: Where Buffett and Silicon Valley Billionaires Agree Chapter 2: Dividing Up the Turf Chapter 3: What Monopolies and King Kong Have in Common Chapter 4: Squeezing the Worker Chapter 5: Silicon Valley Throws Some Shade Chapter 6: Toll Roads and Robber Barons Chapter 7: What Trusts and Nazis Had in Common Chapter 8: Regulation and Chemotherapy Chapter 9: Morganizing America Chapter 10: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle Conclusion: Economic and Political Freedom Acknowledgments About the Authors Index End User License Agreement List of Tables Chapter 2 Table 2.1 The Largest Highly Concentrated Industries List of Illustrations Chapter 1 Figure 1.1 Merger Manias: 1890–2015 Figure 1.2 Collapse in the Number of US Public Companies Since 1996 Figure 1.3 Collapse in Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) Figure 1.4 Frequency of the Words “Competition,” “Competitors,” and “Pressure” in Annual Reports Chapter 2 Figure 2.1 Zero and Negative Central Bank Rates Promote Cartels Chapter 3 Figure 3.1 The US Economy Has Become Less Entrepreneurial over Time Figure 3.2 New Firms Play a Decreasing Role in the Economy Figure 3.3 Growth Phases of Organisms and Companies Figure 3.4 Lower Productivity Growth as Fewer Firms Enter Figure 3.5 Investment Significantly Lagging Profitability Chapter 4 Figure 4.1 Variant Perception US Wages Leading Indicator Figure 4.2 Percentage of Workers with Noncompete Agreements, by Group Figure 4.3 States That Do Not Enforce Noncompetes Have Higher Wages Figure 4.4 Rural Areas Are Lagging (aggregate wage growth, year-over-year, third quarter 2016) Figure 4.5 Monopsonies in Labor Markets: Commuting Zones with High Labor Concentration Figure 4.6 Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Figure 4.7 Union Membership versus Income Distribution to Top 10% Figure 4.8 Wage Growth Closely Associated with Strikes Figure 4.9 The Great Suppression: Falling Unions and Increasing Licensing, 1950s–Today Chapter 6 Figure 6.1 Rail Mergers: Making of the Big Four Figure 6.2 Airline Mergers in Today's Oligopoly Figure 6.3 Banking Mergers in the United States Figure 6.4 Life Expectancy versus Health Expenditure over Time (1970–2014) Figure 6.5 Leading Global Meat Processing Firms Timeline of Ownership Changes, 1996–2016 Chapter 7 Figure 7.1 The First and Second Merger Waves (1890–1903, 1920–1930) Figure 7.2 Antitrust Enforcement Budget Figure 7.3 Twenty Years of Industry Consolidation Figure 7.4 Three Mega Merger Waves in the Past Three Decades Figure 7.5 Proportion of Completed Mergers and Acquisitions Chapter 8 Figure 8.1 Total US Patents Issued Annually, 1900–2014 Figure 8.2 Pages in the Federal Register (1936–2015) Figure 8.3 Companies That Lobby Extensively Have Higher Returns Figure 8.4 Revolving Door between Goldman Sachs and the Federal Government Figure 8.5 Revolving Door between Monsanto and the Federal Government Chapter 9 Figure 9.1 Largest Owners of US Banks (as of 2016 Q2) Figure 9.2 Share of Passively Managed Assets in US Markets Figure 9.3 S&P 500 Ownership by “Big 3” Figure 9.4 Net Investment by Nonfinancial Businesses Figure 9.5 Buybacks Zoom to Record Highs Chapter 10 Figure 10.1 Income Inequality in the United States, 1910–2015 Figure 10.2 The Global Wealth Pyramid, 2017 Figure 10.3 Rising Inequality.
The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells
air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game
So, there has been, at the same time, a process of concentration of technological know-how in transnational production networks, and a much broader diffusion of this knowhow around the world, as the geography of trans-border production networks becomes increasingly complex. I will illustrate this analysis with developments in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. Seizing new opportunities of innovation spurred by the Internet revolution, Silicon Valley increased its technological leadership in information technology vis-à-vis the rest of the world. But Silicon Valley in 2000 is, socially and ethnically, a totally different Silicon Valley from what it was in the 1970s. Anna Lee Saxenian, the leading analyst of Silicon Valley, has shown, in her 1999 study the decisive role of immigrant entrepreneurs in the new make-up of this high-tech node.
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Two of Saxenian’s students have shown a similarly powerful connection between Silicon Valley and the booming Israeli software industry, and a significant, if still small, presence of Mexican engineers in Silicon Valley.101 Thus, Silicon Valley expanded on the basis of the technological and business networks it spun around the world. In return, the firms created around these networks attracted talent from everywhere (but primarily from India and China – in just proportion of the world population), who ultimately transformed Silicon Valley itself, and furthered the technology connection with their countries of origin. Granted, Silicon Valley is a very special case because of its pre-eminence in information technology innovation.
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In the 1990s, when the Internet was privatized, and became a commercial technology, Silicon Valley was also able to capture the new industry. Leading Internet equipment companies (such as Cisco Systems), computer networking companies (such as Sun Microsystems), software companies (such as Oracle), and Internet portals (such as Yahoo!) started in Silicon Valley.72 Moreover, most of the Internet start-ups that introduced e-commerce, and revolutionized business (such as Ebay), also clustered in Silicon Valley. The coming of multimedia in the mid-1990s created a network of technological and business linkages between computer-design capabilities from Silicon Valley companies and image-producing studios in Hollywood, immediately labeled the “Siliwood” industry.
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
Browder has accordingly been celebrated as a “wunderkind” in magazines and websites such as Wired, Business Insider, and Newsweek, as well as at Stanford itself. And he’s secured the support of one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz, which led the seed round of funding for Browder’s company in 2017. But this is exactly the type of story—and there are hundreds of them at Stanford and in Silicon Valley—that gives us pause. From our perspective, it’s essential to reflect on why parking tickets exist in the first place. Annoying as they might be, they serve many important, legitimate purposes.
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He just lives in a world where it is normal not to think twice about how new technology companies could create harmful effects. Browder is but one recent example of the start-up mindset birthed at Stanford and in Silicon Valley at large. He’s been encouraged by his professors, his peers, and his investors to think bigger and be ambitious. But too rarely do people stop and ask: Whose problem are you solving? Is it a problem actually worth solving? And is the solution proposed one that would be good for human beings and for society? Back in 2004, just as Silicon Valley was reemerging from the “dot-com bust,” a young man named Aaron Swartz enrolled at Stanford University. Like Browder, he had been fascinated by computer programming from an early age.
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He was the latest in successive generations of technologists who felt that technology was a tool for human empowerment and espoused unapologetically utopian and radically democratic visions of a technological future, a vision with deep roots in the creation of the internet and the culture of Silicon Valley. Today, fewer than ten years after his death, virtually nobody talks about Aaron Swartz. He is mostly forgotten in Silicon Valley, and he is unknown to the wider public. At Stanford University, we rarely meet students who know Swartz’s name or can describe what he did. They do know the names of Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and former Stanford students such as Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the cofounders of Google), Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (the cofounders of Snapchat), Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger (the cofounders of Instagram), and Elon Musk (the founder of Tesla and SpaceX).
When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach by Ashlee Vance
"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, fake it until you make it, Google Earth, hacker house, Hyperloop, intentional community, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, lockdown, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off-the-grid, overview effect, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, Rainbow Mansion, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, TikTok, Virgin Galactic
Now it was obvious that the people who had designed our modern computers and software were intent on moving into aerospace and showing up the bureaucrats. Yes, the Silicon Valley types could perhaps be overconfident and cavalier at times, but they came with ambition, original thinking, and loads of money. Worden, then in his late fifties, thought that, like Musk, he could be an agent of change and play a major role in the movement as something of a go-between linking two worlds: Old Space and New Space. All he needed to do was find a place where he could combine his deep knowledge of space and the inner workings of the government with Silicon Valley’s speed and drive. As luck would have it, a job opened up at just such an idyllic location.
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The most sci-fi touch may be the abundance of self-driving Teslas inching forward through freeway traffic. Beyond not celebrating its present, Silicon Valley does not celebrate its past. It has no time for history. When a tech giant falls from its position of dominance, a new company simply takes over its buildings and begins the cycle anew with no homage paid to the predecessor. The first transistor factory*—the birthplace of the whole damned tech revolution—was turned into a fruit and vegetable shop years ago, and then that was ripped down to make way for yet another office building. To the extent that Silicon Valley does have an iconic temple to its past and present, it’s NASA’s Ames Research Center, located in Mountain View.
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They decided to make use of a pair of bunk beds in one of the rooms and turn it into a youth hostel open to folks traveling through Silicon Valley or looking for a short-term place to stay. A couple other living areas were converted into bedrooms. The goal became to find ten or more people to live in the house at any given time. The concept of a communal house was certainly not new, nor was the idea of communal living at all novel for the Bay Area. It would, however, turn out that the Rainbow Mansion revived the idea for the engineers and software developers flocking to Silicon Valley. In large part thanks to Jessy Kate, so-called hacker houses were about to become a thing.
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
Paul Sagan, who as CEO of Akamai bought Kalanick’s company Red Swoosh, has observed Uber’s CEO from a distance for years. He calls Kalanick “the Goldilocks of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.” His first company, Scour, Sagan said, was too hard—a shooting star that flamed out spectacularly. Red Swoosh was too soft—a labor of love for Kalanick that was never going to be a business. “Uber,” says Sagan, “is just right.” “Just right” is understatement, of course. Silicon Valley is packed with strivers, dreamers, and mercenaries certain they will change the world, realize untold riches, and etch their names on virtual monuments to the power of innovation and disruption.
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Worse, traditional sources of funding for start-up technology companies, especially those run by teams of youthful entrepreneurs whose last start-up had flamed out, had dried up. Kalanick met with a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley—a perennial challenge was the dearth of tech investors in Southern California—who told him he’d felt there was no more innovation left to be invented in software. “It was the most irrationally cynical thing you could ever imagine. It was just a sign of the times.” Kalanick was experiencing the herd mentality that drives venture-capital funding cycles. Silicon Valley investors often would rather invest in five online pet stores than one unique venture. For better or worse, the small Red Swoosh team was pursuing the only business it knew with the only potential clients that would grant them meetings.
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In early December 2008, the duo traveled to Paris for another industry conference, this one created by Loïc Le Meur, a French blogger who yearned to break into the ranks of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Together with his wife at the time, Géraldine, he succeeded in attracting a group of many of the best young Internet personalities from the United States, who needed little arm-twisting to join a boondoggle in Paris. For European attendees, LeWeb was an opportunity to rub shoulders with Silicon Valley’s up-and-coming elite. Le Meur, who ran the conference for twelve years, recounts with pride the significant moments that happened in Paris.
Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli
Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog
They needed far more than they could get by continuing to cadge personal loans from friends, parents, and advance payments from proprietors of hobby shops. Not knowing exactly where he could get that kind of money, Steve began to make a real effort to connect with Silicon Valley’s cloistered world of successful entrepreneurs, marketers, and financiers. In 1976, the route to success in Silicon Valley wasn’t remotely as well mapped as it is today, when entrepreneurs can find the path to financing by simply Googling “venture capital.” Back then the Valley had a much smaller mix of lawyers, financiers, and managers, and most business was conducted face-to-face.
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McKenna was expert at presenting a company’s tale, but he was also a master corporate business strategist. Silicon Valley has long depended on marketers nearly as much as it has depended on engineers. Every technological advance must be framed in a beguiling narrative if it’s to get off the workbench and into businesses or homes. These advances often are foreign concepts, after all, with potential that seems opaque if not daunting, so the job of a great marketer is to wrestle the concept back to earth and make it approachable for mere technophobic mortals. McKenna’s consultancy would have a hand in the creation of many of the elite companies in Silicon Valley and beyond, including National Semiconductor, Silicon Graphics, Electronic Arts, Compaq, Intel, and Lotus Software.
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Robert Noyce was charismatic and forward-thinking and had only been able to start Intel after leaving the shadow of the most imposing figure in semiconductor history, William Shockley. The systems that Andy Grove put in place were more complex and rigorous than anything Mike Scott had ever seen, and yet Grove had also been able to make his company one of the most creative places in Silicon Valley. And Regis McKenna became so adept at deftly navigating the constant shifts and tremors of Silicon Valley culture that he would wind up writing several books explaining how others could do the same. These were well-rounded, complicated, deep, and fascinating men. They were comfortable with change, and they lived where Steve wanted to live himself—at the intersection of technology and something that was more like the liberal arts.
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser
affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional
The most-skilled people in the rich countries have thrived by selling their ideas to the world and by using worldwide labor to produce their inventions more cheaply. The software producers in Bangalore haven’t made Silicon Valley obsolete. Instead, they’ve made it cheaper—and thus easier—for Silicon Valley firms to develop software. The Rise of Silicon Valley America’s greatest information technology hub is Santa Clara County, California, which most people know better as Silicon Valley. Much like Bangalore, the Valley achieved this status by making its luck with education. A century ago, when New York and Nagasaki were old, computers didn’t exist, and Santa Clara County was covered in orchards and farms.
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Many of the companies formed near Stanford focused on hardware, including Intel, Cisco, and Sun Microsystems. Two former Hewlett-Packard employees, both members of Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club, mixed hardware and software innovations when they started Apple Computer. A former Apple employee started eBay in the 1990s, when Silicon Valley also became the place for pioneering the Internet. Both Yahoo! and Google were formed by Stanford graduates not far from their alma mater. In some ways, Silicon Valley is like a well-functioning traditional city. It attracts brilliant people and then connects them. Walker’s Wagon Wheel played a legendary role as a place where smart entrepreneurs shared ideas with one another outside the confines of their various day jobs.
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Stanford’s first PhD in electrical engineering was awarded on the basis of work done at FTC. Like later Silicon Valley firms, FTC produced distinguished progeny. Two Danes who had come to Palo Alto to help with Poulsen’s arc transmitter left to form Magnavox. Another FTC employee invented the first metal detector and started Fisher Research Laboratories. Litton Industries, which grew large by producing vacuum tubes for the military during World War II, was yet another FTC offspring. But no FTC employee did more to make Silicon Valley what it is today than Frederick Terman, who connected with the company as a kid and worked there during his college summers.
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional
Jay Carney, the president’s former press secretary, hired on at Amazon the following year. Larry Summers, for his part, became an adviser for an outfit called OpenGov. Back in Washington, meanwhile, the president established a special federal unit that used Silicon Valley techniques and personnel to revolutionize the government’s web presence; starstruck tech journalists call it “Obama’s stealth startup.”2 The mutual attraction between the president and Silicon Valley had actually begun during Obama’s first campaign, when he famously used Facebook to connect with the young; his reelection effort was the first to use big data and microtargeting to find swing voters.
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Some observers like to imagine the Obama campaigns as triumphant social movements; others see them as triumphs of quite a different nature: as electronic victories demonstrating the irresistible power of digital networks. For people who take the latter view, the Obama presidency is another triumphant iteration of the story Silicon Valley loves to tell itself, the tale of the brilliant startup challenging the slow-moving incumbent, of the scrappy underdog who takes on the conservative dinosaur. Obama is thus said to be, in a typical bit of liberal-class narcissism, “the first tech president.” The tech people themselves go further: a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist calls him “the greatest president of my lifetime.” This is virtually the last surviving form of Obama idealism out there, still going strong in the president’s final year in office.* The administration’s relationship with Silicon Valley has never caused the kind of controversy that his former closeness with Wall Street did—probably because Silicon Valley has never contrived to toss the world economy into a wood chipper.
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This is virtually the last surviving form of Obama idealism out there, still going strong in the president’s final year in office.* The administration’s relationship with Silicon Valley has never caused the kind of controversy that his former closeness with Wall Street did—probably because Silicon Valley has never contrived to toss the world economy into a wood chipper. Also, it is hard to hate this industry, regardless of what they do. An aura of youthful lightheartedness seems to envelop every interaction between the president and the techies. After all, one notable manifestation of Obama’s outreach to this powerful industry was his farcical 2015 interview with YouTube comedienne GloZell Green.
Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler
"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator
During the same stretch of bad news for Uber, the top EU court dealt the company a major blow when it ruled that it should be regulated as a taxi company rather than a technology company that merely connects drivers and riders. The gig economy, as Silicon Valley had invented it, had largely come and gone. It had not, however, ceased to be relevant. Long before the gig economy, large companies outside of Silicon Valley had started moving away from direct employment relationships. Startups like Uber demonstrated new strategies and technologies that could make this process more efficient. They broke work into parcels, automatically coordinated workers, and established practices for using apps as management.
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He usually drove all night, he told me, because that’s when his app tended to pay the most. * * * From the time I first heard about the gig economy until I finished writing this book, I spent nearly six years observing a sector of the economy that brought together the tremendous hopes of Silicon Valley and the disappointing reality that our support systems are not prepared to handle the major changes on the horizon. At the end of it, I don’t think Silicon Valley was wrong to attempt to restructure the job. Our current model wasn’t working, and the startup spirit of experimentation was necessary. But attempting to tackle the problems of the job—and yes, delivering flexibility—without fixing the support structures around it can’t quite count as progress, and it certainly doesn’t look like innovation.
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See also Davenport, Terrence; Foster, Gary; Green, Shakira; Logan, Kristen Samasource Schneider, Nathan Scholz, Trebor Schwartz, Emma (Managed by Q employee) Schwarzenegger, Arnold Screen Actors Guild self-driving cars Shea, Katie Shieber, Jon Shyp (shipping service) sick days Silberman, Six Snapchat So Lo Mo (social, local, mobile) Social Security SpaceX Sprig (restaurant delivery service) Starbucks Stern, Andy Stocksy (stock photo cooperative) subcontractors Arise and earnings Managed by Q and Silicon Valley and Sundararajan, Arun Sweet, Julie SXSW (South by Southwest) Taft-Hartley Act Take Wonolo (staffing agency) Target TaskRabbit (odd job marketplace) taxi industry EU regulation and New York Taxi Workers Alliance tips and Uber and US statistics See also Lyft; ride-hailing services; Uber TechCrunch (blog) TechCrunch Disrupt temp workers and agencies early history of earnings freelancers versus injury rate Kelly Services (“Kelly Girls”) Manpower permanent employees versus Silicon Valley and “temp worker” as a category US statistics work satisfaction Teran, Dan Tischen (labor marketplace) Ton, Zeynep Trader Joe’s trucking industry Trudeau, Kevin Trump, Donald Try Caviar (food delivery service) Turker Nation (online forum) Turkopticon Twitch (live streaming video platform) Twitter Uber (ride-hailing service) 180 days of change affiliate marketing program driver-led activism and protests Drivers’ Guild and FTC charges of exaggerated earnings funding growth of guaranteed fares history of independent contractor model lawsuits and legal issues “No shifts.
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
The sweeping view before them was appropriate, she said, because Theranos was about to become Silicon Valley’s dominant company. Toward the end she boasted, “I’m not afraid of anything,” adding after a brief pause, “except needles.” By this point, Greg had become fully disillusioned and resolved to stick around only two more months until his stock options vested on the first anniversary of his hiring. He’d recently gone to a job fair at his alma mater, Georgia Tech, and had found himself unable to talk the company up to students who stopped by the Theranos booth. Instead, he’d focused his advice on the merits of a career in Silicon Valley. Part of the problem was that Elizabeth and Sunny seemed unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between a prototype and a finished product.
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I knew from reading the New Yorker and Fortune articles and from browsing the Theranos website that Balwani was the company’s president and chief operating officer. If what Alan was saying was true, this added a new twist: Silicon Valley’s first female billionaire tech founder was sleeping with her number-two executive, who was nearly twenty years her senior. It was sloppy corporate governance, but then again this was a private company. There were no rules against that sort of thing in Silicon Valley’s private startup world. What I found more interesting was the fact that Holmes seemed to be hiding the relationship from her board. Why else would the New Yorker article have portrayed her as single, with Henry Kissinger telling the magazine that he and his wife had tried to fix her up on dates?
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Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle were all accused of engaging in the practice at one point or another. Such overpromising became a defining feature of Silicon Valley. The harm done to consumers was minor, measured in frustration and deflated expectations. By positioning Theranos as a tech company in the heart of the Valley, Holmes channeled this fake-it-until-you-make-it culture, and she went to extreme lengths to hide the fakery. Many companies in Silicon Valley make their employees sign nondisclosure agreements, but at Theranos the obsession with secrecy reached a whole different level. Employees were prohibited from putting “Theranos” on their LinkedIn profiles.
Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game
Our federal laws continue to aid and abet the rise of Silicon Valley’s behemoths—in the form of unique “corporate privileges” enjoyed by internet companies that have successfully lobbied our lawmakers for competitive advantages that wrongly favored Silicon Valley over the rest of America. The emergence of these corporate monsters isn’t a product of capitalism but instead the laws and regulations that are vestiges of crony capitalism. The most important of these laws is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996—which confers a broad shield of legal immunity specifically to Silicon Valley titans (“Internet Service Providers”) like Facebook and Twitter for all content published on their platforms.
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Not an allegorical militia like a sales force for selling its ads, but an actual armed militia. The idea that this would even cross the mind of one of Silicon Valley’s titans is downright frightening. Chamath subsequently left Facebook and went on to found a firm called Social Capital, a new woke venture capital fund whose mission is to “advance humanity.” He’s built a sterling reputation for himself by publicly criticizing social media companies for “ripping apart society” while becoming a part owner of the Golden State Warriors and a Silicon Valley celebrity on the back of his appreciated ownership in Facebook.1 I haven’t heard him publicly float his onetime idea about starting a private militia for Facebook… not a great look for a newly woke capitalist.
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It’s no wonder that Big Tech stacked the decks of public debate to favor lockdowns, even as in retrospect we find these policies were of dubious value in preventing the spread of COVID-19 while markedly effective in spreading economic calamity. Yet as tempting as it might be to pin all of this to the economic self-interest of large tech companies, that’s just an asterisk compared to the real story—the pursuit of a monolithic political agenda. In modern Silicon Valley, money isn’t even the main motivator anymore. That’s where woke Silicon Valley today differs from woke Wall Street. The Valley’s titans have more money than either you or they can imagine. Now they’re after raw power. Mailchimp, the bulk email marketing platform, refused service to the Northern Virginia Tea Party, citing that the group was spreading “potentially harmful misinformation.”
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
Tyler asked. “Precisely. We’re the only people in Silicon Valley right now who care about crypto. I take it you guys haven’t been spending much time in the Valley lately.” It was very true. “The people in this room are mostly Silicon Valley outsiders anyway. They build the protocols and tools that power the internet, its plumbing. You could even call them the roadies of the internet.” Naval was right. While some of the faces here were known in deeper technology circles, and Tyler and Cameron recognized some of them, most were not the Silicon Valley “brands” that people across America knew, the billion-dollar unicorns who dominated the West Coast tech scene.
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They needed to go back to the arena where it had all started and begin to fight all over again. 3 DAMAGED GOODS Four weeks later, Cameron’s thoughts were moving at a thousand rpms as he stepped out of the taxi that had taken them straight to the heart of Silicon Valley from SFO. It was “a thirty-minute ride” that never took less than an hour but was at least pretty pleasant if you took the 280 instead of the crapshoot that was the 101. Then again, Cameron had barely noticed the scenery as he sat next to his brother in the back of the cab, going through the heavy folder of company pitch decks they’d brought with them from New York City. After hanging up their oars and officially retiring from U.S. Olympic Crew, they’d dived headlong back into the high-tech entrepreneurial scene that was centered in Silicon Valley. But unlike Zuckerberg years earlier, they hadn’t moved west.
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Zuckerberg had gotten lucky—in another world, the twins never would have had to approach him for coding help. In any event, Tyler and Cameron didn’t believe they were on the earth to exist; they were here to create, to build. 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.
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
Soon, the “real me” exists there, not here. So I’m going to argue an unusual point here. Which is that Silicon Valley, in toto, has become a player in its own attention game. Silicon Valley is addicted to attention just like some two-bit Instagram celebrity. Just like a striving influencer, Silicon Valley desperately wants to be liked. It wants followers. It wants clicks. But there are times where Silicon Valley isn’t doing anything really worth talking about. It’s making loads of money but on boring-ass enterprise software. So this tension leads Silicon Valley to start talking a lot about cool future technology as if it’s going to be a big deal very soon.
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Same as it ever was They’re spending $50 Billion to handle the rising seas from climate change, protecting the Bayou But won’t spend a single dollar preventing climate change Tragic We rented a swamp boat, went down to this little island where our ancestors were shrimpers Saw where they’re putting in the new pipeline 29 In Silicon Valley, Plans for a Monument to Silicon Valley New York Times Silicon Valley has no history. Now, this isn’t technically true, but it’s psychologically descriptive. A handful of Valley histories have been written and filmed; I’ve been a part of several. So it’s not that they don’t exist. Rather, it’s that they are not looked to for guidance. Another way to say it is that our history is ignored. Not willfully ignored—it’s more like our history goes into a black hole of cognitive oblivion. We don’t look backward for answers. We don’t replay the tape. In Silicon Valley, when someone’s career goes off track, or a venture firm fails to return its fund, nobody examines the past for answers.
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The Meaning of Life: Albert Camus on Faith, Suicide, and Absurdity BIG THINK 27. The Emotional Reason Why Kim Kardashian Turned to Surrogacy (Again) for Fourth Baby on the Way PEOPLE 28. Americans Now Spend Twice as Much on Health Care as They Did in the 1980s CNBC 29. In Silicon Valley, Plans for a Monument to Silicon Valley NEW YORK TIMES 30. Forget Terrorism, Climate Change, and Pandemics: Artificial Intelligence Is the Biggest Threat to Humanity NEWSWEEK 31. Why a DNA Testing Company Is Laying Off 100 People IRISH CENTRAL 32. It’s Official: Google Has Achieved Quantum Supremacy NEW SCIENTIST 33.
To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler
The Perils of Willpower On Frictionless Traps Technologies and Truths Postscript Notes Acknowledgments Index Copyright Page To my parents Introduction “In an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost.” —ALDOUS HUXLEY “Complexity is a solvable problem in the right hands.” —JEFF JARVIS Silicon Valley is guilty of many sins, but lack of ambition is not one of them. If you listen to its loudest apostles, Silicon Valley is all about solving problems that someone else—perhaps the greedy bankers on Wall Street or the lazy know-nothings in Washington—have created. “Technology is not really about hardware and software any more. It’s really about the mining and use of this enormous data to make the world a better place,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, told an audience of MIT students in 2011.
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“There are a lot of really big issues for the world to get solved and, as a company, what we are trying to do is to build an infrastructure on top of which to solve some of these problems,” announced Zuckerberg. In the last few years, Silicon Valley’s favorite slogan has quietly changed from “Innovate or Die!” to “Ameliorate or Die!” In the grand scheme of things, what exactly is being improved is not very important; being able to change things, to get humans to behave in more responsible and sustainable ways, to maximize efficiency, is all that matters. Half-baked ideas that might seem too big even for the naïfs at TED Conferences—that Woodstock of the intellectual effete—sit rather comfortably on Silicon Valley’s business plans. “Fitter, happier, more productive”—the refreshingly depressive motto of the popular Radiohead song from the mid-1990s—would make for an apt welcome sign in the corporate headquarters of its many digital mavens.
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But not all has changed: just like today, the system still needs imperfect humans to generate the clicks to suck the cash from advertisers. This brief sketch is not an excerpt from the latest Gary Shteyn-gart novel. Nor is it dystopian science fiction. In fact, there is a good chance that at this very moment, someone in Silicon Valley is making a pitch to investors about one of the technologies described above. Some may already have been built. A dystopia it isn’t; many extremely bright people—in Silicon Valley and beyond—find this frictionless future enticing and inevitable, as their memos and business plans would attest. I, for one, find much of this future terrifying, but probably not for the reasons you would expect.
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
In the meantime, Reddit, as its userbase swelled and its leadership tried to transform it into a profitable company, underwent a series of staffing convulsions and scandals that would have proven the downfall of many startups. A well-regarded Silicon Valley insider was installed as the new CEO, and, in the midst of a massive pornography scandal, raised $50 million. Shortly after, he flamed out under mysterious circumstances. Silicon Valley feminist hero Ellen Pao, who famously sued a top venture capital firm for gender discrimination, was promoted to chief executive. In 2015, Pao too would be forced out after a user revolt that included sexist attacks, personal threats, and which culminated in a near-site-wide blackout.
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He wasn’t persnickety about the contractual language; he had one big, if simple, request—and it was one that required altering the acquisition price and the payout schedule, and the percentages allocated to all parties, including Y Combinator, Graham, and a stock option pool to be left open for future employees. At the close of the deal, Huffman wanted to be a millionaire. It was a weirdly rigid demand that ruffled Condé Nast’s lawyers: They were not accustomed to this sort of Silicon Valley–style acquisition, where Huffman’s behavior was not just the norm, but mild, even. Graham recalls Condé Nast’s lawyers being draconian, “partly because they were just inexperienced” in the way Silicon Valley deals Graham had experienced worked, but also all Reddit parties involved recall there being a “New York” vibe to the negotiations, a particularly curt and abrasive nature that felt like a combination of bureaucracy and backlash.
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Sam Altman, who’d led the round, assumed a new seat on Reddit’s board, which was now comprised of Ohanian, Sauerberg, Wong, and Keith Rabois, the former PayPal executive who’d joined Silicon Valley investment firm Khosla Ventures, but who had made only a small investment in Reddit. He was dubbed an “independent board member.” Altman had taken the helm at Y Combinator earlier in the year from Paul Graham. Graham, Livingston, and their two sons would decamp from Silicon Valley before long for the English countryside. If the press wasn’t yet over the celebrity photo leak scandal, investors seemed to be. “The press never affected us,” Wong recalled.
The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger
active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day
With pale eyes and gradually graying hair, Grosse looked more like a bespectacled suburban dad than one of Silicon Valley’s key players, but his Stanford computer science PhD and hobby of piloting his own high-winged plane, gave him Valley credibility. By the time my colleague Nicole Perlroth and I arrived at Grosse’s office on the edge of the Google campus in early summer 2014, he was deeply engaged in figuring out how to block every pathway the NSA could carve into the tech giant’s networks. In the open cubicles that looked out on the old air base, Moffett Field, in the heart of what is now Silicon Valley—the remnant of a pre–World War II age when the airplane was remaking global power—Grosse and his team of engineers were working day and night to NSA-proof the Google systems.
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“While the North Korean cyberattack on Sony was the most destructive on a US entity so far, this threat affects us all….Just as Russia and China have advanced cyber capabilities and strategies ranging from stealthy network penetration to intellectual property theft, criminal and terrorist networks are also increasing their cyber operations.” He went on to describe the “Cyber Missions Forces” that were being built up at US Cyber Command: 6,200 American warriors, including defensive teams and combat teams. And he called on Silicon Valley to send some of its best and brightest for tours of a year in the Pentagon so that the United States would be on the cutting edge of defense. (Silicon Valley executives were cautious about this idea. The head of a major firm doing business with the Pentagon told Carter’s entourage that he doubted his talented group of coders would be able to obtain security clearances. “Because they smoked pot in college?”
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“This is why we have fifty-year-old aircraft carriers,” Shah said, “with thirty-year-old software.” When Shah’s flying days were coming to an end, he landed back in Silicon Valley, “where everything runs on speed.” From his new perch, the Pentagon’s mode of operating seemed even more ridiculous. “Who wants a four-year-old phone?” he asked me one day. Shah had some allies in holding this view, including Ashton Carter, who had spent months in Silicon Valley between the time he was deputy secretary of defense and when Obama brought him back to serve as secretary in February 2015. Carter and his chief of staff, Eric Rosenbach, another major architect of the Pentagon’s cyber efforts, were determined to use their two years to change the culture of the Pentagon.
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 you have used the internet at all in the last twenty years, you’ve touched a product, service, or website connected to the creators of PayPal. The founders of several of our era’s defining firms—the creators of YouTube, Yelp, Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, and Palantir, among others—were early PayPal employees; others occupy top posts at Google, Facebook, and Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms. Both in the foreground and behind the scenes, PayPal’s alumni have built, funded, or counseled nearly every Silicon Valley company of consequence for the last two decades. As a group, they constitute one of the most powerful and successful networks ever created—power and influence captured in the controversial phrase the “PayPal Mafia.” Several billionaires and many multimillionaires have emerged from PayPal’s ranks; the group’s combined net worth is higher than the GDP of New Zealand.
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Later, Thiel would call the cataclysm clarifying. “Perhaps the peak of insanity was also the peak of clarity,” he recalled, “where in some sense you saw very clearly what the distant future was going to be, even though it turned out that a lot of specific things went very wrong.” Suddenly, Silicon Valley’s excess curdled into austerity. “All the other companies in Silicon Valley that had waited to close their funding rounds, for whatever reason, the money just dried up—instantly,” Sacks remembered, snapping his fingers. Members of the team remembered the shock of seeing once-busy Palo Alto storefronts now boarded up. Even high-profile support didn’t count for much once the correction began.
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Musk admired Steve Jobs and studied the period of his departure from Apple. “That ship was sailing really well,” Musk observed of the interregnum between Jobs’s departure and return, “… towards the reef.” David Sacks remembered this as “a period of time when Silicon Valley didn’t have self-confidence in its own executives,” he said, arguing this approach resulted in disaster. “This might have been the moment at which Silicon Valley flipped… away from the ‘Sculley model’ to the ‘Zuckerberg model,’ which is, you grow with your entrepreneurs, you let them keep running the company.” It could all sound a bit self-serving to critics: of course a group of young founders would excoriate “adult supervision.”
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
Push costs down and some new business that does things cheaper and better pops up faster than a Whac-a-Mole. Scale with a capital S. It works like magic. I made a career out of riding these waves. I wondered if I could find them in medicine. It wasn’t so obvious. This is how Silicon Valley works. Every year, the cost of every chip, gate, transistor, function drops by 30%—it halves every two years. If nothing else happened, Silicon Valley would shrink into oblivion. But elasticity kicks in—SCALE. Put simply, every time costs decline, some new application opens up to take advantage of the cheaper functionality, and you sell three times as many. Or 10 times as many.
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But isn’t that like the early days of Silicon Valley? Try something, perfect it. Open the door of the oven to see if it’s done.” The more I looked, the more it felt like those early days to me. Something was possible, there were issues, and capital funded a bunch of different approaches and experiments raged through the night and innovation exploded all over the place. Maybe it wasn’t Intel that would provide the solution. Maybe, as Don Listwin predicted, we’d see venture capitalists coming out of the woodwork once a return was visible. Thousands of biochemists descending on Silicon Valley, or anywhere for that matter, finding biomarkers, developing protein sensors, imaging probes, outcomes databases, all the little pieces that are needed.
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The End of Medicine HOW SILICON VALLEY (AND NAKED MICE) WILL REBOOT YOUR DOCTOR Andy Kessler To Nancy, my life sustainer Contents Introduction Chapter 1 Broken Neck? Chapter 2 Physical Part I Chapter 3 In the Cath Lab Chapter 4 What the Hell Am I Doing Here? Chapter 5 Echo/Nuclear Chapter 6 Do Doctors Scale? Chapter 7 Zap It Out Chapter 8 Blood Tests Chapter 9 CAVE Chapter 10 LASIK Chapter 11 The Big Three Chapter 12 Magic Pill Chapter 13 Meeting Gary Glazer Part II Chapter 14 The Dish Chapter 15 Close to Home Chapter 16 Cholesterol Conspiracy?
The Flat White Economy by Douglas McWilliams
access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer age, correlation coefficient, Crossrail, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, George Gilder, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, vertical integration, working-age population, zero-sum game
Fintech – the business of financing technology – is still in its infancy in London. But it has shown substantial growth in the past decade, and particularly since 2008. London accounts for 8.9% of world technology finance – a long way short of the 30% contributed from Silicon Valley but nevertheless a figure which indicates an emerging growth. In the five years to 2013 London fintech growth was twice that of Silicon Valley. The UK and Ireland (which is, in practice, chiefly a London measure) accounts for more than 50% of European technology venture capital measured by number of deals – and 69% measured by funds invested. Deal volume in London has been growing at an annual rate of over 70% since 2008 and grew by 117% in the year to Q1 2014.
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At the same time, there has been a huge rise in the number of people getting on their bikes – 176 per cent more since 2000.”17 But the significant danger of at least serious injury must be a discouragement to many potential cyclists. Clothing According to Business Insider, Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and one of Silicon Valley’s key venture capitalists, “hates suits”. While he cautions that there are “no absolute and timeless sartorial rules,” Thiel says that, “in Silicon Valley, wearing a suit in a pitch meeting makes you look like someone who is bad at sales and worse at tech.” Maybe that’s why he has a simple rule for investing: never bet on a CEO in a suit. Thiel says that this rule has helped him avoid making poor bets on slick business folk compensating for crap products with well-dressed charm.
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According to Technology Review, “Amazon has moved a mobile development team to the area, Google has expanded quickly into new buildings and drug companies are piling in too.”4 Around Silicon Roundabout in London, rents shot up in 2013 to over £40 per square foot (£70 including services), but have fallen back slightly since as new space has been attracted on to the market. In Paris, Moscow and Beijing the drive to replicate Silicon Valley is strongly supported with government money. Yet economists argue about whether it is possible to promote technology top down. On the one hand, the original development of Silicon Valley had much to do with US government defence spending and the current development of the Israeli technology sector is again driven by military spending. In addition, in China, technology giant Huawei allegedly grew out of the communications arm of the People’s Liberation Army, while the Russian technology cluster also appears to have had historic links with military developments.
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
Decisions at larger firms can get delegated to more junior investment professionals and not as much cross-partnership scrutiny is given to each decision. Some entrepreneurs view geographical dispersion as a negative as compared to geographical focus. When VCs are not physically located close to you, they are less likely to be as helpful or in touch with the ups and downs of your start-up. That is why Silicon Valley-based VCs typically fund Silicon Valley-based firms and Boston-based VCs typically fund East Coast start-ups. There are plenty of exceptions (e.g., Jack Dorsey’s Twitter chose Fred Wilson, a New York City-based VC, to be his lead investor), but being close by for a quick chat about strategy, recruiting, product positioning, and financing is beneficial to a productive VC-entrepreneur relationship.
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Find a local management team, provide them with a brand and back-office support (accounting, fund management, and the like), and create a global network of venture capitalists that are tied together by economic and social bonds, share deals and analysis, yet make investment decisions and control the bulk of their own economics locally. Sitting down together over cocktails during an industry conference in New York City, I asked Tim—why the drive to expand globally? “I love entrepreneurs,” he explained. “I want to find them everywhere. I knew they wouldn’t all be in Silicon Valley. Microsoft was in Redmond, Washington; it didn’t come from the Silicon Valley or Route 128 outside of Boston. I thought, Where else are deals going to come from? It was a huge step to go international. People looked at me as if I were out of my mind. I partly am. But it worked out really well. I’ve been to sixty-five different countries and probably funded businesses in thirty of them.
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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.
What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee
4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar
In its outer reaches it is an ambition manifested in ideas of Seasteading (a movement to build self-governing floating cities, started by PayPal founder Peter Thiel) and the Singularity (a belief in “the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity,” originating with the ideas of inventor and now Google employee Ray Kurzweil). Just as Hollywood is both a physical location and a global industry with a distinctive set of traditions, beliefs, and practices, so Silicon Valley is more than a place—it is shorthand for the world of digital technology, specifically Internet technology. Silicon Valley includes big companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, and it includes a never-ending stream of ambitious startups, not all physically located in Silicon Valley proper, but all driven by and products of the broader Internet culture. The Sharing Economy takes its inspiration from one particular tenet of that culture: a belief in the virtues of openness.
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As Alice Marwick writes, ideas of personal branding and investment in self-promotion have taken off in a big way in Silicon Valley; part of the region’s belief in the value of entrepreneurship,11 so now Sharing Economy companies have coined a word for “people as companies.” Airbnb hosts, Lyft drivers, and TaskRabbit errand-runners are “micro-entrepreneurs”: the self as corporation, and one’s reputation as personal brand. If investment in “reputation as an asset” gains ground, then reputation may become a measure of how well we conform to the prejudices and expectations of Silicon Valley culture. RATINGS DO NOT DISCRIMINATE Start by looking at ratings on Netflix: the ratings of movies and TV shows by Netflix customers.
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Three years on, Rosenberg was an advisor to Google management, and found himself in “a world that has outstripped even his wildest expectations.” 11 Drawing on stories from books like Wikinomics,12 on the Government of Canada’s Open Government Declaration, on the non-profit Khan Academy’s video lectures, on PatientsLikeMe in healthcare and Google’s mapping tools, as well as Google’s own success with Android smartphones and the Chrome browser, Rosenberg believes that openness needs to go even further: “We must aim beyond even an open internet. Institutions in general must continue to embrace this ethos.” Here is the ambition of Silicon Valley: to reshape the world in the Internet’s image. Open institutions, open government, open access. It’s the ambition that the Sharing Economy seeks to realize: to take the philosophy of openness and to reshape whole industries, and their relationship to government, but to keep something for themselves. Rosenberg’s ability to hold contradictory beliefs is symptomatic of Silicon Valley culture. He believes thoroughly in openness, congratulating himself and his industry on discovering a viewpoint that is “counter-intuitive to the traditionally trained MBA who is taught to generate a sustainable competitive advantage by creating a closed system, making it popular, then milking it through the product life cycle.”
Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland
affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional
It offered something that everybody was looking for, they just didn’t know it. The computer became a social entity. You went to these conferences and you found people from all over the world, sharing a common conversation. Today, there is this misnomer about Silicon Valley, that it is a “start-up community.” There’s about—I’m guessing—thirty thousand companies in Silicon Valley. Every imaginable technology: fundamental technology, software companies, biotech companies, medical companies. And I’ve worked with all of them. They always liked ads, because—I don’t know—there is something macho about an ad. And they think it says more than it does.
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TIM DRAPER The office of his venture capital firm is one block from El Camino Real—the road that used to connect the Missions during the Spanish colonization of California and now snakes down the tech corridor from San Francisco to San Jose. The walls are covered with huge murals of superheroes—Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman—frozen in action poses. My grandfather was the first venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. My dad moved here, joined him, and became one of the pioneers of the business. So I grew up here when El Camino was a dirt road. Downtown Menlo Park had about five stores total. I’ve watched this whole metropolis build around Silicon Valley, and tried to get to the heart of what makes this ecosystem work. I’ve been the Johnny Appleseed of venture capital—spreading the seeds of this valley everywhere I go. You need angel investors who work together to fund start-ups.
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The next thing I know, the State Department was like, “Hey, we want someone to host and mentor this start-up weekend in post-revolution Egypt, and USAID will fund it.” I mentored at a developer conference with Google in Saudi Arabia. The government of Malaysia invited Silicon Valley to come—it was an event for local entrepreneurs called “Silicon Valley Comes to Malaysia”—and so I went. I even got the opportunity to meet the president of Turkey. During this period, there were many “small world” moments. One entrepreneur I met at the start-up weekend in Egypt, he was nineteen at the time. He had way too much swagger for somebody his age.
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
SAIL was as unconventional as it was innovative. Researchers lived in the attic above their offices, encounter groups met in the steam tunnels in the basement, and from that tumult emerged the technological insights that would help reshape both Silicon Valley and the entire world during the next decade. At dinner with Engelbart, I realized that, in spite of reading widely about the history of Silicon Valley and computing, I wasn’t familiar with the stories being told that evening. What struck me was that the tales weren’t about the technologies but rather about the lives of the researchers themselves, their personal relationships, the drugs they took, the sex they enjoyed, the rock and roll they listened to, and the political protest in which they took part.
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At about the same time, a New York–based Rolling Stone writer, Steven Levy, showed up at our Palo Alto offices and took me out for pizza at the Roundtable on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto. Steven had come to Silicon Valley to do research for what would become Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, an account that seventeen years later is still the definitive work on the culture of the modern computing world. More recently, Steven was kind enough to dig through his old boxes to share transcripts from his original interviews. Also, I have to give special thanks to friends who were willing to listen to me chatter endlessly about what my reporting had dug up. Paul Saffo has been one of the sharpest thinkers in Silicon Valley for more than two decades, with a wonderful critical eye.
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The combustive combination of radical politics and technological ambition is laid out so convincingly, in fact, that it’s mildly disappointing when, in the closing pages, Markoff attaches momentous significance to a confrontation between the freewheeling Californian computer culture and a young Bill Gates only to bring the story to an abrupt halt. Hopefully, he’s already started work on the sequel.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A lively prehistory of Silicon Valley and its brilliant denizens of yore…. Technogeeks will know much of this history already, but Markoff does a fine job of distilling it here while pointing out how much bleaker the world might be if the pioneers had just said no.” —Kirkus Reviews “Striking…. a fine job of recording the history of that exceptional time.
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor
OWNERSHIP, POSSESSION, AND CONTROL It’s not just founders who need to get along. Everyone in your company needs to work well together. A Silicon Valley libertarian might say you could solve this problem by restricting yourself to a sole proprietorship. Freud, Jung, and every other psychologist has a theory about how every individual mind is divided against itself, but in business at least, working for yourself guarantees alignment. Unfortunately, it also limits what kind of company you can build. It’s very hard to go from 0 to 1 without a team. A Silicon Valley anarchist might say you could achieve perfect alignment as long as you hire just the right people, who will flourish peacefully without any guiding structure.
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My primary goal in teaching the class was to help my students see beyond the tracks laid down by academic specialties to the broader future that is theirs to create. One of those students, Blake Masters, took detailed class notes, which circulated far beyond the campus, and in Zero to One I have worked with him to revise the notes for a wider audience. There’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley. 1 THE CHALLENGE OF THE FUTURE WHENEVER I INTERVIEW someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon.
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The Chinese have been straightforwardly copying everything that has worked in the developed world: 19th-century railroads, 20th-century air conditioning, and even entire cities. They might skip a few steps along the way—going straight to wireless without installing landlines, for instance—but they’re copying all the same. The single word for vertical, 0 to 1 progress is technology. The rapid progress of information technology in recent decades has made Silicon Valley the capital of “technology” in general. But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology. Because globalization and technology are different modes of progress, it’s possible to have both, either, or neither at the same time.
Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs by Gina Keating
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, company town, corporate raider, digital rights, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Netflix Prize, new economy, out of africa, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Superbowl ad, tech worker, telemarketer, warehouse automation, X Prize
It was a common dance in 1990s Silicon Valley, a verdant and sunny groove of flat land sandwiched between the southern reaches of the San Francisco Bay in the east and the Santa Cruz Mountains in the west. Start-ups bloomed for a year or so, watered by plentiful venture capital dollars, and were quickly swallowed up by private investors or large, rich companies fishing for the next big innovation in software, biomedical engineering, telecoms, or the ever-evolving Internet. It was the new gold rush, and venture capital investors would pour more than $70 billion into Silicon Valley start-ups before the decade was out.
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By mid-1999, the company’s head count had been pushed past one hundred, and—with McCord having trouble convincing programmers to drive over the hill to work in Scotts Valley—Netflix went looking for bigger digs closer to the heart of Silicon Valley. In a final capitulation, Randolph gave up his dream of working almost within walking distance of his home and moved the operation into a nondescript, low-slung building on University Avenue in Los Gatos, the southernmost town in Silicon Valley. The other members of the founding team saw Randolph being pushed aside with mixed feelings. They had poured their energy and creativity into Netflix at a fraction of their usual salaries for two years to bring their dream company to life, and they wanted to see it succeed.
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“Netflix Is Moving to Get Big Fast; Overnight Service Firm’s Aiming for Profit and a Million Subscribers in Second Quarter of ’03.” Investor’s Business Daily, July 2, 2002. Simon, Mark. “Widespread Success for TechNet: Silicon Valley Political Action Group Is a Big Hit.” San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 1998. ———. “Political Action Chief Steps Down: Reed Hastings Will Stay Active in Silicon Valley Group.” San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 12, 1999. Sinton, Peter. “Start-ups Fetch Record Financing.” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 11, 1999. Spector, Mike. “Icahn Takes Blockbuster Debt Holding.” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 17, 2010.
The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Benchmark Capital, billion-dollar mistake, Burning Man, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, global village, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Network effects, Peter Thiel, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, SoftBank, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, UUNET, Whole Earth Review, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler
Anything like that would be phenomenal for a year-old company led by a twenty-year-old with seven employees and annualized revenues of less than $1 million. But Parker was wrong. He got more. As soon as word got out that Thefacebook was contemplating an investment, the Silicon Valley greed machine kicked into high gear. Inquiries started pouring in. Cell phones at Thefacebook rang incessantly. Ron Conway, one of the most connected men in Silicon Valley and a veteran angel investor, was giving Parker advice about who to talk to and what to say. He was also making email introductions to established Silicon Valley companies and key venture capital firms. (Zuckerberg now says he didn’t know about most of this activity at the time.) Investor interest was further heightened when the Los Angeles Times wrote a front-page story about Thefacebook on January 23, the first big story ever about the company in a major media publication.
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He would work weeks on end to accomplish some company objective, sleeping in the office, then not come in at all for days. Finally they booted him out. In the end they even hired a private investigator to document his alleged misbehavior. Parker was among the growing number of Silicon Valley executives who were becoming convinced that social networking would become a very big business. In the fall of 2003, Silicon Valley venture investors had put a total of $36 million into four high-profile social networking start-ups—Friendster, LinkedIn, Spoke, and Tribe. In late March, not long after Thefacebook took over the Stanford campus in mere days, Parker sent Zuckerberg an email out of the blue.
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When Jeff Rothschild started at Thefacebook he dressed like a typical middle-aged, nerdy Silicon Valley engineer—clunky running shoes and a shirt tucked into khaki pants or loose jeans. About a month later a friend ran into him at the airport. He was wearing designer jeans with his shirttail untucked in the hipster manner. “Jeff, what happened?” his friend asked. “They said I was making them look bad,” Rothschild replied. “They weren’t going to let me back into the office.” The other employees started calling Rothschild “J-Ro.” “Part of our company mission was to be the coolest company in Silicon Valley,” says Parker. “I played up the idea that this should be a fun, rock-’n’-roll place to work.”
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
The Valley’s relatively contained geography: AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 29. 21. “From the outset”: Ibid. Much of the information on the history of Silicon Valley comes from Saxenian’s book. 22. They had become friends: Kaplan, The Silicon Boys, p. 34. 23. Later he encouraged the duo: Saxenian, Regional Advantage, p. 20. 24. Hewlett and Packard are the iconic models: The information on Hewlett and Packard’s early days in Silicon Valley comes mainly from John Markoff, “William Hewlett Dies at 87: A Pioneer of Silicon Valley,” obituary, New York Times, Jan. 13, 2001. 25.
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* * * At Home in Woodside Once they make their fortunes, many of the most successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs head to the historic Silicon Valley town of Woodside. A community of about five thousand people, Woodside is a place of bucolic, two-lane country roads lined with old-fashioned, horseshoe-shaped mailboxes. Looking around, it is difficult to imagine that this town is, in fact, one of the wealthiest in the nation. Although the primary residences of Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs are in nearby Silicon Valley communities, both of which are not more than a twenty-minute drive away, they also maintain estates in Woodside, a town where a billionaire can buy some privacy.
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Microsoft’s successful deal with IBM made it possible for Gates to import talented engineers from around the world, such as his top software architect Charles Simonyi, who relocated from Silicon Valley to Microsoft’s relatively isolated corporate campus in Redmond. Microsoft’s headquarters was a place where employees were not liable to be lured away by job offers from rival software company executives at the local coffee shop, as they could be in Silicon Valley. “Even back in the late seventies,”19 says Charles Simonyi, “Bill anticipated what would happen. In Seattle, there would be stability in the workforce.” In contrast to the one-industry town of Redmond, the story of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley is much more dynamic and colorful. Every few years at least four or five new members from the Bay Area make the Forbes 400 list, while another four or five fall off.
Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty by Vikram Chandra
Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, business process, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, East Village, European colonialism, finite state, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, haute couture, hype cycle, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, land reform, London Whale, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, pink-collar, revision control, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, tech worker, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, theory of mind, Therac-25, Turing machine, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce
CBS Money Watch, July 13, 2012. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-57471697/jpmorgan-chase-earnings-london-whale-cost-$5.8-billion/. Scott, Alec. “Lessons from Canada’s Silicon Valley Diaspora.” The Globe and Mail, February 23, 2012. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/lessons-from-canadas-silicon-valley-diaspora/article535544/?service=print. Shulman, David. “The Buzz of God and the Click of Delight.” In Aesthetics in Performance: Formations of Symbolic Construction and Experience, edited by Angela Hobart and Bruce Kapferer, 43–63. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. Silver, Nate. “In Silicon Valley, Technology Talent Gap Threatens G.O.P. Campaigns.” New York Times, November 28, 2012.
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Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering 15, no. 3 (2009): 205–22. Wadhwa, Vivek. “The Face of Success, Part I: How the Indians Conquered Silicon Valley.” Inc.com, January 13, 2012. http://www.inc.com/vivek-wadhwa/how-the-indians-succeeded-in-silicon-valley.html. Wallis, Christopher. “The Descent of Power: Possession, Mysticism, and Initiation in the Śaiva Theology of Abhinavagupta.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 36, no. 2 (2008): 247–95. Warner, Melanie. “The Indians of Silicon Valley.” Money.cnn.com, May 15, 2000. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000/05/15/279748/. West, James L. III, ed.
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The corporate imperative toward cost-cutting—on both sides of the globe—results in shoddy products, in programming as in any other industrialized field. And the Indian Einsteins, until fairly recently, have gravitated inevitably toward Silicon Valley, often snapped up directly from Indian campuses by American recruiters. There, they have formed the core of the Indian Mafia. So this is another history of success in Silicon Valley that may be placed beside the more familiar narrative of solitary, pioneering heroes who seem to have sprung from an Ayn Rand novel—in this Indian-American version we have a tenacious patience, learned in a country with sparse resources and endless competition, a perseverance trained and honed by a thousand endless queues in government offices; a willingness to work at “shiz” scorned by people conditioned by a less straitened environment; cooperation and mutual help; and a huge, continuing financial investment by a young nation state, despite the paradoxes of unequal development and the flight of intellectual capital.
Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey
Madeleine Schwartz, “Welcome to the Reel World,” Harvard Crimson, February 5, 2009. 14. David Postman, “RealNetworks CEO Donates Big Bucks to Politics,” Seattle Times, July 26, 2004. 15. “Green Economy Offers New Opportunities for Growth in Silicon Valley,” 2009 Silicon Valley Index, February 17, 2009, www .jointventure.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=74: the-2009-silicon-valley-index&catid=39:silicon-valley-index&Itemid=52. 16. Lori Olszewski, “Some Prop. 39 Backers Have Deep Pockets,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 23, 2000. bnotes.indd 302 5/11/10 6:29:36 AM notes to pages 190–221 303 17. Paul Festa, “High-Tech Advocates Clash over School Vouchers, Skilled Labor,” CNET News, September 22, 2000, http://news .cnet.com/High-tech-advocates-clash-over-school-vouchers,-skilledlabor/2100-1023_3-246068.html. 18.
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Wealthy technologists have only tentatively embraced progressive politics, c08.indd 179 5/11/10 6:24:52 AM 180 fortunes of change and their pet causes—and pet peeves—are only starting to come into focus. The vast wealth of Silicon Valley—as well as in the Seattle area— has become such a fixture in America’s collective conscious that it is easy to forget how new these fortunes are. Although Silicon Valley has long been a high-tech center, going back to World War II and earlier, it wasn’t until Apple Computer’s successful initial public offering (IPO) in 1980 that the valley became synonymous with great wealth.
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Since then, the high-tech rich have remained a political work in progress. Like much of California, Silicon Valley has been trending Democratic for years, and a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won Santa Clara County—which covers much of the valley—since 1984. Obama won 70 percent of the votes in the county in 2008, while Kerry won 64 percent. These margins are as high as nearly anywhere in the country. And big tech money is flowing to Democrats, too. For most of the 1990s, Democratic politicians didn’t bother much with Silicon Valley, which donated only modestly at election time. For example, the tech industry gave only $5.2 million in campaign contributions in 1992— nearly a third less than the amount Hollywood gave.
Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida
Abraham Maslow, active measures, assortative mating, back-to-the-city movement, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, Celebration, Florida, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, edge city, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, extreme commuting, financial engineering, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, invention of the telegraph, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-work, power law, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, World Values Survey, young professional
In a detailed study of the biotech industry published in 2001, Joseph Cortright and Heike Mayer found that three-quarters of all biotech firms founded in the 1990s were located in just nine regions. 12 Compared with others, those nine regions boasted eight times as much biotech research, ten times as many biotech companies, and thirty times more biotech venture capital. Venture capital is another useful indicator of how high-tech industries cluster, and it’s one reason for the success of Silicon Valley. “There’s a unique set of resources in Silicon Valley that don’t exist in other places,” VideoEgg founder, Matt Sanchez, told the Wall Street Journal. “So if you’re going to build a tech company, this is the place to do it.”13 It’s not just high-tech industries that cluster. Many other industries also benefit from being located near one another.
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It “puts people in the flow of the many different thoughts and actions that reside in any one world,” writes Andrew Hargadon, director of technology management programs at the University of California-Davis.18 At its heart, bridging “changes the way people look at not just those different ideas they find in other worlds, it also changes the way they look at thoughts and actions that dominate their own. Bridging activities provide the conditions for creativity, for the Eureka moment when new possibilities suddenly become apparent.” In her study of the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley and on Route 128 outside Boston, Berkeley’s AnnaLee Saxenian found that the resilience and superior performance of Silicon Valley companies during the 1990s turned on the adaptive capabilities of the region’s decentralized but cooperative networks of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, technologists, and newly minted university talent.19 No matter what form it takes, networking reflects what Stanford University sociologist Mark Granovetter calls “the strength of weak ties,” a remarkable phrase that captures the essence of what’s going on.20 In a widely influential study that examined how people find jobs, Granovetter concluded that it is our numerous weak ties, rather than our fewer strong ones, that really matter.
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Many forms of innovative and creative activity—whether high-tech businesses, art galleries, or musical groups—require the same thing: cheap space. That’s what Jane Jacobs was getting at when she famously wrote, “New ideas require old buildings.” These spaces, formerly abundant in places like Silicon Valley and downtown New York City, are where everyone from Steve Jobs to Bob Dylan got their start. Cheap space in these towns is now hard to come by. Several Silicon Valley garages that witnessed high-tech start-ups in the 1990s have been turned into museums. When housing prices rise and buildings are converted into expensive condos or high-end retail shops, venues for fostering creativity disappear.
Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland
"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game
The Cyrillic alphabet, which had sometimes been a barrier to Russia’s success in the global economy, turned out to be a boon for Milner, making it harder for Silicon Valley to conquer his domestic market. But winning in the Russian technology market wasn’t enough for Milner. He decided that his failure in Russia had taught him to be faster and hungrier than the Americans he had met at Wharton. Now that he understood how to respond to revolution, he would take that talent to the place where the biggest transformation in the world was happening: Silicon Valley. Milner was the first major outside investor in Facebook, a coup he pulled off in May 2009 by agreeing to terms that seemed ridiculous to the Valley: $200 million for a 1.96 percent stake, valuing the five-year-old company at more than $1 billion, and with no board seats.
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Google, they believed, was the ship, and the social networking revolution was the wave: Google would either learn to ride it—or drown. Even for Google, a company whose insurgent founders are still in their thirties, responding to revolution is hard. One reason Google may have a chance is that the business leaders of Silicon Valley, like those in the emerging markets, made their first fortunes by responding to revolution. For them, constant change is the status quo. Indeed, responding to revolution is so central to Silicon Valley culture that the most successful entrepreneurs have developed a culture of continuous revolution. Caroline O’Connor and Perry Klebahn, at Stanford’s design school, call this the ability to “pivot.”
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While he was at Oxford pursuing his intellectual passion and building his CV, like the good superstar in training he clearly was, Hoffman realized that the world was changing and the old rules no longer applied. “Being in Oxford was in a sense taking a massive risk by taking me out of Silicon Valley,” he said. “That was when the online revolution was starting. And being present—being in the network when things are happening, where the opportunities are, is really critical.” Hoffman was lucky. His undergraduate years in the Stanford cognitive science department and having a stepmother who worked in Silicon Valley’s venture capital industry meant that even amid Oxford’s dreamy spires he was able to figure out that a revolution was taking place more than five thousand miles away.
WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar
Is the enthusiasm of its investors a sign of a fundamental restructuring of the nature of work, or a sign of an investment mania like the one leading up to the dot-com bust in 2001? How do we tell the difference? Startups with a valuation of more than a billion dollars understandably get a lot of attention, even more so now that they have a name, unicorn, the term du jour in Silicon Valley. Fortune magazine started keeping a list of companies with that exalted status. Silicon Valley news site TechCrunch has a constantly updated “Unicorn Leaderboard.” But even when these companies succeed, they may not be the surest guide to the future. At O’Reilly Media, we learned to tune in to very different signals by watching the innovators who first brought us the Internet and the open source software that made it possible.
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The experiment was so successful that they decided to build out a short-term room, apartment, and home rental service for the upcoming SXSW technology conference in Austin, Texas, because they knew that every hotel room in the city would be sold out. They followed that up by doing the same thing for the 2008 Democratic National Convention, held in Denver, Colorado. In 2009, they were accepted into Y Combinator, the prestigious Silicon Valley startup incubator, and then received funding from one of Silicon Valley’s top venture firms, Sequoia Capital. But despite a promising start, they were still struggling with acquiring users fast enough. The breakthrough came when they realized that hosts were taking lousy photographs of their properties, leading to lower trust and thus lower interest by possible renters.
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Uber and Lyft believe that their computer-mediated marketplace achieves the same goals more effectively. Surely it should be possible to evaluate the success or failure of these alternative approaches using data. As discussed in Chapter 7, there is a profound cultural and experiential divide here between Silicon Valley companies and government that is part of the problem. In Silicon Valley, every new app or service starts out as an experiment. From the very first day a company is funded by venture capitalists, or launches without funding, its success is dependent on achieving key metrics such as user adoption, usage, or engagement. Because the service is online, this feedback comes in near-real time.
Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest
23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game
Meanwhile, other traditional industries, including real estate and automotive, are already succumbing to this new zeitgeist. The automobile industry in particular has had its cage rattled by the emergence of the all-electric Tesla. While the Tesla is a high-performance luxury car, it’s much more than just that. In fact, in Silicon Valley, it is common to describe it is as a computer that happens to move—and move very well. Who would ever have predicted that in just three years a Silicon Valley team of (mostly) electrical engineers would have created the safest car ever built? For one thing, they weren’t dragging 120 years of Iron-Age automotive history behind them like an anchor, as Chevrolet was when it designed the Volt, a plug-in that relies on a traditional gas engine to power a generator that charges the battery.
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First, by focusing on the problem space, you are not tied to one particular idea or solution, and thus don’t end up shoehorning a technology into a problem space where it might not be a good fit. Silicon Valley is littered with the carcasses of companies with great technologies searching for a problem to solve. Second, there is no shortage of either ideas or new technologies. After all, everybody in a place like Silicon Valley has an idea for a new tech business. Instead, the key to success is relentless execution, hence the need for passion and the MTP. To demonstrate, consider the number of times the founders of the following companies pitched investors before finally succeeding: Company Number of Investor Pitches Skype 40 Cisco 76 Pandora 300 Google 350 What if Larry Page and Sergey Brin had stopped pitching after 340 attempts?
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The winning teams get all-expense-paid trips to mach49’s Silicon Valley facility. There, they are paired with non-competitive teams from other industries. All the groups are then immersed in Lean startup-style entrepreneurship and design thinking. The goal is to validate business opportunities through prototypes and in-market tests. After working alongside the mach49 team and network, these small, multi-disciplinary teams of corporate intrapreneurs leave with defined, validated opportunities and a clear execution plan. They can then stay on in Silicon Valley to accelerate, be spun back into (or out of) the mother ship, or serve as pilots to pave the way to larger acquisitions or partnerships.
Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World by Christopher Steiner
23andMe, Ada Lovelace, airport security, Al Roth, algorithmic trading, Apollo 13, backtesting, Bear Stearns, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, dumpster diving, financial engineering, Flash crash, G4S, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, High speed trading, Howard Rheingold, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge economy, late fees, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, medical residency, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Sergey Aleynikov, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator
The Valley thinks he’s on to something; Hammerbacher and the rest of the Cloudera founders have raised $76 million in venture capital, an outsized number for a software company so young. Hammerbacher is one of a troupe that has shifted from lower Manhattan to Silicon Valley to help inject Wall Street–style data mashing into our everyday lives. Investment banks and trading houses learned to build their data mines into ramparts that can ward off competition, and now these kinds of defenses are being erected in Silicon Valley. “Facebook has more information about your clickstream than it does of photos of your friends,” says Glenn Kelman, Redfin’s CEO. “Web sites that have built scale are learning to dominate all others because they’re the ones with the data to optimize.”
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At its historical pace the Medallion Fund would turn $100,000 into more than $20 million in just twenty years. When exceedingly smart, calculating people begin turning down Renaissance riches for undetermined outcomes in Silicon Valley, the pendulum has officially swung 100 percent away from Wall Street. “It used to be if you went to Harvard or Yale, you wanted to be a finance titan,” Kelman says. “But now everybody wants to be a Zuckerberg.” THE DAMAGE WROUGHT BY WALL STREET Where would our economy be without Silicon Valley and its software bots? As bad as the economy looked in 2008–2011, it would be far worse without the string of innovation that the Valley has continually dished out.
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A TALE OF TWO COASTS Jeffrey Hammerbacher is one of the linchpins in the tale of quant talent drifting away from the steady riches of Wall Street for the unpredictable and meritocratic zone of Silicon Valley. He’s a symbol of all that’s different between the two worlds. One side uses bots and algorithms to chop up subprime mortgages and peddle them to unsuspecting German banks that end up eating the debt for pennies on the dollar—sorry about that!—and to trade stocks at fast speeds that do in fact benefit the public in lower transaction costs, but also cost them in the way of higher volatilities and the possibility of epic chaos. The other side, Silicon Valley, uses similar brains and technology to create a game that may keep you entertained for fifteen minutes a day.
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
• • • Kumar arrived on the cusp of a powerful surge of Asian immigrants into Silicon Valley and throughout the American technology industry. Asians already held a third of the technology jobs in the Valley and were half of the software developers.1 More than a quarter of American doctoral degree recipients as a whole were foreign born and half of those from Asia.2 In engineering and computer science, about 40 percent of the Ph.D.s were born abroad.3 These demographics created racial tension. A black leader in Silicon Valley said the Asian employment bulge was not incidental—technology companies, she said, “do not want to employ Americans.
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Both men were also contemplating the personal payoffs to come. Chamberlain was already superlatively ambitious, but the Hub offered another dimension of opportunity. A battery guy in the Bay Area had remarked that if he managed to oversee the big leap in batteries, he would be made in Silicon Valley—everyone would know his name. That notion—that he might “stand out in Silicon Valley”—fixed Chamberlain’s attention. He had failed to do so when he was raising money for his start-ups, but his Bay Area friend might be correct that the Hub could finally attest that he had done it before. 23 Team Argonne Scientists had been working for two centuries on the battery.
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Musk’s bet was that a pure engineering play—a sizzling concentration of high-tech luxury on wheels—could win the market before anyone created a super battery, perhaps long before. It was a brave, clever, and altogether unpredictable maneuver. Musk, a doyen of Silicon Valley with a bachelor’s degree in physics, was thumbing his nose at scientists: his senior team seemed old school, with a former Toyota executive in charge of manufacturing and a Mazda man as chief designer; only JB Straubel, his chief technical officer, was a standard product of Silicon Valley, with a master’s degree from Stanford and a string of technology jobs. And though they invented no new battery materials, their cars were unlike anyone else’s.
Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen
23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture
He had worked on one of its first prominent cases, defending Yahoo in a lawsuit over bootleg video game sales on its site. (Yahoo won.) Now he was a copyright gun for hire for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, a prominent Silicon Valley civil liberties group. One of its founders, John Perry Barlow, an eccentric former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, railed against government and corporate attempts to rein in the web. In a 1994 essay Barlow predicted the internet’s coming ubiquity and laid out the philosophy that would define Silicon Valley: Once that has happened, all the goods of the Information Age—all of the expressions once contained in books or film strips or newsletters—will exist either as pure thought or something very much like thought: voltage conditions darting around the Net at the speed of light, in conditions that one might behold in effect, as glowing pixels or transmitted sounds, but never touch or claim to “own” in the old sense of the word.
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* * * • • • Susan Diane Wojcicki was born in 1968 in Santa Clara, California, in the beating heart of Silicon Valley, into a family later canonized for being exceptional. Her father, Stanley, a particle physicist, grew up Catholic in Krakow, right by train tracks to Auschwitz. Nazis commandeered his family’s apartment before he escaped to Sweden. When Susan was young, Stanford University named Stanley its physics department chair. Susan’s mother, Esther, was born to Russian Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side and became a vivacious journalist and educator, well known across Silicon Valley for teaching at Palo Alto High School, near Stanford.
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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “not a legal one”: Jeff Stone, “James Foley Execution Video Creates Editorial Questions for Twitter, YouTube,” International Business Times, August 20, 2014, https://www.ibtimes.com/james-foley-execution-video-creates-editorial-questions-twitter-youtube-1664478. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “dangerous precedent”: “Silicon Valley Firms Reacted Quickly to Halt Spread of Steven Sotloff Beheading Video,” NBC, September 4, 2014, https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valley-firms-halted-spread-of-steven-sotloff-beheading-video/2085940/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT told the press: Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, “NSA Infiltrates Links to Yahoo, Google Data Centers Worldwide, Snowden Documents Say,” The Washington Post, October 30, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html.
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism
The problem isn’t a lack of compelling women of color to invest in; it’s a system in Silicon Valley that isn’t set up to develop, encourage and create pathways for blacks, Latinos or women. Don’t just take my word for it—listen to industry leaders interviewed for a USA Today story on the Valley’s lack of commitment to diversity. Jessica Guynn reports that “venture capitalists tell [Mitch Kapor] all the time that they are ‘color blind’ when funding companies. He’s not sure they are ready to let go of a deeply rooted sense that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy.”2 Hiles goes on to discuss the exclusionary practices of Silicon Valley, challenging the notion that merit and opportunity go to the smartest people prepared to innovate.
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Filling the pipeline and holding “future” Black women programmers responsible for solving the problems of racist exclusion and misrepresentation in Silicon Valley or in biased product development is not the answer. Commercial search prioritizes results predicated on a variety of factors that are anything but objective or value-free. Indeed, there are infinite possibilities for other ways of designing access to knowledge and information, but the lack of attention to the kind of White and Asian male dominance that Guynn reported sidesteps those who are responsible for these companies’ current technology designers and their troublesome products. Few voices of African American women innovators and tech-company leaders in Silicon Valley have emerged to reframe the “diversity problems” that keep African American women at bay.
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By rendering people of color as nontechnical, the domain of technology “belongs” to Whites and reinforces problematic conceptions of African Americans.3 This is only exacerbated by framing the problems as “pipeline” issues instead of as an issue of racism and sexism, which extends from employment practices to product design. “Black girls need to learn how to code” is an excuse for not addressing the persistent marginalization of Black women in Silicon Valley. Who Is Responsible for the Results? As a result of the lack of African Americans and people with deeper knowledge of the sordid history of racism and sexism working in Silicon Valley, products are designed with a lack of careful analysis about their potential impact on a diverse array of people. If Google software engineers are not responsible for the design of their algorithms, then who is?
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
On April 18, 1998, he wrote a colorful portrait of the startup scene in all its flawed glory: The big money, the high risk, the lack of diversity, the punishing working hours, the desperate socializing. It could be, he quoted one denizen saying, “pretty depressing.” But, Nick continued, “no one dwells on that.” At a Silicon Valley party, “all anyone sees is someone, obscenely young, having fun, making it, someone they want to be, someone they can be, damnit.” Then the article took a turn: “Including me: I am leaving the Financial Times after eight years as a journalist to join a small internet venture with big ambitions. The Silicon Valley stories may be airbrushed. But like so many others, I want to believe them.” * * * • • • That was Nick: the improbable combination of irony and romanticism, the willful self-delusion, the will to create his own reality.
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Jonah had watched Kenny and Arianna raise that first round for The Huffington Post, and he was confident that when the time came to strike out on his own, he could tell the kind of story that attracted venture capitalists in New York and San Francisco alike. But Nick didn’t want to raise money from Silicon Valley. He’d been there before, had his board shoot him down when he was right on the verge of a real tech deal. He’d been talking to friends about doing a startup already when he was covering Silicon Valley for the Financial Times in the late 1990s. He spent more than a decade fantasizing that Kinja, the tech platform, would be his real business—not just a bunch of blogs. Maybe that explains why Nick decided to launch Valleywag.
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On Valleywag, Nick targeted the people he might have been, had he stayed out west, had Moreover turned into the giant news platform Nick had dreamed it could become. But if it was the least successful of his ventures, the blog about Silicon Valley was what would destroy his company. Valleywag channeled Nick’s frustrated ambition. It embodied New York’s scorn and resentment for Silicon Valley. It was obsessed with exposure in a tech world that valued its privacy, even as it would end global privacy as we’d known it. Nick had always produced traffic flow by giving people the things they wouldn’t admit they wanted, and by publishing the things that nobody else would.
Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan
accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management
Getting the balancing act right is difficult, but through a fortuitous confluence of circumstances, Silicon Valley did it by evolving a novel structure for the labor market for computer engineers. Why Silicon Valley? What made it such a fertile marketplace of ideas? Most industry experts in the 1970s would have predicted that the center of the computer industry would not be Silicon Valley but Route 128 near Boston, Massachusetts. Route 128 was already home to a thriving computer industry. Its firms were the most dynamic in the world. Close to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it could tap many of the best brains in computer science. But it faded from the scene as Silicon Valley charged ahead.
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What was the difference? Silicon Valley’s success traces back to a variety of factors. The proximity to and help from Stanford University’s engineering school got Silicon Valley started, and Stanford continued to supply it with a flow of highly trained engineers and managers. The lifestyle in California attracted educated young people to stay or move there. The propensity of the leading Silicon Valley firms to subcontract most manufacturing tasks made for flexibility. The ready availability of venture capital made it easy to start new firms, though this is as much a symptom of Silicon Valley’s success as a cause of it.
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The ready availability of venture capital made it easy to start new firms, though this is as much a symptom of Silicon Valley’s success as a cause of it. Luck also undoubtedly played a role. The main reason for Silicon Valley’s success, argued Annalee Saxenian in Regional Advantage, her influential book on what makes Silicon Valley tick, is its culture of mobility and sharing. The labor market for engineers operated differently in Silicon Valley than in Route 128. Unencumbered by tradition, Silicon Valley developed a culture of open relationships between employees of competing firms. Ideas were freely exchanged. Engineers changed jobs often, and no one disapproved if they took what they learned in the old firm to the new one. Massachusetts was more hidebound.
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
One day Tony, looking at the newsletters I was producing on my Mac for various Silicon Valley clients, asked if it was possible to design a magazine on a Mac, using a page layout program like Quark Xpress, a few type fonts from Adobe, and a laser printer. Yes, I said. Possible. “Let’s do a Silicon Valley business magazine,” Tony said. “People will have to pay attention to us.” He was serious. He had me design some layouts, and he took them to his boyhood friend, a young venture capitalist named Tim Draper. Tony raised $60,000 from Tim, enough to quit his Silicon Valley Bank job, and a year later we launched Silicon Valley’s first business magazine, Upside.
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I was a technical writer at a Palo Alto research institute and copywriting for a Silicon Valley ad agency. I was married, and I owned a condo, a new Volkswagen Jetta, a Macintosh computer, and a laser printer. Not bad. I was on my way. My friend Tony thirsted for far more. He was much more ambitious than me, openly so. He worked as a loan officer at Silicon Valley Bank and was frustrated with his slow career progress. He wanted to be a bank vice president, then a successful venture capitalist or rich entrepreneur. He wanted fame and power, and he was in a hurry. He confided many times that he wanted to be a Silicon Valley player. One day Tony, looking at the newsletters I was producing on my Mac for various Silicon Valley clients, asked if it was possible to design a magazine on a Mac, using a page layout program like Quark Xpress, a few type fonts from Adobe, and a laser printer.
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* * * Plenty of industries try to replace older workers with younger ones, but technology companies are particularly distrustful of long résumés. In Silicon Valley’s most successful companies, the median employee is likely to be thirty-two or younger. And these aren’t a handful of unicorn startups. They are corporate—and cultural—giants like Apple, Google, Tesla, Facebook, and LinkedIn. These companies reflect a dark ethos that has been circulating around the valley for years. In 2011 billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla told an audience that “people over forty-five basically die in terms of new ideas.” Journalist Noam Scheiber has channeled the ageism of Silicon Valley through the story of Dr. Seth Matarasso, a San Francisco–based plastic surgeon: When Matarasso first opened shop in San Francisco, he found that he was mostly helping patients in late middle age: former homecoming queens, spouses who’d been cheated on, spouses looking to cheat.
The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution by T. R. Reid
Albert Einstein, Bob Noyce, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, George Gilder, Guggenheim Bilbao, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Turing machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
His colleagues and competitors called him “the mayor of Silicon Valley,” and the only problem with that title was that his influence reached well beyond Silicon Valley in his last decade or so. He was successful as a scientist and engineer—he won a slew of academic and industrial awards, and surely would have shared the Nobel Prize with Jack Kilby if he had lived long enough. But he was even more successful as an entrepreneur—indeed, he set the mold for that classic turn-of-the-century phenomenon, the high-tech multimillionaire. It was Bob Noyce who first demonstrated to the denizens of Silicon Valley that a clever engineer could turn his technical talent into boundless wealth.
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Americans have maintained supremacy in virtually every other type of integrated circuit. For Silicon Valley to worry about Japanese or Korean or Taiwanese sales of memory chips is like General Motors losing sleep over a smaller company that has done well in the spark plug business. But many Americans were worried. The Japanese inroads in chips, a congressional committee reported, “indicate the potential for an irreversible loss of world leadership by U.S. firms in the innovation and diffusion of semiconductor technology.” The Silicon Valley firms were sufficiently alarmed to form a trade group, the Semiconductor Industry Association, specifically to fight off the foreign challenge.
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Texas Instruments, after all, was hardly the only place in the world where people were trying to overcome the tyranny of numbers. The monolithic idea occurred to Robert Noyce in the depth of winter—or at least in the mildly chilly season that passes for winter in the sunny valley of San Francisco Bay that is known today, because of that idea, as Silicon Valley. Unlike Kilby, Bob Noyce did not have to check with the boss when he got an idea; at the age of thirty-one, Noyce was the boss. It was January 1959, and the valley was still largely an agricultural domain, with only a handful of electronics firms sprouting amid the endless peach and prune orchards.
Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte
“We’re working on it,” Botts says. 5 THE RISE OF THE DATA SCIENTIST The San Francisco office of Cloudera resides on the eleventh floor of a modern office building on California Street in the city’s financial district. In recent years, a San Francisco office for fast-growing technology companies headquartered in Silicon Valley has become a popular amenity—and one that reflects the shifting topography of entrepreneurialism, talent, and taste in northern California’s Bay Area. Not so long ago, the boundaries were clear-cut. Silicon Valley had all of the start-ups and the engineering wizardry. San Francisco had trendy culture, fine dining, and old money. But the Valley’s monopoly on entrepreneurial vigor has been broken decisively by the rise of San Francisco–based technology companies ranging from Twitter to Salesforce.com, a supplier of Internet software for companies.
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The founders’ pitch was that Nest had a historic opportunity to transform the conventional thermostat from a dumb switch into a clever digital assistant that would save home owners money, reduce energy consumption, and curb pollution. A few industrial companies sold programmable thermostats, but they proved to be so hard to program that few people did. The Silicon Valley start-up would make a digital device that didn’t ask users to program it. Nest was producing “the world’s first learning thermostat—a thermostat for the iPhone generation,” as Fadell told me in the fall of 2011, when Nest was about to introduce its first product. In Fadell’s telling, Nest was a new take on Silicon Valley’s favorite story line: change the world and make a bundle. About half of household energy consumption in the United States is heating and cooling, and most people set their thermostats and forget them, until they really notice the cold in winter or heat in summer, and then crank up the heat or air-conditioning, respectively.
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GPS (Global Positioning System) location data on planes is translated to screen images that show air-traffic controllers when a flight is going astray—“off trajectory,” as he puts it—well before a plane crashes. Buchman wants the same sort of early warning system for patients whose pattern of vital signs is off trajectory, before they crash, in medical terms. “That’s where big data is taking us,” he says. The age of big data is coming of age, moving well beyond Internet incubators in Silicon Valley, such as Google and Facebook. It began in the digital-only world of bits, and is rapidly marching into the physical world of atoms, into the mainstream. The McKesson distribution center and the Emory intensive care unit show the way—big data saving money and saving lives. Indeed, the long view of the technology is that it will become a layer of data-driven artificial intelligence that resides on top of both the digital and the physical realms.
The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich
different worldview, Mark Zuckerberg, old-boy network, Peter Thiel, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, social web
He wanted to work on Wirehog and thefacebook in Silicon Valley—a place of legend, to computer programmers like Mark, the land of all of his heroes. Coincidentally, Andrew McCollum had landed a job at Silicon Valley-based EA sports, and Adam D’Angelo was going as well. Mark and his computer friends had even found a cheap sublet on a street called La Jennifer Way in Palo Alto, right near the Stanford campus. To Mark, it seemed like a perfect plan. He’d bring Dustin along, they’d set up shop in the rental house, and thefacebook and Wirehog would be right where they belonged. California. Silicon Valley. The epicenter of the online world.
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At the same time, Sean believed he had lost both a company and his two former best friends. It had been ugly, and it had been pathetic, and in Sean’s view it had been unfair. But, well, it had happened. Not just to him—in Silicon Valley, it happened all the time. That was the thing about VC money. It was awesome—until it wasn’t. Plaxo had ended badly, but that hadn’t meant it was over for Sean Parker. Not even close. The Silicon Valley gossip rags had gotten even more excited about him after the twofer of Napster and Plaxo, and they began to paint him as this bad boy around town. The girls. The designer clothes. And of course, unsubstantiated stories about drugs.
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Watching him program at four, five in the morning—every morning—Sean had no doubt that Mark had the makings of one of the truly great success stories in the modern, revitalized Silicon Valley. But where was Eduardo Saverin? Or more accurately—was Eduardo Saverin even part of the equation anymore? Eduardo had seemed like a perfectly nice kid. And of course, he’d been there in the beginning. He’d put up a thousand dollars, according to Mark, to pay for the first servers. And it was his money, at the moment, that was financing the current operation. That gave him some weight, sure, like any investor in a start-up. But beyond that? Eduardo saw himself as a businessman—but what did that mean, exactly? Silicon Valley wasn’t about business—it was an ongoing war.
Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber by Susan Fowler
"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Burning Man, cloud computing, data science, deep learning, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, microservices, Mitch Kapor, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, work culture
On the last day of January, after a couple of weeks at home with my family, I packed all of my belongings into my new Jeep Wrangler and drove from my mom’s house in Wickenburg, Arizona, to the San Francisco Bay Area, where my new job as a platform engineer at Plaid was waiting for me. CHAPTER FIVE Looking back at it now, you could say that working at Plaid was a hazing ritual for working in Silicon Valley. It was a stereotypical small technology startup in every way, the kind of half company, half frat house immortalized in the show Silicon Valley. Plaid’s founders, Zach and William, were two twentysomethings from well-to-do families who’d written their software application, which aggregated financial data, after graduating from college. They entered their app in the infamous TechCrunch Disrupt competition and won.
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There was something about it all—the free clothing, the free food, the constant drinking, the expensive parties—that didn’t feel quite right to me. I’d never worked a corporate job before, but I began to suspect that this wasn’t how things were supposed to be. It wasn’t just Plaid, however; this seemed to be true for most companies in Silicon Valley. When I asked other engineers about workplace culture at tech companies, many of them boasted that the lack of normal corporate professionalism was what made working in Silicon Valley so much fun. I agreed it was fun, but only up to a certain point. When the companies gave employees everything they “needed” in life—friends, a social life, food, and more—at the office, they made it difficult for those employees to have autonomy and build lives of their own.
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I’d never been to a Silicon Valley holiday party before; the only Christmas parties I’d ever been to were the ones at my family’s church and the loud, drunken physics department parties at Penn. This was going to be totally different. From the way people talked about it, it was the event of the year, and Uber was a company that prided itself on lavish, blowout parties. It seemed like everyone around me had been planning what they would wear and whom they would bring for months in advance. After much consideration and some very careful googling about what women wore to Silicon Valley holiday parties, I bought a purple velvet dress that was neither too conservative nor too revealing.
Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game
Michael Young, “Down with Meritocracy,” Guardian, June 28, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment. 3. Sarah McBride, “Insight: In Silicon Valley Start-up World, Pedigree Counts,” Reuters, September 12, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-startup-connections-insight-idUSBRE98B15U20130912. 4. Vivek Wadhwa, “Silicon Valley: You and Some of Your VC’s Have a Gender Problem,” TechCrunch, February 7, 2010, https://techcrunch.com/2010/02/07/silicon-valley-you%E2%80%99ve-got-a-gender-problem-and-some-of-your-vc%E2%80%99s-still-live-in-the-past. 5. Claire Burke and Kate Dwyer, “2016 Review of Female Founders Raising Institutional Capital,” Female Founders Fund, February 1, 2017, http://femalefoundersfund.com/2016-review-of-female-founders-raising-institutional-capital/#sthash.Snz0RmSe.dpbs. 6.
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But they share a common foundation: a tech culture that’s built on white, male values—while insisting it’s brilliant enough to serve all of us. Or, as they call it in Silicon Valley, “meritocracy.” It’s a term you’ll hear constantly in tech, whether in a Hacker News forum or on Twitter or in line for coffee in San Francisco. The argument is simple: the tech industry is based purely on merit, and the people who are at the top got there because they were smarter, more innovative, and more ambitious than everyone else. If a company doesn’t employ many women or people of color—well, it’s just because no good ones applied. After all, the story goes, “Silicon Valley is swimming in money” 1—so, clearly nothing’s wrong (never mind that by these criteria alone, you can justify everything from the heroin trade to chattel slavery).
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Venture capitalists routinely fund startups run by white guys because they share the same background as a past success—not because they have more merit. According to a 2013 Reuters analysis, of eighty-eight tech companies that received “Series A” funding from one of the five top Silicon Valley venture firms between the start of 2011 and June of 2013, seventy of them—80 percent—had founders from what Reuters dubbed the “traditional Silicon Valley cohort”: people who’d already started a successful company in the past; who worked in the industry already, either in a senior role at a large tech company or at a well-connected smaller one; or who attended one of three elite colleges: MIT, Stanford, or Harvard.
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
The Author Ben Casnocha (pronounced kas-NO-ka) is a Silicon Valley–based entrepreneur and writer. Currently nineteen years old, he serves on the board of Comcate, (pronounced KOM-kate) Inc., the leading e-government technology firm he founded six years ago. He has received various accolades. In 2006 BusinessWeek named him one of America’s best young entrepreneurs. In 2004 PoliticsOnline ranked him among the “twenty-five most influential people in the world of internet and politics.” The Silicon Valley Business Journal named his blog one of the “Top 25 in Silicon Valley.” His work has been featured in hundreds of media around the world, including CNN and USA Today.
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My Start-Up Life What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley Ben Casnocha Foreword by Marc Benioff John Wiley & Sons, Inc. My Start-Up Life My Start-Up Life What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley Ben Casnocha Foreword by Marc Benioff John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 www.josseybass.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com.
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. >> Despite additional school commitments I still kept a hand in broader Silicon Valley life. I met people of all backgrounds, even 121 122 MY START-UP LIFE if they knew nothing about local government. I went to events on education, science, technology, and journalism. What I was really doing, it seems to me, in this broad engagement with the local community, was creating and projecting a personal brand. I started living my life out loud. Many in the industry knew me for founding Comcate. But I wanted to be known for who I was more than for what I had done. My activities in Silicon Valley life fell into three categories: networking, philanthropy, and media.
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
All of a sudden, Zendesk was super hot. We started to get new Silicon Valley customers. We weren’t even looking for more capital, but VCs starting calling us, wanting to invest in the company, and hoping to preempt the next round. It was a huge shift for us, to be chased. Of course, our sudden popularity wasn’t exclusively due to anything new that we had done. It was somewhat reflective of the crazy flock mentality that sometimes also characterizes Silicon Valley. However, it definitely helped that we had built up quite a portfolio of customers in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. That increased our exposure to VCs as they heard our name from their portfolio companies.
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“Oh my god, Michael Arrington just blackballed us from Silicon Valley,” I announced. The only consolation was that later, Om Malik did publish a nice post. “It’s not sexy, like some social networks, but it is useful and fully featured,” he wrote of us. “Zendesk would fall into our ‘small really is beautiful’ category of startups.”2 It wasn’t a total disaster. 68 Page 68 Svane c04.tex V3 - 10/28/2014 7:36 P.M. 4 The Bubble Redux Battling circumstances beyond your control In response to “TechCrunch-gate,” worried I would never again be in the good graces of Silicon Valley kingpin Michael Arrington, and completely cognizant that I had no clue what I was doing with the press, we hired a marketing pro in San Francisco to help us with introductions and advice.
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(There’s a lot of “crushing it” and “killing it” and other aggressive verbiage in the local vernacular.) You could argue that all this is just the nature of competition, or that success and failure rises and falls based on this kind of hype. Making it in Silicon Valley is not all about letting the best product win. Ultimately it is all about winning the order, closing the deal. It’s about the money. Okay, not all about the money. But definitely a lot about the money. I lost my innocence in Silicon Valley. Maybe we were just so out of touch before. Maybe we were cocky and naïve teenagers for longer than I thought—idealistic and in love with our own story. We thought success was entirely determined by building a great product.
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
The Portola Institute became an umbrella for a wide range of projects and would become Silicon Valley’s first “incubator.” Raymond pioneered the idea for nonprofits in the sixties, and as a result of his philosophy, the institute would have a significant impact. Both the Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Club, which gave rise to several dozen companies that forged the personal computer industry—including Apple—emerged from the fertile ground that Raymond created. He would also help pioneer the entrepreneurial culture that is still at the heart of Silicon Valley—where failure due to having taken risks is a badge of honor rather than shame.
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Venice and Florence lit the spark that led to the Renaissance, and pre–World War I Vienna served as an extraordinary cultural and scientific hotbed for modernism. Silicon Valley, first named in 1971, has been a similar magnet for the forces that shape world history. Historians have paid attention both to William Hewlett and David Packard’s garage in Professorville and to William Shockley’s laboratory in Mountain View, but less attention has been paid to the extraordinary convergence of counterculture institutions in 1968 at what would soon become the northern boundary of Silicon Valley. It was not accidental that the Whole Earth Catalog emerged in the heart of this technology hothouse, shaped by the same forces and at exactly the same historical moment that birthed Silicon Valley.
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Before going to New York, Kane had grown up in Silicon Valley, where in junior high school he had the distinction of punching a young Steve Jobs in the nose—and breaking it—when he found Jobs and another boy harassing his brother in the schoolyard. Kane had arrived at the Quarterly in the early 1980s and had taken over a regular column in the San Francisco Chronicle that Brand had recently begun before quickly deciding it wasn’t his cup of tea. Brand could be a compelling writer, but he was never able to master the art form of the weekly eight-hundred-word essay. Despite Kane’s Silicon Valley roots, he had little interest in the personal computer cultural explosion that was beginning to transform workplaces everywhere.
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
The executive team chose this site in the rolling, golden hills that form the western edge of Silicon Valley to review major business issues in a relaxing setting away from the busy office. In some ways this perch—looking down on the Valley—was an appropriate setting for a dot-com that had accomplished as much as ours. PayPal survived the NASDAQ crash, outmaneuvered its myriad competitors, slugged its way to profitability, signed up millions of customers, became the first dot-com to IPO following September 11, and had just negotiated a blockbuster sale to an established company. By all accounts, PayPal had reached the pinnacle of Silicon Valley success, and now it was time to reflect on the company’s next steps while also pausing to celebrate its accomplishments.
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When PayPal’s online payment service debuted toward the end of the dot-com boom, it set in motion a chain of events that would ultimately pit the company’s talented entrepreneurs, revolutionary technology, and bold vision for global currency change against one of the fiercest series of challenges ever endured by a Silicon Valley startup. At the risk of giving away the ending, PayPal managed to survive the onslaught—but just barely. After several years of erratic ups and downs, the venture reached profitability, registered 40 million users, became the first Internet company to stage an IPO following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and eventually sold out to a much bigger firm.
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When they emigrated from Kiev to Chicago in 1991 they made the most of their newfound freedom by buying Max a used computer. Max went on to graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and formed a startup called NetMeridian that focused on automated marketing tools. After selling NetMeridian to Microsoft, Max moved to Silicon Valley on the lookout for his next startup idea. Peter and Max hit it off. After several lunchtime discussions over the following weeks, the pair decided to launch a company with a security focus allowing users to store encrypted information on Palm Pilots and other personal digital assistant (PDA) devices.
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
Airbnb had found an audience, and it had started to grow; they had liftoff. In Silicon Valley start-up terms, Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharczyk had achieved what’s known as “product/market fit,” a holy grail, proof-of-life milestone that a start-up hits when its concept has both found a good market—one with lots of real, potential customers—and demonstrated that it has created a product that can satisfy that market. Popularization of the term is often credited to Marc Andreessen, the celebrated technology entrepreneur–turned–venture capitalist–turned–philosopher-guru to legions of start-up founders in Silicon Valley. Thousands of start-ups fail trying to get to this point.
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He’d already begun this process with Airbnb’s earliest advisers: first, the weekly office-hours sessions with Michael Seibel and Y Combinator’s Paul Graham; then, breakfasts at Rocco’s with Sequoia’s Greg McAdoo. Airbnb’s next investment rounds unlocked access to Silicon Valley icons like Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz, all seen as gurus when it came to the art of building tech companies in Silicon Valley. The more successful Airbnb became, the more top people the founders had access to, and as it began to get bigger, Chesky started seeking out sources for specific areas of study: Apple’s Jony Ive on design, LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner and Disney’s Bob Iger on management, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on product, and Sheryl Sandberg on international expansion and on the importance of empowering women leaders.
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Over the next year or two, though, the company started to gain buzz, edging onto the radar of our tech-reporting team. Someone brought it up internally as a company to watch. Wait a minute, I thought. Those guys? I was not involved with Fortune’s tech coverage, which meant that I didn’t always know what I was talking about when it came to the companies coming out of Silicon Valley. But I also felt that distance gave me a healthy arms’-length perspective on the self-important euphoria that seemed to waft out of the region. As the keeper of Fortune’s “40 under 40” list, I was also used to breathless pitches from companies claiming they would change the world in one year’s time, only to be significantly humbled the next.
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game
FOR LAURA, CHARLIE, AND JULIA CONTENTS Title Page Copyright Notice Dedication Prologue PART I 1978 Dean Price Total War: Newt Gingrich Jeff Connaughton 1984 Tammy Thomas Her Own: Oprah Winfrey Jeff Connaughton 1987 Craftsman: Raymond Carver Dean Price Tammy Thomas Mr. Sam: Sam Walton 1994 Jeff Connaughton Silicon Valley 1999 Dean Price Tammy Thomas 2003 Institution Man (1): Colin Powell Jeff Connaughton PART II Dean Price Radish Queen: Alice Waters Tampa Silicon Valley 2008 Institution Man (2): Robert Rubin Jeff Connaughton Tammy Thomas Dean Price Just Business: Jay-Z Tampa PART III Jeff Connaughton 2010 Citizen Journalist: Andrew Breitbart Tampa Dean Price Tammy Thomas Tampa Prairie Populist: Elizabeth Warren Wall Street 2012 Silicon Valley Jeff Connaughton Tampa Tammy Thomas Dean Price Note A Note on Sources Acknowledgments Also by George Packer A Note About the Author Copyright PROLOGUE No one can say when the unwinding began—when the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way.
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I didn’t want to work with frenemies, I wanted to work with friends. In Silicon Valley it seemed possible, because there was no sort of internal structure where people were competing for diminishing resources.” Unlike New York, Silicon Valley wasn’t a zero-sum game. It took two more years. In the summer of 1998, Thiel gave a guest lecture at Stanford on currency trading. It was a hot day and around six people showed up. One of them was a twenty-three-year-old Ukrainian-born computer programmer named Max Levchin. Just out of the University of Illinois, he had come to Silicon Valley that summer with a vague notion of starting a company, sleeping on friends’ floors—on the day of the lecture he was looking for an air-conditioned room to cool off in.
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The roommate was thirty-one years old, three years older than Thiel, and he ran out of money. He had to call his dad for a loan. That was when Thiel left New York and moved back to Silicon Valley for good. * * * The Valley was no longer the place Thiel had left four years earlier. What had happened in the meantime was the Internet. Between the midseventies and the early nineties, the personal computer had spawned countless hardware and software companies in Silicon Valley, and in other high-tech centers around the country; during the seventies and eighties the population of San Jose doubled, approaching a million, and by 1994 there were 315 public companies in the Valley.
The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor
"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional
And there is no guarantee that the lucky few who find success in the winner-take-all economy online are more diverse, authentic, or compelling than those who succeeded under the old system. Despite the exciting opportunities the Internet offers, we are witnessing not a leveling of the cultural playing field, but a rearrangement, with new winners and losers. In the place of Hollywood moguls, for example, we now have Silicon Valley tycoons (or, more precisely, we have Hollywood moguls and Silicon Valley tycoons). The pressure to be quick, to appeal to the broadest possible public, to be sensational, to seek easy celebrity, to be attractive to corporate sponsors—these forces multiply online where every click can be measured, every piece of data mined, every view marketed against.
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The National Center for Women and Information Technology reports that of the top one hundred tech companies, only 6 percent of chief executives are women.16 The numbers for Asians who ascend to the top are comparable despite the fact that they make up a third of all Silicon Valley software engineers.17 In 2010, not even 1 percent of the founders of Silicon Valley companies were black.18 Data on gender within online communities, routinely held up as exemplars of a new, open culture, are especially damning. First, consider Wikipedia. One survey revealed that women write less than 15 percent of the articles on the site, despite the fact that they use the resource in equal numbers to men.
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There have been revelations about the existence of a sprawling international surveillance infrastructure, uncompetitive business and exploitative labor practices, and shady political lobbying initiatives, all of which have made major technology firms the subjects of increasing scrutiny from academics, commentators, activists, and even government officials in the United States and abroad.3 People are beginning to recognize that Silicon Valley platitudes about “changing the world” and maxims like “don’t be evil” are not enough to ensure that some of the biggest corporations on Earth will behave well. The risk, however, is that we will respond to troubling disclosures and other disappointments with cynicism and resignation when what we need is clearheaded and rigorous inquiry into the obstacles that have stalled some of the positive changes the Internet was supposed to usher in.
The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale
Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game
6 THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY • Should the hundreds of thousands of American citizens placed on secret “watch lists” be so informed, and should they be given the chance to clear their names? The leading firms of Wall Street and Silicon Valley are not alone in the secretiveness of their operations, but I will be focusing primarily on them because of their unique roles in society. While accounting for “less than 10% of the value added” in the U.S. economy in the fourth quarter of 2010, the finance sector took 29 percent— $57.7 billion— of profits.14 Silicon Valley firms are also remarkably profitable, and powerful.15 What finance firms do with money, leading Internet companies do with attention.
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Competitive striving can do as much to trample privacy as to protect it.133 In an era where Big Data is the key to maximizing profit, every business has an incentive to be nosy.134 What the search industry blandly calls “competition” for users and “consent” to data collection looks increasingly like monopoly and coercion. Silicon Valley is no longer a wide-open realm of opportunity. The start-ups of today may be able to sell their bright ideas to the existing web giants. They may get rich doing so. But they’re not likely to become web giants themselves. Silicon Valley promulgates a myth of constant “disruption”; it presents itself as a seething cauldron of creative chaos that leaves even the top-seeded players always at risk. But the truth of the great Internet firms is closer to the oligopolistic dominance of AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast.
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I was at a conference dinner talking about some basic principles of search neutrality when a Silicon Valley consultant said abruptly, “We can’t code for neutrality.” He meant that decisions about fair treatment of ordered sites could not be reduced to the algorithms that drive most sites’ operations. When I offered some of the proposals I’ve made in this book, he simply repeated, with a touch of condescension: “Yes, but we can’t code for it, so it can’t be done.” For him, not only the technology, but even the social practices of current operations are unalterable givens of all future policy interventions. Reform will proceed on the Silicon Valley giants’ terms, or not at all.
Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor
Peters, “Bannon’s Worldview: Dissecting the Message of ‘The Fourth Turning,’ ” New York Times , April 8, 2017, https:// www .nytimes .com /2017 /04 /08 /us /politics /bannon -fourth -turning .html. 149 1960s science fiction novel : Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light (New York: Harper Voyager, 2010). 149 “In Silicon Valley” : Andy Beckett, “Accelerationism: How a Fringe Philosophy Predicted the Future We Live In,” Guardian , May 11, 2017, https:// www .theguardian .com /world /2017 /may /11 /accelerationism -how -a -fringe -philosophy -predicted -the -future -we -live -in. 150 “It’s a fine line” : Max Chafkin, QAnon Anonymous podcast, December 10, 2021. 150 “cognitive elite” : Mark O’Connell, “Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand,” Guardian , February 15, 2018, https:// www .theguardian .com /news /2018 /feb /15 /why -silicon -valley -billionaires -are -prepping -for -the -apocalypse -in -new -zealand. 150 Thiel also funded : Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (New York: Penguin, 2021).
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We are not products of these platforms so much as the labor force. We dutifully read, click, post, and retweet; we become enraged, scandalized, and indignant; and we go on to complain, attack, or cancel. That’s work. The beneficiaries are the shareholders. For what Silicon Valley really chose to learn from the AOL debacle is that the true product of any of these companies is the stock . In the new, improved, post-crash version of Silicon Valley, extreme capitalism rules. Digital technology is valued most for its ability to scale a business without needing to hire many human beings, and to provide the earnings or—as is more often the case—the hype required to boost the share price.
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Bannon may believe that the technocrats have put Western civilization on a downward trajectory and that only a shock to the system can reverse its decline. But the irony here is that Bannon’s scorched-earth anti-technocratic dream is itself based on a fringe Silicon Valley technocratic orthodoxy called accelerationism. Originating in a 1960s science fiction novel (of course), accelerationism holds that the best way forward for humanity is to accelerate computer development, automation, and global capitalism, ultimately merging human beings with digital technology. “In Silicon Valley ,” according to technology historian Fred Turner, “accelerationism is part of a whole movement which is saying, we don’t need politics anymore, we can get rid of ‘left’ and ‘right,’ if we just get technology right.”
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth
4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP
But back in those first years after the Aurora attack, the men and women inside Google’s security team worked with new resolve. Security at Google, across the Valley, would never be the same. Adkin’s team summed it up with their new unofficial two-word motto: “Never again.” CHAPTER 15 Bounty Hunters Silicon Valley, California Aurora was Silicon Valley’s own Project Gunman. It had taken a Russian attack to push the NSA to step up its game in offense. Likewise, Aurora—and Snowden’s revelations three years later—pushed Silicon Valley to rethink defense. “The attack was proof that serious actors—nation-states—were doing these things, not just kids,” Adkins told me. Google knew China would be back. To buy time, it shifted as many systems as possible to platforms that would be alien to the Chinese.
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With more than 750 million internet users, China’s internet population had surpassed the combined populations of Europe and the United States. Google’s archrival, Apple, was heavily investing in China. Baidu, Google’s rival in China, had set up shop right next to Google’s complex in Silicon Valley. Other Chinese tech companies—Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei—started setting up their own Silicon Valley research and development centers and poaching Google employees with higher salaries. Human rights concerns fell by the wayside as the company refocused on its bottom line. Executives hell-bent on capturing market share from Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Amazon, and Chinese competitors like Baidu had no patience for those who continued to push for a principled debate on human rights.
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“We were just telling different people how to fix the same vulnerabilities over and over again,” Jobert said. In 2011 the two met a thirtysomething Dutch entrepreneur by the name of Merijn Terheggen. Terheggen was in the Netherlands on business but lived in Silicon Valley, and he regaled the young men with stories of start-ups and the venture-capital dollars that seemed to magically appear out of thin air. The two imagined Silicon Valley to be a techie’s paradise, nestled among redwoods and verdant mountains—like Switzerland, only with smiling engineers pedaling up and down Sand Hill Road in logoed hoodies. Terheggen invited them to visit. “Great, we’ll be there in two weeks,” they said.
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
Mike Moritz, of Sequoia Capital, peeled back the truth with mordant detachment: “One of the dirty little secrets of the Valley is that all the jobs-creation we like to talk about is probably less than the Big Three automakers have laid off in the last decade. One of the best ways to have a nice Silicon Valley company is to keep your head count as low as possible for as long as possible.” The Benchmark partners never parroted the line that venture capital gave the world the gift of new jobs; they never claimed anything grand. As long as they hewed to the we-serve-entrepreneurs theme, their self-described role in a larger scheme was limited. The individual venture capitalist in Silicon Valley did not make life-or-death decisions about promising fledgling businesses; there was simply too much capital available from too many different sources for a good idea to remain unfunded.
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“KP took public 79 infotech and life sciences companies that have not been acquired since. If you’d bought each of those stocks immediately after the first day of trading, you would have lost money on 55 of them. That’s right, a loser rate of 70 percent.” Melanie Warner, “Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine,” Fortune, 26 October 1998. The Economist estimated: “Going, Going . . . : On-line Auctions,” The Economist, 31 May 1997. his memoir, Startup: Jerry Kaplan, Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995). For an article that highlights Kaplan’s tendency to overdramatize and claim credit for advances achieved by predecessors, see Lee Gomes, “Story of Go Is Juicy, But Is It History?”
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A year before eBay knocked on Benchmark Capital’s door, I had knocked there, interested in writing a book about a corner of the financial world whose inner workings remained shrouded, even to those in other precincts of professional money management. Yet venture capitalists, who were concentrated in Silicon Valley, were entrusted with ever increasing amounts of capital by institutions, such as university endowments and charitable foundations, to invest in newly formed companies. In 1996 venture funds attracted $10 billion in capital; in 1997 the total jumped to $20 billion; and in 1998 it passed $26 billion.
Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking
4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler
All of these networks would bloom (within ten years, there were more than 100 million active blogs), but across them all, the sociality was only a side effect of the main feature. The golden moment had yet to arrive. And then came Armageddon. In 2000, the “dot-com” bubble burst, and $2.5 trillion of Silicon Valley investment was obliterated in a few weeks. Hundreds of companies teetered and collapsed. Yet the crash also had the same regenerative effect as a forest fire. It paved the way for a new generation of digital services, building atop the charred remains of the old. Even as Wall Street retreated from Silicon Valley, the internet continued its extraordinary growth. The 360 million internet users at the turn of the millennium had grown to roughly 820 million in 2004, when Facebook was launched.
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These companies had become multinational giants, grappling with regulations across dozens of national jurisdictions. As the scope of Silicon Valley’s ambition became truly international, its commitment to free speech sagged. In 2012, both Blogger (originally marketed as “Push-Button Publishing for the People”) and Twitter (“the free speech wing of the free speech party”) quietly introduced features that allowed governments to submit censorship requests on a per-country basis. If there was a moment that signified the end of Silicon Valley as an explicitly American institution, it came in 2013, when a young defense contractor named Edward Snowden boarded a Hong Kong–bound plane with tens of thousands of top-secret digitized documents.
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Since their founding, social media companies had stuck by the belief that their services were essentially a “marketplace of ideas,” one in which those that came to dominate public discourse would naturally be the most virtuous and rational. But Silicon Valley had lost the faith. Social media no longer seemed a freewheeling platform where the best ideas rose to the surface. Even naïve engineers had begun to recognize that it was a battlefield, one with real-world consequences and on which only the losers played fair. Their politics-free “garden” had nurtured violence and extremism. The trouble went deeper than the specters of terrorism and far-right extremism, however. Silicon Valley was beginning to awaken to another, more fundamental challenge. This was a growing realization that all the doomsaying about homophily, filter bubbles, and echo chambers had been accurate.
One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com by Richard L. Brandt
Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, deal flow, drop ship, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Free Software Foundation, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, Pershing Square Capital Management, science of happiness, search inside the book, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, software patent, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K
“Shel” Kaphan, a well-known engineer who had been bouncing from start-up to start-up in Silicon Valley in search of one that would become the next Apple Computer. It was early 1994. Kaphan had a B.A. in mathematics from the University of California in Santa Cruz, the laid-back university and surfer town where he grew up. But by the mid-1990s, Santa Cruz, seventy miles down the coast from San Francisco and thirty-five miles southwest of San Jose, had become something of a Silicon Valley suburb. Several technology companies had moved or grown up there, and people (like Kaphan) who preferred the coastal, hippie-ish culture of Santa Cruz commuted to Silicon Valley. Kaphan’s reputation as a superb programmer had spread throughout Silicon Valley over the twenty years he had worked there, but he had not yet ended up at a successful start-up where he could make his fortune.
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It took several more years before these changes caught on and spread to popular awareness. In 1993, a government-funded group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created a new generation of Web browser called Mosaic, a wonderful, graphics-based browser. The following year, a very astute Silicon Valley venture capitalist named John Doerr decided to recruit a bright young man, Marc Andreessen, from the Mosaic team in Illinois to move to Silicon Valley and start a Web browser company. That same year the company, called Netscape, launched its browser, Navigator. Shaw decided the Internet had a future, and gave Bezos the task of finding the opportunities there. In the spring of 1994, he began researching the Internet, and was impressed with what he found.
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The city that best suited the criteria was not in Silicon Valley. Bezos found that Seattle, Washington—the birthplace of Microsoft—best fit the bill. Because of Microsoft, Seattle was becoming a major technology center, attracting other research centers from tech companies such as Nintendo and Adobe Systems, and was spinning off entrepreneurial companies, including the streaming media company RealNetworks (then called Progressive Networks), started by a former Microsoft executive. In many ways, the greater Seattle area was a younger version of Silicon Valley—and certainly a much cheaper place to live.
Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson
Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator
We raised a $1 million seed investment round from friends and family and expanded our office three times in six months, continually taking on more space as it came available, since we were hiring all of our college friends and even some legitimate adults to join us on the mission. We renamed the company—thankfully—to Versity.com. In the summer of 1999, we raised $10 million of venture capital from Venrock Associates, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and moved the company—then fifty people—from Michigan to Silicon Valley. We kept growing. We hired a “professional” executive team, who, in retrospect, were primarily interested in selling the company. Which we did. In January 2000, we sold Veristy.com in an all-stock transaction to another company courting college students—CollegeClub.com—which had just filed to go public.
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To solve this puzzle, companies must first start by recognizing that code is creative, that many developers are in fact creative problem solvers—and should be treated as such. It’s Not About Ping-Pong Companies from outside Silicon Valley spend a lot of time studying the way tech companies operate. They send teams on “silicon safaris” to visit startups and tech giants like Google and Facebook, and build innovation labs out here. I’ve met with a bunch of those executive teams on their trips, and there’s one thing I like to emphasize—they need to let their developers lead the way. But too often I witness executives leave Silicon Valley, taking away the wrong lessons. It’s easy to latch on to the superficial stuff that is evident when you walk around tech offices, like free food, or letting people wear T-shirts and hoodies, and bring dogs to the office.
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Would Patio11, the consummate independent developer, have joined a big company if they asked him to grind out code? Not likely. But Collison shared a big, giant, hairy problem and asked him to solve it, while providing him with the resources of a well-funded Silicon Valley startup and the support of its founders. For a developer like Patio11, that’s an exciting challenge. Call for Startups Paul Graham cofounded Y Combinator, one of the most successful Silicon Valley incubators and early-stage investors. Since its founding in 2005, Y Combinator has funded more than two thousand startups, including Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, and Dropbox. The combined value of the startups funded by YC exceeded $150 billion as of October 2019.
A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, pink-collar, profit motive, public intellectual, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog, wikimedia commons
T hese works include Susan Rosegrant and David Lampe, Route 128: Lessons from Boston’s High-Tech Community (New York: Basic Books, 1992); 245 246 Notes to Pages 3–5 AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930–1970 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); and Barry Katz, Make It New: The History of Silicon Valley Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). Margaret Pugh O’Mara’s Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) includes Philadelphia and Atlanta, but offers a chapter on Silicon Valley as the basis for comparison. Notable exceptions to this American bicoastal focus are Paul Ceruzzi’s Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945–2005 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008) and Thomas Misa’s Digital State: The Story of Minnesota’s Computing Industry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 6.
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The history of computing and networking has likewise been dominated by a Great White Men (and now, maybe a handful of women) storyline. Part of the Silicon Valley myt hology is that the Information Age had Founding Fathers, men including Jobs, Gates, and Zuckerberg. According to this origin story, t here were no computers for ordinary people—no personal computing—until those Founding Fathers and their hardware and software made computing accessible to everyone. Business and government leaders around the world look to Silicon Valley for guidance, inspiration, and emulation, but the Silicon Valley ideal venerates grand men with grand ideas. That narrative, by focusing on the few, has obliterated the history of the many: the many people across the United States and around the world who have been computing in different ways for decades.
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Classification: LCC QA76.17 .R365 2018 | DDC 004.0973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009562 For Scott and Lucy Contents introduction: People Computing (Not the Silicon Valley Mythology) 1 1 When Students Taught the Computer 2 Making a Macho Computing Culture 3 Back to BASICs 12 38 66 4 The Promise of Computing Utilities and the Proliferation of Networks 106 5 How The Oregon Trail Began in Minnesota 139 6 PLATO Builds a Plasma Screen 7 PLATO’s Republic (or, the Other ARPANET) 193 epilogue: From Personal Computing to Personal Computers 228 Notes 245 Bibliography 295 Acknowle dgments Index 315 311 166 A People’s History of Computing in the United States Introduction People Computing (Not the Silicon Valley Mythology) The students at South Portland High School buzzed with enthusiasm; the wires in their classroom walls hummed with information.
You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier
1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, digital Maoism, Douglas Hofstadter, Extropian, follow your passion, General Magic , hive mind, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Conway, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Long Term Capital Management, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Project Xanadu, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, social graph, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog
The Big N Here we come to one way that the ideal of “free” music and the corruption of the financial world are connected. Silicon Valley has actively proselytized Wall Street to buy into the doctrines of open/free culture and crowdsourcing. According to Chris Anderson, for instance, Bear Stearns issued a report in 2007 “to address pushback and other objections from media industry heavyweights who make up a big part of Bear Stearns’s client base.” What the heavyweights were pushing back against was the Silicon Valley assertion that “content” from identifiable humans would no longer matter, and that the chattering of the crowd with itself was a better business bet than paying people to make movies, books, and music.
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The ascendant tribe is composed of the folks from the open culture/Creative Commons world, the Linux community, folks associated with the artificial intelligence approach to computer science, the web 2.0 people, the anticontext file sharers and remashers, and a variety of others. Their capital is Silicon Valley, but they have power bases all over the world, wherever digital culture is being created. Their favorite blogs include Boing Boing, TechCrunch, and Slashdot, and their embassy in the old country is Wired. Obviously, I’m painting with a broad brush; not every member of the groups I mentioned subscribes to every belief I’m criticizing.
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You can believe that your mind makes up the world, but a bullet will still kill you. A virtual bullet, however, doesn’t even exist unless there is a person to recognize it as a representation of a bullet. Guns are real in a way that computers are not. Making People Obsolete So That Computers Seem More Advanced Many of today’s Silicon Valley intellectuals seem to have embraced what used to be speculations as certainties, without the spirit of unbounded curiosity that originally gave rise to them. Ideas that were once tucked away in the obscure world of artificial intelligence labs have gone mainstream in tech culture. The first tenet of this new culture is that all of reality, including humans, is one big information system.
The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax
Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture
You get all of these effects together, and the digital economy is an unequal economy.” Silicon Valley may be booming, but that doesn’t help the hundreds living in homeless camps just miles away. Research by the Brookings Institution found that San Francisco saw a vast increase in inequality from 2007 to 2012, more than any other US city. Occasionally this issue gets pushed to the forefront, as it did in 2013, when groups of protesters in San Francisco blocked the private buses that shuttled workers at technology firms to their jobs in Silicon Valley. The objective of the protests was ostensibly around these so-called luxury buses abusing taxpayer-funded infrastructure, but its root was the increasing divide in that city between the tech haves and the nontech have-nots.
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Meditation and its broader umbrella movement, mindfulness, have become practically mandatory at the leading companies in Silicon Valley. Google’s Search Inside Yourself program features regular meditation classes, and the company even has a purpose-built labyrinth for walking meditations. Facebook and Twitter both have meditation rooms in their offices, something that is now even found at hedge funds and banks. Zen masters, monks, and mindfulness gurus are as in demand in Silicon Valley as personal trainers and java script coders, and Unterberg himself has consulted with Yahoo!, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, and others (all entirely unpaid, as part of his Buddhist teaching).
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Meditation may be a fairly esoteric application of analog thinking in Silicon Valley, but across digital technology companies, the investment in analog is most visible in the physical workspace. Tech company offices, especially startups, are often rightly ridiculed for their outlandish, almost kindergartenesque atmosphere. The cliché of Segway-riding, foosball-playing coder bros picking up free kale smoothies on their way to the free bike mechanic class may be overplayed, but the reality is actually even more surreal. During my week in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, many of the offices I visited were just a talking chair shy of Pee-wee’s Playhouse.
Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge
affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
It was no coincidence that the main corporate heroes of the period all hailed from a place famous for small, agile firms—the thin sliver of land between San Jose and San Francisco that had once been known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. SILICON VALLEY In 1996, with the Internet revolution gathering pace, John Perry Barlow, a Grateful Dead songwriter and cyber guru, issued the following warning: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us.” Silicon Valley’s penchant for hyperbole can be grating. All the same, the business ideas that the Valley pioneered, combined with the technology it invented, helped unbundle the company still further. Silicon Valley’s story actually dates back to 1938, when David Packard and a fellow Stanford engineering student, Bill Hewlett, set up shop in a garage in Palo Alto.
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This metamorphosis underlined what set the Valley apart.20 America’s other high-tech center, Boston’s Route 128, boasted just as much venture capital, and just as many universities. Yet, when both clusters fell from grace in the mid-1980s, Silicon Valley proved far more resilient. The reason was structural. Big East Coast firms such as Digital Equipment and Data General were self-contained empires that focused on one product, mini-computers. Silicon Valley’s network of small firms endlessly spawned new ones. It was for much the same reason that the Internet business found a natural home in northern California. The late 1990s saw an unprecedented number of young Valley firms going public.
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Even allowing for that (and all the Valley’s other drawbacks, such as high house prices, terrible traffic, and unrelenting ugliness), the region still counted as the most dynamic industry cluster in the world. By 2001, Silicon Valley provided jobs for 1.35 million people, roughly three times the figure for 1975, its productivity and income levels were roughly double the national averages, and it collected one in twelve new patents in America.21 Silicon Valley changed companies in two ways. The first was through the products it made. At the heart of nearly all of them was the principle of miniaturization. In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the cost of computing processing power tumbled by 99.99 percent—or 35 percent a year.22 Computers thrust ever more power down the corporate hierarchy—to local area networks, to the desktop, and increasingly to outside the office altogether.
The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson
1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler
Also: Rebecca Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (University of California, 1997); Michael Malone, The Intel Trinity (HarperBusiness, 2014), Infinite Loop (Doubleday, 1999), The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley (Doubleday, 1985), The Valley of Heart’s Delight: A Silicon Valley Notebook, 1963–2001 (Wiley, 2002), Bill and Dave (Portfolio, 2007); Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley (MIT, 2007); C. Stewart Gillmore, Fred Terman at Stanford: Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley (Stanford, 2004); Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, 2005); Thomas Heinrich, “Cold War Armory: Military Contracting in Silicon Valley,” Enterprise & Society, June 1, 2002; Steve Blank, “The Secret History of Silicon Valley,” http://steveblank.com/secret-history/. 50.
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Sources for the passages on Silicon Valley include Leslie Berlin’s The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (Oxford, 2005; locations refer to the Kindle edition), 1332 and passim. Berlin is the project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford and is writing a book on the rise of Silicon Valley. Also: Rebecca Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (University of California, 1997); Michael Malone, The Intel Trinity (HarperBusiness, 2014), Infinite Loop (Doubleday, 1999), The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley (Doubleday, 1985), The Valley of Heart’s Delight: A Silicon Valley Notebook, 1963–2001 (Wiley, 2002), Bill and Dave (Portfolio, 2007); Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley (MIT, 2007); C.
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Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 129. 39. Andrew Grove interview, “American Experience: Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013. 40. Tedlow, Andy Grove, 74; Andy Grove oral history conducted by Arnold Thackray and David C. Brock, July 14 and Sept. 1, 2004, Chemical Heritage Foundation. 41. Author’s interview with Arthur Rock. 42. Michael Malone interview, “American Experience: Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013. 43. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 4400. 44. Ann Bowers interview, “American Experience: Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013. 45. Ted Hoff interview, “American Experience: Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013. 46. Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce.” 47.
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
After my speech, the first question I got was, “What do you recommend we people of Detroit do to get the kind of prosperity we hear about from the Silicon Valley?” I answered, “Well, you have been living off the automotive teat for more than three generations. That is long enough! I recommend that you do something else.” Then she followed up with, “But if we want to stay in automotive, what then?” I said, “Well, you have lost the electric car game to Tesla, so you better make ‘em fly.” The press took that message to the car companies, and the quotes I saw from the CEOs of the Big Three were understandably a little angry. Two of them went on the attack, saying in effect, “Who is this jerk from the Silicon Valley coming to Detroit to tell us how the auto industry should work?”
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I put a team together with local Anchorage real estate businessman Jim Yarmon and fellow Harvard Business School alum Jim Lynch. The three of us agreed to put half the money in Alaska, and half in Silicon Valley. We called the fund Polaris Fund to give it local appeal, and we were off to the races. We made it work, funding a bone-stretching technology company (seemed painful, but it grew people’s bones), a low-Earth orbit satellite company, and the fish head splitter company as well as a few great Silicon Valley companies. It took a few years, but we ended up returning the $6 million to AIDEA and much more. Burt can now rest easy knowing that the money was well invested.
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I decided to fix California’s problem by creating a new entrepreneurial state. I wanted to offer a small group of counties the option to join a new state, called the state of Silicon Valley. My plan was to later offer the other California counties the option to join the new state, forcing California to become accountable and compete to keep its counties. But in my discussions with various economic and political experts, I determined that it would be unfair to all the other states for Silicon Valley to be able to create a new state when the rest of the Californians could not, and that for only twice the cost, I could allow Californians to dissolve the existing single government and create six new ones in its place.
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier
Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar
It turned out that they both had very specific tastes in music and an appreciation for high-quality coffee. They both liked photography. There weren’t many engineers in Silicon Valley Dorsey could talk to about those things. And Systrom flattered Dorsey, who was self-taught, by asking for his help with computer programming. Systrom did have his quirks. Once he learned to get better at the coding language JavaScript, he was precious about perfecting its syntax and style so that it was nice to look at. This made no sense to Dorsey and was almost sacrilegious in Silicon Valley’s hacker culture, which revered getting things done quickly. It didn’t matter if you sealed lines of text together with the digital equivalent of duct tape, as long as it worked.
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For him, after graduating Stanford with degrees in management and engineering, going to Google was basically like going to grad school. He’d have a salary with a base of about $60,000—paltry compared to the life-changing wealth Facebook would have afforded—but he would get a crash course in Silicon Valley logic. Founded in 1998, Google had started trading on public markets in 2004, minting enough millionaires to lift Silicon Valley out of its malaise from the dot-com bust. When Systrom joined in 2006, it had almost 10,000 employees. Google, far more functional and established than tiny Odeo, was led mostly by former Stanford students making data-based decisions.
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A couple months later, a meeting with Andreessen’s Conway, the son of famed Silicon Valley angel investor Ron Conway, dashed their hopes further. “What do you guys do again?” Conway asked. Systrom tried once more to explain Burbn—It’s a fun way to see what your friends are doing and go join them in real life! You can get inspired about where to go next! But it was clear Conway wasn’t excited about the idea, despite playing a part in his firm’s investment. To him, Systrom seemed to be rattling off all of Silicon Valley’s latest buzzwords. Mobile? Check. Social? Check. Location-based? Check. Conway was probably the tenth person with a deer-in-the-headlights reaction to the app, Systrom thought.
Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols
3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game
It’s the question I get most often from city, state, and national leaders wherever I travel. Part of my response is to urge policymakers to broaden their thinking about the role of technology in economic development. Too often they focus on trying to attract Silicon Valley companies in hopes they will open offices locally. They want Silicon Valley satellites. Instead, they should be working on plans to make the best technologies available to local entrepreneurs so that they can organically grow more jobs at home—not just in high-tech industries but in every economic sector. They need to develop economic strategies that can enhance the natural advantages their regions enjoy in particular industries by fully and quickly embracing supportive leading-edge technologies.
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Accessed December 8, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-wants-apple-to-help-unlock-iphone-used-by-san-bernardino-shooter/2016/02/16/69b903ee-d4d9-11e5-9823-02b905009f99_story.html. Bloomberg, Michael. “The Terrorism Fight Needs Silicon Valley; Tech Executives Are Dangerously Wrong in Resisting the Government’s Requests for Their Help.” Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2016. Accessed December 8, 2016. http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-terrorism-fight-needs-silicon-valley-1467239710. Hazelwood, Charles. “Trusting the Ensemble.” TED Talk, 19:36, filmed July 2011. http://www.ted.com/talks/charles_hazlewood. Gates, Bill. “Memo from Bill Gates.” The Official Microsoft Blog, January 11, 2012. http://news.microsoft.com/2012/01/11/memo-from-bill-gates/#sm.00000196kro2y0ndaxxlau37xidty.
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Speaking to us from another century, Rilke is saying that what lies ahead is very much within us, determined by the course each of us takes today. That course, those decisions, is what I’ve set out to describe. In these pages, you will follow three distinct storylines. First, as prologue, I’ll share my own transformation moving from India to my new home in America with stops in the heartland, in Silicon Valley, and at a Microsoft then in its ascendancy. Part two focuses on hitting refresh at Microsoft as the unlikely CEO who succeeded Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Microsoft’s transformation under my leadership is not complete, but I am proud of our progress. In the third and final act, I’ll take up the argument that a Fourth Industrial Revolution lies ahead, one in which machine intelligence will rival that of humans.
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
Notes Chapter 1: The Caddie and the CEO 1.Arthur Daley, “Sports of the Times; Pride of the Lions,” New York Times, November 22, 1961. 2.“300 Attend Testimonial for Columbia’s Eleven,” New York Times, December 20, 1961. 3.Photograph courtesy of Columbia University Athletics. 4.Photograph courtesy of Columbia University Athletics. 5.George Vecsey, “From Morningside Heights to Silicon Valley,” New York Times, September 5, 2009. 6.Charles Butler, “The Coach of Silicon Valley,” Columbia College Today, May 2005. 7.P. Frost, J. E. Dutton, S. Maitlis, J. Lilius, J. Kanov, and M. Worline, “Seeing Organizations Differently: Three Lenses on Compassion,” in The SAGE Handbook of Organization Studies, 2nd ed., eds. S. Clegg, C. Hardy, T. Lawrence, and W. Nord (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 843–66. 8.Butler, “The Coach of Silicon Valley.” 9.Michael Hiltzik, “A Reminder That Apple’s ‘1984’ Ad Is the Only Great Super Bowl Commercial Ever—and It’s Now 33 Years Old,” Los Angeles Times, January 31, 2017. 10.Michael P.
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Your People Make You a Leader. Chapter 3: Build an Envelope of Trust Chapter 4: Team First Chapter 5: The Power of Love Chapter 6: The Yardstick Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Authors Also by the Authors Copyright About the Publisher Foreword Nearly a decade ago, I read a story in Fortune about Silicon Valley’s best-kept secret. It wasn’t a piece of hardware or a bit of software. It wasn’t even a product. It was a man. His name was Bill Campbell, and he wasn’t a hacker. He was a football coach turned sales guy. Yet somehow, Bill had become so influential that he went on a weekly Sunday walk with Steve Jobs, and the Google founders said they wouldn’t have made it without him.
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When Bill decided to transition to business, it was his old football teammates who opened the door. They were convinced that his weakness in a zero-sum sport could be a strength in many companies. Sure enough, Bill ended up excelling as an executive at Apple and as the CEO of Intuit. Every time I talked to someone in Silicon Valley who had a reputation for unusual generosity, they told me the same thing: it was Bill Campbell who gave them their worldview. Not wanting to bother Bill himself, I started reaching out to his mentees. Soon I had a flurry of calls with Bill’s protégés, who described him as a father and compared him to Oprah.
The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K
When the tech executive asked me that, I told him that we did—that the promise of Silicon Valley was as much an article of faith for those of us watching from the outside as for its insiders; that we both envied the world of digital and hoped that it would remain the great exception to economic disappointment, the place where even in the long, sluggish recovery from the crash of 2008, the promise of American innovation was still alive. And I would probably say the same thing now, despite the stories I’ve just told—because notwithstanding Billy McFarland and Elizabeth Holmes, notwithstanding the peculiar trajectory of Uber, many Silicon Valley institutions deserve their success, many tech companies have real customers and real revenue and a solid structure underneath, and the Internet economy is as real as twenty-first-century growth and innovation gets.
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That could serve as the epigraph not only for the portrait of the American upper-middle class (mobbed up and otherwise) in that show but also for the portraits of the modern American city’s politics and culture in The Wire; the portrait of Washington, DC, in shows such as House of Cards and (rather less self-seriously) Veep; and other decadence-infused productions, from Breaking Bad, to True Detective, to Girls. The stagnationist, tech-skeptical view of Silicon Valley as a lot of money and ego and talent chasing a lot of essentially small ideas is also the view served up by Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley on HBO. Nowhere is Barzun’s image of a “falling-off” in Western life more vividly embodied than by Walter White and his frustrated ambitions, or Hannah Horvath and her drifting urban pals. (Something similar is true in literary fiction: its cultural currency has declined with its sales, and the breakout exceptions are often fictions—the work of Michel Houellebecq, the bad-hookup New Yorker short story “Cat Person,” the novels of Sally Rooney—that replace the old nineteenth-century marriage plot with stories about how the sexes struggle to relate to one another anymore.)
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To many readers, this argument will seem counterintuitive: a definition of decadence that dealt only with excess and luxury and various forms of political sclerosis might fit our era, but the idea of an overall stagnation or repetition—of late-modern civilization as a treadmill rather than a headlong charge—doesn’t fit particularly well with many readings of the age in which we live. It seems in tension with the sense of constant acceleration, of vertiginous change, that permeates so much of early-twenty-first-century life—as well as with the jargon of our time, which from Davos, to Silicon Valley, to the roving tent-revivalism of TED Talks, retains a breathless faith that the world is changing at a pace that would put Thomas Edison and Samuel Morse to shame. The question, though, is whether that jargon corresponds with reality anymore, or whether our sense of continued acceleration is now to some extent an illusion created by the Internet—the one area of clear technological progress in our era, but also a distorting filter on the world beyond your screen.
Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together by Andrew Selee
Berlin Wall, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, job automation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, public intellectual, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Wozniak, work culture , Y Combinator
“If there is an industry that could represent an opportunity for Mexico,” says Blanca Treviño, “it’s technology.” In 2009, as the economy of Silicon Valley started to recover from the financial crisis, Bismarck Lepe, a successful tech entrepreneur with a Stanford degree, began to look for ways of sourcing talent for his growing company, Ooyala, which provides online video solutions for business. He knew that the venture capital companies would be ready to open the tap again after the economic slowdown, and Ooyala was ripe for a big expansion. Lepe also knew he would need to increase the company’s workforce dramatically, but Silicon Valley was becoming way too expensive to handle the kind of talent expansion he had in mind.
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“And it’s not only the talented people that are there but the ones we can attract to live there,” he adds, noting that Wizeline has employees from Egypt, France, Ecuador, Colombia, China, New Zealand, and, of course, the United States working at its Guadalajara offices. Getting them work visas is easy, something that is becoming harder north of the border, and they love the quality of life in a city that is far less expensive than Silicon Valley but still has great cultural and recreational options. Lepe is so convinced by Guadalajara that he started a nonprofit, Startup GDL, to promote the city as a tech hub to other Silicon Valley start-ups. It currently has a long pipeline of US-based small and medium-sized tech companies looking at putting part or all of their operations in Guadalajara. Bismarck Lepe has no illusions that everything in Mexico is perfect.
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And other than Jaime Reyes’s Secretariat of Innovation, which helps support the event, there are few signs of any government presence at all. Ruy Cervantes, a local scholar who once worked as the director of knowledge management in Jaime Reyes’s Secretariat of Innovation, has written extensively about the emerging innovation culture in Guadalajara. “It’s a culture that’s inspired by, not copied from, Silicon Valley,” he says. But like in Silicon Valley, it’s about horizontal relationships based not on kinship but on talent, mutual sharing of ideas, and risk taking. Those business practices are not common in most Mexican companies—or even many American companies—and they are nurtured by constant conversations among innovation entrepreneurs about their efforts.
Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben
"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve
instituteforenergyresearch.org, December 18, 2013. CHAPTER 12 1. Nellie Bowles, “Silicon Valley Flocks to Foiling, Racing Above the Bay’s Waves,” New York Times, August 20, 2017. 2. Adam Vaughan, “Google to Be 100% Powered by Renewable Energy from 2017,” Guardian, December 6, 2016. 3. Nick Bilton, “Silicon Valley’s Most Disturbing Obsession,” Vanity Fair, November 2016. 4. Maureen Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion Dollar Crusade to Stop the AI Apocalypse,” Vanity Fair, April 2017. 5. Melia Robinson, “Silicon Valley’s Dream of a Floating, Isolated City Might Actually Happen,” Business Insider, October 5, 2016. 6.
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Travis Kalanick, who founded Uber, used the cover of The Fountainhead as his Twitter avatar. Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, once launched a mission to develop a floating city, a “sea-stead” that would be a politically autonomous city-state where national governments would have no sway.5 Some of Silicon Valley’s antigovernment sentiment is old, or at least as old as anything can be in Silicon Valley. As early as 2001—before the iPhone and Facebook, back in the days when you just checked email—a writer named Paulina Borsook published Cyberselfish, a book she called a “critical romp through the terribly libertarian culture of high-tech.” Even then, she said, it was unsurprising to open the local newspaper—this was right before Craigslist decimated local newspapers—and see a personal ad that read, “Ayn Rand enthusiast is seeking libertarian-oriented female for great conversation and romance.
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But our current changes are so big that they’re starting to tilt the whole machine, at which point it will fall silent. And as we shall see, because of the radical inequality we’ve allowed to overtake our society, the key decisions have been and will be made by a handful of humans in a handful of places: oil company executives in Houston, say, and tech moguls in Silicon Valley and Shanghai. Particular people in particular places at a particular moment in time following a particular philosophic bent: that’s leverage piled on top of leverage. And their ability to skew our politics with their wealth is one more layer of leverage. It scares me. It scares me even though the human game is not perfect—in fact, no one gets out of it alive, and no one without sadness and loss.
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
The new business model centered on selling subscriptions to a variety of computer applications that could be accessed through the cloud. Masa had built his fortune selling floppy disks and CD-ROMs, but thirty years later, SaaS businesses were producing some of Silicon Valley’s largest valuations: Salesforce, Slack, Palantir, and a host of largely anonymous companies that offered new cloud-based services forming the backbone of the new economy. But the flock of Silicon Valley unicorns had grown so large that Benioff himself had become nervous. The kind of rapid expansion that venture capital made possible wasn’t sustainable without discipline. In the middle of the decade, Benioff had issued a warning: “There’s going to be a lot of dead unicorns.”
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While WeWork had plenty of tech start-ups as members, it was having a harder time convincing Silicon Valley that the company itself was one of them. Adam still rarely used a computer, and WeWork had only recently hired a chief technology officer. Another chief product officer, with experience at Yahoo! and Adobe, had come and gone without making the WeConnect dream a meaningful reality. The Neumanns spent some of 2017 living in the Bay Area, as did Michael Gross and his family, partly in the hope that Neumann and Gross could woo Silicon Valley much as they had New York’s real estate and investment world. In the fall, WeWork announced it was looking to hire a hundred software engineers and that it was taking over three floors halfway up Salesforce Tower, the most expensive real estate in all San Francisco, to entice them.
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I visited Uber’s headquarters in the spring of 2017, just as Travis Kalanick was being chastened for recklessness in the rabid pursuit of global domination. It felt as if most start-ups could think of no other worthy goal, and now an office-management company in New York City was deploying the same bravado as the new class of world-altering tech companies emerging from Silicon Valley. WeWork seemed to capture both the early hope of the 2010s and the fractures forming as it came to a close. The company promised community to post-recession millennials entering the workforce with Obama-era ideals—Yes, we can. Neumann himself had been a college dropout, an immigrant on the verge of being forced to leave the country, and a failed entrepreneur.
Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff
"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar
Enter Tristan Walker, founder and CEO of Walker & Company, whose flagship product is the Bevel, a single-blade razor designed for coarse or curly hair, and whose company is dedicated to designing health and beauty products for people of color. When Tristan set out to launch Walker & Company in Silicon Valley, he went against the grain in at least three ways: It was a consumer goods company in a market that favors tech; it targeted consumers of color when most investors are white guys; and he wasn’t an engineer—in an ecosystem that heavily favors tech CEOs. Now, to be clear, you don’t need to be a white, twenty-two-year-old computer programmer in a food-stained hoodie to succeed in Silicon Valley. You do, however, need an overdeveloped sense of curiosity—and Tristan Walker is exceptionally curious.
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Our world urgently needs people who possess the tenacity and the will to tackle ambitious challenges, adapt to difficult and volatile circumstances, and offer us fresh solutions. If you want to bring something new into this world and scale it, you don’t necessarily have to be a young guy in a hoodie. You don’t need to be an engineer or programmer, or live in Silicon Valley. And you don’t need big bucks—in fact, many of the successful startups in this book began with less than $5,000. But you do need knowledge, insight, and inspiration. That’s where these leaders come in. Enjoy their stories and heed their advice. Then get out there and start—then scale. 1 Getting to No When she first pitched her idea for a new kind of career development website to investors, Kathryn Minshew was turned down 148 times…not that she was counting.
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“I get that women in New York and San Francisco love this product, but I think you’re going to really have a hard time finding women who care about their careers once you go outside of the coasts.” (“No.”) * * * — When you’re still early and unproven in your career—and you’re getting “Nos” from some of the smartest and most successful investors in Silicon Valley and New York City—it can be difficult not to ask yourself, “What if the naysayers are right?” But at the end of the day, you have to listen to your gut instinct. And Kathryn trusted hers. She remembers looking at these guys doling out the “Nos” and thinking, Do you know a lot of women? Kathryn was right to ask this question.
The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown
Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler
The unknown exerted a far greater pull than the known. It turned out to be a fortuitous choice. Ellen discovered Silicon Valley and a totally different way of doing business. She loved the way Silicon Valley entrepreneurs engaged in exploring interesting ideas with each other regardless of name, rank, or serial number. Ellen learned that these restless entrepreneurs were eagerly seeking out new connections in an effort to gain new perspectives on challenging business problems. It was not long before Ellen was building her own personal network in Silicon Valley. She had a passion for golf and ended up meeting some amazing people on the Stanford golf course during her hours of practice every day.
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She initially joined this effort because she was passionate about Stanford and wanted to help the university in a way that would make the most of her skills, even though she initially thought it would distract her from the network and the work she had been pursuing in Silicon Valley. In fact, the opposite occurred. Media X became a platform to deepen and broaden Ellen’s personal network while at the same time enhancing Stanford’s ability to connect more effectively with the Silicon Valley community and the broader business world. Now, as head of strategy at LinkedIn—and in her Silicon Valley Connect advisory business—Ellen is using pull to create value in and across networks of relationships. She’s practicing a form of brokerage, yes, but it’s not the old Machiavellian brokerage in which what you know and I don’t gives you the strategic advantage.
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Shared passion, however, does not imply uniformity. Spikes in fact consist of considerable cognitive diversity: different ways of seeing the world, solving problems, and so on.14 Take Silicon Valley, where we live, for example. Geeks and nerds abound, all drawn to the area by a shared passion for technology. Yet they came from different parts of the country, and even the world (over half of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley were born outside the United States). They went to many different schools. They are working on very different technology problems, ranging from how to fit more transistors on a silicon chip to user experiences in virtual environments.
Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy
4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler
There’s no reason to suspect that labor will do anything other than continue to support efforts to institute Net Neutrality regulation, and there are indications that the unions are making strides towards taking a more holistic, informed approach to Internet policy in general: several national-level activists have expressed remorse about the role that labor played during the SOPA/PIPA debacle, and the unions even proactively engaged us and other Internet freedom activists as they sought to work with us to combat attempts by the International Telecommunication Union (an agency of the United Nations, not a labor union) to assert greater, unaccountable control over the Internet this fall. As Republicans make plays for financial support from Silicon Valley and electoral support from Americans who care about Internet freedom, Democratic partisans among us might ask that labor perform a more public expression of its contrition. They also ought reach out to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs—especially those of my generation and younger—who have had limited prior interactions with labor, might not have a complete understanding of so much good that unions have done, and, sadly, are now even more disposed to look at them skeptically.
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“It was like an inquisition court for the MPAA,” recalled a senior House staffer, who was appalled at the damage this could do the public’s perception of the institution. The notion that Congress wouldn’t even listen to technical concerns probably radicalized Silicon Valley to the point where something big, like a blackout, was seen as the only way to get a point across. Ahead of the hearing, ten House members—among them Ron Paul, Jared Polis, Issa, and Lofgren—sent a letter to Smith and ranking Democrat John Conyers warning that SOPA would target domestic websites and urging them to go slow. While Silicon Valley was heavily represented on the letter, the signatures also began to tell the story of the coalition’s broadening reach, with representatives from tech corridors in Austin, Boulder, and Pittsburgh signing on.
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The prize of becoming the Party of The Internet (or, more cynically, the Party of Silicon Valley and the attendant campaign cash) is worth fighting for. The SOPA battle had already made cameos in the presidential race, and we decided to keep pushing along that axis: as the parties moved towards their quadrennial conventions, the moment was ripe try to get them to adopt robust, formal Internet freedom platform planks for the first time. (Each platform had contained but an oblique reference or two to the web in prior years—by no means seeing it exclusively in a positive light.) Rep. Darrell Issa was leading the Republicans’ charge towards Silicon Valley and had become one of the most outspoken SOPA/PIPA opponents—and his and other Republicans’ efforts were beginning to pay off: their pitch was resonating with adherents to the anarcho-capitalist, network utopian, “California” ideology that represents a substantial strain of belief in tech-centric communities.
The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey
Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP
As new waves of highly disruptive technologies start to strip more Americans of their jobs—and as we’ll see later, cryptocurrencies could well be included in those—resentment toward the “wisdom” of the Silicon Valley establishment could grow further. On the other hand, the products that come out of the Valley have made positive contributions to society, such as the ones that emerged from the advent of the Internet. In fact, it’s their relatively recent experience with the Internet’s development that helps many Silicon Valley types get excited about cryptocurrencies. They don’t know what the future holds for bitcoin, but because of the unpredictable spin-off innovations that the Internet made way for, many sense that this new “platform” has similar, liberating prospects.
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(For a visual representation of how this plays out, compare the open-planned office layouts in the contemporaneous TV show Silicon Valley with the closed offices of the sixties-era Mad Men.) Much like the open-source-software development teams that look after bitcoin and countless other computing projects, communities are being formed—mostly online—with no titular head and no central hub. They are held together by the commonly recognized convention that the consensus of the crowd trumps everything else. Is a clash building between these two movements, the corporate world’s concentration of wealth and power, and Silicon Valley’s reempowerment of the individual? Perhaps these trends can continue to coexist if the decentralizing movement remains limited to areas of the economy that don’t bleed into the larger sectors that Big Business dominates.
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The meandering history of the domain name: Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey, “BitBeat: The Men Who Owned Bitcoin.com,” Wall Street Journal, MoneyBeat blog, http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/04/22/bitbeat-the-men-who-owned-bitcoin-com/. In a post on the StrictlyVC blog: Connie Loizos, “A Bitcoin Bear in Silicon Valley, It’s True,” StrictlyVC, March 7, 2014, http://www.strictlyvc.com/2014/03/07/bitcoin-bear-silicon-valley-true/. “If you went back to 1993 and you asked”: Chris Dixon, phone interview with Michael J. Casey, June 25, 2014. 8. The Unbanked Roughly 2.5 billion people in the world: Asli Demirguc-Kunt and Leora Klapper, “Measuring Financial Inclusion,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 6025, April 2012.
Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor
At some point in exploring the various strands of this approach to escaping the permanent future, I start asking myself: What’s the difference between Patrick Tucker’s evocation of the twenty-first–century future-enabled techno-individualist who no longer wants or needs to rely on the government or the education system or any institutional organization, really, and the twenty-first–century prepper who no longer believes they can or should have to rely on the government or the education system? Isn’t Jerry saying exactly what many denizens of the Silicon Valley technocracy are saying? Not unlike among the Silicon Valley elite, there’s the rhetoric of self-reliance, the self-fulfilling prophecy of institutional ineffectuality, and an enthusiasm for all things gadget, especially those things that supposedly enable people to solve their problems themselves. Patrick Tucker has his tricorders and legions of futurists building and operating their own drones, Tom Martin and the preppers have their bugout kits, smoke bombs, and portable greenhouses.
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Dan Schawbel, “Dale Stephens: Ditch College And Create Your Own Educational Experience,” Forbes, March 5, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2013/03/05/dale-stephens-ditch-college-and-create-your-own-educational-ex-perience/. 42. Friedman, “How to Get a Job at Google.” 43. “Close the Innovation Deficit,” n.d., http://www.innovationdeficit.org/. 44. Steven Leckart, “The Hackathon Fast Track, From Campus to Silicon Valley,” The New York Times, April 6, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/education/edlife/the-hackathon-fast-track-from-campus-to-silicon-valley.html. 45. Alex Williams, “Saying No to College,” The New York Times, November 30, 2012, sec. Fashion & Style, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/fashion/saying-no-to-college.html. 46. “Undrip ~ Mobile App for Content Discovery,” accessed April 28, 2014, http://undrip.com/. 47.
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“Hult Prize 2013 Finals,” accessed April 15, 2015, http://www.hultprize.org/en/compete/2013-prize/2013-finalists/. 10. “Smart Tech Challenges Foundation,” Smart Tech Challenges Foundation, accessed April 15, 2015, https://smarttechfoundation.org/. 11. Chuck Salter, “Silicon Valley’s Smart Tech Foundation Launches $1 Million Competition For Safer Guns,” Fast Company, accessed April 15, 2015, http://www.fastcompany.com/3021232/silicon-valley-trio-launches-1-million-competi-tion-for-smarter-safer-guns-exclusive. 12. Hugo Miller and Erlichman, “BlackBerry Inventor Starts Fund to Make Star Trek Device Reality,” Bloomberg.com, accessed April 15, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-03-19/blackberry-inventor-starts-fund-to-make-star-trek-device-reality. 13.
Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks
affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor
Municipal and business strategies that aggressively court high-tech industries often result in regional “ecocide.”7 According to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Superfund sites in Silicon Valley are disproportionately located in communities of color, immigrant communities, and poor communities, which continue to suffer the costs of high-tech legacy pollution after manufacturing moves to areas with less citizen resistance, weaker environmental regulations, and fewer labor protections. Low-paid service workers in high-tech areas like Silicon Valley or Silicon Gulch have little choice but to live in the most environmentally degraded neighborhoods, travel extremely long distances for work, crowd too many people into substandard living spaces, or a combination of all three.
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Administrative Science Quarterly 43:397–428. 254 References Sewell, Graham, and Barry Wilkinson. 1992. “Someone to Watch Over Me”: Surveillance, Discipline, and the Just-in-Time Labor Process. Sociology: The Journal of the British Sociological Association 26:271–289. Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. 1997. Silicon Valley Toxic Tour. <http://www.svtc. org/site/PageServer?pagename=svtc_silicon_valley_toxic_tour> (accessed May 17, 2010). Silliman, Jael, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena Gutierrez. 2004. Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Smith, Angela. 2003.
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Why did I insist on examining the goose laying the golden eggs while everyone else was drinking lattes, doing yoga, and cashing in their stock options? So, in 1997, I fled the triumphant arrival of the “new economy” in Silicon Valley and went to live beside the Hudson River in the historic city of Troy, New York. My experiences in the Bay Area traveled east with me and remained on my mind. These formative experiences—my work in community technology centers, the publication of Brillo, and my experiences with magical thinking during the Silicon Valley “miracle”—mark the beginning of this book. I was a committed community technology practitioner for nearly ten years, and I believed that access to technology was a fundamental social justice issue in American cities.
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
Buccaneers 93 Number of companies 2,500,000 2,000,000 1,500,000 1,000,000 500,000 0 Within first year Between 1 and 5 Between 5 and 10 More than 10 Figure 5.1 Silicon Valley Silicon Valley in California is the centre of the IT universe, It is where innovative tech start-ups vie for venture capital, and where technological titans such as Twitter, Google and PayPal were all born. It is without a doubt the most visible modern manifestation of the pioneering, entrepreneurial American spirit. There are a number of elements to Silicon Valley’s success – which explains the difficulty that other countries have had in trying to emulate it. Firstly, the proximity of Stanford University, a world leader in science and technology, offered a steady stream of highly skilled graduates in the decades following the Second World War, closely backed by local businesses such as Hewlett Packard.
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Nor can the UK succumb to the quick and easy temptation of statism – that more government spending is the answer. Corporatism has little to recommend it. The malaise lies deeper than government policy alone can address. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and one of the most famous Silicon Valley venture capitalists, argues that there is no reason why you couldn’t replicate the Valley’s success in Europe. One area in which Britain is already competitive with the US is the quality of its universities. If Silicon Valley was originated from and is sustained by graduates of Stanford University, Hoffman argues that London, Oxford and Cambridge could allow Britain to become the entrepreneurial centre of Europe.
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The Vietnamese Government has a policy of ‘actively expanding co-operation and international integration in science and technology’.103 And while US patent registrations from China remain small compared to Japan, the UK and Germany, they are rapidly growing – in 1999 China registered only 90 patents, but by 2009 the figure had increased to 1,655.104 Anyone, anywhere, can access the latest ideas and modify them for their market. Lowering the Bar Low-wage workers from the US to Germany to the UK are seeing very little improvement in their salaries. Take Eric Saragoza, who previously worked at the iPod factory in Silicon Valley as an engineer. His job is now done by an army of cheaper and faster engineers in the massive iPod plant in China. He now works at an electronics temp agency. For $10 an hour with no benefits, he wipes thousands of glass screens and tests audio ports by plugging in headphones.105 These changes in circumstances are often blamed on globalisation.
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War
As Manuel Castells has pointed out, the electronics industry and its geographical hubs, including the San Francisco Bay area, were among the industries and regions most dependent on network patterns of organization.22 In Silicon Valley, these networks had been coming together for decades. It is tempting to ascribe the rise of network organizations to the rise of networked communication technologies, but in the case of Silicon Valley, at least, it would be inaccurate to do so: there, the increase in networked forms of doing business preceded and in fact helped drive the development of the technologies on which systems like the WELL depended.23 The Valley had been a center for electronics research since the early twentieth century.
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By 1984 Silicon Valley’s economy had become the fastest-growing and wealthiest in the United States. Between 1986 and 1990, the region saw the value of its electronics firms grow by $25 billion; by contrast, the Route 128 area of Massachusetts, a region endowed with similar industries but more hierarchical patterns of social and professional life, saw growth of just $1 billion.26 Within the Bay area’s computer industries, the rapid growth, coupled with the constantly changing demands of technical work in this period, helped drive extraordinary professional mobility. Job tenure for Silicon Valley engineers and managers in the early 1980s averaged two to three years; turnover among manual laborers was even more rapid.
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“A company is just a vehicle which allows you to work,” explained one engineer. Even though individual employers came and went, strong networks allowed the engineers and managers of Silicon Valley to keep working steadily over time.27 Throughout its early years, the WELL population included large numbers of users from the growing computer industry. Most of its members hailed from the San Francisco Bay and Silicon Valley areas. Moreover, its contributors included a substantial number of professionals from other industries that had long depended on networks, including academe, journalism, and consulting.
The Future of Technology by Tom Standage
air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K
What has yet to sink in Actual 104 is that this downturn is some103 thing more than the bottom of 102 another cycle in the technol101 ogy industry. Rather, the 1 1960 65 70 75 80 85 90 95 2002 sector is going through deep Source: Intel structural changes which suggest that it is growing up or even, horrors, maturing. Silicon Valley, in particular, has not yet come to grips with the realities, argues Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle, a database giant (who in his early 60s still sports a youthful hairdo). “There’s a bizarre belief that we’ll be young forever,” he says. It is not that Moore’s law has suddenly ceased to apply.
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With it budgets now tight, firms are increasingly buying computers based on pc technology. “Why pay $300,000 for a Unix server,” asks Mr Andreessen, “if you can get ten Dell machines for $3,000 each – and better performance?” Google goes even further. A visit to one of the company’s data centres in Silicon Valley is a trip back to the future. In the same way that members of the Valley’s legendary Homebrew Computer Club put together the first pcs using off-the-shelf parts in the early 1970s, Google has built a huge computer system out of electronic commodity parts. Modern Heath Robinsons When the two Stanford drop-outs who founded Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, launched the company in 1998, they went to Fry’s, an electronics outlet where the Valley’s hardcore computer hobbyists have always bought their gear.
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Amazon.com, the leading online shopping mall, for instance, managed to cut its quarterly technology spending by almost $20m (see Chart 1.3). The most interesting feature of Google’s data centre, however, is that its servers are not powered by high-end chips, and probably will not have Itanium, Intel’s most powerful processor, inside for some time yet, if ever. This sets Google apart among hot Silicon Valley start-ups, whose business plans are mostly based on taking full advantage of the exponential increase in computing power and similar growth in demand for technology. “Forget Moore’s law,” blared the headline of an article about Google in Red Herring, a now-defunct technology magazine. That is surely overblown, but Google’s decision to give Itanium a miss for now suggests that microprocessors themselves are increasingly in “overshoot”, even for servers – and that the industry’s 30-year race for ever more powerful chips with smaller and smaller transistors is coming to an end.
Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider
1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar
These new structures embrace the technology to creatively reshape it, embed their values, and then operate it in support of local economies. Seriously, why does a village in Denmark or a town like Marfa in rural West Texas have to generate profits for some fifty people in Silicon Valley if they can create their own version of Airbnb? Instead of trying to be the next Silicon Valley, generating profits for the few, these cities could mandate the use of a cooperative platform, which could maximize use value for the community. Platform co-ops already exist, from cooperatively owned online labor brokerages and marketplaces like Fairmondo, to video streaming sites that are owned by filmmakers and their fans.
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RACE TO THE BOTTOM IN THE FREELANCE SOCIETY Now a new and alarming mash-up of Silicon Valley technology and Wall Street greed is thrusting upon us the latest economic trend: the so-called sharing (or gig) economy. Companies like Uber, Instacart, Upwork, and TaskRabbit allegedly are “liberating workers” to become “independent entrepreneurs” and the “CEOs of their own businesses.” In reality, these workers also are contractors, with little choice but to hire themselves out for ever-smaller jobs (“gigs”) at low wages and with no safety net, while the companies profit. Silicon Valley is redesigning the corporation itself. These gig companies are little more than a website and an app, with a small number of executives and regular employees who oversee an army of freelancers, temps, and contractors.
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In publications like The Nation and Vice, Nathan was reporting on the protest movements of 2011 and efforts among young people to create ethical livelihoods, online and off, once the protests receded. We met at OuiShare Fest in Paris in 2014, and, at Trebor’s “Sweatshops, Picket Lines, and Barricades” conference later the same year, we both sensed it was time to think about constructive alternatives to the dominant Silicon Valley model. That December, Trebor published “Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy,” framing this concept that would come to be this movement’s moniker. The same month, Shareable published Nathan’s article “Owning Is the New Sharing,” which mapped out some of the efforts to build cooperative platforms already underway.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product
Dave Lee, “‘Spell-Check for Hate’ Needed, Says Google’s Schmidt,” BBC News, December 7, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35035087. 13. Danny Yadron, “Agenda for White House Summit with Silicon Valley,” Guardian, January 7, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/07/white-house-summit-silicon-valley-tech-summit-agenda-terrorism; Danny Yadron, “Revealed: White House Seeks to Enlist Silicon Valley to ‘Disrupt Radicalization,’” Guardian, January 8, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/07/white-house-social-media-terrorism-meeting-facebook-apple-youtube. 14. Kashmir Hill, “The Government Wants Silicon Valley to Build Terrorist-Spotting Algorithms. But Is It Possible?” Fusion, January 14, 2016, http://fusion.net/story/255180/terrorist-spotting-algorithm. 15.
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… partner with a portal… license the technology… wait for a big company to purchase them.”22 Despite these general misgivings about Google’s viability, the firm’s prestigious venture backing gave the founders confidence in their ability to raise money. This changed abruptly in April 2000, when the legendary dot-com economy began its steep plunge into recession, and Silicon Valley’s Garden of Eden unexpectedly became the epicenter of a financial earthquake. By mid-April, Silicon Valley’s fast-money culture of privilege was under siege with the implosion of what came to be known as the “dot-com bubble.” It is easy to forget exactly how terrifying things were for the valley’s ambitious young people and their slightly older investors.
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Loss of that high-status signaling power assigned a young company to a long list of also-rans in Silicon Valley’s fast-moving saga. Other research findings point to the consequences of the impatient money that flooded the valley as inflationary hype drew speculators and ratcheted up the volatility of venture funding.28 Studies of pre-bubble investment patterns showed a “big-score” mentality in which bad results tended to stimulate increased investing as funders chased the belief that some young company would suddenly discover the elusive business model destined to turn all their bets into rivers of gold.29 Startup mortality rates in Silicon Valley outstripped those for other venture capital centers such as Boston and Washington, DC, with impatient money producing a few big wins and many losses.30 Impatient money is also reflected in the size of Silicon Valley startups, which during this period were significantly smaller than in other regions, employing an average of 68 employees as compared to an average of 112 in the rest of the country.31 This reflects an interest in quick returns without spending much time on growing a business or deepening its talent base, let alone developing the institutional capabilities that Joseph Schumpeter would have advised.
Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World by Anna Crowley Redding
Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Burning Man, California high-speed rail, Colonization of Mars, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, energy security, Ford Model T, gigafactory, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, Large Hadron Collider, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Wayback Machine
If you were going to become a dot-com billionaire, this was the time and that was the place. The 1990s at Stanford, in the heart of Silicon Valley. “The Internet came along, and it was like, oh, okay, the Internet. I’m pretty sure success is one of the possible outcomes. So I can either do a PhD and watch it happen or I can participate and help build it in some fashion,”45 Elon explained. Stanford University is located thirty-five miles south of San Francisco, in the heart of Silicon Valley. The school is known for being an incubator of tech companies. Yahoo!, Google, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and many more have started in the halls and dorms of Stanford.
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“Very pleased + proud that my ex -- you might have heard of him -- helped get this documentary made about (one of my heroines) Eve Ensler.” Twitter, 9 Oct. 2018. twitter.com/justinemusk/status/1049512433834844161. Musk, Kimbal. Interview by Susan Adams. “Kimbal Musk on How Silicon Valley Taught Him to Run Restaurants and Why His Brother Elon Will Win,” Trep Talks, Forbes, 14 July 2016. www.forbes.com/sites/forbestreptalks/2016/07/14/kimbal-musk-on-how-silicon-valley-taught-him-to-run-restaurants-and-why-his-brother-elon-will-win/. National Geographic. “Exclusive: Watch Elon Musk Freak Out over the Falcon Heavy Launch.” Cape Canaveral, FL, 6 Feb. 2018. Video, 1:37. news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/elon-musk-reacts-spacex-falcon-heavy-launch-space-science/. _____.
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“So you add some leaves to the tree of knowledge,” he said, laughing, “and the leaf is ‘Nope, it’s not possible.’”42 That would be a bummer. And Elon’s drive centered on making a meaningful contribution to humanity. It was a lot to think about. And he needed more information. Luckily, as his final college summer arrived in 1994, he had two internships set up in Silicon Valley—a massive dose of real world experience. Working every waking hour, Elon spent his days focusing on ultracapacitors for electric cars at a company called Pinnacle Research Institute. Then, at the end of that shift, he headed to his job at the video game maker Rocket Science! At the end of the summer, it was time to have a long conversation about what he learned, what he experienced, and what he wanted to do next.
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game
He made his way to Morehouse College, then to Princeton for graduate school, then to prestigious positions at the Ford and Minneapolis foundations. Then he went to Silicon Valley, where he became one of the leading advisers to technology entrepreneurs wishing to make a difference in the world. That was when he was told to stop using the phrase “social justice.” It had worked fine for him at Ford and Minneapolis. In Silicon Valley, it rubbed people the wrong way. “I spent twenty-five years working on social justice,” he said to me one day, “and the first twenty years I thought it was important to use the term ‘social justice.’ ” In Silicon Valley, “people interpret social justice different ways,” often as win-lose thinking.
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Nowhere is this idea of entrepreneurship-as-humanitarianism more entrenched than in Silicon Valley, where company founders regularly speak of themselves as liberators of mankind and of their technologies as intrinsically utopian. After all, even a workplace software company like Rosenstein’s Asana could claim that “we’ll improve the lives of every person on the planet.” A friend of Rosenstein, Greg Ferenstein, set out years ago to chronicle these grand claims and make sense of this new mentality radiating from the Valley. He was a reporter in the Bay Area who had written for various outlets, notably TechCrunch, the booster newsletter of Silicon Valley. He had become interested in the bigger ideas animating the people he covered—what win-win-ism imagines for the world and what, at times, it obscures.
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He could profit from and defend a company doing everything in its power to smash the idea of a labor movement, while unabashedly speaking of this conference in the language of movements. He could, as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, be the very picture of what was making the country less equal, while claiming to be fighting on behalf of the common man. * * * — Shervin Pishevar’s refusal to own up to his power was not an isolated occurrence. Such modesty is a defining feature of Silicon Valley, an epicenter of new power. “They fight as though they are insurgents while they operate as though they are kings,” writes Danah Boyd, a technology scholar.
The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day
In the digital space, investors have grown accustomed to quick wins and windfalls. Dropbox, a file-sharing platform, reached a $10 billion valuation just six years after it launched. Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital owned a 20% stake when Dropbox filed its IPO, making its shares worth $1.7 billion.71 In Silicon Valley, startups that are valued over $1 billion are called “unicorns,” and with a valuation ten times that amount, Dropbox is what’s known as a “decacorn.” By 2018, there were enough unicorns and decacorns to fill a Silicon Valley zoo, and several of them were partners with the G-MAFIA, including SpaceX, Coinbase, Peloton, Credit Karma, Airbnb, Palantir, and Uber.
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Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, wrote: “We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack—often in mobs—anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.”10 Talking about diversity—asking for forgiveness and promising to do better—isn’t the same thing as addressing diversity within the databases, algorithms, and frameworks that make up the AI ecosystem. When talking doesn’t lead to action, the result is an ecosystem of systems and products that reflect a certain anti-humanistic bias. Here are just a few of our real-world outcomes: In 2016, an AI-powered security robot intentionally crashed into a 16-month-old child in a Silicon Valley mall.11 The AI system powering the Elite: Dangerous video game developed a suite of superweapons that the creators never imagined, wreaking havoc within the game and destroying the progress made by all the real human players.12 There are myriad problems when it comes to AI safety, some of which are big and obvious: self-driving cars have already run red lights and, in a few instances, killed pedestrians.
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They wind up developing a set of shared experiences, which translate to a common lexicon, which result in a common set of ideas, behaviors, and goals. This is why so many startup stories, political movements, and cultural juggernauts begin the same way: a few friends share a dorm room, home, or garage and work intensely on adjacently related projects. While the business epicenters for modern AI might be Silicon Valley, Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen, colleges are the lifeblood of AI’s tribes. There are just a few hubs. In the United States, they include Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Washington, Harvard, Cornell, Duke, MIT, Boston University, McGill University, and the Université de Montréal.
Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie
4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game
The U.S. regulatory investigation that I later took part in eventually determined that at least thirty Facebook employees knew about Cambridge Analytica—but prior to the story being made public by my whistleblowing, the company did not put into place any procedures to report this to regulators. Later, I was invited by Andreessen Horowitz staff to a private Facebook chat group called “Futureworld,” where executives from major Silicon Valley companies were discussing problems facing the tech sector, including issues I had raised. Andreessen also started talking to other executives in Silicon Valley about how their platforms were potentially being misused. He welcomed several other Silicon Valley notables to his house for a dinner group they began to refer to as “the Junta”—a reference to authoritarian groups that rule a country after taking power. “It’ll sure be ironic if the reason our correspondence lands on the government’s radar,” one group member emailed Andreessen, was because “their algorithms were triggered by our sarcastic use of the word ‘junta.’ ” * * * — IN EARLY SUMMER OF 2016, the Russia narrative started bubbling up.
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Damian Collins MP and the entire Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee at the British Parliament, thank you for being some of the loudest voices for holding Silicon Valley to account. Your nonpartisan collaboration on the inquiry into disinformation and “fake news” put the public interest first, and you all set a shining example of how politics should be done. By working together, your committee took on the giants of Silicon Valley and pulled together support for legislative action from around the world. And Damian, as a bleeding-heart liberal I never thought I would ever say this, but you showed me that—maybe—some Tories really can be cool.
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The companies that control the flow of information are among the most powerful in the world; the algorithms they’ve designed in secret are shaping minds in the United States and elsewhere in ways previously unimaginable. No matter what issue you care about most—gun violence, immigration, free speech, religious freedom—you can’t escape Silicon Valley, the new epicenter of America’s crisis of perception. My work with Cambridge Analytica exposed the dark side of tech innovation. We innovated. The alt-right innovated. Russia innovated. And Facebook, that same site where you share your party invites and baby pictures, allowed those innovations to be unleashed
An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks
“He was like a very nerdy movie star,” observed one friend who worked for the start-up and frequented the Palo Alto home Zuckerberg and his roommates had dubbed “Casa Facebook.” “Facebook was still small, by Silicon Valley standards, but a lot of people already saw him as the next big thing.” The ideas that Zuckerberg would have been absorbing during his junior year at Harvard were replaced with the philosophies of entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal, who had invested $500,000 in Thefacebook in August 2004, and Marc Andreessen, Netscape’s cofounder. As two of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley, they did more than just create and invest in new start-ups: they shaped the ethos of what it meant to be a tech ingénue.
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Facebook’s security team also tested employees by leaving “mousetraps” around the company, with what appeared to be secret information, to see if employees would turn them in. While it had become commonplace for Silicon Valley companies to demand nondisclosure agreements from employees, which barred them from discussing work with anyone outside the company, Facebook demanded that many employees sign an additional nondisclosure agreement. Facebook employees could not even talk about the things they were not allowed to talk about. Even by the standards set by Google, Twitter, and other Silicon Valley social media companies, Facebook was notorious for taking an exceptionally strict line with employees. Michael Nuñez, the Gizmodo writer, did not have a long history of reporting on Facebook and had never lived in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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At the time, Stamos was Yahoo’s information security officer and one of the youngest and most high-profile cybersecurity experts in Silicon Valley.6 He had grown up in California’s hacker community, a precocious coder with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. By age thirty-five, he had started and sold a successful cybersecurity company, iSEC Partners. Over the course of his career, he had been called in to consult with some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley as they uncovered Russian and Chinese hackers on their networks. In most cases, the hackers had been there for years, and Stamos was appalled at how vulnerable companies remained to relatively simple attacks.
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game
To adjudicate the matter, he turned to a Silicon Valley legend, a former Columbia University football coach named Bill Campbell. An amiable former Apple exec and the chief executive of Intuit in the mid-1990s, Campbell had a reputation for being an astute listener who could parachute into difficult corporate situations and get executives to confront their own shortcomings. Steve Jobs considered him a confidant and got him to join the Apple board when Jobs returned to the helm of that company in 1997. At Amazon, Campbell’s stated mission was to help Galli play nicely with others. He commuted between Silicon Valley and Seattle for a few weeks, sitting quietly in executive meetings and talking privately with Amazon managers about the metastasizing leadership problems.
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Marketing vice president Kathy Savitt had persuaded Bezos to splurge on the historic moment, and, characteristically, they organized everything in such a way that it had a benefit for customers: the concert was streamed live on Amazon.com and watched by a million people. Despite how far Amazon.com had come, it was still often a media afterthought. It was now officially the age of Google, the search-engine star from Silicon Valley. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were rewriting the story of the Internet. Their high-profile ascent, which included an IPO in 2004, was universally watched. Suddenly, clever online business models and experienced CEOs from traditional companies were passé in Silicon Valley, replaced by executives with deep technical competence. This, it seemed, was to be the era of Stanford computer science PhDs, not Harvard MBAs or hedge-fund whiz kids from Wall Street, and the outside world did not believe Amazon would fare well in this profound shift.
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Jeff Holden, who worked for Bezos first at D. E. Shaw & Co. and later at Amazon, says he was “the most introspective guy I ever met. He was very methodical about everything in his life.” D. E. Shaw had none of the gratuitous formalities of other Wall Street firms; in outward temperament, at least, it was closer to a Silicon Valley startup. Employees wore jeans or khakis, not suits and ties, and the hierarchy was flat (though key information about trading formulas was tightly held). Bezos seemed to love the idea of the nonstop workday; he kept a rolled-up sleeping bag in his office and some egg-crate foam on his windowsill in case he needed to bunk down for the night.
Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr
Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog
A wartime naval technician, he’d been recruited by the forerunner of NASA to work at Silicon Valley’s Ames Research Center. He was twenty-five and content in work and love. What more was there do to? All his goals were met. This insight came to him during his commute and he found it so awful he’d had to pull his car over. ‘My God, this is ridiculous. No goals!’ He spent that night preoccupied with finding a new project to aim his life at. He knew he wanted to change the world. But how? Could he invent something that would help humans cope better with the dizzying complexity of the future? It all came to him, then, in a torrent of fabulous insight that Silicon Valley historian John Markoff has called ‘a complete vision of the information age’.
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’ * As we were finishing our burgers, I asked Jeremy if he had any idea why conspicuous shows of wealth seemed to be so unfashionable in Silicon Valley. This felt like an interesting cultural quirk and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. ‘Well, it’s because it’s very easy to get a huge amount of money very, very fast and people are not impressed by it,’ he said. ‘It’s much more important to be known for what you’ve made.’ ‘But why?’ ‘It’s another facet of power, to have something you created affect the lives of millions of people. In Silicon Valley, we’re all trying to change the world. There are people who say that and there are people who believe it.
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In 1943 Jean-Paul Sartre noticed that there was a cultural concept of the perfect waiter just as there are models of the perfect teacher, the perfect pop star, the perfect politician, the perfect parent and the perfect boss. In Silicon Valley there’s a model of ideal self that many younger tech workers aspire to be that’s become significantly influential throughout the West. It’s a concentration of all their hopes, values and ideals. It is ‘The Founder’, the plucky self-starting genius, who through inspiration, bravery and hard work has not only made themselves rich but who has made the world a better place. When I asked Professor Marwick, who carried out extensive fieldwork in Silicon Valley during the Web 2.0 era, to describe this strange archetype, this is what she told me: ‘The Founder is visionary.
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
Page and Brin had solved a problem for Internet users, said Motwani, who thought: “This is going to change the way the Internet is used!” The word of mouth was electric. Motwani was certain Internet companies would jockey to purchase the technology, and soon after, Brin said, the two partners began speaking to various Silicon Valley companies. Yet all passed on possibly acquiring Google. Even new media companies, it appears, were slow to peer over the horizon. IN 1998, the year Google was incorporated, utopianism radiated from Silicon Valley and across the Web. Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of MIT’s Media Lab, published a book, Being Digital, proclaiming that the Web would usher in a new generation “free of many of the old prejudices....
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That help came in the form of Bill Campbell, then sixty-one, a barrel-chested man known throughout Silicon Valley as “the coach.” At one time Columbia University’s head football coach, Campbell had also been a senior executive at Apple and a CEO of several Valley companies, including the Go Corporation and Intuit, the now-thriving online software company that provides financial services to individuals and small businesses and where he worked side by side with the founder. John Doerr knew that Campbell felt an obligation to give back to a Silicon Valley that had made him rich enough to own his own Gulfstream IV His discretion is legendary, and part of his allure.
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It was being defined by our competitors.” Gigi Sohn, the president and cofounder of Public Knowledge, a nonprofit organization that lobbies for both an open Internet and more balanced copyright laws, said that like many Silicon Valley companies, Google chose to have a smaller presence in the nation’s capital. But Google was more extreme, she said. “They were almost alone among Silicon Valley companies in failing to recognize that you have to play in the sandbox. If you want progressive spectrum policies, the free market does not ensure that.” Google’s one-man operation in Washington expanded in 2007 to include twenty-two staffers.
Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar
Many of the silliest government policies are driven by what might be called “Siliconitis”: the conviction that encouraging entrepreneurialism is synonymous with creating your own version of Silicon Valley—hence Silicon Alley, in New York; Silicon Glen, in Scotland; and even, depressingly, Silicon Roundabout, in London. But most Silicon knockoffs are failures. There is no point in trying to create the next Silicon Valley if you lack the Valley’s remarkable resources: two world-class universities, Stanford and Berkeley, and a major financial center, San Francisco. Instead, you are much better off focusing on your own strengths, whatever they might be. Monitor argues that there are two models of successful entrepreneurial ecologies other than the “classic” Silicon Valley model.
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Stanford University, which has so far made more than $200 million from its investments in Google alone, is so keen on promoting entrepreneurship that it has created a Monopoly-like game to teach its professors how to become entrepreneurs. About half of the startups in Silicon Valley have their roots in the university. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has produced so many successful spin-offs that, if they were turned into a nation, they would have the 28th-largest GDP in the world. The third is a historically open immigration policy. Vivek Wadhwa, of the University of California, Berkeley, notes that 52 percent of Silicon Valley startups were founded by immigrants, up from 25 percent a few years ago, with Indian immigrants founding 26 percent of them.
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The Rolling Stones would not have been the Rolling Stones without Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, nor the Beatles the Beatles without Lennon and McCartney. Entrepreneurship also flourishes in certain clusters. One-third of American venture capital flows into two places, Silicon Valley and Boston, and two-thirds into just six places, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Austin as well as the Valley and Boston. This is partly because entrepreneurship is encouraged as a way of life—coffeehouses in Silicon Valley are full of young people loudly talking about their business plans—and partly because the infrastructure is already in place, radically reducing the cost of starting a business. A second myth is that most entrepreneurs are twentysomethings, or even adolescents.
Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims
Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Black Swan, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, fail fast, fear of failure, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, PageRank, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, TED Talk, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, urban planning, Wall-E
Indeed, the idea to title this book Little Bets came from a discussion I had with former HP Executive Vice President Ned Barnholt. Barnholt is the former CEO of Agilent Technologies, but these days he’s one of the more respected executives in Silicon Valley, kind of a senior business statesperson whom people trust. Now in his late sixties, he’s a board member at eBay, KLA Tencor, and Adobe. A number of Silicon Valley CEOs consider him a mentor. You wouldn’t guess all of this if you met him. Barnholt is a gentle man: genuine, calm, and even tempered. He comes across as grandfatherly. Before Agilent, the measurement company that was spun off from Hewlett-Packard in 1999, Barnholt worked at Hewlett-Packard for more than thirty years, during which he witnessed and helped build one of the most innovative companies ever.
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The dominant hierarchical work environment supports the fallacy that the most experienced or senior person in the group will have the answers. People around Google and other corners of Silicon Valley often refer to this as the HiPPO phenomenon. That is, the highest paid person’s opinion(HiPPO) usually dominates how people make decisions inside most organizations. People look to the HiPPO to make decisions. People equate status and money with intelligence and insight, when often there’s little correlation. Catmull, Lasseter, and Docter will freely admit that, as the most experienced people at Pixar, they don’t have all the answers. Everyone at Pixar knows this. As Silicon Valley blogger Chris Yeh says, “Pixar should be commended for being the anti-HiPPOs.”
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Hewlett-Packard calculators: Interview with Chuck House, a long-time HP veteran and HP historian, the coauthor with Raymond Price of The HP Phenomenon, Stanford Business Books (2009). Chapter 2 Vinod Khosla “fail in every possible way”: Quote from “How to Succeed In Silicon Valley by Bumbling and Failing …” by Tom Foreminski, Silicon Valley Watcher, June 28, 2009. Research on mind-sets: Interview discussions with Dr. Carol Dweck and the following secondary sources: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck, Random House (2006). “Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement Across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention,” by Lisa S.
To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge
Looking at BigDog, for instance, skittering with blind insectile relentlessness over a patch of ice, or WildCat, with its uncanny hydraulic dressage, I would feel a pleasurable thrill of dread—an instinctive terror of predation, perhaps—compounded with the knowledge that these robots had been created with Pentagon funding, and had become by acquisition the creatures of the world’s most powerful technology corporation. The rhetoric of Silicon Valley’s geek establishment is steeped in a diluted solution of countercultural idealism—changing the world, making things better, disrupting old orders, and so forth—but its roots are deep in the blood-rich soil of war. As the writer Rebecca Solnit puts it, “the story Silicon Valley rarely tells about itself has to do with dollar signs and weapons systems.” Hewlett-Packard, the valley’s first major success, was a military contractor whose cofounder David Packard served as deputy secretary of defense during the Nixon administration.
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For all that transhumanism presented itself as resolutely oriented toward a vision of a world to come, it felt to me almost nostalgically evocative of a human past in which radical optimism seemed a viable position to take with respect to the future. In the way it looked forward, transhumanism seemed, somehow, always to be facing backward. The more I learned about transhumanism, the more I came to see that, for all its apparent extremity and strangeness, it was nonetheless exerting certain formative pressures on the culture of Silicon Valley, and thereby the broader cultural imagination of technology. Transhumanism’s influence seemed perceptible in the fanatical dedication of many tech entrepreneurs to the ideal of radical life extension—in the PayPal cofounder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel’s funding of various life extension projects, for instance, and in Google’s establishment of its biotech subsidiary Calico, aimed at generating solutions to the problem of human aging.
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Now a boyish forty-three, he had lived in California only for the last five years, but had come to think of it as home, or the closest thing to home he’d encountered in the course of a nomadic life. And much of this had to do with the culture of techno-progressivism that had spread outward from its concentrated origins in Silicon Valley and come to encompass the entire Bay Area, with its historically high turnover of radical ideas. It had been a while now, he said, since he’d described his work to someone, only for them to react as though he were making a misjudged joke, or to simply walk off mid-conversation. Randal was not joking about any of this.
Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic
“I like going to Burning Man”: Will Oremus, “Google CEO Is Tired of Rivals, Laws, Wants to Start His Own Country,” Slate, May 15, 2013. 10. In 2007, Elon Musk did just that: Gregory Ferenstein, “Burning Man Founder Is Cool with Capitalism, and Silicon Valley Billionaires,” TechCrunch, September 3, 2013. 11. He also came up with the ideas: Sarah Buhr, “Elon Musk Is Right, Burning Man Is Silicon Valley,” TechCrunch, September 4, 2004; Ferenstein, “Burning Man Founder Is Cool with Capitalism, and Silicon Valley Billionaires.” 12. Zappos founder and CEO Tony Hsieh: David Hochman, “Playboy Interview: Tony Hsieh,” Playboy, April 2014. 13. While much has been made of the fact’: Zack Guzman, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Shares What He Would Have Changed About his $350M Downtown Las Vegas Project,” CNBC, August 9, 2016, and Jennifer Reingold, “How a Radical Shift Left Zappos Reeling,” Fortune, March 4, 2016. 14.
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But today, the ranks of Burners, as attendees call themselves, include members of a high-powered subculture, a tech-nomadic glitterati that have access to capital, markets, and global communication platforms. When Tim Ferriss mentioned that nearly all of the billionaires he knows in Silicon Valley take psychedelics to help themselves solve complex problems, Burning Man is one of their preferred locations to step out and go big. “If you haven’t been [to Burning Man], you just don’t get Silicon Valley,”3 serial entrepreneur and longtime attendee Elon Musk noted in Re/Code. “You could take the craziest L.A. party and multiply it by a thousand, and it doesn’t even get fucking close.” Among certain circles, mention of “the playa” or “Black Rock City” gains you instant camaraderie with those who have shared that baptism by fire.
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Michael Michaels’: San Mateo City Innovation Week Panel discussion on the role of Burning Man in Silicon Valley culture, 2014, excerpt at https://vimeo.com/164357369 and entirety https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0yKsy-mWec. 3. You sink to your level of training: This quote is frequently attributed to an anonymous Navy SEAL (and often repeated by team members), but it most likely originated with the Greek poet Archilochus. “If you haven’t been [to Burning Man]’”: Nellie Bowles, “At HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ Premiere, Elon Musk Has Some Notes,” ReCode, April 3, 2014. 4. “So embedded, so accepted has Burning Man become”: Vanessa Hua, “Burning Man,” SFGate, August 20, 2000. 5.
Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr
Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler
By spreading a utopian view of technology, a view that defines progress as essentially technological, they’ve encouraged people to switch off their critical faculties and give Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and financiers free rein in remaking culture to fit their commercial interests. If, after all, the technologists are creating a world of superabundance, a world without work or want, their interests must be indistinguishable from society’s. To stand in their way, or even to question their motives and tactics, would be self-defeating. It would serve only to delay the wonderful inevitable. The Silicon Valley line has been given an academic imprimatur by theorists from universities and think tanks.
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In a speech last fall at the Y Combinator Startup School, venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan channeled Leary when he called for “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit”—the establishment of a new country beyond the reach of the U.S. government and other allegedly failed states. “You know, they fled religious persecution, the American Revolutionaries which left England’s orbit,” Srinivasan said, referring to the Pilgrims. “Then we started moving west, leaving the East Coast bureaucracy.” Now, the time has come for innovators to start up their own society: What do I mean by Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit? It basically means: build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the U.S., run by technology.
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To Nora and Henry CONTENTS Introduction: SILICON VALLEY DAYS UTOPIA IS CREEPY: THE BEST OF ROUGH TYPE THE AMORALITY OF WEB 2.0 MYSPACE’S VACANCY THE SERENDIPITY MACHINE CALIFORNIA KINGS THE WIKIPEDIAN CRACKUP EXCUSE ME WHILE I BLOG THE METABOLIC THING BIG TROUBLE IN SECOND LIFE LOOK AT YOU! DIGITAL SHARECROPPING STEVE’S DEVICES TWITTER DOT DASH GHOSTS IN THE CODE GO ASK ALICE’S AVATAR LONG PLAYER SHOULD THE NET FORGET? THE MEANS OF CREATIVITY VAMPIRES BEHIND THE HEDGEROW, EATING GARBAGE THE SOCIAL GRAFT SEXBOT ACES TURING TEST LOOKING INTO A SEE-THROUGH WORLD GILLIGAN’S WEB COMPLETE CONTROL EVERYTHING THAT DIGITIZES MUST CONVERGE RESURRECTION ROCK-BY-NUMBER RAISING THE VIRTUAL CHILD THE IPAD LUDDITES NOWNESS CHARLIE BIT MY COGNITIVE SURPLUS MAKING SHARING SAFE FOR CAPITALISTS THE QUALITY OF ALLUSION IS NOT GOOGLE SITUATIONAL OVERLOAD AND AMBIENT OVERLOAD GRAND THEFT ATTENTION MEMORY IS THE GRAVITY OF MIND THE MEDIUM IS McLUHAN FACEBOOK’S BUSINESS MODEL UTOPIA IS CREEPY SPINELESSNESS FUTURE GOTHIC THE HIERARCHY OF INNOVATION RIP.
Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar
The ODNI, the office that oversees the entire U.S. intelligence community, was so proud of this event that it even tweeted photos of the rocket and a separate one of the logo, which also served as a mission patch. It is a matter of pride to confess one’s informational avarice. No wonder, then, that the NSA and Silicon Valley have made such good partners. Both are in the data collection and targeting business, and Silicon Valley collects heaps of data which the NSA would love to have.* Silicon Valley is merely targeting consumers with ads and prompts and nudges that might get them to click or to buy something. They are bound together by common interests, philosophies, and methods. One of the main problems with Big Data is that it produces correlations but not causations.
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—Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology” In 1995, two British media theorists, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, launched an extraordinary broadside against Silicon Valley. In a work they titled “The Californian Ideology,” Barbrook and Cameron described a “new faith” emerging “from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley.” Mixing “the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies,” the Californian Ideology drew on the state’s history of countercultural rebellion, its role as a crucible of the New Left, the global village prophecies of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and “a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.”
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One would think that the dot-com crash of 2000 and the failure of Silicon Valley’s immense ambitions would have introduced some humility, along with some critical self-examination about the role of technology in human affairs. The opposite has been the case. The Californian Ideology chugs along, finding new forms for new times. Steve Jobs remains secure in his perch as an industry icon, his example now posthumous and unimpeachable. The industry’s triumphant individualism has been augmented by the introduction of Ayn Rand as Silicon Valley’s de facto house philosopher; her atavistic arguments for the virtues of selfishness and unfettered enterprise have found supporters from Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales to Oracle’s Larry Ellison.
Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty
Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional
The bracero program ended in 1964 after a backlash from domestic workers, but by then it had become easier for businesses to sponsor migrants for citizenship or pay them under the table. As Silicon Valley’s Latino population surged, bringing more women, and then children, the North Fair Oaks retail strip sprouted taquerias and quinceañera shops, and the area earned the nicknames Little Aguililla and Little Michoacán. By the 1970s, when companies like Atari and Apple and Oracle took root in Silicon Valley, many of the earliest migrant families were on their way to the middle class, buying homes, owning businesses, and sending their kids to college.
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What feels right about the story isn’t the style of the houses or the size of their respective yards, but that it defines affluence in terms of breadth. It’s a picture that can’t be reproduced today, when the California housing story is about a growing market for homes that cost $30 million and up, Silicon Valley software engineers who consider a $400,000 annual salary middle-class, and teachers who get up at 4:00 a.m. to drive to work and along the way pass tent cities under freeways. This book is about that new, less flattering version of California. Most of it takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area, the nation’s foremost center of technology and a place where housing costs are routinely described as “a crisis.”
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Things started escalating in 2013, when a group calling itself Heart of the City descended on the annual Pride Parade with a white bus emblazoned with a banner that read “Gentrification & Eviction Technologies OUT” (GET OUT) in Google font and coloring. Later that year, on December 9, 2013, the same group created a human blockade that prevented one of Google’s employees-only shuttle buses from leaving a stop in the Mission en route to the company’s headquarters, which sat thirty-five traffic-choked miles away in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View. Anyone in search of a meme-ready example of the “barbell economy”—bulges of rich and poor separated by a rail of middle class—would have a hard time doing better than the Bay Area tech buses. They were hulking double-deckers with velvety seats and fast Wi-Fi and tinted windows to hide the private lives of software geeks.
Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum
air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game
But beneath all that was an unmet mechanical need, an unbuilt room in the Internet’s basement: Where could all the networks connect? They came up with the answer down the road, in the heart of Silicon Valley—in a basement, in fact. Only Connect For a couple of years at the beginning of the millennium—during the quiet time after the Internet bubble burst but before it inflated again—I lived in Menlo Park, California, a supremely tidy suburb in the heart of Silicon Valley. Menlo Park is a place rich in a lot of things, Internet history among them. When Leonard Kleinrock recorded his first “host-to-host” communication—what he likes to call “the first breath of the Internet’s life”—the computer on the other end of the line was at the Stanford Research Institute, barely a mile from our apartment.
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White said of New York, this was the place you came if you were willing to be lucky. Just as Wall Street, Broadway, or Sunset Boulevard each contain a dream, so too does this corner of Silicon Valley. Most often, that dream is to build a new piece of the Internet, preferably one worth a billion dollars. (Facebook, by the way, recently moved into a fifty-seven-acre campus, back in Menlo Park.) An economic geographer would describe all this as a “a business cluster.” Silicon Valley’s unique combination of talent, expertise, and money has created an atmosphere of astounding innovation—as well as what the local venture capitalist John Doerr once described as the “greatest legal accumulation of wealth in human history.”
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He had been using his post-Digg sabbatical to take guitar lessons, move into a new $3 million house, spend time with his three kids, and weigh his options for the future—mulling a third act in what had already been a very successful Silicon Valley career. It was the first act that interested me: when he helped solve the problem of MAE-East, and in the process raised the Equinix flag above what are today the Internet’s most important choke points. “You want to hear the whole story?” Adelson said, already gearing up, digging into a chicken Caesar salad. “It was an interesting period, a real transitional point for the Internet.” It all happened fast, at the height of the dot-com boom. At the end of 1996, Adelson had a job at Netcom, one of Silicon Valley’s first commercial Internet providers.
Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell
air gap, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, follow your passion, General Magic , Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hiring and firing, HyperCard, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Kickstarter, Mary Meeker, microplastics / micro fibres, new economy, pets.com, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, synthetic biology, TED Talk, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Y Combinator
Then it would get delivered to their house in one easy-to-manage bundle. It was 1999. Silicon Valley was exploding with money and talent and ideas and we were on our way. I was going to make up for the failure of General Magic and the wasted potential of the Velo and Nino. I was inspired. Determined. Nothing could stop us. And those, of course, are the words that launched a thousand startups right off a cliff. In April 2000 the internet bubble burst. Just as I started looking for funding, the steady waterfall of money that had been pouring into Silicon Valley dried up overnight. [See also: Chapter 4.3: Marrying for Money: The world of investment is cyclical.]
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—Scott Belsky, founder, Behance and CPO, Adobe “Build is the new bible for anyone interested in creating successful products and companies. Fadell’s frank account of an epic period in Silicon Valley is so engrossing, you won’t realize how much you have learned until the finish.” —Randy Komisar, general partner, Kleiner Perkins and author, The Monk and the Riddle “Tony Fadell takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride, revealing what it’s really like to work in Silicon Valley and simultaneously providing a compelling instruction manual for anyone who wants to follow in his footsteps.” —John Markoff, author, Machines of Loving Grace “Tony’s experience can be applied to any builder or creator anywhere in the world.
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I’ve learned the value of a good night’s sleep. Just read this book. It contains much of the advice I give out daily to new grads and CEOs, to execs and interns, to everyone trying to claw their way through the business world and build their career. This advice is unorthodox because it’s old-school. The religion of Silicon Valley is reinvention, disruption—blowing up old ways of thinking and proposing new ones. But certain things you can’t blow up. Human nature doesn’t change, regardless of what you’re building, where you live, how old you are, how wealthy or not. And over the last thirty-plus years I’ve seen what humans need to reach their potential, to disrupt what needs disrupting, to forge their own unorthodox path.
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
“Cereal, too,” Joe would be quick to add. At first they bootstrapped it because they wanted to, because it was the smart thing to do. Then they bootstrapped it because they had to, because it was the only thing to do. Many of the most admired figures in Silicon Valley know the value of bootstrapping and have exhorted aspiring founders to embrace it. Ron Conway, the “Godfather of Silicon Valley,” once advised entrepreneurs that “bootstrapping as long as you can is the best thing for the company because you own the entire company . . . Use your credit cards, do anything you can so that by the time you go to angels you have built a working prototype and have some users.
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Ottawa gave Tobi the distance he needed to be as creative and unconventional as he wanted to be in building the software that now powers more than 820,000 merchants, who have sold more than $100 billion worth of goods and services in 175 different countries. Had Tobi taken one of those offers in 2008 and agreed to move, it is very likely that the institutional memory of Silicon Valley—which still suffered some PTSD resulting from the role of e-commerce in the dot-com crash—would have rounded off many of the edges on Tobi’s plans and may have bent his software into the shape of something less dynamic. This is not to speak ill of moving your business, or of moving it to Silicon Valley; it’s just the nature of trying to remake something in an entirely new way. There will always be resistance, and the gravity of money and memory will always pull you toward the familiar.
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If the real action is happening somewhere else, move.” It’s not unreasonable to imagine that hundreds of thousands of people have moved to Silicon Valley from all over the world to start businesses since the turn of the millennia for this very reason. Apoorva Mehta, the founder of Instacart, did so after quitting his job at Amazon in 2010. “As I read more and more about entrepreneurship, I started to find all these prolific entrepreneurs and investors had something in common, which was that all of them were in Silicon Valley,” he said. “And to me it was like, if you’re playing soccer, it’s probably a good idea for you to be in Brazil; or if you’re in acting, it’s probably a good idea for you to be in Hollywood.
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator
They’d tell Salar that the VCs didn’t need to know the figures unless they were going to commit the money. Page was working the “hiding strategy” even before he had something to hide. The elite of the elite venture capital firms in Silicon Valley was Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The head was John Doerr, a bony blond man with oversize spectacles who looked a bit like Sherman in the Mr. Peabody cartoons but loomed over Silicon Valley like Bill Russell in the Boston Celtics’ glory years. Originally an engineer at Intel, he joined KPCB in 1980 and rose to the top of the VC heap during the Internet craze, funding Amazon.com and Netscape, among others.
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To quote the pitch one of the participants made in 2006 to recent and upcoming college graduates: “We invest more into our APMs than any other company has ever invested into young employees…. We envision a world where everyone is awed by the fact that Google’s executives, the best CEOs in the Silicon Valley, and the most respected leaders of global non-profits all came through the Google APM program.” Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, told me, “One of these people will probably be our CEO one day—we just don’t know which one.” The eighteen APMs on the trip worked all over Google: in search, advertising, applications, and even stealth projects such as Google’s attempt to capture the rights to include magazines in its index.
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When people proposed a short-term solution, Page’s instinct was to think long term. There would eventually be a joke among Googlers that Page “went to the future and came back to tell us about it.” Page earned a degree in computer science like his father did. But his destiny was in California, specifically in the Silicon Valley. In a way, Page’s arrival at Stanford was a homecoming. He’d lived there briefly in 1979 when his dad had spent a sabbatical at Stanford; some faculty members still remembered him as an insatiably curious seven-year-old. In 1995, Stanford was not only the best place to pursue cutting-edge computer science but, because of the Internet boom, was also the world capital of ambition.
Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance
The tech worker and author of the incendiary Abolish Silicon Valley, Wendy Liu, kicked off 2022 by tweeting an image of a shirt emblazoned with the motto THE LUDDITES WERE RIGHT. More and more people are beginning to add “Luddite,” irony-free, to their social media profiles. At the vanguard of what we might call this new Luddite movement is the popular podcast This Machine Kills, hosted by tech journalist Edward Ongweso Jr. and social scientist Jathan Sadowski, and produced by Jereme Brown. TMK embraces Luddism as a framework for exploring—and excoriating—the dominance of Big Tech and Silicon Valley. It quickly became a must-listen for tech critics and insiders alike, and for workers trying to navigate the world that Big Tech made.
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Techlash was shortlisted for Oxford English Dictionary’s 2018 word of the year. It was defined by the OED as “a strong and widespread negative reaction to the growing power and influence of large technology companies, particularly those based in Silicon Valley.” It’s fertile ground for Luddism, if inadequate in its current remit, the hosts think. “It wasn’t long ago since tech was covered breathlessly,” Sadowski said, “but Silicon Valley has co-opted the techlash—” “But the apocalyptic language remains,” Ongweso chimed in. “The recommendations are ass, like, ‘We should have a government watchdog.’ If you think this is a threat to human life and democracy, then what is a watchdog going to do?”
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If you think this is a threat to human life and democracy, then what is a watchdog going to do?” “Luddism is more like the techlash that we need, and the techlash that people were hoping for and wanted,” Sadowski said. “Not for a nicer Silicon Valley. No, Silicon Valley is rotten to the core. The problem is structural. Which necessitates a Luddite response.” That Luddite response is bubbling up in ways that are not always recognized. TMK cited the yellow-vest movement in France, where participants smashed surveillance cameras. And the Black Lives Matter movement, which erupted into a series of some of the most momentous days of civil unrest in recent American history, in the summer of 2020, saw both orderly, peaceful protest and the burning of police departments and smashing of department stores.
The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day
Xi Jinping, speech to the National Propaganda and Ideology Work Conference, August 2013 Contents Author’s note Acronyms and abbreviations Map Introduction: Early warnings Part 1: Wall 1.Protests: Solidarity from Hong Kong to Tiananmen 2.Over the wall: China’s first email and the rise of the online censor 3.Nailing the jello: Chinese democracy and the Great Firewall 4.Enemy at the gates: How fear of Falun Gong boosted the Firewall 5.Searching for an opening: Google, Yahoo and Silicon Valley’s moral failing in China Part 2: Shield 6.Along came a spider: Lu Wei reins in the Chinese internet 7.Peak traffic: Getting the Dalai Lama online 8.Filtered: The Firewall catches up with Da Cankao 9.Jumping the wall: FreeGate, UltraSurf, and Falun Gong’s fight against the censors 10.Called to account: Silicon Valley’s reckoning on Capitol Hill Part 3: Sword 11.Uyghurs online: Ilham Tohti and the birth of the Uyghur internet 12.Shutdown: How to take 20 million people offline 13.Ghosts in the machine: Chinese hackers expand the Firewall’s reach 14.NoGuGe: The ignominious end of Google China 15.The social network: Weibo and the last free-speech platform 16.Gorillas in the mist: Exposing China’s hackers to the world Part 4: War 17.Caught: The death of the Uyghur internet 18.Key opinion leader: How Chinese trolls go after dissidents overseas 19.Root and stem: The internet is more vulnerable than you think 20.The censor at the UN: China’s undermining of global internet freedoms 21.Sovereignty: When Xi Jinping came for the internet 22.Friends in Moscow: The Great Firewall goes west 23.Plane crash: China helps Russia bring Telegram to heel 24.One app to rule them all: How WeChat opened up new frontiers of surveillance and censorship 25.Buttocks: Uganda’s internet blackouts follow Beijing’s lead Epilogue: Silicon Valley won’t save you Acknowledgements Notes Selected bibliography Index Author’s note Names: I have tried to use the most common spelling or usage for the names of people and places, even if this sometimes creates inconsistency, such as using the Pinyin transliteration system for mainland Chinese names (Zhou Enlai not Chou En-lai) but the older, less accurate Wade-Giles system for Hong Kong and Taiwanese names (Chiang Kai-shek not Jiang Jieshi).
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To do so, they have relied on an alliance of conservative anti-Communist US lawmakers, internet freedom advocates and software engineers. One group of allies they could not enlist – indeed, who often worked against them, hand in hand with the censors – was Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. Chapter 5 Searching for an opening Google, Yahoo and Silicon Valley’s moral failing in China The small crowd wore heavy coats, hats and scarves to guard against the bitter cold of the Beijing winter. Snow was on the ground as they gathered outside the ten-storey concrete and glass building that housed Google China on 12 January 2010.
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Kulwin, ‘The internet apologizes …’, New York Magazine, 16 April 2018, http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/an-apology-for-the-internet-from-the-people-who-built-it.html 27M. Scott, ‘Welcome to new era of global digital censorship’, Politico, 14 January 2018, https://www.politico.eu/article/google-facebook-twitter-censorship-europe-commission-hate-speech-propaganda-terrorist/ 28B. Tarnoff and M. Weigel, ‘Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself’, The Guardian, 3 May 2018, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/03/why-silicon-valley-cant-fix-itself-tech-humanism Selected bibliography Ahrens, N. (2013) China’s Competitiveness: myth, reality, and lessons for the United States and Japan, Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies. Baker, S. (2013) Skating on Stilts: why we aren’t stopping tomorrow’s terrorism, Stanford CA: Hoover Press.
Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid
Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K
Page 164 In Silicon Valley the parallel vertical strands (represented by the lettered lines) might represent Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Sun, Oracle, Xerox PARC, Intel, Cypress, Netscape, Yahoo!, and so on. The numbered lines could represent R&D, software engineers, chip designers, financial managers, accounting, librarians, legal services, and catering. Such links become specially interesting where several, similar firms group tightly together. Then the lines between them are relatively short and the links dense. Clustered Ecologies Clusters like the one that makes up Silicon Valley have a long history.
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Informal ties can form rapidly, running directly along networks of practice, speeding well ahead of the slow pace of formal contacts and negotiations between organizations. Marshall pointed out how in clusters, "[s]ocial forces cooperate with economic ones." And in a similar vein, Saxenian draws attention to the importance of social forces to the development of Silicon Valley, contrasting its "culture" to that of Route 128.31 In explaining the success of the former, she notes such things as the remarkably permissive attitude in Silicon Valley that both encourages and is encouraged by the networks of practice that run between companies. By contrast, the companies of Page 167 Route 128 discouraged fraternization between firms. This insularity not only cut firms off from their ecology but also prevented the ecology as a whole from developing.
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Even for information technology firms, neighborhoods and regions remain significant. The namesnot only Silicon Valley, but less-familiar names from the Silicon family ("Silicon Glen" (Scotland), "Silicon Alley" (New York), "Silicon Forest" (Oregon), and many more) as well as others such as "Multimedia Gulch" and "Audio Alley''suggest the continuing formation (and imitation) of clusters. Like firms, ecologies need a range of overlapping but also complementary practices and organizations. From its origins in semiconductors, Silicon Valley has developed rich related expertise in disk drives (IBM), networking (3Com, Cisco Systems), operating systems (Apple, Bee, NeXt), high-end workstations Page 168 (Sun, HP, Silicon Graphics), and database management (Oracle).
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard
"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte
Associated Press, June 30, 2016. http://www.bigstory.ap.org/article/ee71bd075fb948308727b4bbff7b3ad8/self-driving-car-driver-died-after-crash-florida-first. “machine, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press. Last updated March 2000. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/111850. Marantz, Andrew. “How ‘Silicon Valley’ Nails Silicon Valley.” New Yorker, June 9, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-silicon-valley. Marshall, Aarian. “Uber Fired Its Robocar Guru, But Its Legal Fight with Google Goes On.” Wired, May 30, 2017. https://www.wired.com/2017/05/uber-fires-anthony-levandowski-waymo-google-lawsuit/. Martinez, Natalia. “‘Drone Slayer’ Claims Victory in Court.”
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For example, Mothers Against Drunk Driving used statistics to bring about change in drunk driving laws, which has led to greater public safety. Most people now agree that people shouldn’t drive drunk. However, claiming that people shouldn’t drive and machines should—that’s different story. 11. Chafkin, “Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather of Free Online Education, Changes Course.” 12. Marantz, “How ‘Silicon Valley’ Nails Silicon Valley.” 13. Dougherty, “Google Photos Mistakenly Labels Black People ‘Gorillas.’” 14. Evtimov et al., “Robust Physical-World Attacks on Deep Learning Models.” 15. Hill, “Jamming GPS Signals Is Illegal, Dangerous, Cheap, and Easy.” 16. See Harris, “God Is a Bot, and Anthony Levandowski Is His Messenger”; Marshall, “Uber Fired Its Robocar Guru, But Its Legal Fight with Google Goes On.”
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Molenda, and Charlotte R. Cramer. “Can Evidence Impact Attitudes? Public Reactions to Evidence of Gender Bias in STEM Fields.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 39 (2) (June 2015): 194–209. https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684314565777. Mundy, Liza. “Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?” The Atlantic, April 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/. Natanson, Hannah. “A Sort of Everyday Struggle.” The Harvard Crimson, October 20, 2017. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/10/20/everyday-struggle-women-math/. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and US Department of Transportation.
The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund by Anita Raghavan
"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, delayed gratification, estate planning, Etonian, glass ceiling, high net worth, junk bonds, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, McMansion, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, technology bubble, too big to fail
In his decade in the banking industry at Chase and then at Needham, Rajaratnam had developed close ties to Silicon Valley’s expatriate South Asian community. Like Rajaratnam on Wall Street, many of them started in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, when South Asians were rare. Segregated from their Wonder Bread colleagues, the new arrivals from South Asia bonded easily, forging intimate friendships in the workplace. Unusual alliances arose—even between Hindus and Muslims—more often out of mutual need than real kinship. To get ahead, one needed connections. Besides the Atmel Corp. executive Kris Chellam, one of Rajaratnam’s best “friends” in Silicon Valley was a thirty-nine-year-old product-marketing engineer at Intel named Roomy Khan.
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“When you are presenting a highly technical story, it is not too often you get an analyst who really understands it,” says Bob Anderson, one of the cofounders of KLA Instruments. “He clearly had the ability to understand what was going on.” Fortuitously for him, Rajaratnam arrived on Wall Street just as Silicon Valley was starting to see an influx of South Asians too. Rajaratnam forged multiple ties with Silicon Valley’s small but growing community of Indian expatriates. One of his earliest contacts was Kris Chellam, a technology industry veteran who worked at Intel. A professional relationship between the two flowered into a friendship, particularly after Chellam joined Atmel Corp. in September 1991.
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Rajaratnam asked Goel to do him a favor: could he keep an eye out for the happenings in Silicon Valley? He told Goel he was interested in learning about the ups and downs of the real estate market and getting a sense of people’s moods. The questions seemed innocuous enough. Goel was happy to oblige an old friend he admired. He promised to keep his eyes peeled. Rajaratnam knew that Goel had not prospered in the way he had since leaving Wharton. Like Kumar, Goel returned to work in India at the wrong time (when the lumbering Indian economy was still muddling along) and came back to the United States as Silicon Valley started to crest. He missed out on the Indian boom and all the riches that fell to entrepreneurs who staked their futures on it, and he came back to a California that was so effervescent it would take years before he and his wife could even afford to buy a house.
Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo
Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population
A famous example of within-country variation in social institutions, with consequences for the performance of economic networks, is represented by the contrast between Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128. Route 128 was a technology cluster that competed with Silicon Valley until it began to wane in the 1980s. According to AnnaLee Saxenian, a regional economic development expert who has written extensively on these two clusters, social institutions are among the factors that help explain the difference between these two clusters: [Silicon Valley’s] dense social networks and open labor markets encourage entrepreneurship and experimentation. Companies compete intensely while at the same time learning from one another about changing markets and technologies through informal communication and collaborative practices.
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The firms of Route 128, through their distrust of their employees and other firms, promoted structures that were more hierarchical and less porous, giving rise to a regional cluster that was less adaptable. This lack of adaptability, in turn, translated into a difference in size, since over the long run the less adaptable Route 128 cluster shrank with respect to Silicon Valley. So social institutions affect not only the size of the networks that people form but also their adaptability, and this helped Silicon Valley leave Route 128 in the dust.15 Silicon Valley’s porous boundaries and adaptability are exemplified in Steve Jobs’ famous visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) in late 1979. It was there that Jobs learned about graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and object-oriented programming.
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For interactive color versions of this figure visit the Observatory of Economic Complexity (atlas.media.mit.edu) or http://atlas.media.mit.edu/explore/network/sitc/export/mys/all/show/1980/ for the 1980 figure and http://atlas.media.mit.edu/explore/network/sitc/export/mys/all/show/1990/ for the 1990 figure. Figure 11. Industry space for Nova Lima in 2002 and 2012. (Source: dataviva.info) Consider Silicon Valley, a place that packs many personbytes of knowledge and knowhow relevant for making software, hardware, and websites. Silicon Valley’s knowledge and knowhow are not contained in a collection of perennially unemployed experts but rather in the experts working in firms that participate in the design and development of software and hardware. In fact, the histories of most firms in Silicon Valley are highly interwoven. Steve Jobs worked at Atari and Steve Wozniak worked at HP before starting Apple.
The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter) by Golden Krishna
Airbnb, Bear Stearns, computer vision, crossover SUV, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, impulse control, Inbox Zero, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, microdosing, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, QR code, RFID, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator, Y2K
Silicon Sentier, 57. Silicon Shipyard, 58. Silicon Shire, 59. Silicon Shore, 60. Silicon Sloboda, 61. Silicon Slopes, 62. Silicon Spa, 63. Silicon St, 64. Silicon Surf, 65. Silicon Swamp, 66. Silicon Taiga, 67. Silicon Valley, 68. Silicon Valley of China, 69. Silicon Valley of India, 70. Silicon Valley of Indonesia, 71. Silicon Valley of South Korea, 72. Silicon Valley of Taiwan, 73. Silicon Valley North, 74. Silicon Vineyard, 75. Silicon Wadi, 76. Silicon Walk, 77. Silicon Welly, 78. Silicon Woods, 79. Silicotton Valley, 80. Solar Valley, 81. Ticino Valley Area, 82. Wyoming Silicon Prairie (also called the Silicon Range) “Innovation” centers around the world.
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As an industry, we’ve gotten caught up in a globally evident technological impotence of me-too thinking that is taking us away from real innovation. 1. BioCon Valley, 2. Bit Valley, 3. Brazilian Silicon Valley, 4. CFK Valley, 5. Cwm Silicon, 6. Cyber District, 7. Cyberabad, 8. Dallas-Fort Worth Silicon Prairie, 9. Dubai Silicon Oasis, 10. Etna Valley, 11. Food Valley, 12. Health Valley, 13. Illinois Silicon Prairie, 14. Isar Valley, 15. Lima Valley, 16. Measurement Valley, 17. Medical Valley, 18. Mexican Silicon Valley/Silicon Valley South, 19. Midwest Silicon Prairie, 20. Philicon Valley, 21. Russian Silicon Valley, 22. Silicon Allee, 23. Silicon Alley, 24. Silicon Anchor, 25. Silicon Beach, 26. Silicon Border, 27.
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.* Ellis Hamburger was a reporter for the technology news and culture website The Verge from 2012–2015. Now he’s working in marketing at Snapchat. Contents Welcome 1 Introduction Why did you buy this book? Um, why did you buy this book again? 2 Screen-based Thinking Let’s make an app! Tackle a global issue? Improve our lives? No, no. When smart people get together in Silicon Valley they often brainstorm, “What app can we make?” The Problem 3 Slap an Interface on It! Slimmer TVs! Faster computers! And an overlooked epidemic of awful. We’ve seen huge leaps in consumer technology, like high resolution displays and multi-core processors. But there’s an awful trend that is taking us away from what really matters. 4 UX ≠ UI I make interfaces because that’s my job, bro UX is about making great experiences.
The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato
Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
Abbate’s (1999) extensive research shows how the Internet grew out of the small Defense Department network project (ARPANET) of connecting a dozen research sites in the US into a network linking millions of computers and billions of people. Leslie (2000) argues that while Silicon Valley has been an attractive and influential model for regional development, it has been also difficult to copy it, because almost every advocate of the Silicon Valley model tells a story of ‘freewheeling entrepreneurs and visionary venture capitalists’ and yet misses the crucial factor: the military’s role in creating and sustaining it. Leslie shows that ‘Silicon Valley owes its present configuration to patterns of federal spending, corporate strategies, industry–university relationships, and technological innovation shaped by the assumptions and priorities of Cold War defense policy’ (Leslie 2000, 49).
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The personal computer emerged during this time with Apple introducing the first one in 1976. Following this, the computer industry’s boom in Silicon Valley and the key role of DARPA in the massive growth of personal computing received significant attention, but has since been forgotten by those who claim Silicon Valley is an example of ‘free market’ capitalism. In a recent documentary, Something Ventured, Something Gained, for example, the role of the State is not mentioned once in the 85 minutes spent describing the development of Silicon Valley (Geller and Goldfine 2012). Also, during the 1970s, the significant developments taking place in biotechnology illustrated to policymakers that the role of DARPA in the computer industry was not a unique or isolated case of success.
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‘Creative Destruction: Placing Innovation at the Heart of Progressive Economics’. IPPR discussion paper, December. Lerner, J. 1999. ‘The Government as Venture Capitalist: The Long Run Impact of the SBIR Program’. Journal of Business 72, no. 3: 285–318. Leslie, S. W. 2000. ‘The Biggest “Angel” of Them All: The Military and the Making of Silicon Valley’. In Understanding Silicon Valley: The Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region, edited by M. Kenney, 44–67. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levine, S. 2009. ‘Can the Military Find the Answer to Alternative Energy?’ Businessweek.com, 23 July. Available online at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_31/b4141032537895.htm (accessed 28 January 2013).
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
* * * Found out what bollocks means, from a Net user at a university in Bristol. Those Brits are a cheeky lot! It means, "balls"! FRIDAY Abe e-mailed from Redmond. He finally fessed up to something that I've known a long time - that nobody really knows where the Silicon Valley is - or what it is. Abe grew up in Rochester and never came west until Microsoft. My reply: Silicon Valley Where/what is it? Its a backward J-shaped strand of cities, starting at the south of San Francisco and looping down the bay, east of San Jose: San Mateo, Foster City, Belmont, San Carlos, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Los Ritos, Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Saratoga, Campbell, Los Gatos, Santa Clara, San Jose, Milpitas and Fremont.
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. %-43]505)%1$])3D=$5D526524Y'0T]24D5#5$Q954Y&3U(@$)$#L!PZ</ - goes here.] MONDAY Dad got fired! Didn't we see that one coming a mile away. This whole restructuring business. Mom phoned around 11:00 a.m. and she spent only ten minutes giving me the news. She had to get back to Dad, who was out on the back patio, in shock, looking out over Silicon Valley. She said we'll have to talk longer tomorrow. I got off the phone and my head was buzzing. * * * The results came in from the overnight stress tests - the tests we run to try to locate bugs in the code - and there were five breaks. Five! So I had my work cut out for me today. Nine days until shipping.
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It was a really bad phone call, but Mom just needed to vent - she has so few ears in her life who will listen. Who really ever does, I guess? * * * Michael never did return from Cupertino. Rumor had it Bill had Michael secretly working on a project called Pink, but nothing ever came of the rumor. A delivery firm specializing in high-tech moves carted Michael's things to Silicon Valley. His pyramid of empty diet Coke cans - his suitcase-worth of Habitrail gerbil mazes - his collection of C. S. Lewis novels. Gone. * * * Fun fact: We found about 40 empty cough syrup bottles in the cupboard - Michael is a Robitussin addict! (Actually, he bulk-buys knockoff house brands-he's a "PayLess Tussin" addict.)
The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab
4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game
Rapid growth and more funding rounds followed, and by 2018 their company was valued at $6 billion, making the then thirty-one-year-old Tenev and thirty-three-year-old Bhatt billionaires.[6] The cult of Silicon Valley hero worship of young merchant princes soon followed, and the men were asked about their daily routines (Bhatt wakes early and practices intermittent fasting; Tenev rarely stays up late and enjoys reading classics such as Plato’s Republic and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War).[7] Key to the success of Robinhood is that, unlike Charles Schwab, Fidelity, or TD Ameritrade, it was born in modern Silicon Valley. Even compared with those competitors that got their start during the dot-com era, it had an edge because it grew up after the smartphone had been invented.
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But I’ll share some good news too. There really is a way for the little guy to stick it to the man and, by the end of this book, you’ll know how to do it yourself. First, let me introduce you to the key players of this story—the princes of Wall Street, some of whom nearly became paupers; the Silicon Valley wunderkinds who were too smart to doubt the wisdom of the crowds they enabled; and the reluctant revolutionary with nerves of steel who inspired an army of retail investors to get in the game. Chapter 1 Mr. Kitty Goes to Washington Keith Gill “I am not a cat.” So began the congressional testimony of an until recently middle-class, thirty-four-year-old financial wellness expert from the suburbs of Boston.
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Tenev had immigrated to the US from Bulgaria as a child shortly after the fall of its communist regime. As a boy, he was preoccupied with having money so that his family wouldn’t get sent back, and he studied hard, majoring in math at Stanford. Tenev had become a billionaire three years earlier by harnessing both Silicon Valley’s and Wall Street’s money machines to start a company named for Robin Hood, the mythical figure who stole from the rich to give to the poor. But now he was the prime suspect in rigging the game for Wall Street’s fat cats by restricting trading just as the squeeze had them on the ropes. Tenev started out his testimony by reading lines taken straight from his company’s marketing materials about how “the financial system should be built to work for everyone,” not just people with a lot of money.
Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy
active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product
For several years, because of a family connection to Electronic Arts executive Bing Gordon, Andrew McCollum had been interning for the game company and was intending to return to Silicon Valley. Adam D’Angelo had a Google internship for the break, and was also planning to be in the Bay Area. Since Thefacebook couldn’t operate from Suite H33 during the summer, and things seemed headed toward the Valley anyway, Zuckerberg figured maybe the team should get a house in California and keep working. It seemed a much better alternative than finding a summer job. “This was a cool place to spend the summer, my friends were there, and this is Silicon Valley,” he later explained. He went to Craigslist and saw an ad for a furnished house in the Barron Park section of Palo Alto, a leafy area a few miles from downtown.
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But a year and a half later, when a recruiter sent him an AOL instant message trying to lure him to the company, he felt it was too small an operation to consider. Besides, he told the Facebook recruiter, he and a friend had just bought a house. You’ll be able to buy TEN houses in Silicon Valley! the recruiter told him. I know Silicon Valley, Boz thought, and nobody can afford ten houses there. But he figured he’d get an expenses-paid trip to see his family. Before his trip out west he went to lunch with a group of eight Harvard friends working at Microsoft at the time, and told them he was going to talk to Facebook.
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The difference between plan A (Fetterman’s original API) and the new plan B was that the latter positioned Facebook as not just a platform but an operating system. This was the pinnacle of Silicon Valley’s pyramid of value. If you owned the OS, you had your own little monopoly. The most successful OS of the previous era was Microsoft’s Windows, which a judge had determined was in fact a big monopoly. While many Silicon Valley leaders still viewed Microsoft as the industry’s Darth Vader, Zuckerberg admired Bill Gates’s company. The Windows system was unbeatable because a huge majority of PC users had computers that ran it.
The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst
Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar
Elon Musk is one of these innovators, and he understood what it would take to get that group behind the wheel of an electric car. He would need to design a car that could be compelling enough to act as a status symbol for young professionals in the insular community of Silicon Valley. He knew his audience would be highly technologically literate and very social in both how they bought the car and how they talked about it. He needed a luxury car that would be the “it” car in Silicon Valley. But perhaps as importantly, he would need to find a solution for the incredibly expensive battery technology needed for the car to work. Just the battery for an electric car costs more than double the price of an entry-level car in the market.
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Knopf, 2013. Print. Seligman, Martin E. P. Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. New York: Free, 2011. Print. Stern, Lewis Richard. Executive Coaching: Building and Managing Your Professional Practice. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. Print. “Silicon Valley Strategies.” Silicon Valley Strategies. N.p., n.d. Web. TED talk: Amanda Palmer Tennant, Kyle. Unfriend Yourself: Three Days to Detox, Discern, and Decide about Social Media. Chicago: Moody, 2012. Print. “The MBA—some history.” The Economist. N.p., 17 Oct. 2013. Web. Thomas, D. A. “The truth about mentoring minorities: Race matters.”
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At first glance, many of the hot new companies today, like local retail market maker Zaarly, look like Information Economy companies, but they are at their core part of this new economy. As I explore in Section Three, their DNA is different. A common refrain we hear from technologists and the media is that the Information Economy is just getting started. Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley are home to some of the world’s most successful companies, many of them start-ups. But I’m not suggesting that its evolution will stop, or that it won’t still be a major driving force in overall economic development. I’m suggesting that in terms of setting the course, the Purpose Economy will eventually edge it out.
Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, PalmPilot, patent troll, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the new new thing
RIM had thrived in the high-stakes wireless market in its early days because it was more innovative and nimbler than industry leaders such as Motorola, Nokia, and Palm. Now two of Silicon Valley’s most visionary powerhouses, Apple and Google, had moved onto the field. They had shifted the smartphone market away from Lazaridis’s vision of a simple mobile e-mail device to a handheld mini-computer that was loaded like a modern Swiss Army knife with practical and whimsical add-ons. For years Lazaridis and Balsillie had bravely battled everyone from the Topper to Steve Jobs. Now, it seemed, all they had left to fight was each other. RIM’s internal challenges were the talk of Silicon Valley. “They’ve been caught flat-footed,” Jean-Louis Gassée, a Palo Alto venture capitalist and former Apple executive told the New York Times in April 2011.
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The South Lawn of the White House was dotted with colorful tents that sagged under a heavy midday sun. It was July 22, 1993. Representatives from technology companies were gathered to show off the latest in mobile communications. President Bill Clinton led an entourage through the tents. Stopping at one, he examined a thick glass tablet and black electronic pen created by Eo Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up. Push the stylus across the surface of the EO Personal Communicator, Clinton was urged, your handwriting will automatically convert into a digital text message, poised to fly across radio waves to the person of your choice. Reflecting on dozens of American victims claimed by recent flooding in Illinois and nearby states, the president moved the stylus across the tablet: “Al, stop the rain in the Midwest.
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Palm Pilot was a huge hit because it allowed busy professionals to easily store and update calendar and contact information on a pocket-sized device. If the e-mail-enabled Leapfrog came with calendar and contact applications, Castell urged Lazaridis, then RIM could position its product as the most comprehensive PDA on the market. Lazaridis, who used a Palm, worried RIM would be seen as a weakling against the Silicon Valley darling. Castell’s pitch, however, was compelling: “If you want addresses and calendar, go for Palm. If e-mail is important, we’re the PDA to choose.” Lazaridis was swayed. His busy engineers were handed another impossibly short deadline to add calendar and contact applications to the device.
How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski
Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, deal flow, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator
I admire Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s CEO, for possessing such a clear vision and such an ability to build a singularly brilliant app on a single platform. The final twist to the story – doubling Instagram’s valuation in a mere four days – is the stuff of Silicon Valley legend. Instagram marked a turning point in Internet history: it was the first billion-dollar acquisition of an app. It led to speculation that Mark Zuckerberg had lost his mind and that Silicon Valley crazy-think was back in full force. Were people deluded into thinking it was 1999 all over again? On the surface, Instagram was just a group of 16 developers hacking some software in a poky office above a pizza shop in Palo Alto.
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It launched an advertising product for brands on 1 November 2013.13 So let’s take a moment to dive into the details of Instagram’s famous journey and understand a bit more about how Silicon Valley thinks, and why the billion-dollar acquisition of the company by Facebook actually does make sense. The face of Instagram Instagram has two cofounders. The first is Kevin Systrom, who is the app’s best-known public face.14 Systrom grew up in a rather nice Boston suburb called Holliston. He was a pretty smart kid, fascinated by computers and photography, which led him to enrol at Stanford – but Silicon Valley had always been on his mind. While at Stanford he snagged a summer internship at Odeo, the company that would later evolve into Twitter.
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mg= reno64-wsj. 17 ‘Small Retailers Reap the Benefits of Selling on Amazon, but Challenges Remain’, article on InternetRetailer.com, 14 February 2014, www.internetretailer.com/mobile500/. 18 Bill Siwicki, ‘It’s Official: Mobile Devices Surpass PCs in Online Retail’, article on InternetRetailer.com, 1 October 2013, www.internetretailer.com/2013/10/01/its-official-mobile-devices-surpass-pcs-online-retail. 19 ‘Mobile Commerce Comes of Age’, article on InternetRetailer.com, 24 September 2013, www.internetretailer.com/2013/09/24/mobile-commerce-comes-age. 20 ‘Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments Declined 6.9 Percent in Fourth Quarter of 2013’, article on Gartner.com, 9 January 2014, www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2647517. 21 Mary Meeker and Liang Wu, May 2013, slide 31, op. cit. 21 In-Soo Nam, ‘A Rising Addiction Among Youths: Smartphones’, article on WSJ.com, 23 July 2013, online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324263404578615162292157222.html. 23 ‘Americans Can’t Put Down Their SmartPhones, Even During Sex’, article on Jumio.com, 11 July 2013, www.jumio.com/2013/07/americans-cant-put-down-their-smartphones-even-during-sex/. 24 Drew Olanoff, ‘Mark Zuckerberg: Our Biggest Mistake was Betting Too Much on HTML5’, article on TechCrunch.com, 11 September 2012, TechCrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/. 25 Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Little, Brown: London, 2012, p. 501. 26 ‘Standish Newsroom – Open Source’, press release, Boston, April 2008, blog.standishgroup.com/pmresearch. 27 Richard Rothwell, ‘Creating Wealth with Free Software’, article on FreeSoftwareMagazine.com, 8 May 2012, www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/creating_wealth_free_software. 28 ‘Samsung Elec Says Gear Smartwatch Sales Hit 800,000 in 2 Months’, article on Reuters.com, 19 November 2013, www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/19/samsung-gear-idUSL4N0J41VR20131119. 29 Jay Yarow, ‘Meet the Team of Experts Apple Assembled To Create The iWatch, Its Next Industry-Defining Product’, article on BusinessInsider.com. 18 July 2013, www.BusinessInsider.com/iwatch-sensors-2013-7. 30 Macelo Ballve, ‘Wearable Gadgets Are Still Not Getting The Attention They Deserve – Here’s Why They Will Create A Massive New Market’, article on BusinessInsider.com, 29 August 2013, www.BusinessInsider.com/wearable-devices-create-a-new-market-2013-8. Chapter 3: A Billion-Dollar Idea 1 Eric Jackson, ‘Why Silicon Valley Tech Wunderkids Will Only Ever Have 1 Good Business Idea During Their Entire Lives’, article on Forbes.com, 18 June 2012, www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/06/18/why-silicon-valley-tech-wunderkids-overestimate-their-own-smarts-and-abilities/. 2 Kevin Rose, ‘Foundation: Evan Williams on Hatching Big Ideas’, article on TechCrunch.com, 28 June 2013, TechCrunch.com/2013/06/28/ foundation-evan-williams-on-hatching-big-ideas/. 3 Evelyn M.
Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost
Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional
Also worth reading is Michael Malone’s The Microprocessor: A Biography (1995). Leslie Berlin’s The Man Behind the Microchip (2005) is a fine biography of Robert Noyce. The Silicon Valley phenomenon is explored in AnnaLee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (1994), Martin Kenney’s edited volume Understanding Silicon Valley (2000), and Christophe Lécuyer’s Making Silicon Valley (2006). There is no monographic study of the calculator industry, although An Wang’s Lessons (1986) and Edwin Darby’s It All Adds Up (1968) give useful insights into the decline of the US industry.
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When the aging General Doriot retired from ARD in 1972, its original stake in DEC was worth $350 million. SEMICONDUCTORS AND SILICON VALLEY For the first several decades of its existence, the geographical center of the computer industry was the East Coast of the United States, concentrated around well-established information-technology firms such as IBM and Bell Labs and elite universities such as MIT, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. Beginning in the mid-1950s, however, a remarkable shift westward occurred, and by the end of the 1960s it was the Silicon Valley region of northern California that had become the place where innovation in the computer industry occurred.
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The combination of semiconductor manufacturing, venture capital, and military contracting would soon transform the apricot and prune orchards around Palo Alto into the best-known high-tech development center in the world. More than any other company, it was Fairchild Semiconductor that spawned the phenomenon we now know as Silicon Valley. To begin with, unlike Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild focused on products that had immediate profit potential, and quickly landed large corporate and military clients. In 1959 Fairchild co-founder Jean Hoerni developed a novel method for manufacturing transistors called the planar process, which allowed for multiple transistors to be deposited on a single wafer of silicon using photographic and chemical techniques.
After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K
It also discovered: Kim Zetter, “New Documents Solve a Few Mysteries in the Apple-FBI Saga,” Wired, March 11, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/03/new-documents-solve-mysteries-apple-fbi-saga/. In early January: John Shinal, “War on Terror Comes to Silicon Valley,” USA Today, February 25, 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/02/25/war-terror-comes-silicon-valley/80918106/. The Obama administration representatives: Ellen Nakashima, “Obama’s Top National Security Officials to Meet with Silicon Valley CEOs,” Washington Post, January 7, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obamas-top-national-security-officials-to-meet-with-silicon-valley-ceos/2016/01/07/178d95ca-b586-11e5-a842-0feb51d1d124_story.html. The relationship between the government: Glenn Greenwald, “NSA Prism Program Taps In to User Data of Apple, Google and Others,” Guardian, June 7, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data.
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The outside world wanted to know what the company was going to do about tariffs, immigration, and privacy. They wanted Cook. The creative soul of Apple had been eclipsed by the machine. Chapter 1 One More Thing Jony Ive steeled himself outside the stately two-story home in Palo Alto. It was early Tuesday morning, October 4, 2011, and a storm system shrouded Silicon Valley’s usually sunny flatlands with heavy clouds. In better circumstances, Ive would have been arriving in Cupertino. Apple was hosting a special event there that day to introduce a new iPhone that he had designed. Instead, he was skipping the show to see his boss, friend, and spiritual partner, Steve Jobs.
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Jobs’s brazen salesmanship of their computers was dismissed by some as all pitch, no substance, but the Apple II computer became one of the first commercially successful PCs, earning the company $117 million in annual sales before it went public in 1980. It made Jobs and Wozniak millionaires and secured their place in Silicon Valley mythology with a rags-to-riches tale that had begun in a garage. A masterful marketer with an eye for design, Jobs redefined the PC category in 1984 with the Macintosh, a computer for the masses that could be controlled by the click of a mouse rather than by pecking on a keyboard. He pitched it as a machine that would democratize technology and dethrone the largest computer maker, IBM.
Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose
"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture
Weren’t these the same panicky technophobes who warned us that Nintendo games would melt our brains? Didn’t their fears always end up being overblown? Several years ago, when I started as a tech columnist for the Times, most of what I heard about AI mirrored my own optimistic views. I met with start-up founders and engineers in Silicon Valley who showed me how new advances in fields like deep learning were helping them build all kinds of world-improving tools: algorithms that could increase farmers’ crop yields, software that would help hospitals run more efficiently, self-driving cars that could shuttle us around while we took naps and watched Netflix.
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Both the optimists and the pessimists talk about “algorithms curing diseases” or “robots taking jobs,” as if machines can be programmed with both sentience and career ambition. Neither side does a good job of acknowledging that humans are waking up every day and making decisions about how to design, deploy, and measure the effectiveness of these systems. I hear the “automation is destiny” argument all the time—especially in Silicon Valley, where people tend to talk about technological progress as a speeding train we either have to climb aboard or get run over by—and I get why it’s tempting to believe. For a long time, I believed it myself. But it’s wrong. And deep down, we all know it’s wrong. From the very first time a Homo sapiens rubbed two sticks together to make a fire, technological change has always been driven by human desires.
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—Norbert Wiener The lights dimmed, a guitar lick boomed over the speakers, and a screen behind the stage lit up with the names of robots. Infosec Auditor Bot—Accenture Turbo Extractor Bot—Kraft Heinz Web Monitor Bot—Infosys It was April 2019, and I was in a hotel ballroom in Manhattan, watching a Silicon Valley start-up called Automation Anywhere show off its latest products to a few hundred corporate executives. These weren’t the physical, beep-boop robots you see in sci-fi movies. They were all software bots, made of bytes and pixels, that had been programmed to take the place of human workers. Automation Anywhere’s pitch to these executives was simple: Our bots make better office grunts than your humans.
Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day
They immediately cross lines from business to politics and challenge our ideas about safety, freedom, and justice, and it has been fascinating to watch and occasionally participate as governments, companies, and civic-minded people grapple with the fast-changing ramifications. Security is about power. And it has been getting increasingly complex since the moment the internet escaped from its controlled university environment in the 1980s. As I worked on my first book out of Silicon Valley, about the rise and fall of Napster, I began to grow more concerned about computer security, or the lack of it. Shawn Fanning was one of the first hackers to be admired by the public at large, and he got early help from a more experienced crew, including some people I kept in touch with and who appear in this volume.
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Though a boom in Bay Area real estate put the hillside place in Glen Park out of the reach of most Americans, it was modest by local standards. There weren’t nearly enough chairs for those who came to the dinner party, and the guests made their own tacos and drank wine from plastic cups as they stood. Adam was no swaggering Silicon Valley executive. The Philadelphia native had bought the property before the latest housing boom, using money from the sale of a security company where he had worked to Cisco Systems. Adam had joined the target company when it bought the start-up he had cofounded in 2009, which had been early to take advantage of what became known as the cloud, protecting computers from viruses more quickly than rivals.
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Because they were the first to grapple with many ethical issues in computer security, cDc members inspired legions of hackers and professionals who came after them. cDc figures and those they trained have advised US presidents, cabinet members, and the chief executives of Microsoft, Apple, and Google. And as issues of tech security became matters of public safety, national security, and ultimately the future of democracy, the Cult of the Dead Cow’s influence figured in critical decisions and national dialogue, even if many were unaware of its role. In the Silicon Valley of 2018, cDc shared indirect responsibility for rank-and-file engineers citing human rights to protest their own companies’ work with immigration enforcement, the Pentagon, and China. Adam had contributed to other political campaigns, especially in the wake of Trump’s election, including some Democratic neophytes identified by the entrepreneur founder of a new Bay Area grassroots group called Tech Solidarity.
Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman
activist lawyer, Benjamin Mako Hill, commoditize, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, ghettoisation, GnuPG, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, Jaron Lanier, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Wall, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, means of production, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, software patent, software studies, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, web application, web of trust, Yochai Benkler
No one knew at the time that in a mere few years, the commercial sector would jubilantly embrace free software, even if a few things had to change, including its name. 1998–2004: Triumph of Open Source and Ominous DMCA By 1998, the Silicon Valley tech boom was truly booming. Technology entrepreneurs were amassing millions in stock options from inflated initial public offerings fueled in part by techno-utopic articles in Wired and the New York Times.18 Internet companies like DoubleClick, Star Media, and Ivillage, all fledgling star Silicon Valley firms, were awash in venture capital funding and feverish stock market investments. In the context of one of Silicon Valley’s most pronounced tech booms, geeks continued to install free software servers and other applications in universities and, more than ever, companies, including many Silicon Valley start-ups.
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In fact, by exploring in detail free software’s sociocultural dynamics, I hope this book will make it more difficult to group free software in with other digital formations such as YouTube, as the media, pundits, and some academics regularly do under the banner of Web 2.0. The relationship between Silicon Valley and open source is substantial as well as complicated. Without a doubt, when it comes to computers, hackers, and F/OSS, this high-tech region matters, as I quickly came to learn within weeks of my arrival there. For the last thirty years, hackers have flocked to the Bay Area from around the world to make it one of their most cherished homelands, although it certainly is not the only region where hackers have settled and set deep roots. At the turn of this century, open source also became the object of Silicon Valley entrepreneurial energy, funding, and hype, even though today the fever for open source has diminished significantly, redirected toward other social media platforms.
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I was attending a protest along with a group of about fifty programmers, system administrators, and free software enthusiasts who were demanding the release of a Russian programmer, Dmitry Sklyarov, arrested weeks earlier in Las Vegas by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as he left Defcon, the largest hacker conference in the world. Arrested at the behest of the Silicon Valley software giant Adobe, Sklyarov was charged with violating the recently ratified and controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). He had written a piece of software, the Advanced eBook Processor software, for his Russian employer. The application transforms the Adobe eBook format into the Portable Document Format (PDF).
Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram
"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons
I reluctantly left the company to go to Stanford, but I eagerly kept tabs on the fundraising progress. In 2008, Nanosolar landed a $300 million venture capital round—the biggest of any company in Silicon Valley save Facebook.2 The sky was the limit for next-generation solar technology. Then the sky came crashing down. The price of PV panels plunged—between 2008 and 2013, it fell 80 percent—and a flood of cheap Chinese silicon panels washed away nearly the entire crop of American start-ups. To be sure, Silicon Valley shouldered part of the blame, as companies made questionable business decisions and investors lost patience in their portfolios. In Nanosolar’s case, the firm scaled up manufacturing before it ironed out the kinks in its technology, and when the deluge of Chinese panels arrived, Nanosolar was in no position to compete.
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Many of the investors and entrepreneurs who drove the boom in solar start-ups had previously worked in Silicon Valley’s venerated semiconductor industry. There, they had pioneered the equipment and technology to make highly complex silicon microchips for electronics. These semiconductor veterans saw the solar industry as a backwater—one that had simply borrowed decades-old equipment from semiconductor production lines to make mediocre solar panels. One of these pioneers was my father. In 2008, high on Silicon Valley hubris, he left the semiconductor industry to start a new solar venture, Twin Creeks Technologies.
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But it is alive and well for memory chips, as I’ve learned from my father—the technology chief at a major chipmaker—who recently unveiled a new flash memory chip design that is actually beating Moore’s Law and is already in your iPhone.)2 Recognizing the value of different perspectives, I’ve eagerly sought out more over the last decade. In addition to my time in academia and in Los Angeles, I’ve worked at two Silicon Valley start-ups, consulted for large energy companies, advised U.S. federal and state officials, and visited burgeoning markets for solar power all over the world. There, too, I’ve found contradictions. Scientists despair that commercial solar technology is stagnating, whereas the industry trumpets its progress.
From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture by Theodore Roszak
Buckminster Fuller, germ theory of disease, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Internet Archive, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, Murray Bookchin, Norbert Wiener, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog
FROM SATORI TO SILICON VALLEY o ® Theodore Roszak Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 http://archive.org/details/fromsatoritosiliOOrosz OTHER BOOKS BY THEODORE ROSZAK Nonfiction Person/Planet Unfinished Animal The Cult of Information Where the Wasteland The Making of Editor Ends a Counter Culture and contributor The Dissenting Academy Masculine/Feminine (with coeditor Betty Roszak) Sources Fiction Dreamwatcher Bugs Pontifex FROM SATORI TO SILICON VALLEY San Francisco and the American Counterculture Theodore Roszak Don't Call It Frisco Press Publisher & Distributor 4079 19th Avenue San Francisco California 94132 DON'T CALL FRISCO PRESS IT 4079 19th Avenue San Francisco, CA 94132 Copyright 1986 by Theodore Roszak.
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for Children of Prosperity by Hugh Gardner, The Times They Are A-Changing A shortened version of this essay was presented at San Francisco State University Alvin Fine Lecture. 1985 as the in April A few weeks before the event, student in the Public Affairs Office called arrange some campus publicity. He had me a to a question. "Where's Satori?" "What?" "It says plained. I asked. 'From Satori know where "I to Silicon Valley,'" Silicon Valley he ex- is. But where's Satori?" "The Zen state of enlightenment . . . you never heard of that?" "Oh. I never took any courses in Oriental religion." I started to explain the term, spelling out its . once obvious connection with the counterculture of the sixties. "Counterculture," he interrupted.
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This found is ter) its where the Zen-Taoist impulse arose and example, (for be more fully unfolded to San Francisco Zen Cen- in the most studied expression America; in where the mendicant-communitarian urban and rural, found is where the announced its cal energies. hackers new its ecological this is who would both main public examples; presence and And this is lifestyle, first sensibility organized this first its politi- where the inspired young revolutionize Silicon Valley gathered in their greatest numbers. The truth is, if one probes just beneath the surface of the bucolic hippy image, one finds this puzzling infatuation with certain forms of outre technology reaching well back into the early I first became aware of its when I realized knew during that presence that the countercultural students period were almost exclusively, readers of science fiction.
No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika
2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar
The impact of foreign entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, for instance, has been significant. One-third to one-half of Silicon Valley high-tech start-ups have foreign-born founders. Foreign-born residents represent 36 percent of Silicon Valley’s population, almost triple the national average of 13 percent. Among all adults in Silicon Valley, 46 percent have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with the national average of 29 percent. Foreign talent has provided critical engineering skills, often developed at US universities, the lack of which might otherwise have hampered Silicon Valley’s growth.65 Take Frankfurt as another illustration.
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Ref=progress_report_download. 61. http://openinnovation.astrazeneca.com. 62. www.unilever.com/innovation/collaborating-with-unilever/challenging-and-wants. 63. www.bosch-pt.com/innovation/home.htm?Locale=en. 64. Manyika et al., “Global flows in a digital age.” 65. 2014 Silicon Valley Index, Joint Venture Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley Community Foundation, www.siliconvalleycf.org/sites/default/files/publications/2014-silicon-valley-index.pdf. 66. www.intelligentcommunity.org/index.php?Src=gendocs&ref=Smart21_2012&link=Smart21_2012. 67. Richard Dobbs, Jaana Remes, Sven Smit, James Manyika, Jonathan Woetzel, and Yaw Agyenm-Boateng, “Urban world: The shifting global business landscape,” McKinsey Global Institute, October 2013. 68.
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in Japan, 53–54 Rocket Internet, 79 Russia, 81 (table) Saga, 70 San Francisco, California, 27, 29, 30 See also Silicon Valley Sarkozy, Nicolas, 197 Saudi Arabia, 56, 81 (table), 113 (table), 143 Savings rates, 137–138, 139 Scentsa, 52 Schröder, Gerhard, 181–182 Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), 155, 156, 158, 159 (table) The Second Machine Age (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 6 Seniors. See Aging population Sensors, 38, 47, 70 Sephora, 52 Services. See Goods and services; New goods and services Shanghai, China, 21 (fig.), 24, 71 Shapeways, 84 Sharing economy, 32, 48, 167–168, 171–172 See also Peer-to-peer services Shenzhen, China, 101 Silicon Valley, 58, 64, 77, 86, 175, 189 Singapore aging population in, 67, 68 connectedness rank of, 81 (table), 87 immigration policy tightening in, 185–186 infrastructure innovation by, 28 SWFs in, 143 talent relocation to, 177–178 Skills gap.
The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife by Marc Freedman
airport security, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Blue Ocean Strategy, David Brooks, follow your passion, illegal immigration, intentional community, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, McMansion, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, transcontinental railway, working poor, working-age population
Toward the end of my year, HP called me and said, “Hey, we’ve got this new Encore Fellowships program with Civic Ventures and the Packard Foundation, and we thought you might be interested in helping us to pilot it.” And I said, “Huh? You’ve got a program that places recent retirees in nonprofits in Silicon Valley where we take on significant, part-time, yearlong assignments; help the nonprofit advance; and learn something about the nonprofit sector? Wow! That sounds good. Count me in!” I chose to work with the Silicon Valley Education Foundation. They wanted to focus on human resource issues initially, and then they needed some help in finance and board governance. I thought that was a good match and said, “Let’s make a go of it.”
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And on top of that, I’m the chair of the board of Palo Alto University and serve on the board of the Children’s Health Council and the Child Advocates of Silicon Valley, where we train volunteers to work with kids in the foster-care system. I have no moments of doubt, no regrets. Even though I seem to be doing quite a bit now, it’s nowhere close to what I was doing before. Well, I do have one regret—I still don’t have enough time. James Otieno was one of ten people to take part in the first pilot of the Silicon Valley Encore Fellows program. Holly Thibodeaux Ontario, California I’m the oldest of seven children, and neither of my parents went to college.
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Indeed, at Civic Ventures we talk a lot about the new demographics producing a potential “experience dividend,” the payoff from tapping into the vast stores of human capital accumulating in so many individuals in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and beyond. That capital represents a huge investment by the country, and by these individuals themselves, over many years. Yet in our society the value of experience is often disregarded. Seen as dead weight. Tossed away. “Finished at forty” is a slogan that floats around Silicon Valley, near where I live. But I’ve seen much that challenges this assumption. Take Gary Maxworthy. Forty years ago, Maxworthy was an idealistic young man who wanted to join the Peace Corps in the wake of JFK’s call to service. But he already had a family to support. Instead of joining up, he launched a career working in the food distribution business, where he ended up spending decades accumulating considerable expertise.
Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace
3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game
“The rapture of the nerds” has become a term of derision, denoting that the speaker scorns the idea that AGI is possible in the near term, or thinks that it may turn out to be an unfortunate event. Silicon Valley, ground zero for the Singularity Silicon Valley is a wonderful place. It is blessed with one of the best climates on the planet, and neighbouring San Francisco is one of the world’s most attractive and exciting cities. (It is a peculiar irony that this wonderful city is located in the one place for thousands of miles around that has a damp, foggy micro-climate.) Silicon Valley is the technological and entrepreneurial crucible of the world. Of course it doesn’t have a global monopoly on innovation: there are brilliant scientists and engineers all over the planet, and clever new business models are being developed in Kolkata, Chongqing and Cambridge.
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Probably nowhere else in the world takes the ideas of the singularity as seriously as Silicon Valley. And after all, Silicon Valley is a leading contender to be the location where the first AGI is created. The controversial inventor and author Ray Kurzweil is the leading proponent of the claim that a positive singularity is almost inevitable, and it is no coincidence that he is now a director of engineering at Google. Kurzweil is also one of the co-founders of the Singularity University (SU), also located (of course) in Silicon Valley – although SU focuses on the technological developments which can be foreseen over the next five to ten years, and is careful to avoid talking about the Singularity itself, which Kurzweil predicts will arrive in 2045.
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Of course it doesn’t have a global monopoly on innovation: there are brilliant scientists and engineers all over the planet, and clever new business models are being developed in Kolkata, Chongqing and Cambridge. But for various historical reasons including military funding, Silicon Valley has assembled a uniquely successful blend of academics, venture capitalists, programmers and entrepreneurs. It is home to more high technology giants (Google, Apple, Facebook, Intel, for instance) than any other area and it receives nearly half of all the venture funding invested in the US. (43) Silicon Valley takes this leadership position very seriously, and an ideology has grown up to go along with it. If you work there you don’t have to believe that technological progress is leading us towards a world of radical abundance which will be a much better place than the world today – but it certainly helps.
I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K
"That made the presentation kind of dry," Salar went on, "so Sergey's solution was to annotate it with clip art the night before our first meeting." I tried to picture the power brokers of Silicon Valley intently pondering an investment of ten million dollars as cheesy money trees and sparkling dollar signs sprouted around Google's potential revenue streams (sales of technology and targeted advertising). Then I imagined their reaction to Google's aggressive traffic projections, which showed the company conducting fifty percent of all Internet searches within two years. Even in Silicon Valley, nobody grew that fast. In 1999, you would have needed uncanny foresight or powerful pharmaceuticals to envision Google's future success.
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Why would I volunteer to take a twenty-five-thousand-dollar salary cut and a less impressive title to be with a bunch of college kids playacting at creating a company? It seemed logical at the time, but only because logic at the time was warped and twisted by the expanding dot-com bubble. Managing marketing and then online product development at the Merc ("The Newspaper of Silicon Valley") had given me a great view of the Internet explosion taking place outside our walls. Jerry Ceppos, the paper's executive editor, called it "the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance, happening right in our backyard." The region was rife with emerging e-Medicis and dot-Botticellis crafting new businesses from nothing but bits and big ideas.
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Google listed her current contact information as the first result. I tried more searches. They all worked better than they had on AltaVista. I no longer begrudged Google the stationery and the stamp. Other signs pointed to something out of the ordinary. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins were the Montagues and Capulets of Silicon Valley venture capital (VC) firms. They had enviable success records individually—Yahoo, Amazon, Apple, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems—and an intense rivalry that usually kept them from investing in the same startup. Yet together they had poured twenty-five million dollars into the fledgling company.
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle
2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War
It was time for the Democrats to lock down Silicon Valley support, now that Clinton had demonstrated, through the Telecommunications Act, his commitment to the industry.72 Clinton didn’t quite clinch the tech lobby’s support that day, but he did five months later when he returned to California to tell tech leaders that he supported their opposition to the state’s Proposition 211, a referendum that would have made these executives and their board members personally liable in lawsuits brought by investors against startups that had improperly squandered resources. The defeat of Proposition 211 was second only to the passage of telecom reform on Silicon Valley’s wish list for 1996. Clinton’s support gave the opponents of the proposition the assistance they needed. Less than a month after Clinton’s visit, industry leaders announced their satisfaction with the Clinton-Gore regime. Steve Jobs put it well: “The past four years have been the best Silicon Valley has ever seen.”73 The message was clear: Silicon Valley wanted another four years of Clinton-Gore. High-tech contributions to the Democrats’ 1996 campaign surged. Clinton sailed to victory in November, and California Proposition 211 was defeated.
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They also understood that their success would depend on their ability not just to free their consciousness and ways of thinking from the dreaded IBM mainframe way of doing things but also to raise large amounts of cash from deep-pocketed venture capitalists. The resulting unions of hackers and capitalists would bring together the left and right versions of neoliberal ideology in particularly powerful ways. They would give Silicon Valley its character and showcase it as a demonstration of how classical liberalism’s original promise to set men free to transform the world could be made concrete. The Silicon Valley story provides a window on many of the characteristics, anticipated and unanticipated, of the coming neoliberal order. Fulfilling the potential of classical liberalism was only one strand of neoliberal thought.
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They themselves were convinced that the IT revolution would sweep all before it, and that Americans had to jump on the train—or more accurately get on the ramp toward the “information superhighway,” as Gore had called it, or see their nation left behind.55 Initially, Silicon Valley was drawn more to Gingrich than to Clinton. He was the one talking in loudest terms about releasing the creative spirits of the market economy and of ensuring that cyberspace would be free of regulation. But the high-flying high-tech wizards of Silicon Valley had themselves never been entirely comfortable with the Republicans’ emphasis on morals and their willingness to use government to enforce them. The wizards believed that an individual should be able to make decisions about his or her own religiosity, sexuality, and entertainment without having to get permission slips from Jerry Falwell–like moral overlords; that was part of the hacker’s creed.
The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game
Alas, Microsoft made server software, too, and Microsoft's marketing muscle brought it an expanding piece of that pie. And then Microsoft adopted the Java language but developed a modified version that worked best with the rest of the Microsoft applications suite. 28 The Lor*q BOOM There were other major thrusts and parries throughout the 1990s. No matter what the Silicon Valley coalition did, Microsoft somehow countered. So the Silicon Valley crew eventually turned to its last weapon. This group, which had often prided itself on its libertarian impulses and its disregard for government, looked to Uncle Sam for help at the end of the 1990s. As in the battle with IBM twenty year before, the U.S. government seemed to be the only player big enough to take on Microsoft.
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The strategy had spread through the heartland of America to Denver, Green Bay, and Minnesota, among other teams. The West Coast offense was now just the winning one. The parallels to the world of business are so striking that they're almost eerie. At almost the same time that Walsh was creating his new offense in Silicon Valley, the business community there was creating a new business model, too. This model shared many of the same attributes: The Silicon Valley business model was about speed in everything from the initial design phase to manufacturing to getting products to market. It was also about smarts. For one thing, new business ideas in the Valley often spun off from research at Stanford University and other academic institutions in the Bay Area.
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Other hallmarks of the new economic model did not have direct parallels to football. For example, unlike sports teams, the companies in Silicon Valley tended to form cooperative networks that shared The MilleivNiAl TRANSITION 45 ideas and worked together on projects—while still competing intensely in other areas. The workers and top talent frequently changed jobs, bringing about further cross-fertilization. In essence, the business model for what became the underpinning of the New Economy was developed in Silicon Valley throughout the 1980s. As the model proved its success, it started migrating out of the Valley—first, via disciples who had experienced its magic.
User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant
A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce
At only four stories tall, the world’s largest office building sits low to the ground but commands a footprint worthy of a UFO that could blot out the sun: a perfect doughnut shape, a mile around its edge. In the middle lies a grove meant to recall the time, just fifty years ago, when Silicon Valley wasn’t Silicon Valley, but rather the Valley of Heart’s Delight, covered in 10 million fruit trees—apricot, cherry, peach, pear, and apple. It took Apple, the computing giant, years to buy up all that land in secret, assembling some sixteen different plots across fifty acres in a $5 billion jigsaw. If the building looks like a spaceship, then it’s one that lifted off directly from Steve Jobs’s imagination to land in the heart of an otherwise sleepy suburb.
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User-friendliness wrought a world in which making things easier to use morphed into making them usable without a second thought. That ease eventually morphed into making products more irresistible, even outright addicting. For a brief period in Silicon Valley, that search for addictiveness seemed harmless—partly because addiction itself was usually framed as “engagement,” a Silicon Valley byword for having users constantly coming back for more. This naive enthusiasm was incubated at Stanford by B. J. Fogg, who had been a star student of Clifford Nass, the Stanford professor whom we met in chapter 4 who studied the politeness that people applied to computers.
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Then the engineer in the back seat piped up to tell me what was about to happen, and I watched as the car’s center console blinked to life with a countdown timer: “5 minutes until pilot mode available.” As one of the first people outside of Audi to experience what was about to happen, I dutifully stared at the timer and waited for the future to arrive. With a sticker price starting at $68,000, the A7 was a fancy car, but not enough to draw attention along the stock-option-paved highways of Silicon Valley. I looked at the drivers around us, knowing they hadn’t a clue about what was happening in the next lane. The five minutes passed, and then two buttons on the steering wheel’s hub blinked, ready to be pressed. That action was inspired by America’s nuclear missile systems, where two keys had to be turned at the same time to avoid mistakes.
Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt
Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen
The “end of history”: Fukuyama, End of History. Silicon Valley versus Route 128: AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 2–3. See also: “Silicon Valley Is Changing, and Its Lead over Other Tech Hubs Narrowing,” Economist, September 1, 2018, https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/09/01/silicon-valley-is-changing-and-its-lead-over-other-tech-hubs-narrowing; “Why Startups Are Leaving Silicon Valley,” Economist, August 30, 2018, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/30/why-startups-are-leaving-silicon-valley. Imperial China and Europe’s fragmented states: Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
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Computer behemoth IBM hailed from New York state, as did Kodak for photography and Xerox for copiers. A slew of computer companies lined Boston’s Route 128. In 1959, tech jobs in the Route 128 corridor were almost triple that of Silicon Valley. Yet by 1990 Silicon Valley’s technology employment was far larger and the region was creating three times as many new jobs. How did Silicon Valley succeed? The answer is that the East Coast tech titans were run like government bureaucracies: monolithic and highly centralized. This was the era of the company man in the gray flannel suit. The Route 128 firms (with now-forgotten names like Digital Equipment Corp., Apollo Computer, and Wang Labs) were formal, hierarchical organizations where decision-making was concentrated at the top and information was cordoned off rather than shared outside the firm.
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Stability was prized, not novel thinking, notes the business scholar AnnaLee Saxenian, in her landmark work, Regional Advantage. In contrast, Silicon Valley was home to a flourishing network of small, nimble firms that competed against one another and actively searched for new ideas. There were no domineering players, start-ups were decentralized, and risk-taking was respected. Competition amounted to lots of small experiments that made everyone smarter. Workers from different firms met outside the office to share ideas, and the labor market encouraged job hopping, letting companies draw on a fuller set of frames from employees. The result was that fragmented Silicon Valley was more innovative and efficient than conformist East Coast firms.
Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford
AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator
Matt Reynolds, “New computer vision challenge wants to teach robots to see in 3D,” New Scientist, April 7, 2017, www.newscientist.com/article/2127131-new-computer-vision-challenge-wants-to-teach-robots-to-see-in-3d/. 3. Ashlee Vance, “Silicon Valley’s latest unicorn is run by a 22-year-old,” Bloomberg Businessweek, August 5, 2019, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-05/scale-ai-is-silicon-valley-s-latest-unicorn. 4. Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, David Silver et al. “Playing Atari with deep reinforcement learning,” DeepMind Research, January 1, 2013, deepmind.com/research/publications/playing-atari-deep-reinforcement-learning. 5.
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As both training and tools get better and as more developers and entrepreneurs begin to deploy AI applications, we are likely to see a kind of Cambrian explosion as the technology is applied in a myriad of different ways. Something similar has occurred on other major computing platforms. I was running a small software company in Silicon Valley in the 1990s when Microsoft Windows emerged as the dominant platform for personal computers. Initially, Windows application development was a highly technical affair involving the C programming language and thousand-page manuals packed with arcane details. The emergence of easier-to-use tools, including highly accessible development environments like Microsoft’s Visual Basic, dramatically expanded the number of people who could engage in Windows programming and soon led to an explosion of applications.
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The company is employing robotic picker arms that use suction cups to lift items with suitable surfaces, such as cans, as well as soft rubber robotic hands that someday will be able to effectively grasp more fragile items. The quest to build a truly dexterous robot has become a major focus of Silicon Valley venture capital firms, and a number of well-funded startup companies have emerged, embracing varied approaches as they innovate at the research frontier. One of the highest-profile startups is Covariant, which was founded in 2017 but emerged from stealth mode only in early 2020. The researchers at Covariant believe that “reinforcement learning”—or essentially learning through trial and error—is the most effective way to progress, and the company claims to be building a system based on a massive deep neural network that it calls “universal AI for robots,” which it expects to eventually power a variety of machines that can “see, reason and act in the world around them, completing tasks too complex and varied for traditional programmed robots.”21 The company, founded by researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and OpenAI, has received investments and publicity from some of the brightest lights in deep learning, including Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, Google’s Jeff Dean and ImageNet founder Fei-Fei Li.22 In 2019, Covariant defeated nineteen other companies in a competition organized by the Swiss industrial robot maker ABB by demonstrating the only system capable of recognizing and manipulating a variety of items without any need for human intervention.23 Covariant will be working with ABB as well other major companies to imbue industrial robots deployed in warehouses and factories with intelligence that the company believes will eventually match or exceed human-level perception and dexterity.
Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game
Yet Microsoft’s eventual rise was in many ways a stark contrast to the archetypal Silicon Valley start-up. Gates’s company was profitable from the beginning. Its headquarters moved from New Mexico not to the Bay Area, but to a Seattle suburb. Gates himself was financially conservative, preferring independence to the involvement of venture capitalists. When Microsoft finally did relent to the overtures of Silicon Valley, it raised $1 million for a meager 5 percent of the company in 1981—this at a time when the company was already on track to generate $15 million in revenues that year. Microsoft was so removed from the IPO track of Silicon Valley, it wasn’t even a corporation for the first five years, organized instead as a partnership.
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In 1971, on track for just $9 million in revenues for the year, Intel filed for what is now the successful start-up’s final rite of passage: an initial public offering. Intel’s IPO, taking place within three years of the company’s founding, helped formalize the financial playbook of Silicon Valley. While Intel is one of Silicon Valley’s most storied brands, its initial fund-raising method was not a typical venture capital round, as the money was collected separately from wealthy individuals and families, including Grinnell College, and the founders. However, as start-ups had no financial histories, institutional investors such as pension funds, university endowments, and foundations were not equipped for the task of evaluating the strength of these new companies as investment prospects.
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But his adoptive home provided great love: As a young adult, to avoid hurting his parents’ feelings, he didn’t search for his origins. And yet Silicon Valley seemed as open to him as it was to William Henry Gates III, a scion of a wealthy family from Seattle who had served as a congressional page during high school, who had access to a mainframe computer in his posh Seattle private school, who had made it to Harvard. Indeed, Jobs reached the economic pinnacle much faster than Gates. The accelerants were venture capital, geographic location, and access to Silicon Valley’s tight ecosystem. When Jobs sensed he had a product that worked in the market, he reached out to Atari’s founder, Nolan Bushnell.
Americana by Bhu Srinivasan
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game
Yet Microsoft’s eventual rise was in many ways a stark contrast to the archetypal Silicon Valley start-up. Gates’s company was profitable from the beginning. Its headquarters moved from New Mexico not to the Bay Area, but to a Seattle suburb. Gates himself was financially conservative, preferring independence to the involvement of venture capitalists. When Microsoft finally did relent to the overtures of Silicon Valley, it raised $1 million for a meager 5 percent of the company in 1981—this at a time when the company was already on track to generate $15 million in revenues that year. Microsoft was so removed from the IPO track of Silicon Valley, it wasn’t even a corporation for the first five years, organized instead as a partnership.
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In 1971, on track for just $9 million in revenues for the year, Intel filed for what is now the successful start-up’s final rite of passage: an initial public offering. Intel’s IPO, taking place within three years of the company’s founding, helped formalize the financial playbook of Silicon Valley. While Intel is one of Silicon Valley’s most storied brands, its initial fund-raising method was not a typical venture capital round, as the money was collected separately from wealthy individuals and families, including Grinnell College, and the founders. However, as start-ups had no financial histories, institutional investors such as pension funds, university endowments, and foundations were not equipped for the task of evaluating the strength of these new companies as investment prospects.
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But his adoptive home provided great love: As a young adult, to avoid hurting his parents’ feelings, he didn’t search for his origins. And yet Silicon Valley seemed as open to him as it was to William Henry Gates III, a scion of a wealthy family from Seattle who had served as a congressional page during high school, who had access to a mainframe computer in his posh Seattle private school, who had made it to Harvard. Indeed, Jobs reached the economic pinnacle much faster than Gates. The accelerants were venture capital, geographic location, and access to Silicon Valley’s tight ecosystem. When Jobs sensed he had a product that worked in the market, he reached out to Atari’s founder, Nolan Bushnell.
Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook by Michael Lopp
do what you love, finite state, game design, job satisfaction, John Gruber, knowledge worker, reality distortion field, remote working, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sorting algorithm, systems thinking, web application
At the end of this analysis is an unfortunate truth: you're not going to know what you're getting until you're there. The only guarantee is that it will be different than where you are now, and that means you're going to learn...something. Good. The more you know, the fewer the surprises. Chapter 36. The Curse of the Silicon Valley In 20 years of engineering life in the Silicon Valley, I have never heard an engineering manager tell me, "My degree in engineering management sure came in handy there." In fact, outside of company-sponsored management training, I've never heard of training specifically in engineering management. I'm certain it exists, but the fact that no coworker I've ever worked with has showered praise on an external engineering management class is intriguing.
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No drama, dealing with in management, You Will Be a Multilingual Translator Dreamweaver, My Tools Do Only What I've Told Them to Do Dropbox, My Tools Do Not Care Where My Work Is E editing presentations, The Disaster email and remote workers, Do You Mean It? Enemy, The Enemy engagement at work, Early Warning Signs of Doom engineers, That Damned Triangle, That Damned Triangle, The Reveal, The Curse of the Silicon Valley bits, features, and truth exercise, That Damned Triangle constructing a demo, The Reveal management, where they come from, The Curse of the Silicon Valley established companies vs. startups, Three Choices Evening Scrub of the to-do list, Practice Productivity Minimalism, The Trickle Process excuses, On Excuses exodus from the company, This Sucks experience, The Issue with the Doof, Established, Established, Bad News About Your Bright Future acquiring, at established companies, Established value of, The Issue with the Doof vs. confidence, Bad News About Your Bright Future F failure, Delivery, Do You Mean It?
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, Up, Up, Partial Information, Partial Information, The Enemy, The Illuminator, Bits, Features, and Truth, Bits, The Curse of the Silicon Valley doofs, Partial Information managing up, Up micromanagers, Technical Direction, The Illuminator organic vs. mechanic, Is There a 1:1? program managers, Bits, Features, and Truth, Bits responses to fuckups, The Enemy status reports and communication, Are There Status Reports? when to bring issues to, Up where they are coming from, The Curse of the Silicon Valley measures vs. content in the yearly review, Show Me the Money mechanic managers, Is There a 1:1? meetings, Managing Managers, Are There Status Reports?
Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System by Chet Haase
Andy Rubin, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, commoditize, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Ken Thompson, lock screen, machine readable, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, pull request, QWERTY keyboard, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, web application
I particularly enjoyed these two: Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff Operation Elop: The Final Years of Nokia’s Mobile Phones, by Merina Salminen and Pekka Nykänen (The original Finnish book Operaatio Elop was never published in English, but a crowd-sourced effort resulted in an English translation in PDF and other formats, which are available online). Silicon Valley Tech History There are also many great books and documentaries about tech history, including these which I really enjoyed: Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made, by Andy Hertzfeld This is a great book for understanding how one of the canonical pieces of Silicon Valley history came to be. It’s also a great look into the people and the team behind that project. Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson I enjoyed this book not only for its interesting portrayal of Mr. Jobs, but also (even more) for the history of Silicon Valley and high tech that it told along the way.
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Most of the people who joined the Android team through 2006 had worked at one or more of Be/PalmSource, WebTV/Microsoft, and Danger. It has always been a fact in tech, and in Silicon Valley in particular, that people move around between companies and end up working together in different places and contexts throughout their careers. It’s never a good idea to burn bridges when you leave companies. For one thing, being decent to people is just the right thing to do. But in Silicon Valley, it’s a really bad idea to burn those bridges, because the odds are very high that your future self will need to cross those bridges with some of those very same people; it would be handy if the bridges weren’t on fire at the time.39 In the case of Android, it was much more than this indirect and coincidental effect of people ending up at the same company later on.
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Hiring was the next step: Android needed more people. But hiring Android engineers proved to be difficult at Google. Hiring at Google Google has always been famous in the tech world for its hiring process. Around that time, there were billboards up and down the main artery of Silicon Valley, Highway 101, displaying a cryptic math puzzle: This equation greeted drivers at that time along highway 101 in Silicon Valley The puzzle confounded drivers. There was no mention of Google, just a puzzle that would lead successful solvers to a recruiting site for the programmer-focused company. An engineering candidate lucky enough to get their resume past the recruiter and into the system faced potentially multiple interviews, including a phone screen and in-person interviews with various engineers.
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
Here are some of the topics I’ll be covering: How the subscription model is transforming every industry on the planet, including retail, journalism, manufacturing, media, transportation, and enterprise software The basic financial model and most important growth metrics for subscription businesses How the subscription model changes your approach to engineering, marketing, sales, finance, and IT The eight core growth strategies of all subscription businesses A customer-centric operating framework for subscription businesses I want to note that this isn’t just a Silicon Valley story, nor is this a Silicon Valley book (there are already lots of those). This is a business story. In many ways, this is a book that favors the so-called legacy companies, or “the incumbents.” Because underneath all the hype of technological disruption is actually a very simple but powerful idea: companies are finally starting to understand their customers.
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And with all the dramatic improvements we’re seeing in manufacturing and 3D printing, maybe a whole new crop of automobile start-ups will be able to batch-print their own vehicles in Chinese factories (just like cell phones!), right? Wrong. As it turns out, it is really hard to build a safe, great car at scale. Just ask Elon Musk. Or Apple. Or Google. SILICON VALLEY VERSUS DETROIT? BET ON DETROIT As it turns out, the Big Three have some distinct institutional advantages over Silicon Valley when it comes to building the future of the automobile industry. First, they have the distribution. The vast dealer networks these companies operate are commanding assets. Second, the scale of their operations is impossible to duplicate; more than 17 million cars were sold in the United States last year (Tesla sold around 100,000).
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Roughly a quarter of the more than 1,000 enclosed malls in the United States are expected to close within the next five years (the total number of malls peaked at around 1,500 in the nineties). A quick retail industry Google search turns up “dead mall” fan sites with names like “Label Scar” for the faded markings left behind when sign lettering is removed. Ecommerce, the thinking in Silicon Valley goes, is clearly the future. It now represents more than 13 percent of the total retail market and is growing at 15 percent a year, versus just 3 percent for brick and mortar retail. As of this writing, that ecommerce dollar amount currently stands at around $450 billion and is expected to surpass $500 billion by the end of 2018.
The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler
The rest of the country has been slow to realize it, but there are many areas in which San Francisco is not that relevant, and New York dominates.” As the Applied Sciences competition was building, comparisons to Silicon Valley were ubiquitous in statements from city officials and in news coverage. “We can’t just sit here and let Silicon Valley beat us,” Mayor Bloomberg told a gathering of tech entrepreneurs in October 2011, as the responses to the request for proposals were coming in.60 But New York was not, in fact, seeking to transplant an entire industry or create a Silicon Valley East. The NYCEDC and the mayor’s office were clear that Applied Sciences NYC would be connected to the particular existing and emerging strengths of the city.
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Silicon Forest was initially planted in 1946, when four returning war veterans started Tektronix to invent and manufacture oscilloscopes.53 Tektronix grew to be one of the top manufacturers of test and measurement instruments and, over time, spun off dozens of start-up companies. In 1976 the semiconductor maker Intel started up in Silicon Valley. Portland was conveniently close to Silicon Valley, with a lower cost of living and inexpensive raw materials for manufacturing (like water and electricity). Soon thereafter, Intel moved a cadre of engineers to Portland, and a Portland-based team developed the company’s signature Pentium chip. Intel did not spur as many spin-offs in the region as Tektronix had, but it did attract a group of specialized suppliers, who sought to be near a major customer.
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CHAPTER 8 1. The phrase “cities of knowledge” comes from Margaret Pugh O’Mara’s excellent book of the same name. Her book is a careful exposition of the role of the federal government in creating Silicon Valley and of the efforts of other places to create their own comparable centers of knowledge and economic development. Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton University Press, 2005). 2. Daniel P. Moynihan, “Toward a National Urban Policy,” The Public Interest 17 (Fall 1969), p. 8. Over his long career, Moynihan remained intensely focused on the sprawl-inducing impact of federal housing and transportation policies and investments on the American metropolitan landscape.
Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product
Many women, including myself, could see experiences of their own—experiences that perhaps they were unwilling to label as harassment at the time—in Horvath’s allegations. TechCrunch, ordinarily a Silicon Valley cheerleading rag, and seldom one to rock the boat, published a remarkably sympathetic piece documenting the abuse she experienced at the company, concluding that the “situation has greater import than a single person’s struggle: Horvath’s story is a tale of what many underrepresented groups feel and experience in the tech sector.” The story of Horvath’s exit had a long media cycle, including coverage in publications rarely concerned with Silicon Valley or its products at the time. Readers outside the tech industry learned about GitHub’s bizarre policy of “holacracy,” the so-called decentralized management structure that is a clusterfuck in practice, where no one is responsible for anything and everyone is responsible for everything.
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To deter scrutiny, many tech founders and insiders assumed the mantle of responsibility and attempted to diversify their teams (rather than turning to existing feminist organizers in Silicon Valley, like Double Union). They prioritized capitalism-compliant optics over real solutions, the polite over the combative, and the conciliatory over the activist, just like Lean In. Championing “diversity” was also a diversion tactic. Throwing money at diversity programs was less fraught than examining the causes for the lack of it (patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism). Heartwarming images of ten-year-old girls learning Python could temporarily overshadow other issues that Silicon Valley was increasingly held accountable for, like the vast and growing economic inequality in the Bay Area, the omnisurveillance that Edward Snowden’s disclosures brought to public attention, surveillance capitalism, and how the tech industry exacerbated lack of public trust in institutions.
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“I am a human being, not an algorithm,” Kristy Milland, an Amazon Mechanical Turk worker, once wrote in an email to jeff@amazon.com, describing how she relies on MTurk income to keep her “family safe from foreclosure,” and wishes to be seen on the platform as a “highly skilled laborer,” rather than hidden from requesters like lines of code. She wasn’t speaking as a user, but as a laborer. But even users can be conscripted to these platforms just the same, subject to the whims of Silicon Valley mega-corporations as if they were exploited workers or dispirited constituents. Google has its users perform free micro-labor when they solve reCAPTCHA puzzles—ostensibly to keep bots from accessing websites, but in practice, a distributed system of cleaning various machine-learning corpuses.
From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly
Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business process, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, computer vision, continuous integration, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, inventory management, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, popular electronics, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, vertical integration
In the last 20 or 30 years, in Europe and many other parts of the world, planners have attempted to reproduce the success of Silicon Valley in their local economies. Great Britain, for example, has a Silicon Fen (in the lowlands around Cambridge), a Silicon Ditch (in the Thames Valley corridor to the west of London), and a Silicon Glen (in Scotland). When planners attempt to clone Silicon Valley, they generally do so by trying to establish an economic and physical environment similar to that which enabled the original Silicon Valley to flourish. Such attempts are always deeply informed by history. For example, it is widely understood that Silicon Valley did not happen overnight. Though it was first called “Silicon Valley” in the mid 1970s, it was the culmination of a process that had begun at least 40 years earlier with the appointment of Frederick Terman as a professor at Stanford University.
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Though it was first called “Silicon Valley” in the mid 1970s, it was the culmination of a process that had begun at least 40 years earlier with the appointment of Frederick Terman as a professor at Stanford University. Its symbolic birth was the formation of Hewlett-Packard in a garage in 1939.1 Usually, a Silicon Valley clone has a technological university as a source of innovation, venture capital is available, and an attempt is made to foster certain cultural factors, such as ease of transfer between academe and commerce and forgiveness of entrepreneurial failure. The cultural factors are usually the hardest to reproduce.
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The cultural factors are usually the hardest to reproduce. Not all Silicon Valley clones have been successful, but the results are encouraging enough to have spawned dozens of attempts, some of which have been successful indeed. Silicon Valley clones have mainly fostered firms in the computer hardware, 304 Chapter 10 networking, and telecommunications industries. They do not appear to be especially good Petri dishes for software firms. In this closing chapter, I will identify some of the historical factors that have led to US dominance of the software industry and consider why these factors have been so difficult to replicate elsewhere.
The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida
affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional
The current urban trend in high tech is not so much a startling reversal as a correction of a historical aberration. The venture capital icon Paul Graham saw the writing on the wall in 2006. For all its advantages and power, he wrote, Silicon Valley had a great weakness. This high-tech “paradise,” with its roots in the 1950s and 1960s, had become “one giant parking lot,” he observed. “San Francisco and Berkeley are great, but they’re 40 miles away. Silicon Valley proper is soul-crushing suburban sprawl. It has fabulous weather, which makes it significantly better than the soul-crushing sprawl of most other American cities. But a competitor that managed to avoid sprawl would have real leverage.”20 He was right—and that’s exactly what’s happening today.
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Its leaders were working hard to change its trajectory, and as a professor of economic development I was involved in the thick of it. Yet, for all its leading-edge research and innovation potential, the talent at Pittsburgh’s universities was not staying in the region; my computer science and engineering colleagues and my own students were leaving in droves for high-tech hubs like Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Austin. When the Internet pioneer Lycos, which had its roots at CMU, abruptly announced that it was moving from Pittsburgh to Boston, all at once a lightbulb seemed to go off in my head. The traditional thinking that people followed companies and jobs, it seemed to me, was not working.
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Table 2.2 shows the top five large metros (those with over 1 million people) where the average worker has the most left over after paying for housing and the five where the average worker has the least.28 The top five are a who’s who of tech hubs and superstar cities. The average worker in San Jose (the heart of Silicon Valley) has $48,566 left over; in San Francisco, it’s $45,200. In Washington, DC, it’s $43,308, and in Boston and New York it’s $42,858 and $42,120, respectively, considerably more than Orlando, $25,774, or Las Vegas, $26,194. In fact, the wages for the “average worker,” as well as for each of the three main classes of workers—highly paid creative-class workers, lower-paid working-class workers, and service workers—are all higher in larger metros, being positively correlated with population size.29 But these relatively large average amounts left over are mainly the product of the higher wages that accrue to the members of the advantaged creative class.
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper
Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Bill Atkinson, business cycle, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Gary Kildall, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, informal economy, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, natural language processing, new economy, PalmPilot, pets.com, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, urban planning
The same joke is now true in Silicon Valley. You can buttonhole a stranger in line at Starbucks and ask how her Web site is doing. The stranger—without skipping a beat— will reply, "Great! I've just restructured the frames to tighten up the navigation!" Here in Silicon Valley, we forget how skewed our population is, and we should frequently remind ourselves how abnormal we really are. The average person who uses a software-based product around here isn't really very average. Programmers generally work in high-tech environments, surrounded by their technical peers in enclaves such as Silicon Valley; Route 128 outside Boston; Research Triangle in North Carolina; Redmond, Washington; and Austin, Texas.
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All of Jane's documents were stored in little folders, which were stored in other little folders. Jane didn't understand this or see the advantage to storing things that way. Actually, Jane didn't give it a lot of thought but merely took the path of least resistance. Jane had just finished drafting the new PR contract for a Silicon Valley startup company. She selected Close from the File menu. Instead of simply doing as she directed and closing the document, Word popped up a dialog box. It was, of course, the all-too-familiar Do You Want to Save the Changes? confirmation box. She responded—as always—by pressing the Enter key. She responded this way so consistently and often that she no longer even looked at the dialog box.
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Meanwhile, the survivors sit staring at their computer screens wondering how to find anything that might be of use to them. They wait endlessly for Web sites to download unnecessary pictures while still letting them get lost in complex hierarchies of unwanted information. The Web is probably the biggest dancing bear we've ever faced. Deadline Management There is a lot of obsessive behavior in Silicon Valley about time to market. It is frequently asserted that shipping a product right now is far better than shipping it later. This imperative is used as a justification for setting impossibly ambitious ship dates and for burning out employees, but this is a smoke screen that hides bigger, deeper fears—a red herring.
Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies
active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game
It is closer to the footprints that are left on a beach: evidence of some past physical activity. In the case of Silicon Valley’s tech giants, the beach in question is open to the public, but privately owned and run, granting its owners exclusive rights to analyze the prints in the sand. In the utopia of Zuckerberg et al., every thought or emotion that passes through our minds will leave an impression, opening up the recesses of human psychology to inspection on a vast scale. Critics of Silicon Valley occasionally argue that data should really belong to the user, given that we produced it (as if ordering an Uber were like writing a poem).
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Since the late nineteenth century, nationalists have sought to manufacture popular mobilizations by conjuring up memories of past wars and enthusiasm for future ones. But something else has happened more recently, which has quietly fed the spirit of warfare into civilian life, making us increasingly combative. The emphasis on “real time” knowledge that was originally privileged in war has become a feature of the business world, of Silicon Valley in particular. The speed of knowledge and decision making becomes crucial, and consensus is sidelined in the process. Rather than trusting experts, on the basis that they are neutral and outside the fray, we have come to rely on services that are fast, but whose public status is unclear. A 2017 survey, for example, found that more people were willing to trust search engines than human editors.4 The promise of expertise, first made in the seventeenth century, is to provide us with a version of reality that we can all agree on.
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Interest in the public uses and benefits of mathematics blossomed through the 1670s and 1680s, not least because of all the new jobs in public finance and taxation that the government was creating at the time. Outside the state, often among the recently established coffee houses of the financial class, a new intellectual culture was developing, centered around a commitment to solving problems using mathematics. Like today’s Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, poring over the latest techniques of data analytics in search of the next big business idea, this nerdish culture had world-changing implications. It built on the example of mercantile accounting, which demonstrated the new social possibilities of using numbers to depict social life, while combining it with faith in mathematics.
Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork
Amazon execs favored Boston, Bloomberg News reported. There were a few dissenting voices. Silicon Valley congressman Ro Khanna tweeted that tech companies shouldn’t “be asking for tax breaks from cities within my district or those outside. They should be investing in communities.” A Los Angeles Times columnist called the process “arrogant, naive and more than a teensy bit cynical.” But as Bezos had hoped, the overall response was positive and clarifying. While tech-industry critics in Seattle and Silicon Valley were questioning the tech giants’ role in accelerating gentrification and homelessness, other cities were desperate to host them.
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More from the Author Gearheads About the Author © DAVID PAUL MORRIS Brad Stone is senior executive editor of global technology at Bloomberg News and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, and The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley. He has covered Silicon Valley for more than twenty years and lives in the San Francisco Bay area. SimonandSchuster.com www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Brad-Stone @simonbooks ALSO BY BRAD STONE The Upstarts The Everything Store Gearheads We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.
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There was 30, 40, 50 percent growth in orders each week, undermining any attempts at careful planning and pushing that earliest batch of eclectic recruits into such a frenetic pace that they would later share a palpable sense of amnesia about those early times. The first potential investors mostly balked, distrustful of the internet and this geeky, self-assured young man from the East Coast with a crazy, barking laugh. But in 1996, Silicon Valley venture capitalists got ahold of the startup, and the abundance of money flipped a switch in the brain of the budding CEO, sparking a bullish fervor of wild ambitions and fever dreams of domination. The first company-wide motto was “Get Big Fast.” Amazon’s rapid expansion, during what became known as the dot-com boom in the late 1990s, was epic.
Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell
Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve
Other prominent boosters included Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan, the entrepreneur best known for advocating Silicon Valley’s complete secession from the United States to form its own corporate city-state. The Sovereign Individual’s coauthors were James Dale Davidson, a private investor who specializes in advising the rich on how to profit from economic catastrophe, and the late William Rees-Mogg, long-serving editor of the Times and father of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Conservative MP beloved of Britain’s reactionary pro-Brexit right. I was intrigued by Anthony’s description of the book as a master key to the relationship between New Zealand and the techno-libertarians of Silicon Valley. Reluctant to enrich Davidson or the Rees-Mogg estate any further, I bought a used edition online, the musty pages of which were here and there smeared with the desiccated snot of whatever nose-picking libertarian had preceded me.
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Moldbug was the intellectual progenitor of neoreaction, an antidemocratic movement that advocated for a kind of white-nationalist oligarchic neofeudalism—rule by and for a self-proclaimed cognitive elite—and which had found a small but influential constituency in Silicon Valley. Beneath all the intricacy and detail of its world-building, The Founder’s Paradox was clearly animated by an uneasy fascination with the utopian future imagined by the techno-libertarians of Silicon Valley. The exhibition’s centerpiece was a tabletop strategy game called Founders, which drew heavily on the aesthetic—as well as the explicitly colonialist language and objectives—of The Settlers of Catan, a massively popular multiplayer strategy board game.
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New Zealand, Anthony pointed out, was positioned right on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a horseshoe curve of geological fault lines stretching upward from the western flank of the Americas, back down along the eastern coasts of Russia and Japan and on into the South Pacific. It was volcano country. It seemed odd, I said, given all this seismic activity, that superrich Silicon Valley technologists were supposedly apocalypse-proofing themselves by buying up land down here. “Yeah,” said Anthony, “but some of them are buying farms and sheep stations pretty far inland. Tsunamis aren’t going to be a big issue there. And what they’re after is space, and clean water. Two things we’ve got a lot of down here.”
Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff
4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler
., “Internet Milestone—30th Anniversary 3-Network Transmission,” filmed November 7, 2007, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, https://youtu.be/lapwgqzWC5g. Thanks also to Marc Weber and Eric Dennis of the Computer History Museum for providing photographs and video of the van from the museum’s collection. Recently became known as Silicon Valley: in 1971, the journalist Don Hoefler popularized the term “Silicon Valley” in a series of articles for Electronic News, an industry trade publication. 4, The first computer sat … The computer in the van was an LSI-11; the custom packet radio equipment was built by Collins Radio. The location of the repeaters in the Bay Area packet radio network is shown in a map provided by the Computer History Museum.
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Google is especially reliant on contingent labor; the company has more temps, vendors, and contractors (TVCs) than full-time employees. 131, They also perform … Gray and Suri, Ghost Work. 132, This shadow workforce is just … A 2016 report found that average earnings for direct employees in Silicon Valley was $113,300, while white-collar contract workers made $53,200 and blue-collar contract workers made $19,900. The same study found that contract workers receive few benefits: 31 percent of blue-collar contract workers had no health insurance at all. See Silicon Valley Rising, “Tech’s Invisible Workforce,” March 2016. Traumatizing working conditions for content moderators: Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). 132, Predatory inclusion, argues … Predatory inclusion: Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Where Platform Capitalism and Racial Capitalism Meet: The Sociology of Race and Racism in the Digital Society,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 6, no. 4 (2020): 441–49.
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Drawing closer, you might’ve seen something else through the rear windows: a person typing at a computer terminal. In fact, the whole back of the van was filled with electronics. It looked like the inside of a research lab, the sort you might find in the meticulously landscaped office parks of the surrounding region, a place so crowded with semiconductor companies that it had recently become known as Silicon Valley. But what made this van special wouldn’t be visible no matter how close you came. The van was a node in a network. Not a single network, but a network of networks—an inter-network. This internetwork was immense. It spanned land, sea, sky, and space, and stitched together computers from all over the world.
Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork
Watching and reporting on the strategies and maneuvers of all of the top media and tech entities gave rise to this book. It took root as the two of us collaborated in 2018 on daily (nigh hourly) business and technology stories for Deadline, the entertainment news outlet that originated as Nikki Finke’s rule-breaking blog. Both of us had spent years covering Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street in equal measure. We chronicled stories with far-reaching consequences, among them the emergence of the internet, boom and bust times interrupted by 9/11 and the global financial crisis, and the devastation of the Sony Pictures hack. But we had never experienced anything like the eruption of streaming, which was rewriting the rules of the entertainment business so quickly that it often gave our daily work an Etch A Sketch quality.
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Hastings was increasingly focused on education reform but planned to keep his “toe in the water” as an investor or advisor. Hastings and Randolph both lived in Santa Cruz, so they soon developed a habit of carpooling on Highway 17 up and over the Santa Cruz Mountains, spitballing ideas along the way. As Randolph observed, Silicon Valley loves a good origin story, a tale of inspiration or keen insight that distills the essence of a company. The best-loved of these creation stories involve disruptive change that holds the promise of rich rewards. Consider the alcohol-soaked genesis of Uber, an idea StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp began incubating after he and his friends spent $800 to hire a private driver on New Year’s Eve.
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Compared with Blockbuster, whose khaki-and-blue-shirt staff uniforms and regimented aisles were directly inspired by mass brands like McDonald’s, Netflix emphasized the individual. It encouraged customers to rate each movie, reflecting those ratings on its site. It was also beginning to gather data from each subscriber that would become a revolutionary tool. Netflix’s subscribers weren’t the only ones who were enthusiastic. Silicon Valley investors had pumped $100 million into the startup, allowing it to grow to more than 350 employees. As the dot-com boom approached its frenzied apex, bankers sniffing another initial public-stock offering in the air began “circling [Netflix] like vultures with briefcases.” When the tech bubble burst in March 2000, the easy money dried up.
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
In his view, Morgan Stanley, having no tradition of pleasing investors, and no ability to do so, designed its investment bank without the investor in mind. Meeker and her bosses didn’t know enough to have a guilty conscience when they sold out investors to please corporations. In a game like this, that’s a huge advantage. viii Introduction M y partner Fred and I are standing outside of Il Fornaio Restaurant in Palo Alto, the epicenter of Silicon Valley. It’s July 1999, and although it’s only eight in the morning, we have already been scrambling at the office for an hour and a half. It’s a busy day, way too busy to be loitering around. Things are hopping. Internet and telecom names are jumping off the charts, so all my old friends are busy too.
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He told me that I had felt familiar, and that he saw a lot of him in me (without the deep booming voice, I suppose.) Wall Street, especially research, was a game, and he would teach me what he could about how to win it. I asked a few questions, but mostly about where we were headed. Los Angeles was just a quick stop to see a company from Bob’s PA (personal account), and then off to San Francisco and Silicon Valley for several analyst meetings. · · · After a quick lunch at an El Pollo Loco, I was about to visit my first company as an analyst. Oddly, it was a milk company, Foremost-Knudsen. Bob explained that we were about to enter a company with sales in the multi-billions, but whose stock was trading for less than $100 million in value.
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. · · · Aware they had a revenue problem, management at Paine Webber began to hire investment bankers to leverage the research department. Bob Pangia, who had previously run a technology group at Drexel Burnham, was hired out of Kidder Peabody. With his sidekick, Dave Lahar, and a former Baltimore Colts cheerleader, Susan Harmon, out in San Francisco, we began to scour Silicon Valley for deals. It was frustrating as Morgan Stanley and their technology banker Frank Quattrone were winning most of the good deals. On one trip, Pangia and Lahar picked me up in the morning at the Santa Clara Marriott, and we drove around to four or five meetings. We ended up north of Santa Clara, near Burlingame, with no more meetings.
CIOs at Work by Ed Yourdon
8-hour work day, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, distributed generation, Donald Knuth, fail fast, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Googley, Grace Hopper, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, Julian Assange, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Zipcar
If anything, the result of all this technology is that people are not likely to reduce their work week; they are likely to just take on more work. That was my conclusion, so I changed fields kind of by accident. I had moved, by this point, from the University of Illinois in Champaign to Silicon Valley. And I began to work in Silicon Valley—still working for the Parks and Recreation Department, but I began to see and meet people in technology. People who work for HP, people who worked for some of the chip companies, Texas Instruments, and various others. So my general awareness of technology started to ramp up pretty significantly.
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And as it turns out, I’ve been on a couple of public boards also, so I completely agree with you that obviously in places like Silicon Valley, maybe everybody on the board is a technology person. But not in the typical Fortune 500 companies. You’ve got strong marketing people and financial people and so on, but, you know, having a real strong voice for technology—what a great career. Ford: And I’m a very strong believer in all kinds of diversity, and I think some of those Silicon Valley companies would be a lot better off if they didn’t have just technologists on the board. Yourdon: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
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Yourdon: Now that is very interesting. Now you spent an early part of your career out in Silicon Valley, didn’t you? Ellyn: I did, I did. Yourdon: And there were no women out there? Ellyn: Just to recap, the first five years were in hospitals, and I did a lot of medical computing. Yourdon: Right. Ellyn: The next ten were at Chrysler Corporation. Yourdon: Oh right. Ellyn: Where I was in advanced technology software planning and managed the artificial intelligence group. Then I went to Xerox and from Xerox went to Netscape. Yourdon: Ahh, okay. What about out in Silicon Valley? Was there also an absence of female, you know, really strong IT managers?
Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook
3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game
This culture of mavericks is more interested in moving the needle forward than following the path of tradition.”34 Silicon Valley is in many ways a land of opportunity within the land of opportunity. Unsurprisingly, nearly 35 percent of Silicon Valley residents are immigrants (for the U.S. as a whole, it’s only about 13 percent). Many of these immigrants notes Perry Piscione, “came with no English language skills, no family or friends, varying degrees of education, but a common drive to seek out better opportunities. If you are motivated in Silicon Valley, [then] you can make it, period.”35 What matters in the Valley is not where you were born or where (or even whether) you went to college.
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Probably the freest industries in America today are found in the high-tech arena, epitomized by Silicon Valley, home to companies such as Hewlett Packard, Facebook, Google, Cisco, Oracle, and Intel. If you’ve visited the Valley and experienced its entrepreneurial culture, you’ll be struck by how similar it is to the way America was described during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the energy, the optimism, the fearless pursuit of success and achievement. In her book Secrets of Silicon Valley, author and entrepreneur Deborah Perry Piscione describes how, after living in the Valley for several months, she “started to appreciate how much people are in the driver’s seat here.
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If you are motivated in Silicon Valley, [then] you can make it, period.”35 What matters in the Valley is not where you were born or where (or even whether) you went to college. What matters is your ability. Talent is the currency of Silicon Valley, and individuals there use their talent to move us forward, pioneering revolutionary achievements in social media, big data, personalized health care, biotechnology, smartphones, mobile commerce, cloud technology, and 3D printing, to name just a few. Silicon Valley is the place creators like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Peter Thiel go to make a fortune by inventing the future. What made it all possible? No doubt there are many forces at work, but one enormous factor is the extent to which the government has kept its hands off the Valley.
No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer
Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, FedEx blackjack story, global village, hiring and firing, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, late fees, loose coupling, loss aversion, out of africa, performance metric, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, super pumped, tech worker, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, work culture
At that time Ted was one of just a few employees based in Los Angeles and he would commute up to Silicon Valley one day a week. Every Wednesday he’d race into the office and try to cram in three days’ worth of discussions into six hours. David, Patty, and Leslie all gave Ted feedback about how hectic his one day in the office was for everybody else. “When you leave on Wednesday afternoon it feels like a jet boat came through and left a massive wake behind it,” Patty explained. “It’s stressful and disruptive for the entire office.” I’d been meaning to talk to Ted about this, but now I didn’t have to. After that session he reorganized his schedule to come to Silicon Valley for longer trips and to handle more over the phone before his visits.
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Millions of businesspeople have studied the Netflix Culture Deck, a set of 127 slides originally intended for internal use but that Reed shared widely on the internet in 2009. Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, reportedly said that the Culture Deck “may well be the most important document ever to come out of Silicon Valley.” I loved the Netflix Culture Deck for its honesty. And I loathed it for its content. Below is a sample so you can see why. Quite apart from the question of whether it is ethical to fire hardworking employees who don’t manage to do extraordinary work, these slides struck me as pure bad management.
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Reed Reed and I got to know each other and eventually he suggested I interview Netflix employees to get a firsthand glimpse of what the Netflix culture is really like, and to gather data in order to write a book with him. This was a chance to find out how a company with a culture in direct opposition to everything we know about psychology, business, and human behavior can have such remarkable results. I have conducted over two hundred interviews with current and past Netflix employees in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, São Paulo, Amsterdam, Singapore, and Tokyo, speaking with employees at every level, from executives to administrative assistants. Netflix generally doesn’t believe in anonymity, but I insisted that during my interviews all employees be given the option to conduct these interviews anonymously.
Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang
4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases
For this analyst, these apps, their convenience, indicate that disruptive innovation is happening in China. A friend of mine, a VC who spends ample time traveling between the United States and China, remarks that the Silicon Valley hubris is real. He tells me that most of the time, you hear people say they’re starting the new Silicon Valley of somewhere, and it never happens, it fails. As a result, Silicon Valley’s mythological standing only gets greater and greater. But what lies at the heart of Silicon Valley’s greatness, for him, is actually the embrace of failure. This embrace of failure is very much cultural. And in China, he’s observed an increased tolerance for risk, for failure, alongside an increased set of innovations.
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It would have been easy because at least then a person, a company, a country could serve as the symbol of sinister surveillance. Instead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t just remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley. And in Silicon Valley, money and investment are reliquaries of devotion that allow people to transcend rules. For all the attention the Chinese Great Firewall receives in blocking Twitter and YouTube, Alibaba’s Aliyun offers a way to bypass the Great Firewall, for a fee. Other well-known surveillance companies such as Hikvision and SenseTime have a slew of foreign investment.
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One hindrance to Chinese innovation has been the accusation that any technological advancement boils down to a government conspiracy to surveil its citizens. The analyst shakes her head, perplexed by the American obsession with the Chinese surveillance state, while Americans seem to care so little about the surveillance in their own lives. We talk about the Silicon Valley hubris that keeps people from digging too deeply into Chinese technology with an honest look: Silicon Valley is the peak of innovation, so how could another place surpass it? On the other side of hubris is a rhetorical trap: China as a constructed enemy for the American government, in order for it to catalyze domestic support for a range of policies by inciting old-fashioned, U.S.A.
The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard
affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game
The expertise workers gain from this experience increases their chances for entrepreneurial success. Imagine the enormous differences in the odds of discovering the next Internet breakthrough in a cafe in Greece rather than in the workspaces of Google or a start-up in Silicon Valley. Like any game of chance, higher payoffs and better odds motivate increased risk-taking. A growing critical mass of success creates communities of expertise, like Silicon Valley, where experts exchange ideas more frequently and are consequently more likely to find valuable innovations. Again, better odds of success afforded by large communities of experts motivate increased risk-taking.
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Chapter 6: The Myth That Progress Hollows Out the Middle Class 1. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 202. 2. Christopher Matthews, “How Silicon Valley Is Hollowing Out the Economy (and Stealing from You to Boot),” Time, May 7, 2013, http://business.time.com/2013/05/07/how-silicon-valley-is-hollowing-out-the-economy-and-stealing-from-you-while-theyre-at-it. 3. Erik Brynjolfsson, “The Future of Work in the Age of the Machine: A Hamilton Project Policy Forum,” National Press Club, Washington, DC, February 19, 2015, http://www.hamiltonproject.org/assets/legacy/files/download_and_links/2015_02_24_THP_Future_of_Work_in_Machine_Age_tran script_unedited.pdf. 4.
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More gamblers produce more outsized winners, and more innovation, too—whether the risk-adjusted returns are good, on average, or not. Their success has compounding benefits. It provides American workers with more valuable on-the-job training, at companies like Google and Facebook, than they can get in other high-wage, slower-growing manufacturing-based economies. It creates synergistic communities of experts, like Silicon Valley. And it puts equity into the hands of successful risk-takers who use their equity and expertise to underwrite further risk-taking that produces more innovation, faster growth, and compounding benefits. Higher and more certain payoffs coupled with the growing success of others motives increased risk-taking.
As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez
Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, borderless world, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, creative destruction, digital divide, double helix, Ford Model T, global village, Gregor Mendel, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Helicobacter pylori, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, new economy, personalized medicine, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, spice trade, stem cell, the new new thing, yottabyte
(If astronauts leave for Mars on May 6, 2018, the next feasible orbital alignment, it will be because a plasma rocket can get someone to the red planet in 115 days instead of nine months … And if the United States gets there first, it will be due to the work of Franklin Ramon Chang-Diaz, a Costa Rican national born to Chinese-Spanish parents, who lived in Venezuela before becoming a U.S. citizen … flying the space shuttle … and designing a plasma rocket.)10 Over 40 percent of all H1–B visas are awarded to Indian nationals … So, in Silicon Valley high-tech, in 1990 … 55 percent of Indians had Ph.D.s or master’s degrees … 40 percent of Chinese … 18 percent of whites. And so by 1998 … 2,775 of Silicon Valley’s CEOs (one-third of the total) were Indian or Chinese … These folks were generating about half as many sales as the billion people in India export over the course of a year.11 (Perhaps this is why San Jose is now one of the few U.S. cities with English-speaking cab drivers.)
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in Foreign Policy, fall 1999, which is part of a forthcoming book, Flags, Borders, Anthems, and Other Myths: The Impulse Toward Secession and the Americas. 7. Curious? Read Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon’s Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 8. Professor AnnaLee Saxenian wrote Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs (Public Policy Institute of California, 1999) as well as a breakthrough book, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competitiveness in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) … Please read it—it’s great. 9. Commodities allow rebels to finance their mayhem without producing anything. Past conflict increases your chance of further war 40 percent, with the probability falling 1 percent for each year of peace.
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The United States’ neighbors are not benefiting or growing at the same rate as the U.S. is … And, at some point, their interests and outlook may shift drastically … Away from an economic model that leaves them ever further behind. Because if you tear down borders and fences … And bring coyotes and hens together … The only way the hens survive … Is if they are very smart hens … And there are ever fewer such creatures running around Latin America, Quebec, and Africa. Because more and more of them now live in Silicon Valley. There are challenges within the United States as well. Knowledge also concentrates regionally … Five states … California, New York, Texas, New Jersey, and Illinois … Generate 43 percent of all U.S. patents. So even inside the United States research was concentrated … Within a very few ZIP codes
Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine
accounting loophole / creative accounting, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business cycle, classic study, cognitive bias, cotton gin, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jean Tirole, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, market bubble, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, new economy, open economy, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pirate software, placebo effect, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Stallman, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, the market place, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Y2K
In 1965, total technology employment in the Route 128 area was roughly triple that of Silicon Valley. By 1975, Silicon Valley employment had increased fivefold, but it had not quite doubled in Route 128, putting Silicon Valley about fifteen percent ahead in total technology employment. Between 1975 and 1990, the gap substantially widened. Over this period, Silicon Valley created three times the number of new technology-related jobs as Route 128. By 1990, Silicon Valley exported twice the amount of electronic products as Route 128, a comparison that excludes fields like software and multimedia, in which Silicon Valley’s growth has been strongest. In 1995, Silicon Valley reported the highest gains in export sales of any metropolitan area in the United States, an increase of thirty-five percent over 1994; the Boston area, which includes Route 128, was not in the top five.27 What explains this radical difference in growth of the two areas?
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Testing their impact on the rate of innovation should help our understanding of the extent to which intellectual monopoly serves a beneficial social purpose. You have probably heard of Silicon Valley. Perhaps you have not heard of Route 128. Yet Route 128 in Boston has been a high-technology district since the 1940s, long before farmers were displaced from Santa Clara Valley, as P1: PDX head margin: 1/2 gutter margin: 7/8 CUUS245-08 cuus245 978 0 521 87928 6 April 29, 2008 15:42 Does Intellectual Monopoly Increase Innovation? 199 Silicon Valley was then known, to make space for computer firms. In 1965, both Silicon Valley and Route 128 were centers of technology employment of equal importance, and with similar potentials and aspirations for further growth: Route 128 began the race well ahead.
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Even if the employment agreement which contains a postemployment covenant not to compete explicitly designates the law of another state, under which the covenant would be enforceable, as controlling, and even if that state has contacts with the contract, California courts nonetheless will apply section 16600 on behalf of California residents to invalidate the covenant.30 Contrary to many business pundits, the reader of this book will perhaps not be surprised at the beneficial consequences of the Silicon Valley competitive environment. However, Saxenian, in her otherwise-informative book, remarks, “The paradox of Silicon Valley was that competition demanded continuous innovation, which in turn required cooperation among firms.”31 We know that there are good economic reasons why it must be so: competition is the mechanism that breeds innovation, and sustained competitive innovation, paradoxical as that may sound to those that do not understand it, often is best implemented via cooperation among competing firms.
The Payoff by Jeff Connaughton
Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, naked short selling, Neil Kinnock, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, too big to fail, two-sided market, uptick rule, young professional
The Swiss and Japanese were already selling sophisticated encryption beyond the levels permitted by U.S. export controls, and so the U.S. government (the argument went) was needlessly hamstringing the leadership of U.S. information technology industries and products. I told Jack I believed this was the leading issue for Silicon Valley, and that we should go to Northern California and target Silicon Valley companies as clients, to help them devise a strategy for addressing the legitimate national security concerns at issue. Our timing was perfect, as the normally fierce Silicon Valley competitors (Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Sun Microsystems, and others) were for the first time talking amongst themselves about organizing an encryption-export reform coalition to lobby Washington and shape the media debate.
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Just the day before, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, after getting an earful from a number of CEOs, had taken the West Wing stairs two at a time on his way to Mikva’s office. From my desk outside the office, I heard Bowles practically yell, “What the hell are y’all doing to make Silicon Valley so upset about this bill?” Wall Street, seeking to hide the blue stock-trader jackets of high finance behind the white lab coats of high tech, had wisely pushed Silicon Valley in the vanguard of lobbying the White House. What we’re doing is standing up for a fair outcome, I thought to myself, as Mikva closed the door behind Bowles. Afterwards, I begged Mikva to ask to see the president again.
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It’s the analogous reason companies hire the most prestigious law firms: Regardless of what advice one gets, if things turn out badly, the company executive can always say “We hired the best firm in DC.” At Covington & Burling, I had drifted into the realm of issues involving Silicon Valley. I had worked on a brief arguing that the export controls on encryption (which scrambles data and turns it into unintelligible code) raised First Amendment issues, as encryption essentially is commercial speech. Furthermore, as a former math minor in college, I innately grasped the Silicon Valley argument that encryption is mathematics—even if sophisticated math used to write computer code—and that any attempt to stop math from spreading beyond our national borders was futile.
Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz
accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game
“You don’t have to be told that too many times before you don’t come up with any ideas anymore.” Creating the right channels to bring these ideas to life is critical, Dyer said, sharing a sentiment with the tech giants in Silicon Valley and Seattle. “In addition to people having the space to think and the encouragement to think, you also need the supportive mechanism, the process, so when you come up with a new idea, there is a process that you can go through and get a fair hearing,” he said. Throughout Silicon Valley, companies are coming up with these new processes, with many inspired by Jeff Bezos’s six-page memos. At Square, a mobile-payment company, “silent meetings” are standard.
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Inside Jeff Bezos’s Culture of Invention Meet Amazon’s Science Fiction Writers Jeff Bezos’s Robot Employees Hands off the Wheel Life After Yoda Insist on the Highest Standards “That Article” Outputs 2. Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Culture of Feedback Facebook the Vulnerable Building a Feedback Culture Pathways Facebook’s Day One From Broadcast to Private “The Most Chinese Company in Silicon Valley” Enter the Machines Robot Compensation New Inputs Facebook’s Next Reinvention 3. Inside Sundar Pichai’s Culture of Collaboration The Hive Mind The Toolbar Episode The Path to Chrome The Shift The Split AI Answers The Great Reinvention Uprising Exodus 4.
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Following several inquiries, I had my answer: the request was simply a glimpse into the way he runs Facebook. Zuckerberg has built feedback into Facebook’s very fiber. Major meetings end with requests for it. Posters around Facebook’s offices say FEEDBACK IS A GIFT. And nobody in the company is above it, not even Zuckerberg himself. * * * • • • As a tech reporter in Silicon Valley, I’ve watched the tech giants’ unconventional run of dominance from the front row. Instead of following the typical corporate life cycle—grow, slow, stumble, and ossify—Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have only become more powerful as they’ve aged. And perhaps except for Apple (more on that later), they’re showing little sign of letting up.
Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe
3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler
Just as it’s is impossible to make another Silicon Valley somewhere else, although everyone tries, after spending four days in Shenzhen, Joi is convinced that it’s impossible to reproduce this environment anywhere else. Both Shenzhen and Silicon Valley have a “critical mass” that attracts more and more people, resources, and knowledge, but they are also both living ecosystems full of diversity and a work ethic and experience base that any region will have difficulty bootstrapping. Other places have regional advantages—Boston might be able to compete with Silicon Valley on hardware and bioengineering; Latin America and regions of Africa might be able compete with Shenzhen on access to certain resources and markets.
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They simply did what they needed and wanted to do. When Joi helped found the first Internet service provider in Japan, attorneys for the telecom industry wrote letters telling him he couldn’t. He did it anyway. So did the innovators who built Silicon Valley, and it still holds a special place as a hub for agile, scrappy, permissionless innovation. The culture of creative disobedience that draws innovators to Silicon Valley and the Media Lab is deeply threatening to hierarchical managers and many traditional organizations. However, those are the ones who most need to embrace it if they are to support their most creative workers and survive the coming age of disruption.
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It is an approach that began with Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte. The Media Lab emerged from the Architecture Machine Group that Negroponte cofounded, in which architects at MIT used advanced graphical computers to experiment with computer-aided design and Negroponte (along with Steve Jobs, out in Silicon Valley) envisioned an age when computers would become personal devices. Negroponte also predicted a massive convergence that would jumble all of the disciplines together and connect arts and sciences together as well—the Media Lab’s academic program is called “Media Arts and Sciences.” Luckily for Negroponte and the Media Lab, the world was ready for this message and the Lab was able to launch a unique model in which a consortium of companies—many of them competitors—would fund the work and share all of the intellectual property.
The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar
“I actually think that there was always an unsustainable feel about what had happened on Wall Street over the last 10, 15 years,” President Barack Obama told the New York Times in the spring of 2009, “and it’s not that different from the unsustainable nature of what was happening during the dot-com boom, where people in Silicon Valley could make enormous sums of money, even though what they were peddling never really had any signs it would ever make a profit. That doesn’t mean, though, that Silicon Valley is still not a huge, critical, important part of our economy, and Wall Street will remain a big, important part of our economy, just as it was in the ’70s and the ’80s.” He added, “We don’t want every single college grad with mathematical aptitude to become a derivatives trader.
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During my speech I asked the same question I had posed to the Googlers in New York: where do they live, and how do they get to work? I learned that Google runs a shuttle bus complete with wireless Internet access that takes employees who live in downtown San Francisco to its Silicon Valley headquarters. Though some endure the longer commute so they can enjoy the urban vibe downtown San Francisco affords, others prefer to live in the closer Silicon Valley suburbs. Regardless, they all work at the same place and are part of the same economic region. The future of urban development belongs to a larger kind of geographic unit that has emerged over the past several decades: the megaregion.
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The 1880s saw the emergence of linotype technology for printing newspapers and ultimately books. The great systems innovations of the First Reset did not take place just anywhere but arose in particular places. Edison’s lab in central New Jersey, and clusters of innovation in Pittsburgh and Cleveland, functioned as veritable Silicon Valleys of their time,13 with those labs and companies incubating new technologies and siphoning off new branches. They also became centers of early and informal forms of venture finance. Andrew Mellon actually relocated a number of the companies he invested in to Pittsburgh. The First Reset reinforced the position of those innovative centers and allowed them to leapfrog over others to become among the largest and wealthiest cities in the United States.
The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball
"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day
They are actually part of the soft power of America over the rest of the world. The idea that a model of regulation won’t reflect this at some point is hopelessly naive, I think … It’s the history of Silicon Valley. The history of Silicon Valley is the defence industry, it was the defence industry in America in the fifties and sixties. It has been commercialised, but that has never gone away, as the culture that says, this actually has a relationship with central government … It is not just the Silicon Valley companies. Places like AT&T, all these places have research labs, R&D labs. Many of those would have had government funding, NSF grants, et cetera.
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At the national and international level, when your business model relies on numerous intricate negotiations with the Silicon Valley giants and other internet providers, anything lawmakers can do to tip the decks in your favour is also welcome. The cable industry has had decades to hone this approach. Like most US industries, the cable sector isn’t shy of spending on lobbyists in Washington DC – according to the OpenSecrets database, telecoms spent a total of $92 million lobbying Congress13 (Comcast was first, with a $15 million spend) versus a $77 million Silicon Valley spend (just under $22 million of which came from Google’s parent company, Alphabet).14 Like other major companies, cable corporates and their political action committees donate to candidates of both parties.
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utm_term=.77032a06a277 26https://www.cnet.com/news/huawei-reportedly-sides-with-trump-on-5g-us-is-lagging-behind/ 8 THE RESISTANCE 1https://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/us/letter-from-san-francisco-a-beautiful-promenade-turns-ugly-and-a-city-blushes.html 2There’s a lot to nerd out on about Apple’s campus, and if you’d like to do so, this Wired piece on it is excellent: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-campus/ 3https://www.adweek.com/digital/facebooks-menlo-park-campus-now-has-a-new-frank-gehry-designed-building/ 4https://www.fastcompany.com/3068889/googles-newly-approved-hq-are-the-perfect-metaphor-for-silicon-valley 5https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/01/google-submits-plans-million-sq-ft-london-hq-construction-kings-cross 6https://www.eff.org/about/staff 7$11 million in 2016–17, as its audited accounts show, but that has increased, as Cohn told me, and see https://www.eff.org/document/2016-2017-audited-financial-statement 8https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/john-perry-barlow-open-internet-champion-grateful-dead-lyricist-dies-n845781 9http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565929920.do 10https://www.eff.org/about/history 11Barlow’s full declaration can be read here (love it or loathe it, it’s certainly a fascinating document and an insight into a particular time and vision): https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence 12https://www.eff.org/files/annual-report/2017/index.html#FinancialsModal 13The Knight Foundation is a major US funder of journalism, technology and freedom-of-expression projects in the common interest. 14https://panopticlick.eff.org/results?
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
3D printing, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, continuous integration, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hockey-stick growth, Kanban, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, payday loans, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, pull request, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, scientific management, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, social bookmarking, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs
He had a vision of a more collaborative, more effective kind of teaching for students everywhere. With his initial traction, he was able to raise money from some of the most prestigious investors in Silicon Valley. When I first met Farb, his company was already on the fast track to success. They had raised venture capital from well-regarded investors, had built an awesome team, and were fresh off an impressive debut at one of Silicon Valley’s famous startup competitions. They were extremely process-oriented and disciplined. Their product development followed a rigorous version of the agile development methodology known as Extreme Programming (described below), thanks to their partnership with a San Francisco–based company called Pivotal Labs.
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At first, largely because of my background, I viewed these as technical problems that required technical solutions: better architecture, a better engineering process, better discipline, focus, or product vision. These supposed fixes led to still more failure. So I read everything I could get my hands on and was blessed to have had some of the top minds in Silicon Valley as my mentors. By the time I became a cofounder of IMVU, I was hungry for new ideas about how to build a company. I was fortunate to have cofounders who were willing to experiment with new approaches. They were fed up—as I was—by the failure of traditional thinking. Also, we were lucky to have Steve Blank as an investor and adviser.
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As a result of IMVU’s success, I began to be asked for advice by other startups and venture capitalists. When I would describe my experiences at IMVU, I was often met with blank stares or extreme skepticism. The most common reply was “That could never work!” My experience so flew in the face of conventional thinking that most people, even in the innovation hub of Silicon Valley, could not wrap their minds around it. Then I started to write, first on a blog called Startup Lessons Learned, and speak—at conferences and to companies, startups, and venture capitalists—to anyone who would listen. In the process of being called on to defend and explain my insights and with the collaboration of other writers, thinkers, and entrepreneurs, I had a chance to refine and develop the theory of the Lean Startup beyond its rudimentary beginnings.
Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator
So arguably we ought to be intensifying our efforts to immerse ourselves in “internet ways of thinking,” whatever we might take that to mean. Another very recent criticism is that Silicon Valley only specializes in the trivial. In 2017, some of the critics pointed to Juicero, a $400 Wi-Fi–enabled juicer that has been called “the absurd avatar of Silicon Valley hubris.” (The company later went under.) Scott Alexander, one of my favorite bloggers (on the internet, of course), set out to rebut this charge. Here is what he found: I looked at the latest batch of 52 startups from legendary Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator. Thirteen of them had an altruistic or international development focus, including Neema, an app to help poor people without access to banks gain financial services; Kangpe, online health services for people in Africa without access to doctors; Credy, a peer-to-peer lending service in India; Clear Genetics, an automated genetic counseling tool for at-risk parents; and Dost Education, helping to teach literacy skills in India via a $1/month course.
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Financial activities of many kinds tend to be geographically clustered, whether it is traditional bank lending and deal making in New York or London, VC activity in Silicon Valley or Tel Aviv, or green-lighting movie projects in Hollywood. That clustering comes about because finance is so closely linked to the building of trust relationships. The investors want to meet with, judge, monitor, and advise the people they are dealing with, and that is going to require some degree of physical proximity for the network as a whole. Great financial centers will blossom precisely in those areas that are wonderful connectors of human talent, and New York, London, and Silicon Valley all exhibit this skill in nonfinancial areas as well, whether it be for the arts, entertainment, cuisine, or, in the case of northern California, for programming, management, and prediction.
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Ales, Laurence, and Christopher Sleet. 2016. “Taxing Top CEO Incomes.” American Economic Review 106 (11): 3331–3366. Alexander, Scott. 2016. “Contra Robinson on Schooling.” Slate Star Codex (blog). December 6, 2016. Alexander, Scott. 2017. “Silicon Valley: A Reality Check.” Slate Star Codex (blog), May 11, 2017. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/11/silicon-valley-a-reality-check. Allcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkower. 2017. “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election.” NBER Working Paper No. 23089. National Bureau of Economic Research, Washington, DC. Anderson, Ryan. 2016. “The Ugly Truth About Online Dating: Are We Sacrificing Love for Convenience?”
The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour
4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks
From its first beginnings, even in the precocious French public-sector internet known as Minitel, the first thing users did was dissimulate their identities. Anonymity made it possible to wear new textual skins. In the early days of Silicon Valley idealism, anonymity and encryption was all the rage. The ability to lie about ourselves was thought to bring freedom, creative autonomy, escape from surveillance. Lying was the great equalizer. Silicon Valley, as it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, was shaped by an aleatory fusion of hippy and New Right ideologies. Averse to public ownership and regulation, this ‘Californian Ideology’, as Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron dubbed it, was libertarian, property-based and individualist.72 The internet was supposed to be a new agora, a free market of ideas.
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This situation is completely without precedent, and it is now evolving so quickly that we can barely keep track of where we are. And the more technology evolves, the more that new layers of hardware and software are added, the harder it is to change. This is handing tech capitalists a unique source of power. As the Silicon Valley guru Jaron Lanier puts it, they don’t have to persuade us when they can directly manipulate our experience of the world.18 Technologists augment our senses with webcams, smartphones and constantly expanding quantities of digital memory. Because of this, a tiny group of engineers can ‘shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed’.
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But the Twittering Machine is a techno-political regime which in its own way absorbs any nascent desire to challenge these painful conditions. The literary critic Raymond Williams once wrote of certain technologies which promoted ‘mobile privatization’.36 While electrification and railway-building were public affairs, cars and personal stereos were simultaneously mobile and bound to the self-sufficient individual or family home. Silicon Valley has taken this logic much further, extending privatization into the most public of spaces, soliciting our participation on a solitary basis. At the same time, it has taken the place of previous forms of self-medication. Just as the pharmaceutical giants are losing ground with their ‘one weird trick’ pill-shaped remedies for social distress, tech says ‘there’s an app for that’.
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
“I wish Elon knew how to be a little happier,” he says. 9 Go West Silicon Valley, 1994–1995 July 1994 Summer intern At Ivy League schools in the 1990s, ambitious students were tugged either east toward the gilded realms of Wall Street banking or west toward the tech utopianism and entrepreneurial zeal of Silicon Valley. At Penn, Musk received some internship offers from Wall Street, all lucrative, but finance did not interest him. 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.
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Moritz then facilitated a deal with Barclay’s Bank and a community bank in Colorado to become partners, so that X.com could offer mutual funds, have a bank charter, and be FDIC-insured. At twenty-eight, Musk had become a startup celebrity. In an article titled “Elon Musk Is Poised to Become Silicon Valley’s Next Big Thing,” Salon called him “today’s Silicon Valley It guy.” One of Musk’s management tactics, then as later, was to set an insane deadline and drive colleagues to meet it. He did that in the fall of 1999 by announcing, in what one engineer called “a dick move,” that X.com would launch to the public on Thanksgiving weekend.
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“His mom had a number of these necklaces in a case in her bedroom, and Elon told me they were from his father’s emerald mine in South Africa—he pulled one from the case,” Jennifer noted twenty-five years later, when she auctioned it online. In fact, the long-bankrupt mine had not been in South Africa and was not owned by his father, but at the time Musk didn’t mind giving that impression. When he graduated in the spring of 1995, Musk decided to take another cross-country trip to Silicon Valley. He brought along Robin Ren, after teaching him how to drive a stick shift. They stopped at the just-opened Denver airport because Musk wanted to see the baggage-handling system. “He was fascinated by how they designed the robotic machines to handle the luggage without human intervention,” Ren says.
Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy by Lawrence Ingrassia
air freight, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, computer vision, data science, fake news, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Hacker News, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork
I said, very loud, and the chatter stops, and it goes dead quiet. They all turn and look at me, grinning and nodding their heads. They’re in the Silicon Valley world, and they know what happened.” (Because they didn’t yet have a product to sell, Marino and Park didn’t accept the credit card payment, Marino hastens to add.) The online test clinched it. Marino and Park decided to locate the company in Phoenix, where costs were lower and it was easier to hire people. “In Silicon Valley, you’re either an engineer or designer who works for one of the top twenty companies or you’re a founder of your own business. Try to get one of those people to quit and join a mattress start-up that’s not funded,” Marino explains.
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“a Pinterest for shopping”: JT Marino, appearing on “The Start-up That Launched the Horse Race of Online Mattress Companies,” Mixergy, August 15, 2018, https://mixergy.com/interviews/tuft-and-needle-with-jt-marino/. tech luminaries: Marisa Kendall, “Coupa Café: Hot Spot for Silicon Valley Superstars,” San Jose Mercury News, April 6, 2016, https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/04/06/coupa-cafe-hot-spot-for-silicon-valley-superstars/. a Swedish company introduced: Tempur-Pedic foam mattress history from Tempursealy.com, https://www.tempursealy.com/brands/#!/, and Fundinguniverse.com, http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/tempur-pedic-inc-history/.
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But $100,000 was only enough money to start hiring a small team and improve the website. The next step was to try to raise enough additional funding to finance ongoing operations and pay for a new supply of blades. Peter Pham, a cofounder of Science with Jones, proceeded to take Dubin on a series of trips to meet venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. The initial reaction of everyone there was, again, skepticism: Razor blades? Pham has raised money for dozens of start-ups. Dollar Shave Club was among the hardest to sell to investors. This was in the very early days of digitally native brands that were bypassing retailers and selling directly to consumers on the internet.
Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz
Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K
I may as well just do it myself.” Garvey left Boeing in 2000—“after Y2K,” as he put it—and set up a small space consultancy to keep building small rockets, seeking out contracts and advisory jobs. His timing was good, because Silicon Valley had finally come calling. One of the first jobs he landed was with a company called BlastOff, set up by a couple of wealthy Silicon Valley investors named Bill and Larry Gross. “There was a lot of money flowing, people wanting to do stuff. A lot of folks are interested in doing space now, either because they already owned a sports team or they weren’t into sports,” Garvey says.
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Whatever personal enmity had led the team to eject Musk from the CEO suite at PayPal, it had not exhausted their faith in him as an entrepreneur. The Founders Fund manifesto famously complained that “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” an unsubtle dig at Twitter and what they saw as the limited ambitions of other Silicon Valley investors. Given a chance to invest in a rocket ship, they said yes, and the first outside investment in SpaceX was sealed in early 2008. The backing of the US space agency and Silicon Valley allowed Musk to avoid the fate of his competitors. After their investment, Luke Nosek, a Founders Fund partner who joined the board of SpaceX, told me that SpaceX only had enough money to test the Falcon 1 three more times.
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Bush–era program that envisioned privatizing transit between earth and the space station. This was the opportunity that Musk and his nascent space company had desperately needed. Tinkerers at the time, they had blown up more rockets than they had flown. Many considered Musk just another wealthy fool from Silicon Valley with a space bug. A decade before, Microsoft founder Bill Gates had invested millions in plans for an ambitious network of satellites, called a constellation, that people would use to connect to the internet. It ended in bankruptcy. The major space contractors, like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, armies of engineers with decades of practice, scoffed at the idea that youthful companies backed by software engineers might be up to the challenge of space travel.
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
Despite graduating from Stanford University in 1993 and Stanford Law School in 1996, sitting right at the epicenter of the tech boom the whole time, I was largely oblivious to what was happening around me. So, after graduating from law school, I left Silicon Valley to spend a year in my hometown of Houston, Texas, clerking for the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. This was an incredible learning experience and a fun way to spend a year, but, as it would turn out, it had zero relevance to my longer-term career. I moved back to Silicon Valley to work for Lehman Brothers. Lehman, of course, was later a victim of the global financial crisis, suffering an ignominious bankruptcy in September 2008.
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But it was a fun and exciting opportunity to manage a team at scale, as jobs and learning experiences of that kind can be hard to come by in the earlier-stage startup world. Change Is Afoot in Silicon Valley Following the 2007 sale of Opsware to HP, Marc and Ben began investing in earnest as angel investors. Angels are traditionally individuals who invest in very-early-stage startups (generally known as “seed-stage companies”). In Silicon Valley in 2007, the angel community was pretty small, and there were not many institutional seed funds, meaning professional investors who raised money from traditional institutional investors to invest in seed-stage companies.
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Interestingly, Marc and Ben made their angel investments through an entity known as HA Angel Fund (Horowitz Andreessen Angel Fund), a reversal of the now-well-known brand name for their venture fund. Marc and Ben started investing at an exciting time when change was afoot in Silicon Valley. To understand this change, you have to understand a bit of the history of the VC industry. As we’ll dive into deeper in subsequent chapters, the Silicon Valley VC business started in earnest in the 1970s and was characterized for most of the next thirty-odd years by a relatively small number of very successful firms that controlled access to startup capital. In simple terms, capital was the scarce resource, and that resource was “owned” by the then-existing VC firms, many of which are still very successful and active players in the current VC marketplace.
Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend
A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics
The trip ended, and as I disembarked, yet another AV made its debut—a Tesla S. As I stepped off the ungainly shuttle toward the sleek, sporty bit of Silicon Valley steel, I realized I’d passed between one possible future and another—from car-lite commune to self-driving suburb. This California roadrunner was everything the French snail wasn’t—sleek, sexy, free-range, and fast. And the DNA of the two companies couldn’t be more different, pitting Silicon Valley’s venture capital–fueled investors against the industrial giants of the French heartland—EasyMile’s chief financial backer is Alstom, a maker of trains.
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Cheape, Moving the Masses: Urban Public Transit in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia 1880–1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 1. 175companies merely joined forces: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 172. 175the most powerful, reviled traction monopoly: Walt Crowley, “City Light’s Birth and Seattle’s Early Power Struggles, 1886–1950,” History Link, April 26, 2000, https://www.historylink.org/File/2318. 175enjoyed decades of unrivaled power: Owain James, “We Miss Streetcars’ Frequent and Reliable Service, Not Streetcars Themselves,” Mobility Lab, April 17, 2019, https://mobilitylab.org/2019/04/17/we-miss-streetcars-frequent-and-reliable-service-not-streetcars-themselves/; combination of technological change and federal intervention: “Jersey Trolley Merger,” Wall Street Journal, May 13, 1905, 2. 176$100 billion Vision Fund: Katrina Brooker, “The Most Powerful Person in Silicon Valley,” Fast Company, January 14, 2019, https://www.fastcompany.com/90285552/the-most-powerful-person-in-silicon-valley. 176its total commitment to some $9 billion: Pavel Alpeyev, Jie Ma, and Won Jae Ko, “Taxi-Hailing Apps Take Root in Japan as SoftBank, Didi Join Fray,” Bloomberg, July 19, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-19/softbank-didi-to-roll-out-taxi-hailing-business-in-japan. 177$2 billion into Singapore-based Grab: Yoolim Lee, “Grab Vanquishes Uber with Local Strategy, Billions from SoftBank,” Bloomberg, March 26, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/grab-vanquishes-uber-with-local-strategy-billions-from-softbank. 177Ola downloaded $2 billion: Saritha Rai, “India’s Ola Raises $2 Billion from SoftBank, Tencent,” Bloomberg, October 2, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-02/india-s-ola-is-said-to-raise-2-billion-from-softbank-tencent. 17715 percent stake in Uber: Alison Griswold, “SoftBank—not Uber—Is the Real King of Ride-Hailing,” Quartz, January 23, 2018, https://qz.com/1187144/softbank-not-uber-is-the-real-king-of-ride-hailing/. 177Uber picked off Dubai-based Careem: Adam Satariano, “This Estonian Start-Up Has Become a Thorn in Uber’s Side,” New York Times, April 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/technology/bolt-taxify-uber-lyft.html. 177The damage to consumers: Justina Lee, “Singapore Fine Is ‘Minor Bump’ in Grab’s Ride-Hailing Dominance,” Nikkei Asian Review, September 25, 2018, https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Sharing-Economy/Singapore-fine-is-minor-bump-in-Grab-s-ride-hailing-dominance. 177Grab cornered more than 80 percent: Ardhana Aravindan, “Singapore Fines Grab and Uber, Imposes Measures to Open Up Market,” Reuters, September 23, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-grab-singapore/singapore-fines-grab-and-uber-imposes-measures-to-open-up-market-idUSKCN1M406J. 177all launched antitrust investigations: Mai Nguyen, “Vietnam Says Eyeing Formal Antitrust Probe into Uber-Grab Deal,” Reuters, May 16, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-grab-vietnam-idUSKCN1IH0XNiAikaRey, “Antitrust Watchdog Fines Grab P16 Million over Uber Deal,” Rappler, October 17, 2018, https://www.rappler.com/business/214502-philippine-competition-commission-fines-grab-philippines-over-uber-deal; Yoolim Lee, “Singapore Watchdog Fines Uber, Grab $9.5 Million over Merger,” Bloomberg, September 24, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-24/singapore-fines-uber-grab-s-13-million-for-merger-infringement. 177another fare-slashing battle with Ola: “Steering Group: A Bold Scheme to Dominate Ride-Hailing,” The Economist, May 10, 2018, https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/10/a-bold-scheme-to-dominate-ride-hailing. 177“SoftBank is playing the ride-hailing”: Alison Griswold, “Softbank Has Spread Its Ride-Hailing Bets and Didi Looks Like an Early Win,” Quartz, April 24, 2018, https://qz.com/1261177/softbanks-winner-in-ride-hailing-is-chinas-didi-chuxing-not-uber/. 177“driver incentives, passenger discounts”: Tim O’Reilly, “The Fundamental Problem with Silicon Valley’s Favorite Growth Strategy,” Quartz, February 5, 2019, https://qz.com/1540608/the-problem-with-silicon-valleys-obsession-with-blitzscaling-growth/. 178“locked in a capital-fueled deathmatch”: O’Reilly, “The Fundamental Problem.” 178The Vision Fund’s biggest investor: Brooker, “The Most Powerful Person.” 178the proceeds of an earlier liquidation: Catherine Shu, “Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Fund Will Also Invest $45B in SoftBank’s Second Vision Fund,” Tech-Crunch, October 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/07/saudi-arabias-sovereign-fund-will-also-invest-45b-in-softbanks-second-vision-fund/. 178Uber’s multi-billion-dollar quarterly losses: “Aramco Value to Top $2 Trillion, Less Than 5 Percent to Be Sold, Says Prince,” Reuters, April 25, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-plan-aramco-idUSKCN0XM16M. 178the House of Saud: Brooker, “The Most Powerful Person.” 178thwart municipal officials’ attempts at enforcement: Mike Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide,” New York Times, March 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html. 179“Even if that means paying money”: Dara Khosrowshahi, “The Campaign for Sustainable Mobility,” Uber, September 26, 2018, https://www.uber.com/newsroom/campaign-sustainable-mobility/. 180Five-cent nickel fares: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 174–75. 180cities . . . grant a ride-hail monopoly: “Free Exchange: The Market for Driverless Cars Will Head towards Monopoly,” The Economist, June 7, 2018, https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/06/07/the-market-for-driverless-cars-will-head-towards-monopoly. 180“corrupt and contented”: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 177. 180Jay Gould’s Manhattan Railway Company: Terry Golway, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (New York: Live-right, 2014), 135. 180took over Puget Sound’s streetcar: Crowley, “City Light’s Birth.” 181Public transit was the competition: United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Registration Statement under the Securities Act of 1933: Uber Technologies, April 11, 2019, 25, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519103850/d647752ds1.htm#toc. 181deploy predatory pricing: United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Registration Statement. 182“have been created based on cash flows”: “Asset-Backed Security,” Investo-pedia, accessed December 7, 2018, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asset-backedsecurity.asp. 183Amazon’s body-tracking technology: “The Learning Machine: Amazon’s Empire Rests on its Low-Key Approach to AI,” The Economist, April 11, 2019, https://www.economist.com/business/2019/04/13/amazons-empire-rests-on-its-low-key-approach-to-ai. 8.
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Cheape, Moving the Masses: Urban Public Transit in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia 1880–1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 1. 175companies merely joined forces: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 172. 175the most powerful, reviled traction monopoly: Walt Crowley, “City Light’s Birth and Seattle’s Early Power Struggles, 1886–1950,” History Link, April 26, 2000, https://www.historylink.org/File/2318. 175enjoyed decades of unrivaled power: Owain James, “We Miss Streetcars’ Frequent and Reliable Service, Not Streetcars Themselves,” Mobility Lab, April 17, 2019, https://mobilitylab.org/2019/04/17/we-miss-streetcars-frequent-and-reliable-service-not-streetcars-themselves/; combination of technological change and federal intervention: “Jersey Trolley Merger,” Wall Street Journal, May 13, 1905, 2. 176$100 billion Vision Fund: Katrina Brooker, “The Most Powerful Person in Silicon Valley,” Fast Company, January 14, 2019, https://www.fastcompany.com/90285552/the-most-powerful-person-in-silicon-valley. 176its total commitment to some $9 billion: Pavel Alpeyev, Jie Ma, and Won Jae Ko, “Taxi-Hailing Apps Take Root in Japan as SoftBank, Didi Join Fray,” Bloomberg, July 19, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-19/softbank-didi-to-roll-out-taxi-hailing-business-in-japan. 177$2 billion into Singapore-based Grab: Yoolim Lee, “Grab Vanquishes Uber with Local Strategy, Billions from SoftBank,” Bloomberg, March 26, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/grab-vanquishes-uber-with-local-strategy-billions-from-softbank. 177Ola downloaded $2 billion: Saritha Rai, “India’s Ola Raises $2 Billion from SoftBank, Tencent,” Bloomberg, October 2, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-02/india-s-ola-is-said-to-raise-2-billion-from-softbank-tencent. 17715 percent stake in Uber: Alison Griswold, “SoftBank—not Uber—Is the Real King of Ride-Hailing,” Quartz, January 23, 2018, https://qz.com/1187144/softbank-not-uber-is-the-real-king-of-ride-hailing/. 177Uber picked off Dubai-based Careem: Adam Satariano, “This Estonian Start-Up Has Become a Thorn in Uber’s Side,” New York Times, April 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/technology/bolt-taxify-uber-lyft.html. 177The damage to consumers: Justina Lee, “Singapore Fine Is ‘Minor Bump’ in Grab’s Ride-Hailing Dominance,” Nikkei Asian Review, September 25, 2018, https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Sharing-Economy/Singapore-fine-is-minor-bump-in-Grab-s-ride-hailing-dominance. 177Grab cornered more than 80 percent: Ardhana Aravindan, “Singapore Fines Grab and Uber, Imposes Measures to Open Up Market,” Reuters, September 23, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-grab-singapore/singapore-fines-grab-and-uber-imposes-measures-to-open-up-market-idUSKCN1M406J. 177all launched antitrust investigations: Mai Nguyen, “Vietnam Says Eyeing Formal Antitrust Probe into Uber-Grab Deal,” Reuters, May 16, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-grab-vietnam-idUSKCN1IH0XNiAikaRey, “Antitrust Watchdog Fines Grab P16 Million over Uber Deal,” Rappler, October 17, 2018, https://www.rappler.com/business/214502-philippine-competition-commission-fines-grab-philippines-over-uber-deal; Yoolim Lee, “Singapore Watchdog Fines Uber, Grab $9.5 Million over Merger,” Bloomberg, September 24, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-24/singapore-fines-uber-grab-s-13-million-for-merger-infringement. 177another fare-slashing battle with Ola: “Steering Group: A Bold Scheme to Dominate Ride-Hailing,” The Economist, May 10, 2018, https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/10/a-bold-scheme-to-dominate-ride-hailing. 177“SoftBank is playing the ride-hailing”: Alison Griswold, “Softbank Has Spread Its Ride-Hailing Bets and Didi Looks Like an Early Win,” Quartz, April 24, 2018, https://qz.com/1261177/softbanks-winner-in-ride-hailing-is-chinas-didi-chuxing-not-uber/. 177“driver incentives, passenger discounts”: Tim O’Reilly, “The Fundamental Problem with Silicon Valley’s Favorite Growth Strategy,” Quartz, February 5, 2019, https://qz.com/1540608/the-problem-with-silicon-valleys-obsession-with-blitzscaling-growth/. 178“locked in a capital-fueled deathmatch”: O’Reilly, “The Fundamental Problem.” 178The Vision Fund’s biggest investor: Brooker, “The Most Powerful Person.” 178the proceeds of an earlier liquidation: Catherine Shu, “Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Fund Will Also Invest $45B in SoftBank’s Second Vision Fund,” Tech-Crunch, October 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/07/saudi-arabias-sovereign-fund-will-also-invest-45b-in-softbanks-second-vision-fund/. 178Uber’s multi-billion-dollar quarterly losses: “Aramco Value to Top $2 Trillion, Less Than 5 Percent to Be Sold, Says Prince,” Reuters, April 25, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-plan-aramco-idUSKCN0XM16M. 178the House of Saud: Brooker, “The Most Powerful Person.” 178thwart municipal officials’ attempts at enforcement: Mike Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide,” New York Times, March 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html. 179“Even if that means paying money”: Dara Khosrowshahi, “The Campaign for Sustainable Mobility,” Uber, September 26, 2018, https://www.uber.com/newsroom/campaign-sustainable-mobility/. 180Five-cent nickel fares: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 174–75. 180cities . . . grant a ride-hail monopoly: “Free Exchange: The Market for Driverless Cars Will Head towards Monopoly,” The Economist, June 7, 2018, https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/06/07/the-market-for-driverless-cars-will-head-towards-monopoly. 180“corrupt and contented”: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 177. 180Jay Gould’s Manhattan Railway Company: Terry Golway, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (New York: Live-right, 2014), 135. 180took over Puget Sound’s streetcar: Crowley, “City Light’s Birth.” 181Public transit was the competition: United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Registration Statement under the Securities Act of 1933: Uber Technologies, April 11, 2019, 25, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519103850/d647752ds1.htm#toc. 181deploy predatory pricing: United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Registration Statement. 182“have been created based on cash flows”: “Asset-Backed Security,” Investo-pedia, accessed December 7, 2018, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asset-backedsecurity.asp. 183Amazon’s body-tracking technology: “The Learning Machine: Amazon’s Empire Rests on its Low-Key Approach to AI,” The Economist, April 11, 2019, https://www.economist.com/business/2019/04/13/amazons-empire-rests-on-its-low-key-approach-to-ai. 8.
Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie
4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler
rather than a negative one (what shouldn’t we do while we’re here?). Put Real Diversity behind the Platform Silicon Valley engineers, managers, and entrepreneurs are by and large a privileged lot, who tend to see society as fair and meritocratic; to them, communication just needs to be more open and information more free. But harassment and hatred are not problems specific to social media; they are endemic to a culture in which the powerful maintain their position over the less powerful through tactics of intimidation, marginalization, and cruelty, all under cover of a nominally open society. Silicon Valley engineers and entrepreneurs are not the community most likely to really get this, in their bones.
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., “Regulating Behavior in Online Communities”; Kollock and Smith, “Managing the Virtual Commons”; Malaby, “Coding Control”; Suzor, “The Role of the Rule of Law in Virtual Communities”; Taylor, “The Social Design of Virtual Worlds”; Taylor, “Beyond Management”; Zarsky, “Social Justice, Social Norms, and the Governance of Social Media.” 44Agre, “Conceptions of the User in Computer Systems Design”; Oudshoorn and Pinch, How Users Matter; Woolgar, “Configuring the User.” 45Anna Weiner, “Why Can’t Silicon Valley Solve Its Diversity Problem?” New Yorker, November 26, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-cant-silicon-valley-solve-its-diversity-problem. 46Corn-Revere, “Caught in the Seamless Web”; Deibert and Rohozinski, “Liberation vs. Control.” 47Ammori, “The ‘New’ New York Times,” 2278. For some, awareness that their user base is international may heighten an inclination to allow context-specific beliefs govern what should and should not be said.
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See Kaitlyn Tiffany, “Twitter Wants You to Stop Saying ‘Twitter Eggs,’” Verge, March 31, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/3/31/15139464/twitter-egg-replaced-harassment-terms-trolls-language. 3Danielle Citron and Ben Wittes, “Follow Buddies and Block Buddies: A Simple Proposal to Improve Civility, Control, and Privacy on Twitter,” Lawfareblog, January 4, 2017, https://lawfareblog.com/follow-buddies-and-block-buddies-simple-proposal-improve-civility-control-and-privacy-twitter; Geiger, “Bot-Based Collective Blocklists in Twitter.” 4If for some reason the platform wanted to make it possible, users could even seek out content that others had marked “violent.” 5According to the WAM report, “Reporters were asked if the harassment was occurring on multiple platforms. 54 reports (17%) mention harassment taking place on multiple platforms” (15). 6Many thanks to Sharif Mowlabocus for this insight. 7Alexis Madrigal, “What Facebook Did to American Democracy,” Atlantic, October 12, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/what-facebook-did/542502/. 8Blank and Reisdorf, “The Participatory Web”; Halavais, “The Blogosphere and Its Problems”; Postigo, “Questioning the Web 2.0 Discourse”; Dahlgren, “The Internet as a Civic Space”; Levina and Hasinoff, “The Silicon Valley Ethos.” For an insightful repudiation of this “discourse of versions” and the historical distortions it can introduce, see Ankerson, “Social Media and the ‘Read-Only’ Web.” 9Virginia Heffernan, “Trumpcast Live from the Tribeca Film Festival,” Trumpcast, May 1, 2017, http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/trumpcast/2017/05/trumpcast_at_the_tribeca_film_festival.html. 10George Packer and Ken Auletta, “George Packer and Ken Auletta on Silicon Valley,” New Yorker Out Loud Podcast, May 21, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/podcast/out-loud/george-packer-and-ken-auletta-on-silicon-valley. 11Malaby, Making Virtual Worlds, 8, 14. 12Burgess, “From ‘Broadcast Yourself’ to ‘Follow your Interests’”; Hoffman, Proferes, and Zimmer, “‘Making the World More Open and Connected.’” 13Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 15–16. 14Ananny, “From Noxious to Public?”
Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit, Susan Schwartzenberg
blue-collar work, Brownian motion, dematerialisation, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Loma Prieta earthquake, low skilled workers, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, pets.com, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, wage slave
just faces an increasingly long and hard commute, and increased with the sprawl most expensive the Silicon Valley accommodating those who Silicon Valley is coming true who anyone around them, many are finding it is developing into a two-tier society: those wave and those who nomenon of class those are important all — Goodell wrote about "The brutality of the arrive here so unwise as to choose as the tide harder to stay pian rhetoric of Silicon Valley boosters . . . it's who afloat. of wealth clear that Silicon Valley when It's really is have caught the technologi- are being left behind.
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The newness of ebrated everywhere, but in an old history in in some ways it's this become new technology is just continuing a cel- by other means San Francisco: an assault on the poor that began with urban renewal programs And wave of —computers, electronics and software design. In recent years San Francisco has ley's new addressing the housing needs such jobs create, thereby problems that are already among the worst Silicon Valley urban communi- Silicon Valley cities are exacerbat- ensuring a brutal firee-market struggle for places to of low income people some ways, the in the 1950s and has taken many forms new technology is since. returning us to an old era, perhaps to the peak years of the Industrial Revolution, with huge gaps between rich and poor, endless work hours and a devout faith in progress a spartan work and technology.
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A decade ago Los Angeles looked like the future —urban warfare, segregation, despair, injustice and decay, open the new corruption— ^but future looks like San Francisco: a frenzy of financial speculation, covert coercions, overt erasures, a barrage of novelty-item restaurants, websites, technologies and trends, the despair of numbness of incessant work hours and homes and neighborhoods. this country is in the a ripple effect Napa and Sonoma sive the anxiety of destabilized jobs, Bay Area, along with 30 percent of the multimedia/ boom that started in Silicon Valley has pro- throughout the region from south of San Jose to in the north. ^ San Francisco has had the most expen- housing of any major American city in the nation for but in the past few years housing prices —^both skyrocketing, along with commercial rents. at a hectic pace, and they in turn generate sales two decades, and rents —have been New businesses are coming in new boutiques, restaurants and bars that displace earlier businesses, particularly nonprofits, and the industry's workers have been outbidding out from under tenants at a for rentals breakneck pace.
Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital divide, do well by doing good, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, Global Witness, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Elkington, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize
A notable example of this sort of group venture philanthropy is the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund, known as SV2. Launched in 1998, as an innovative arm of the venerable Silicon Valley Community Foundation, it aimed to show newly wealthy tech entrepreneurs and others how they could be effective philanthropists. SV2 was founded by Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, then a business student and herself a second-generation philanthropist—her father is one of the largest donors to Stanford University, having earned a fortune from owning much of the land in Silicon Valley. Arrillaga-Andreessen was concerned that, whilst vast fortunes were being accumulated by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs at a far younger age than ever before, their giving was very low.
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What he meant by venture philanthropy was an adventurous, risk-taking approach to funding unpopular social causes. In the mid-1990s, however, a more narrowly defined, focused form of venture philanthropy emerged, mirroring the techniques of Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists, who by then were starting to be widely admired for their ability to quickly turn a bright idea into a large, successful business. Before the development of the modern venture capital business, which now extends far beyond Silicon Valley, it was largely a matter of luck whether someone with a bright idea could find the necessary investment capital and tap the necessary business expertise to build a successful company out of it.
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I could afford to take the heat,” he says. In a similar spirit, Vinod Khosla, a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, says he has used some of his fortune to pursue political change in part because the status quo is being maintained through massive spending by big oil companies whose motives are less benign than his own. In 1993, having made his fortune as a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, Khosla moved his family to India in an attempt to become a traditional philanthropist. He commuted in six-week stints between India and his work in Silicon Valley, but he quickly concluded that giving a few computers to schools was not the way to achieve fundamental change; a more structural approach was needed.
Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game
Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (2014) STORIES ABOUT VALUE CREATION The epicentre of a still-unfolding technological revolution, Silicon Valley is the most dynamic industrial district in the world for high-tech start-ups. Since the 1980s it has made millionaires of many thousands of founders, early-stage employees, executives and venture capitalists - and billionaires of a significant number too. The ingenuity of these people has undoubtedly been instrumental in changing how we communicate, transact business and live our lives. Their products and services epitomize our contemporary idea of progress. Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs are often viewed as heroic do-gooders.
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Starting after the Second World War, government investment in high-tech ventures grew significantly in the 1950s as part of the military-industrial complex, largely due to the Cold War.8 Before becoming famous around the world as ‘Silicon Valley', a name coined in 1971, the San Francisco Bay area was producing technology for military use or, from the 1960s, spin-offs of military technology for commercial purposes.9 The first formal VC firm in Silicon Valley - Draper, Gaither and Anderson - was headed by two former US Army generals and the author of a secret report to President Eisenhower on how the US should respond to the USSR's launching of Sputnik.10 Much of the work to commercialize military technology was done in the research labs of established ICT companies like General Electric, Texas Instruments, AT&T, Xerox and IBM.
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., Money, Interest and Capital: A Study in the Foundations of Monetary Theory (Cambridge: University Press, 1989). Roncaglia, A., The Wealth of Ideas: A History of Economic Thought (Cambridge: University Press, 2005). Roose, K., ‘Silicon Valley's secessionist movement is growing', New York magazine, 21 October 2013: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/silicon-valleys- secessionists.html Rubin, I. I., Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (1928; Detroit, Ill: Black and Red Press, 1972). Rubin, I. I., A History of Economic Thought (1929; London: Pluto Press, 1989). Saez, E., ‘Striking it richer: The evolution of top incomes in the United States' (University of California, Berkeley, Department of Economics, 2015).
The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game
the “social vaccine of the 21st century” Critics point to a conflict of interest: rather than promote technology that contributes to general human flourishing, Silicon Valley elites favor UBI as a publicly supported solution that does not impede their profit-making activities. See, for example, Jathan Sadowski, “Why Silicon Valley Is Embracing Universal Basic Income,” Guardian, July 14, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/22/silicon-valley-universal-basic-income-y-combinator. an addictive public handout Predictions that a BIG (basic income guarantee) would result in many people laying around lazily are not supported by the evidence.
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But the company does not expect them to merge their identity with the firm, which, executives admit, is not a great thing to do. Rovio chief of marketing Peter Vesterbacka once confessed that the company’s working environment can be chaotic. “People will tell you it pretty much sucks,” he said. “People will tell you brutally what is wrong.” It’s hard to imagine a Silicon Valley executive admitting as much, unless, of course, he or she is a former Silicon Valley executive. Paul Romer, until January 2018 the chief economist at the World Bank, teaches at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Romer has argued that the future of work depends most critically on “meta-ideas” that support the production and transmission of other ideas.
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Kranias, “The #1 Thing Hiring Managers Are Looking For,” The Muse, last modified August 27, 2012, https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-1-thing-hiring-managers-are-looking-for. pronouncing applicants over the age of thirty-five Jon Swartz, “Ageism Is Forcing Many to Look Outside Silicon Valley, but Tech Hubs Offer Little Respite,” USA Today, August 4, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/08/04/ageism-forcing-many-look-outside-silicon-valley-but-tech-hubs-offer-little-respite/479468001/. a difficult time imagining most women as a “good fit” for the job “In these occupations, there’s been a persistent idea that women aren’t a good fit, that by nature they’re not good at the work—which isn’t true,” University of Indiana sociologist Cate Taylor told the Washington Post.
The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov
"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce
As a Western-educated Burmese businessman told the New York Times in early 2010, “The government is trying to distract people from politics. There’s not enough bread, but there’s a lot of circus.” Once Burma is fully wired—and the junta is supportive of technology, having set up its own Silicon Valley in 2002 that goes by the very un-Silicon Valley name of Myanmar Information and Communication Technology Park—the government won’t have to try hard anymore; their citizens will get distracted on their own. Today’s battle is not between David and Goliath; it’s between David and David Letterman. While we thought the Internet might give us a generation of “digital renegades,” it may have given us a generation of “digital captives,” who know how to find comfort online, whatever the political realities of the physical world.
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It looks like a safe bet: Even if the Internet won’t bring democracy to China or Iran, it can still make the Obama administration appear to have the most technologically savvy foreign policy team in history. The best and the brightest are now also the geekiest. The Google Doctrine—the enthusiastic belief in the liberating power of technology accompanied by the irresistible urge to enlist Silicon Valley start-ups in the global fight for freedom—is of growing appeal to many policymakers. In fact, many of them are as upbeat about the revolutionary potential of the Internet as their colleagues in the corporate sector were in the late 1990s. What could possibly go wrong here? As it turns out, quite a lot.
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Contrary to Marc Ambinder’s prediction, when future historians look at what happened in those few hot weeks in June 2009, that email correspondence—which the State Department chose to widely publicize to bolster its own new media credentials—is likely to be of far greater importance that anything the Green Movement actually did on the Internet. Regardless of the immediate fate of democracy in Iran, the world is poised to feel the impact of that symbolic communication for years to come. For the Iranian authorities, such contact between its sworn enemies in the U.S. government and a Silicon Valley firm providing online services that, at least as the Western media described it, were beloved by their citizens quickly gave rise to suspicions that the Internet is an instrument of Western power and that its ultimate end is to foster regime change in Iran. Suddenly, the Iranian authorities no longer saw the Internet as an engine of economic growth or as a way to spread the word of the prophet.
What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson
back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, California energy crisis, clean water, cotton gin, deal flow, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, high net worth, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, microcredit, new economy, proprietary trading, rolling blackouts, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, telemarketer, traffic fines, work culture , young professional
When ladies meet him, they ask if he’s somebody famous, or maybe a politician. His accent is pure Kentucky. He never forgets that his parents were barely high school grads. Dad grew up in a place called Hoodoo Holler, which just about suggests it all: outhouses, bare feet, scant pavement. “What the heck is a hick like me doing in Silicon Valley, huh?” he said when we met. I told him Silicon Valley was full of people from all over the world. I didn’t know anyone here from Kentucky, but I knew a few from Tennessee. He heard me, but he was convinced he was an outcast, the subject of an invisible prejudice against his funny accent and non–Ivy League credentials. That was the first sign of many to indicate Tim had a huge chip on his shoulder, rooted in something unclear.
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I just wanted him to be happy—even as I believed his compromises were a root of his misery. Was I too easy on Tim? Not everyone can adopt Janelle’s motto, Dream job or die. I wanted to be encouraging, but I was afraid of offering false encouragement. Since my book about Silicon Valley, The Nudist on the Late Shift, was published, I had struggled with my culpability in the migration of young people here: 400,000 people had moved to Silicon Valley in the previous four years, most of them young, and most here to chase the dream. During 1999 and 2000, I couldn’t go to a party without some stranger recognizing me and saying he’d moved here because of what I had written.
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My ex-wife had these skills, so I never had to learn them myself. I’d been assigned articles about Silicon Valley—a big topic in those years—so I used these assignments as means to retrain myself. I got on the phone, I went to see people, and I stopped fictionalizing events to serve my ends. I wrote only what I saw, and I dug to find where reality was weirder than fiction. I fought hard for access to events that had always been shrouded in secrecy. Not even the people who knew me best were aware that this was what was driving me. I only talked about it with my therapist. I was not trying to wrestle Silicon Valley, I was trying to heal. I was trying to learn the skills I had relied on my ex-wife for.
Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance by Matthew Brennan
Airbnb, AltaVista, augmented reality, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, ImageNet competition, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, paypal mafia, Pearl River Delta, pre–internet, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WeWork, Y Combinator
TikTok-style feeds began popping up across all kinds of apps as players scrambled to integrate short videos into their offerings. Yet awareness around the power of the format did not exist to the same extent in the West. The era of “copy to China,” a period when Chinese internet firms eagerly pounced on new trends from Silicon Valley and made Chinese clones was coming to an end. With short videos, at least, the tables had turned. It would soon be time for Silicon Valley to play the game of “copy from China.” Bring back, Musical.ly! August 2nd, 2018 was a major milestone in the history of TikTok – the date when Musical.ly and TikTok merged. Overnight Musical.ly users found the app had morphed into “TikTok - including musical.ly” with their old videos and accounts now migrated over into a new app.
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2018-06-20 https://www.jiemian.com/article/2241255.html 抖音的海外战事 2018-06-16 https://36kr.com/p/1722597179393 没有补贴,没有商业化,抖音到底在海外做对了什么 2018-06-13 https://www.sohu.com/a/235450902_403354 “泰国版周杰伦和杨幂 ”,是怎么在抖音海外版上火起来的? 2018-07-11 https://www.tmtpost.com/3324980.html Musical.ly Sells For $800 Million But Peaked By Being Too Silicon Valley 2017-10-10 https://musicindustryblog.wordpress.com/2017/11/10/musical-ly-sells-for-800-million-but-peaked-by-being-too-silicon-valley/ BIGO:全球化夹缝中的生存冠军 - 2020-04-02 https://www.toutiao.com/i6811091360066568716/ ByteDance-Musical.ly Merger Ushers in New Age for Content Companies 2017-12-16 https://hans.vc/bytedance-musical-ly-merger/ 996 Podcast, Episode 4: Liu Zhen on ByteDance’s Global Vision and Why Toutiao Is Unique 2018-08-19 https://youtu.be/YsPeT2oHQLY?
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Companies looked to raid universities to recruit young, unmarried, aspiring “front line soldiers,” employees willing to be chewed up and spat out of the system by their mid-thirties in exchange for generous compensation or the chance to strike it rich with an IPO. 24 Despite its modest success, Yiming’s new employer, Kuxun, holds a somewhat legendary status within China’s internet industry. At its peak, the company employed just 170 people, yet over thirty of those staff members went on to become active entrepreneurs starting their own internet companies. 25 Yiming would become the most prominent member of the “Kuxun entrepreneurship gang,” a term that echoed Silicon Valley’s famous “PayPal mafia.” The Kuxun co-founder Chen Hua had ambitions of competing with search giant Baidu in the race to become “the Google of China.” Yet Baidu, by this time, was already invincible, having defended its market share from Google, who later voluntarily 26 left the market, gifting its former rival a near-monopoly in Chinese language search.
Social Capital and Civil Society by Francis Fukuyama
Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, p-value, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, scientific management, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, transaction costs, vertical integration, World Values Survey
This picture of unbridled competitive individualism is belied, however, by any number of more detailed sociological studies of the actual nature of technological development in Silicon Valley, such as Annalee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage. 17 In assessing the role of social capital in a modern economy, it is important to note that it does not have to manifest itself within the boundaries of individual companies or be embodied in practices like lifetime employment.18 Saxenian contrasts the performance of Silicon Valley with Boston’s Route 1 2 8 and notes that one important reason for the former's success had to do with the different culture of the Valley.
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The social capital produced by such informal social networks permits Silicon Valley to achieve scale economies in R &D not pos20 Ibid., p . 3 3 . 2 1 Thomas A . Stewart and Victoria Brown, “The Invisible Key to Success,” For tu ne ( A u g . 5, 1996): 173-74. 452 Tanner Lectures on Human Values sible in large, vertically integrated firms. Much has been written about the cooperative character of Japanese firms and the way in which technology is shared among members of a keiretsu network. In a certain sense, the whole of Silicon Valley can be seen as a single large network organization that can tap expertise and specialized skills unavailable to even the largest vertically integrated Japanese electronics firms and their keiretsu networks. 22 The importance of social capital to technology development has some paradoxical results.
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The reason is that information is processed much closer to its source: if a door panel from a subcontractor doesn’t fit properly, the worker assigned to bolt it to the chassis has both the authority and the incentive to see that the problem is fixed, rather than letting the information get lost while traveling up and down a long managerial hierarchy. I will provide one further example of where social capital is critical to implementing a flat or networked form of organization, which is the American information technology industry. Silicon Valley might at first glance seem to be a low-trust, low-social-capital 16 See James P. Womack and D . Jones, T h e Machine That Changed the World: T h e Story of Lean Production (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991). [FUKUYAMA] Social Capital 449 part of the American economy where competition rather than cooperation is the norm and where efficiency arises out of the workings of rational utility-maximizers meeting in impersonal markets as described by the neoclassical model.
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cal Newport, data science, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, financial independence, game design, Hacker News, index fund, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Money Mustache, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, price discrimination, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk
” * * * ■ ■ ■ Harris’s transformation into a whistleblower is exceptional in part because his life leading up to it was so normal by Silicon Valley standards. Harris, who at the time of this writing is in his midthirties, was raised in the Bay Area. Like many engineers, he grew up hacking his Macintosh and writing computer code. He went to Stanford to study computer science and, after graduating, started a master’s degree working in BJ Fogg’s famed Persuasive Technology Lab—which explores how to use technology to change how people think and act. In Silicon Valley, Fogg is known as the “millionaire maker,” a reference to the many people who passed through his lab and then applied what they learned to help build lucrative tech start-ups (a group that includes, among other dot-com luminaries, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger).
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To do so, however, we cannot passively allow the wild tangle of tools, entertainments, and distractions provided by the internet age to dictate how we spend our time or how we feel. We must instead take steps to extract the good from these technologies while sidestepping what’s bad. We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction. A philosophy, in other words, like digital minimalism.
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Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking. Maher’s concern with social media was sparked by a 60 Minutes segment that aired a month earlier. The segment is titled “Brain Hacking,” and it opens with Anderson Cooper interviewing a lean, red-haired engineer with the carefully tended stubble popular among young men in Silicon Valley. His name is Tristan Harris, a former start-up founder and Google engineer who deviated from his well-worn path through the world of tech to become something decidedly rarer in this closed world: a whistleblower. “This thing is a slot machine,” Harris says early in the interview while holding up his smartphone.
Give People Money by Annie Lowrey
Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator
“The community is evolving as we speak from a small group of people who say, This is it, to a large group of people who say, Hey, there may be something here,” he told me. There might be some irony, granted, in Silicon Valley boosting a solution to a problem it believes that it is creating—in disrupting the labor underpinnings of the whole economy, and then promoting a disruptive welfare solution. Those job-smothering, life-awesoming technologies come in no small part from garages in Menlo Park and venture-capital offices overlooking the Golden Gate and group houses in Oakland. “Here in Silicon Valley, it feels like we can see the future,” Misha Chellam, the founder of the start-up training school Tradecraft and a UBI advocate, told me.
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“Our ministers know we are right, our teachers know we are right, our doctors know we are right, but it’s about power. Do we have the power to disrupt ‘progress,’ because the progress is progressing into something we don’t have value in?” Don’t have value in, and might not always have a role in—even if Silicon Valley’s fears about the labor-sapping potential of their innovations are overly pessimistic and even if Silicon Valley’s hopes about the transformative potential of their technologies are overly optimistic. Driving around Pittsburgh in the backseat of an Uber, I caught sight of one of the company’s driverless cars. A UBI might help support workers with low-wage jobs—but what about workers without jobs?
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It came up in books, at conferences, in meetings with politicians, in discussions with progressives and libertarians, around the dinner table. I covered it as it happened. I wrote about that failed Swiss referendum, and about a Canadian basic-income experiment that has provided evidence for the contemporary debate. I talked with Silicon Valley investors terrified by the prospect of a jobless future and rode in a driverless car, wondering how long it would be before artificial intelligence started to threaten my job. I chatted with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle about the failing middle class and whether the country needed a new, big redistributive policy to strengthen it.
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr
Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, intentional community, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, web application, Yogi Berra, éminence grise
—Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments “John Doerr is a Silicon Valley legend. He explains how transparently setting objectives and defining key results can align organizations and motivate high performance.” —Jonathan Levin, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business “Measure What Matters is a gift to every leader or entrepreneur who wants a more transparent, accountable, and effective team. It encourages the kind of big, bold bets that can transform an organization.” —John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco “In addition to being a terrific personal history of tech in Silicon Valley, Measure What Matters is an essential handbook for both small and large organizations; the methods described will definitely drive great execution.”
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They’ve kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most. And I wanted to make sure people heard that. Larry Page and John Doerr, 2014. PART ONE OKRs in Action 1 Google, Meet OKRs If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there. —Yogi Berra On a fall day in 1999, in the heart of Silicon Valley, I arrived at a two-story, L-shaped structure off the 101 freeway. It was young Google’s headquarters, and I’d come with a gift. The company had leased the building two months earlier, outgrowing a space above an ice-cream parlor in downtown Palo Alto. Two months before that, I’d placed my biggest bet in nineteen years as a venture capitalist, an $11.8 million wager for 12 percent of a start-up founded by a pair of Stanford grad school dropouts.
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We’ve seen their broadest adoption in tech, where agility and teamwork are absolute imperatives. (In addition to the firms you will hear from in this book, OKR adherents include AOL, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Oracle, Slack, Spotify, and Twitter.) But the system has also been adopted by household names far beyond Silicon Valley: Anheuser-Busch, BMW, Disney, Exxon, Samsung. In today’s economy, change is a fact of life. We cannot cling to what’s worked and hope for the best. We need a trusty scythe to carve a path ahead of the curve. At smaller start-ups, where people absolutely need to be pulling in the same direction, OKRs are a survival tool.
Dead Companies Walking by Scott Fearon
Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cost per available seat-mile, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, housing crisis, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Larry Ellison, late fees, legacy carrier, McMansion, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, young professional
At the same time, slot machines had become hugely popular and were now responsible for as much as 70 percent of most casinos’ revenues. Finally, the general public had become much more accepting of gambling as a pastime. It wasn’t viewed as something sinful or unsavory anymore. Silicon Valley East In many ways, the executives of IGT ran the company more like a Silicon Valley tech firm than an old-fashioned slot machine manufacturer. They recognized that their creatives—the designers who dreamed up new kinds of slot machines—were their biggest assets, and they spoiled them as much as Google spoils its employees. On one of my later trips to Reno, I was walking through the parking lot of IGT’s giant new campus with Tom, and we passed a brand-new red Ferrari Spider.
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Japan is probably the best recent example of this phenomenon. The country is notorious for keeping moribund but politically favored corporations alive, and the results of that strategy are plain. It has been mired in a zero-growth economy since I first tried sushi in the late 1980s. I spend a good deal of time visiting and studying companies in Silicon Valley. That place has taken on an almost mythical status in the business world, and deservedly so. It’s chock-full of smart, creative people. Without all the high-tech innovations they’ve come up with in the last half century, the global economy would be dead in the water. But no one talks about the real reason the Valley is such fertile ground: failure.
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I’ve already recounted some of my experiences during and after the housing craze of the mid-2000s. I also had a front-row seat for the last days of the East Texas oil boom. But nothing compares to the dotcom delirium of the late 1990s. Thinking back on those years is like remembering a weird dream. For half a decade, Silicon Valley turned into nothing less than a business world version of Jonestown. The Kool-Aid wasn’t lethal. But it was very potent, and people were drinking it by the gallon. I remember one particular meeting that captured the mood of the era. In March 2000, I drove to San Mateo to speak with some executives of a website company called Women.com (stock symbol: WOMN).
Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed
adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration
Over time, this led to a growing concentration of firms in the Valley, including the Fairchild Semiconductor Company. By the 1970s, the Santa Clara Valley had spawned a soubriquet of its own, ‘Silicon Valley’, but it remained very much in the shadow of the Massachusetts miracle. The Boston firms had the classic economic advantages. Land and office space costs were significantly lower, as were the wages and salaries of workers, engineers and managers.42 There were other differences, too. The Boston firms were buttoned-up. They wore jackets and ties. The Silicon Valley rebels were more laid-back, preferring jeans and T-shirts. They had different ways of talking, and different terminology.
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‘The technology companies were scattered widely along the corridor and increasingly along the outer band . . . with miles of forest, lakes, and highway separating them. The Route 128 region was so expansive that DEC began to use helicopters to link its widely dispersed facilities.’45 On the surface, at least, Silicon Valley seemed less suited to the high-tech sector. The region didn’t enjoy tax benefits to help them catch up with Route 128, nor did they have additional state support in, say, defence spending. And, as already noted, costs were higher in land, office space and wages. And yet Silicon Valley had something more powerful, an ingredient that rarely finds its way into conventional economic textbooks. You get a sense of this ingredient by reading Tom Wolfe in a famous essay on the Valley: Every year there was some place, the Wagon Wheel, Chez Yvonne, Rickey’s, the Roundhouse, where members of this esoteric fraternity, the young men and women of the semiconductor industry, would head after work to have a drink and gossip and brag and trade war stories about phase jitters, phantom circuits, bubble memories, pulse trains, bounceless contacts, burst modes, leapfrog tests, p-n junctions, sleeping-sickness modes, slow-death episodes, RAMs, NAKs, MOSes, PCMs, PROMs, PROM blowers, PROM burners, PROM blasters, and teramagnitudes, meaning multiples of a million millions.46 In Silicon Valley, people socialised, ideas fizzed around, giving them a chance to meet and mate, to recombine, and to trigger yet new ideas.
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It is symptomatic that forums for idea exchange – whether restaurants, cafes or organically created clubs – were conspicuous by their absence along Route 128. There was no demand. Jeffrey Kalb, who worked in Massachusetts in minicomputing before moving to Silicon Valley, said: ‘I was not aware of similar meeting spots in Route 128. There may have been a lunch spot in Hudson or Marlboro, but there was nothing of the magnitude of Silicon Valley hangouts.’49 Route 128 companies didn’t neglect these things as an act of deliberate self-sabotage. They were creative and smart, but had not made an essential conceptual leap. Innovation is not just about creativity, it is also about connections.
Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider
1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar
It also appeals to Silicon Valley’s preference for simple, elegant algorithms that can solve big problems once and for all. Supporters list the possible outcomes: It could end poverty and reduce inequality with hardly any bureaucracy. Recipients with more time and resources at hand would dream up startups and attend to their families. Some, as critics complain, would surf.14 But perhaps most attractively for the executive class, the payouts would ensure that even an underemployed population could maintain the consumer demand that the robot companies would need to function. As if Silicon Valley hasn’t given us enough already, it may have to start giving us all money.
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Google became one of the world’s leading lobbyists, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. The internet could no longer claim to be a postpolitical subculture; it had become the empire. As tech achieved its Constantinian apotheosis, old religious tropes seemed to offer a return to lost purity, a desert in which to flee, the stark opposite of Silicon Valley. A bonneted “Amish Futurist” began appearing at tech conferences, asking the luminaries about ultimate meaning, as if she came from a world without the internet. Ariana Huffington cashed in with her mobile app, GPS for the Soul. For a year and a half, the unMonastery idea developed and grew.
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Prime Produce wasn’t alone in looking to old guilds as the way of the future. Some see a model for organizing freelancers in Hollywood’s guild-like set-worker unions, which establish industrywide standards as their members bounce from production to production. Jay Z’s Tidal streaming platform sold itself to consumers as a kind of guild for musicians; a group of Silicon Valley business writers has organized itself into the Silicon Guild to help amplify each member’s networks; some gig-economy workers have an Indy Workers Guild to distribute portable benefits. In the twentieth century, Charlie Chaplin and his friends formed United Artists to produce their own films, and photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capra formed Magnum, a cooperative syndication guild.
Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor
Yet, stripped of its “generous” veneer, Uber’s teacher-driver campaigns are also sharing in a more twisted Silicon Valley fantasy: low taxes, good schools, and teachers who drive you home after your expense-account meal with a venture capitalist! These conglomerates are gargantuan outfits that offer short-term, cheap services delivered by “independent” contractors. They have become hugely successful by trading labor across platforms over which workers have little to no say. There was also a gendered element of this dark Silicon Valley fantasia. Of the dozen Uber and Lyft driver-teachers I spoke to in 2016, most were also parents, and almost all were men.
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Robot’s Alderson is given to deadpan enraged voice-overs about the horrors of the contemporary human condition. “Since when did ads infect our family albums?” Alderson said. “Since when did one become greater than ninety-nine?” This is also true for HBO’s Silicon Valley, which examines the huge gap between ramen-eating, couch-surfing, low-end tech workers and their 1 percent tech-guru overlords—the show’s main source of drama and humor. The absurd tech-titan excesses in Silicon Valley—the venture capital toga parties, the private Kid Rock concerts—are starkly contrasted with life on the lower rungs, where a desperate aspirant pitches his app to customers at the liquor store where he works.
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See Education School zones, 135, 136 Schroeder, Matthew, 91 Schwartz, Pepper, 212 Scott-Heron, Gil, 216 Second Act Coaching, 170 Second act industry, 165–88 career navigators, 165–68, 186–87 concept of failure, 179–81 for-profit colleges, 172–78 illusory faith in second acts, 170–79 Michelle Belmont’s story, 184–86 RE:Launch, 165–68, 186–88 remedies, 183–88 sales pitch of, 181–83 use of term, 170 Self-blame, 4, 37, 47, 182, 211, 249–50, 258–59 Self-help books, 181 Self-help mantras, 4 Self-image, 4, 8–9 Service Employees International Union (SEIU), 54, 58 Shame, 155, 214 Sharone, Ofer, 169, 172–73 Sherman, Rachel, 213 Shulevitz, Judith, 244 Silicon Valley, 89–90, 91 housing costs, 147–48, 149, 197 Uber teacher-drivers, 147–50, 160 Silicon Valley (TV show), 222, 223 Simiyu, Esther, 117–18, 120, 145 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 180 Soccer, 131, 142 Social class, 109, 263–65 men and, 150–51 school curricula about, 263–65 Social class segregation, 8, 114, 197 Social comparision theory, 90–91, 93–94 Social media, 214–16 Social mobility, 49–50, 112–13, 154 of immigrants, 112–13, 121–24, 139 Social Security, 241, 278 Social status, 4, 90–94 health outcomes and, 93–94, 96 income and happiness, 90–91, 93–94 Sopranos, The (TV show), 217 Soul, 40 South Africa, hospital birth costs, 24 “Spatial inequality,” 197 Spencer, Tamara, 166, 173–74 Spielberg, Steven, 230–31 “Spoiled identities,” 28 Squeezed, use of term, 4 “Standard of living,” 69–70 Standing, Guy, 6 Stanford University, 16, 252 Stapleton, Ainsley, 98–99 STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), 47–48 Stepford Wives, The (Levin), 102–3 Stocksy, 158 Student debt, 168–69 Belle Goldman’s story, 183–84 of law school graduates, 37–38, 102, 103, 105 Michelle Belmont’s story, 1–2, 100, 185–86 racial differences in, 176–77 remedies, 183–86 Tamara Spencer’s story, 173 “Stupid optimism,” 39 Suárez-Orozco, Carola, 143 Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo, 143 Subsidized day care, 79–80, 253–54 Success Kidz 24 Hour Enrichment Center, 64 Sugarland Express, The (film), 230–31 Summer camps, 98 Summers, Larry, 139 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley by Atsuo Inoue
Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, Apple II, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, business climate, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, fixed income, game design, George Floyd, hive mind, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Masayoshi Son, off grid, popular electronics, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TikTok, Vision Fund, WeWork
He isn’t thinking about things as X product or X field, he’s thinking about how he can make SoftBank the next Silicon Valley.’ In January 2013, Son spoke about ‘a new type of business model they were creating in Silicon Valley’ in an interview with the Japan Broadcasting Corporation. ‘Everything converges in Silicon Valley with these inventions, how everything gets redefined. There’s the phrase “made in America” which everyone likes so much but the truth is it should be “made in Silicon Valley”. You’ve got all of these extraordinary things on the forefront of technology being created in Silicon Valley which become integrated into societies around the world and which become the most in-demand products.
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His thought process is that if it’s something for the greater good then people will want to get on board.’ Miwa would later gain further insight into Son’s principles when he received three new messages from his boss – who was in Silicon Valley at the time – at the end of 2012. ‘They’ve got a clean electricity generation system powered by natural gas. It looks interesting so let’s look into it.’ Miwa flew out straight away. Silicon Valley proved it was not just fertile ground for the IT industry, reinventing itself by developing different types of next-generation energy options. In May 2013, Bloom Energy Japan was founded, capable of stably generating electrical power 24 hours a day, 365 days a week.
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While living in the USA, he interviewed many celebrities including Irving Wallce, Muhammad Ali, George Harrison, and Jeffrey Archer. Over the course of his successful career, he has published numerous books including The Mentalities and Mindsets of Entrepreneur Masayoshi Son, Tokaton – Masayoshi Son Monogatari. Aiming High Masayoshi Son, SoftBank Group, and Disrupting Silicon Valley Atsuo Inoue www.hodder.co.uk First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Hodder & Stoughton An Hachette UK company KOKORAZASHI TAKAKU: SON MASAYOSHI SEIDEN Copyright © Atsuo Inoue 2021t All rights reserved. Original Japanese edition published by Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, Ltd., Tokyo This English edition is published by arrangement with Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, Ltd., Tokyo c/o Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.
The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax
Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game
And innovation is an uncommon practice,” Saxe said. “I think they have been completely conflated. When people say innovation in cities, they generally mean an invention… something technological and usually the model of something app or Silicon Valley based. We’ve ceded it to anything related to Silicon Valley and its ethos. This is false and destructive! There are many, many innovative ideas that are not about apps, gadgets, or Silicon Valley.” True innovation in a city can just as easily be analog, and it often is. A few years ago, during that first visit to Seoul, I was walking with my editor, Taeyung Kang, when we wandered into Samcheong Park, in the hills near the presidential palace.
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This book is not about dragging us back to some predigital stone age. I am writing this book on a computer, not a typewriter, and I will happily binge another season of The Mandalorian the second it drops. But make no mistake, we are at a critical juncture in the struggle for the future. On the one hand, we can continue moving forward blindly, following Silicon Valley’s imperative to create a world where digital is the driver and anything analog is simply disrupted out of existence. Or we can pause, absorb the hard-learned lessons of the digital immersion we experienced during the pandemic, and build a future where digital technology actually elevates the most valuable parts of the analog world rather than replacing them.
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But as much as this was a radical improvement from the earlier work we did on sofas, in bed, or on strategically placed cushions in the bathtub like Melanie, the sense of languishing continued to grow. Something was still missing. Was it the office itself? “We had a crash course in just how much work goes into making stable, reliable workspaces,” said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a consultant in Silicon Valley focused on the future of work and the author of books such as Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less—Here’s How and The Distraction Addiction. “Part of the issue that remote, mobile, non-place-specific work creates for us is that there is a degree of solidity or seamlessness that offices or other kinds of dedicated workspaces are able to provide.”
Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise
Anything that provokes clients to seek a new agency is good for Michael Kassan’s business, for MediaLink conducts agency reviews, orchestrating the entire process from helping choose the competing agencies, defining what the client seeks, helping judge the agency’s creative and strategic pitches, to participating as the client reaches a decision. MediaLink also performs a headhunter role, linking executives to vacant agency and client positions. It also introduces start-ups to investor capital, performing as an investment banker. It serves as a sherpa, making introductions between agencies and Silicon Valley and Hollywood, taking clients on tours of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft, all companies it has represented. MediaLink also represents agencies, arranging speakers for various advertising conferences, where Kassan induces them to cosponsor MediaLink parties and arranges for their executives to appear on panels.
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Or is it a creative business, where consumers’ hearts and minds are captured by big, original ideas articulated with aesthetic brilliance, as the doyens of the Creative Revolution claimed? Or is it, increasingly, a science, in which leadership will gravitate to those who can capture and analyze the most data, as Silicon Valley and its digital gurus claim? Did Gotlieb’s WPP, which is headquartered in the UK, hide U.S. rebates? “We don’t do rebates in the U.S.,” Gotlieb firmly answered, leaving a clear impression that maybe others partook in the United States. Dave Morgan, the CEO of Simulmedia, a marketing technology company that uses data to target TV ad buys, believes most do it.
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They use simple bar codes to partake in 500 million daily transactions, employing 300 million credit cards that link to 300,000 stores, all without switching to another app. If the client does not know, Kassan can explain that WeChat is a one-stop service that combines the varied functions of PayPal, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, Netflix, banks, Expedia, and countless apps. It is clear to Kassan: the mobile future is being shaped in China, not Silicon Valley. But this frightens his clients, because they know China is a hard market to crack, and they know the U.S. companies that control mobile will drive hard bargains with agencies and advertisers. They also know the limitations of mobile. Ads on mobile phones soak up battery life, are constricted by small screens, and are so intrusive and irksome to consumers that about one quarter of Americans and one third of Western Europeans sign up for ad blockers to prevent the interruptions.
Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock
Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book scanning, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive load, company town, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, helicopter parent, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Kevin Roose, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, nudge unit, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, random walk, Richard Thaler, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Turing machine, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy, Y2K
Yevgeniy Dodis, “Some of My Favorite Sayings,” Department of Computer Science, New York University, cs.nyu.edu/~dodis/quotes.html. 159. David Streitfeld, “Silicon Valley’s Favorite Stories,” Bits (blog), New York Times, February 5, 2013, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/silicon-valleys-favorite-stories/?_r=0. 160. “William Shockley Founds Shockley Semiconductor,” Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, http://www.fairchildsemi.com/about-fairchild/history/#. 161. Tom Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley,” Esquire, December 1983. 162. Nick Bilton, “Why San Francisco Is Not New York,” Bits (blog), New York Times, March 20, 2014, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/why-san-francisco-isnt-the-new-new-york/. 163.
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To underscore his point, he concluded: “If after we go public I see any lamborghinis in our parking lot, you better buy two of them because I’m going to take a baseball bat to the windshield of any parked here.” Even though our IPO created many millionaires, we for many years stayed relatively free of the affectations of conspicuous consumption. This ostentation aversion is as much a reflection of the historic engineering culture of Silicon Valley as anything special about Google. New York Times journalist David Streitfeld traces it back to the “founding” of Silicon Valley in 1957,159 when Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Eugene Kleiner, and five others started Fairchild Semiconductor and developed a way to mass-produce silicon transistors.160 Streitfeld describes it as a “new kind of company… one that was all about openness and risk.
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Dropbox had their first Take Your Parents to Work Day in 2013, and LinkedIn later declared November 7 to be theirs, with more than sixty employees bringing their parents into their New York office.199 Maternity programs are improving across the industry. And on-site cafés are now a standard offering at Silicon Valley companies. But the adopters of these programs still seem to be companies in the United States, in Silicon Valley. For anyone considering similar programs, I’ll hazard a few reasons why you don’t see a cornucopia of unique programs across different organizations. First, there’s the false assumption that they cost money. It’s just not true. Yes, in some cases there is opportunity cost (time spent on an ERG is time away from “work”), but as a practical matter that’s more than returned in improved retention and happiness.
Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg
A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K
Kapor had found space in Belmont on the Peninsula fringe of Silicon Valley, in a nondescript low-slung office park just down the road from the glass-towered campus of Oracle, the giant producer of corporate databases. The building also housed “Oracle University.” An Extended Stay America motel was going up next door for migrant businesspeople stopping off at Oracle. But the office complex had plenty of vacancies in the spring of 2002 when Kapor first moved his fledgling company into a corner of the fourth floor, using space no longer needed by a software firm called Reactivity. That’s the way Silicon Valley replenishes itself, forest-like: The technology industry moves in a perennial cycle of growth and decomposition, and new companies have always germinated in the empty space created by the toppling of other companies from a previous wave of growth.
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As a journalist, I would witness my share of the software world’s inexhaustible disaster stories—multinational corporations and government agencies and military-industrial behemoths, all foundering on the iceberg of code. And as a manager, I got to ride my very own desktop Titanic. This discouraging trajectory of twenty-five years of software history may not be a representative experience, but it was mine. Things were supposed to be headed in the opposite direction, according to Silicon Valley’s digital utopianism. In the months following our train wreck of a site launch at Salon, that discrepancy began to eat at me. Programming is no longer in its infancy. We now depend on unfathomably complex software to run our world. Why, after a half century of study and practice, is it still so difficult to produce computer software on time and under budget?
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Kapor repeatedly told his programmers that the nonprofit OSAF was going to operate under different rules from the venture-capital-funded start-ups whose wreckage, in those post–Internet boom days, littered the San Francisco Bay area—leaving OSAF’s new neighborhood south of Market Street feeling like an urban dead zone. At a May meeting he reassured some of them who feared that their team was growing too big, too fast: “We’re not operating with the mythology of the Silicon Valley death march, with the deadline to ship a product and get revenue, where the product quality goes out the window. Everybody who’s been through that—and that pretty much includes everyone in this room—knows what that’s like. If we go down that route, we will have failed miserably.” Kapor kept this promise: OSAF’s growth was steady but careful, and indeed by summer’s end many programmers worried that hiring was too slow.
Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce
But they failed to describe what they thought this regulation should do. That answer would come from the other side of the country, near Silicon Valley itself. And this drama involved a second character who was as unlikely to play a leading role as Max Schrems had been. It was an American named Alastair Mactaggart. In 2015, the San Francisco Bay Area real estate developer hosted a dinner party at his home in Piedmont, California, a leafy suburb across the bay from the Silicon Valley empires quietly dealing in private information. As Mactaggart quizzed one of his guests about his job at Google, he wasn’t just dissatisfied with the answers, he found them terrifying.
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Quinlan, The Transatlantic Economy 2016 (Washington, DC: Center for Transatlantic Relations, 2016), v. Back to note reference 7. An interesting contemporaneous account with Schrems as his case unfolded, see Robert Levine, “Behind the European Privacy Ruling That’s Confounding Silicon Valley,” New York Times, 9 Oct. 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/business/international/behind-the-european-privacy-ruling-thats-confounding-silicon-valley.html. Back to note reference 8. Kashmir Hill, “Max Schrems: The Austrian Thorn in Facebook’s Side,” Forbes, February 7, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/07/the-austrian-thorn-in-facebooks-side/#2d84e427b0b7.
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One of the strongest early investments involves a partnership with the Green Bay Packers across from Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Microsoft and the Packers each committed $5 million to create TitleTownTech, which advances technology innovation in the region. Richard Ryman, “Packers, Microsoft Bring Touch of Silicon Valley to Titletown District,” Green Bay Press Gazette, October 20, 2017, https://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/news/2017/10/19/packers-microsoft-bring-touch-silicon-valley-titletown-district/763041001/; Opinion, “TitletownTech: Packers, Microsoft Partnership a ‘Game Changer’ for Greater Green Bay,” Green Bay Press Gazette, October 21, 2017, https://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/opinion/editorials/2017/10/21/titletowntech-packers-microsoft-partnership-game-changer-greater-green-bay/786094001/.
The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant
Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day
“That’s where the inequality comes in: There’s no level playing field. If you don’t have the access to the networks, to the conferences, to the ones with the money, who are quite often not based here, that’s it.” Part of the problem, he says, was that investors and donors tried to import the Silicon Valley mentality to Nairobi. “Before then, it was expats lecturing guys. You know: ‘This is how it works in Silicon Valley, it should work for you.’” But Kenyans couldn’t simply make a killer app and expect investors to notice it and acquire it for millions like they would in San Francisco. “People just didn’t know what they were signing up for. Entrepreneurship here is more about survival.
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These chapters will start at Chapter 1, and proceed from examining the century-old origins of the idea of a “smartphone” to exploring the powerful technologies gathered under its hood, to investigating how all those parts are assembled in China, to visiting the black markets and e-waste pits where they ultimately wind up. With that, let’s make our first stop—Apple HQ in Cupertino, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. i: Exploring New Rich Interactions iPhone in embryo Apple’s user-testing lab at 2 Infinite Loop had been abandoned for years. Down the hall from the famed Industrial Design studio, the space was divided by a one-way mirror so hidden observers could see how ordinary people navigate new technologies.
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It would be ideal for a trackpad as well as a touchscreen tablet; an idea long pursued but never perfected in the consumer market—and one certainly interesting to the vets of the Newton (which had a resistive touch screen) who still hoped to see mobile computing take off. And it wouldn’t be the first time a merry band of Apple inventors plumbed another organization for UI inspiration. In fact, Silicon Valley’s premier Prometheus myth is rife with parallels: In 1979, a young squad of Apple engineers, led by Steve Jobs, visited the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and laid eyes on its groundbreaking graphical user interface (GUI) boasting windows, icons, and menus. Jobs and his band of “pirates” borrowed some of those ideas for the embryonic Macintosh.
How Money Became Dangerous by Christopher Varelas
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airport security, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, cashless society, corporate raider, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, eat what you kill, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Michael Milken, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, pensions crisis, pets.com, pre–internet, profit motive, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Saturday Night Live, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, universal basic income, zero day
It seemed that their timing couldn’t have been better, as the dotcom craze built toward a crescendo. Similar to homesteaders during westward expansion, a land grab took hold, with newly sprung Silicon Valley companies racing to plant their flags in the virgin soil of the internet. Salomon’s senior management started calling me around this time. “What’s happening with those big IPOs out there on the West Coast?” they asked. “Why aren’t we getting that action?” Taking companies public wasn’t my area of focus; I specialized in M&A and was still based in New York, not Silicon Valley. But since I worked in the tech sector, my Salomon bosses came to me to find out how real the dotcom craze was and why we weren’t landing any of the major public offerings, which seemed to be occurring almost hourly.
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Either way, the sticker highlighted a fascinating mindset that still pervades Silicon Valley: Are we out there just wishing that another bubble would come along, to boost our spirits and our bank accounts for as long as the party lasts? It’s a dangerous wish. Where would that leave us when the next bubble breaks? Many generations have seen true progress and growth, but not without moments when reality falls out of alignment with inflated bubble metrics. Hope, by its very definition, gets too far out in front of reality, and many of those hope-fueled companies don’t survive. The general formula in Silicon Valley is that there will be nine failures for every success—that high rate of failure is a necessary consequence of the freedom to take the risk to innovate.
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Many who now go into finance see it as a stepping stone on the path to something else, much as I did when I took my first full-time job in commercial banking. Today, the youth of America flock to Silicon Valley the way they used to flock to Wall Street—because they can make a lot of money in the tech world, but they can also convince themselves that it’s a noble pursuit. Or they target private equity, where the opportunities to make big money still exist. These days, to lure talented people to Wall Street, investment banks have to pay more than they otherwise would because they’re not only competing with the fortunes to be made in tech but also with Silicon Valley’s mantra that each new gadget or app or startup will “make the world a better place”—regardless of whether there’s any truth to that assertion.
Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain
Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons
“If the entire Group falls, and with it multitudes of suppliers that depend solely on Samsung, South Korea’s biggest banks are at risk of insolvency.” It is a startling admission. South Koreans refer to it as the “Samsung risk.” And many see it as an urgent concern. * * * — IN FACT, SAMSUNG HAS no equivalent among its Silicon Valley peers. Nor does the company have Silicon Valley’s rebellious, counterculture origins. There is no marijuana-smoking college-dropout equivalent of Steve Jobs; there is no mischievous Mark Zuckerberg, ranking co-eds on his dorm room website. There is no flamboyant engineer like Sony’s Akio Morita, who survived World War II, co-founded the company in a bombed-out department store, and drove its success.
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Rusli, and Min-Jeong Lee, “Samsung Plays Catch-up on Software,” The Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2013, https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-weak-spot-for-samsung-1381190699. began poaching software engineers: T.J. Kang, interview by the author, March 27, 2016. Work would eventually begin: Sam Byford, “Take a Look Inside Samsung’s New $300 Million Silicon Valley Campus,” The Verge, February 27, 2013, https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/27/4034988/samsung-silicon-valley-campus-pictures. “There was a rumor that Palm”: T.J. Kang, interview by the author, January 29, 2016. T.J. was prepared to negotiate: Ibid. tryst with a female contractor: David Goldman, “Marc Hurd’s Sex Scandal Letter Emerges,” CNNMoney, December 30, 2011, https://money.cnn.com/2011/12/30/technology/hurd_letter/index.htm.
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Through his branding and advertising campaigns, Samsung overtook Sony in brand value and sales by the mid-2000s. Todd Pendleton. Chief marketing officer at Samsung’s American mobile unit from 2011 to 2015. Led advertising efforts against Apple during the Samsung-versus-Apple smartphone wars. Daren Tsui and Ed Ho. Two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who got their start working with Elon Musk and later sold their music software, mSpot, to Samsung in May 2012. After the sale, they joined Samsung as vice presidents for content and services; they ran the grand experiment Milk Music until its closure in September 2016. Paul Elliott Singer.
Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman
3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional
“If the team is not unquestionably better than what the government has put together in the FDA, then it’s not worth undertaking,” says Chris. “Think about how quickly things turned around when the Obama administration brought in Silicon Valley talent to fix HealthCare.gov.” In 2013, when thousands of technocrats employed by 55 different contractors delivered a website that didn’t work, a small crack team of developers from Silicon Valley raced into the debacle and helped the federal bureaucracy exceed its goal of 8 million insured households nationwide. “That’s the kind dramatic increase in team quality and accountability that you want on a seastead.
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In his now defunct personal blog, he proposed an idea that became contagious: imagine ten thousand homesteads on the sea—“seasteads”—where ocean pioneers will be free to experiment with new societies. Aquatic citizens could live in modular pods that can detach at any time and sail to join another floating city, compelling ocean governments to compete for mobile citizens like companies compete for customers. A market of competing governments, a Silicon Valley of the sea, would allow the best ideas for governance to emerge peacefully, unleashing unimaginable progress in the rate at which we generate solutions to the oldest social problem: How do we get along? By such means, an economic and moral argument could become a technological experiment. On a blog called Let a Thousand Nations Bloom, Patri predicted in the essay “Dynamic Geography” that a process of trial and error on a fluid frontier will generate solutions we can’t even imagine today.
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We’re creating this future because our governments profoundly affect every aspect of our lives, and improving them would unlock enormous human potential. Currently, it is very difficult to experiment with alternative social systems on a small scale: countries are so enormous that it is hard for an individual to make much difference. The world needs a Silicon Valley of the Sea, where those who wish to experiment with building new societies can go to demonstrate their ideas in practice. At the Seasteading Institute, we believe that experiments are the source of all progress: to find something better, you have to try something new. As a nonprofit, we’ve produced hundreds of pages of research in the key areas of engineering, law, and business development freely available at http://www.seasteading.org/overview/.
The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child by Morgan G. Ames
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, clean water, commoditize, computer age, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, fail fast, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, hype cycle, informal economy, Internet of things, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Minecraft, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, SimCity, smart cities, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Hackers Conference, Travis Kalanick
In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard G. Fox, 191–210. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991. ———. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimension of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Asghar, Rob. “Why Silicon Valley’s ‘Fail Fast’ Mantra Is Just Hype.” Forbes, July 14, 2014. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robasghar/2014/07/14/why-silicon-valleys-fail-fast-mantra-is-just-hype/. Azoulay, Pierre, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda. “Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship.” NBER Working Paper No. w24489, April 2018. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3158929. Badham, John, dir.
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See World Economic Forum Debugging, 31 Design masculine, in OLPC, 71 nostalgic, 15–18, 51–55, 58–60, 62, 71, 131–132, 233n15 of XO laptop, flaws in, 89–90, 99, 244nn55–56 Development disruption and, 183 performativity in, 173, 178–183, 250n12 Silicon Valley model of, 178–179 technological utopianism in, problems of, 195, 254n37 United Nations program for, 3 Digital native, 228n47 Disruption of classroom, OLPC expectations of, 83, 92, 106–107 performing development and, 183 Silicon Valley culture of, 189 by XO laptop, 85, 106–107 Doom, 57, 122, 129, 143 DOTA 2, 151 Dourish, Paul, 6 Drake, Daniel, 239n17, 240n23 Educational reform charisma and, 187, 196–198 techno-utopian, 187–189 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 127 English, 169 Futuro teaching, 153, 156 over Guaraní, privileging of, 158, 160 learning, focus on, 156–160 Paraguay Educa arranging lessons in, 145, 151–152, 156 Ensmenger, Nathan, 39 Ethiopia, 176, 185–186 Ethnography, 16, 107 methods of, 214, 224n60 performance and, 174–175 thick description in, 217 Etoys, 148–152 Etoysera, 148 Europe and the People without History (Wolf, E.), 161 Exceptionalism, 10, 69–70 Factory model, of education, 36–37, 60, 229n69, 230n73 Fail Festival, 178–179 Ferguson, James, 161–162, 250n12 Fetishism, 223n42, 234n31 Fieldwork Guaraní in, 214 with Paraguay Educa, 16, 210–214, 216–218 quantitative data supplementing, 16, 214–216 thick description in, 217 Fisher, Allan, 69–70 Formadores, 95–97 Fortunati, Leopoldina, 221n35 Foucault, Michel, 222n37 Fouché, Rayvon, 132–133 Freedom Levy on, 62 in OLPC core principles, 50, 61 Papert on, 65–66 self-taught learner and, 64–66, 236n67 in XO laptop, 61–67, 71–72, 236n59 Free Software Foundation, 62, 64 Freire, Paulo, 76, 229n67, 239n15 Futuro, 153, 156 García, Alan, 245n73 Geertz, Clifford, 194, 217 Gender boy as default, 43, 232n97 hacker ethic and, 38–40 internet and, 43 laptop breakage and, 117 masculine design, 71 motivation and, 70 OLPC and, 39–40, 43–44, 46, 71 Papert and, 43–44 in Paraguay Educa, 117–118, 144–147, 151–152, 155, 159, 163 rebellion and, 38–40 Scratch and, 145–147 technically precocious boy, 15–16, 29, 33, 41–45, 111, 145–146, 152, 155, 187–188, 231n90, 231n92 toys and, 41–43 in video games, 42–44, 57 Gettys, Jim, 51–53 Gibson, William, 39, 53 Globalization, 221n35 Global South, 219n1 imperialism and, 195–196 Logo projects in, 25–27, 225n15 OLPC for, 1–3, 5, 49, 219n9, 220n12 OLPC imaginary and, 7 teachers in, 60 The Gods Must Be Crazy, 107, 246n80 Goffman, Erving, 173 Great Britain, 187 Green machine, laptop as, 2–3, 55 Guaraní English privileged over, 158, 160 in fieldwork, 214 in Paraguay, 77, 81, 157–158, 160, 214, 224n60 rurality and, 157 Gutiérrez, Raúl, 73–74, 77–78, 238n5, 239n18 Hackathons, 250n12 Hacker ethic, 226n31 masculinity and, 39–40 open-source software promoted by, 62 rebellion in, 37–41, 46 Hackers constructionism and, 28–31, 38, 46 infrastructure and identity of, 163 at MIT, culture of, 14–15, 23, 28–31, 38, 54, 58, 226n31 OLPC architects as, 15, 23 Papert and MIT culture of, 29–31, 54 Papert and social imaginary of, 38, 44–45 in Paraguay Educa, culture of, 77, 144, 163 self-taught, social imaginary of, 44–46 as yearners, 44–45 Hackers (Levy), 38–39 freedom in, 62 MIT in, 30, 60, 226n31 as symbol, hacker in, 226n31 Hall, Stuart, 7–8, 45 Haraway, Donna, 14, 199 Harvey, David, 223n42 Heterogeneous networks, 19 Hill, Benjamin Mako, 40, 64–67 Himanen, Pekka, 226n31 Historical Determinism, 191–192 Hodzic, Saida, 250n12 Hole in the Wall, 194 Holmes, Christina, 195 Hour of Code, 187–188 Hoyles, Celia, 27 Humala, Ollanta, 245n73 Hundred-dollar laptop.
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Through a detailed case study of the consequences of charisma—particularly the performativity of such projects, the treacherous allure of nostalgic design, and the catch-22 that short-term funding and performance expectations create—this book offers those interested in technology-heavy educational reform or development projects a way to recognize charisma, to either harness or resist it. Likewise, it offers technologists a means to critically assess the utopian promises that circulate not just in reform projects such as OLPC but across Silicon Valley more generally. One Laptop per Child as a Charismatic Technology From One Laptop per Child’s origins to its big debut when Kofi Annan broke off the ultimately doomed hand crank to its realization, distribution, and use in the world, this account will follow the project’s laptop from idea to mythology to reality.
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
He wanted to have this alternative way of raising money, which didn’t give away any equity, in his back pocket and use it to get better terms from Silicon Valley investors. He wanted to build Ethereum as a for-profit entity with what some call “smart money” behind it—that is, conventional investors with experience and connections that could help the startup flourish. In his view, there would be a separate Ethereum foundation that could do a crowdsale to distribute ether tokens, but the main fundraising vehicle would be a traditional VC round. At around that time, Vitalik and Gavin were actually in Silicon Valley visiting VCs, but to them, it wasn’t about getting them to buy a piece of Ethereum.
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That time in Toronto was when everyone met Steven Nerayoff for the first time. Steven is an attorney who quit his job at a fancy New York law firm during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. He dropped everything and moved to Silicon Valley, where he founded two internet companies to compete with eBay. After the internet bubble burst, Steven needed a break from Silicon Valley, so he moved back to New York in 2002 and started a third company, this time in the health care industry. The firm, Freedom Eldercare, was acquired by a private equity fund in 2008. Nerayoff continued on his founding spree and created an artificial intelligence company, meant to use cameras to alert cities for things like parking tickets, trash collection, snow removal, and crime.
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At another event in a Brooklyn warehouse, the sushi served was advertised as being “on the blockchain,” while wellness guru Deepak Chopra led meditation sessions, and a digital cat, alive only thanks to lines of code and pixels, was sold at an art auction for $140,000. At one crypto company–sponsored venue, Snoop Dogg smoked a blunt onstage and shared it with the audience. Wall Street bankers-turned-crypto-investors courted Silicon Valley dropouts-turned-crypto-entrepreneurs at a penthouse in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. At another after party, Bitcoin bros raised champagne glasses to bethonged dancers in a fabled downtown strip club as a rapper sang cryptocurrency-themed songs flanked by oily poles. Three Lamborghinis parked in front of the Hilton near Times Square greeted some 8,500 attendees who had paid $2,000 a ticket for a chance to get in on the cryptocurrency gold rush.
Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton
4chan, Airbus A320, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, messenger bag, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks
And instead of reeling in trout, the friend’s boy spent the entire trip using Twitter. Campbell returned to Silicon Valley realizing that there was more to the Twitter story than he had first thought, and he told Fenton he would take Ev on. “Campbell is the real deal,” Fenton explained to Ev, trying to convince him to meet with the mentor. “He’s coached Eric Schmidt, Larry and Sergey, and Steve Jobs. He’s a fucking legend.” Ev finally agreed to the meeting. Campbell was an institution in Silicon Valley. A former Ivy League football player, he was nicknamed the Coach by those who knew him. Although he was in his late sixties, he still carried around a bulky physique.
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Dmitry Medvedev, the president of Russia, would be arriving at Twitter’s headquarters to take a tour of the office and, as he put it, to “see with his own eyes” the hottest start-up in Silicon Valley. He also planned to send his first tweet. It was a stark example of how the world’s stage was changing. On previous visits to the United States, leaders of other nations would meet with newspaper and magazine editors. Now, rather than fly into New York City and make the rounds at Esquire, Time, or Newsweek, officials were dropping in to Silicon Valley to see the companies that were changing the way the world communicated. Twitter would be the first part of a three-day trip to the United States by President Medvedev to bolster relations between America and Russia.
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Ev always stood his ground, preferring to go out of business rather than to give in to corporate pressure. Eventually, the coal mine gave up. Blogging had an unintended side effect for Ev. As the company grew, along with other blogging services, Ev was written about in the technology trade press, and he started to grow slightly popular in Silicon Valley. Soon his endless nights on his couch alone with his computer started to change; his personal life started to grow. Just as in his early days with a car in high school, he was now being whisked off to the few tech parties that still existed in the area, hooking up with girls, and drinking beer out of red plastic cups.
Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney
Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture
Tonge traveled to the offices of Herman Miller, Knoll and a few other firms in the office furniture business, and Jony hopped a flight to California to make the rounds in Silicon Valley. He hired a car in San Francisco and drove down the Peninsula to visit a couple of studios, at one point going to ID Two (now IDEO), where Grinyer had worked, and then Lunar Design in downtown San Jose, which was run by Robert Brunner, a fast-rising design star. He and Brunner established an almost immediate connection. Brunner was born in 1958 and grew up in San Jose in Silicon Valley, the child of a mechanical engineer father and artist mother. His father, Russ, a longtime IBM-er, invented much of the guts of the first hard drive.1 Until he reached college, Brunner had no idea there was such a thing as product design.
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They named their new firm Lunar Design, a moniker Brunner had been using for his moonlighting work while at GVO. The timing was perfect. In the mid-eighties, Silicon Valley was just starting to get into consumer products, resulting in a high demand for design agencies like Lunar. GVO also came to the game with a difference—most of the firms in the Valley were run by engineers who had little expertise in design. “It wasn’t like we had a crystal ball or anything,” said Brunner, “but it turned out we had very good timing. It was at the launch of the golden age of Silicon Valley. We got started when Frog came over, and ID2 and Matrix came over, and David Kelley, which became IDEO.
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He was on his way to join the art department at San Jose State University when he fortuitously passed a display of models and renderings by the design department. “I decided there and then that’s what I wanted to do,” he recalled happily. While pursuing a degree in ID at San Jose State, he interned at what was then the biggest and fastest-growing design agency in Silicon Valley, GVO Inc. After graduating, in 1981, Brunner joined the firm but grew unhappy, feeling the company had little ambition or vision. “There was no editorial style at GVO,” he said. “They just wanted you to crank out the renderings and keep the clients happy.”2 In 1984, he tried another tack, teaming up with a couple of other GVO employees, Jeff Smith and Gerard Furbershaw, and another designer, Peter Lowe.
Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do by Jeremy Bailenson
Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, computer vision, deliberate practice, experimental subject, fake news, game design, Google Glasses, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, overview effect, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telepresence, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury
But what about narratives that are designed to create emotional reactions, that are unbound by the restrictions that guide news stories? An industry is already growing in Hollywood and Silicon Valley to explore VR as a space for fictional narratives, and within it storytellers from Hollywood and the gaming world, with technical help from technology companies, are beginning to take the tentative early steps in defining the grammar of virtual storytelling. Brett Leonard was a young filmmaker fresh from his hometown of Toledo, Ohio when he landed in Santa Cruz just before the beginning of the first VR boom in 1979. There he fell in with future Silicon Valley icons like Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Jaron Lanier. Jaron is also one of our most incisive and visionary thinkers about technology and its effects on human commerce and culture; at the time, as well as now, he was the very public face of virtual reality, a term he coined and popularized.
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At the time of the purchase, Oculus, founded by a 21-year-old self-taught engineer who had been mentored by the genius HMD maker Mark Bolas, had already reignited interest in VR among techies and gamers a few years earlier by making a lightweight and effective HMD prototype, the Oculus Rift, jury-rigged with smartphone screens and some clever programming. “I’ve seen a handful of technology demos in my life that made me feel like I was glimpsing into the future,” wrote Chris Dixon, an investor at the influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreesen-Horowitz. “Apple II, the Macintosh, Netscape, Google, the iPhone, and—most recently—the Oculus Rift.”1 While the performance of this new consumer VR equipment was not quite as good as that of the state-of-the-art hardware in labs like mine, it was good enough to avoid the major performance problem that had bedeviled previous attempts at consumer VR—nausea-inducing lag.
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Then, in 2012, backed by a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign, Oculus would begin manufacturing a prototype for the first high-end HMD that could be sold to a large consumer market. After Facebook bought Oculus in March of 2014 for over $2 billion, you could suddenly sense the growing realization in Silicon Valley that something real was finally happening in VR. By January 2015, our lab’s state-of-the-art HMD, the one that cost more than some luxury cars, had been replaced by developer models of consumer HMDs like the Oculus Rift and the Vive. These were smaller and lighter, worked just as well, and cost 1/100 of what we had been using.
The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang
3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator
Nonprofits will be at the front lines of fighting the decline, but most of their activities will be like bandages on top of an infected wound. State governments are generally hamstrung with balanced budget requirements and limited resources. Even if they don’t talk about it in public, many technologists themselves fear a backlash. My friends in Silicon Valley want to be positive, but many are buying bunkers and escape hatches just in case. One reason that solutions are daunting to even my most optimistic friends is that, while their part of the American economy is flourishing, little effort is being made to distribute the gains from automation and reverse the decline in opportunities.
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For every displaced worker, there will be two or three others who have their shifts and hours reduced, their benefits cut, and their already precarious financial lives pushed to the brink. They will try to consider themselves lucky even as their hopes for the future dim. Meanwhile, in Manhattan and Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, my friends and I will be busier than ever fighting to stay current and climb within our own hypercompetitive environments. We will read articles with concern about the future and think about how to redirect our children to more fertile professions and livelihoods. We will retweet something and contribute here and there.
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The overall feeling was one of defeat and downtroddenness. The entrepreneurship messages of “take risks” and “it’s okay to fail” seemed ridiculous and misplaced in many of these contexts. It felt like the metaphorical water level in many places had risen and overtaken whole communities. I would often fly back to Manhattan or Silicon Valley after a trip and think, “I can’t believe I’m still in the same country.” I’d sit down for dinner with my friends and feel like a character in a play about people who ate well while the world burned, struggling to understand and share what I’d seen. It was less the buildings and surroundings and more the people.
Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration
John McCarthy—founder of the lab, who coined the term artificial intelligence, or AI—haunted the halls stroking his pointed beard. A large clearing inside the semicircular structure seemed to await first contact with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. But even in paradise, the natives can grow restless. Silicon Valley made its siren call—a chance to change the world and get rich at the same time. We had been scrounging around for research funds to build our projects; now a new class of financiers—venture capitalists—came calling with their bulging bankrolls. Several startup companies and thirty years later, I finally curbed my entrepreneurial enthusiasm and retired, only to find I wasn’t quite prepared to fade quietly into my dotage.
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Without some foresight and action now, we may condemn our descendants to half a century or more of poverty and inequality, except for a lucky chosen few. Everyone likes to play the lottery—until the losers are identified. We can’t wait to see who’s winning before we take action. The holy grail of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is the disruption of entire industries—because that’s where the big money is to be made. Amazon dominates book retailing; Uber decimates taxi services; Pandora displaces radio. Little attention is paid to the resulting destruction of livelihoods and assets because there’s no incentive to do so.
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These electronic wars aren’t confined to the financial sector. They are becoming a standard part of our commercial landscape in a wide variety of areas. But you don’t have to worry about them spilling over into your home. They already have, though in a more benign way. On an unseasonably cool winter afternoon in Silicon Valley, I visited a friend who works at a hot new company called Rocket Fuel. Flush with a fresh infusion of $300 million from a secondary offering, Mark Torrance, chief technology officer, took a break to meet with me and discuss his company’s business. His own customers have virtually no idea how he does what he does, but they certainly like the results.
Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy
Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush
Later, he would speak about these tasks as if they were Great Works, but he must have known better. When Steve Jobs taunted him "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?" it marked the turning point for Sculley. Sculley's move to Silicon Valley in 1983-a journey the particulars of which he later accounted with Homeric gravity-was the opportunity to make his own dent in the universe. In the Silicon Valley and at Apple in particular, bottom-liners in suits were regarded by the true hackers as necessary evils, but irrelevant in the big scheme. Bozos. Sculley, who hated neckties anyway, resisted this characterization.
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Though the grammars, aesthetics, and even the jargon of this rather ephemeral art form have yet to be fixed, there is a quiet understanding among those working in the front lines of software design that they are participating in the most vital means of expression in our time. During the Renaissance, a period frequently evoked by those working on or developing products for the Macintosh, painters undoubtedly agonized over the smallest details of their paintings. Every brush stroke told a story. In the early 1980s in Silicon Valley, furious disputes in aesthetics were waged over the likes of how many times an item on a drop-down menu should blink when a user dragged the cursor over it. (The Macintosh artists decided on three, but to appease those insisting on a lesser increment, they granted users the option to adjust the number.)
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I convinced Rolling Stone to assign the article to me, and I flew off to California, figuring if there was anything at all to this story, I would find it there. I was thirty years old and had never touched a computer. Within hours after my arrival in the Golden State, I was stewing in a hot tub in the mountaintop retreat of Jim Warren, a gregarious Silicon Valley gadabout who was known for inventing the West Coast Computer hire, an annual Wirehead Woodstock. Also in the tub were Tony Bove and Cheryl Rhodes, a pair of Grateful Deadheads who were sort of Jim's elves, living on his property while they edited a magazine about the possibilities of sending millions of pages of data by radio to people with personal computers.
American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales
4chan, access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, dark pattern, digital divide, East Village, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, invention of the printing press, James Bridle, jitney, Kodak vs Instagram, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, San Francisco homelessness, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, The Chicago School, women in the workforce
; and Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett Packard, there are few highly placed female executives in Silicon Valley. In the digital revolution, which has provided so many job opportunities and seen the start of so many businesses and empires, men have reaped most of the profits. And the culture of Silicon Valley is a male-dominated culture, some say a “frat boy” culture, populated by “brogrammers” and “tech bros.” “In inverse ratio to the forward-looking technology the community produces, it is stunningly backward when it comes to gender relations,” wrote Nina Burleigh in a 2015 Newsweek piece, “What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women.” “Google ‘Silicon Valley’ and ‘frat boy culture’ and you’ll find dozens of pages of articles and links to mainstream news articles, blogs, screeds, letters, videos and tweets about threats of violence, sexist jokes and casual misogyny, plus reports of gender-based hiring and firing, major-league sexual harassment lawsuits and a financing system that rewards young men and shortchanges women.”
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It’s a place,” she continued, “where companies routinely staff conference booths with scantily clad ‘code-babes’ and where women are so routinely sexually harassed at conferences that codes of conduct have become de rigueur—and the subject of endless misogynistic jokes on Twitter.” Burleigh likened Silicon Valley today to the egregiously sexist world of the go-go ’80s depicted in The Wolf of Wall Street, noting that while Wall Street these days seems “tamer,” in Silicon Valley, “misogyny continues unabated.” So what impact does the culture of Silicon Valley have on the place that girls are experiencing all day, most days, on their phones? While not every one of the thousands of social media sites and apps reflects the tech industry’s frat house atmosphere, of course, it would be blind to say that none of them do; and it would be naïve to say that some of the most popular apps, some of the ones most often used by girls, don’t.
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When we talk about social media, we say we’re “going on” it, similar to the way we talk about going on a trip. We seem to experience it as a sort of mental journey to another place; but this isn’t a neutral place, it’s one created by businesspeople, and much of it emanates from Silicon Valley. I don’t think we can talk about the culture of social media, this place where girls are spending most of their time, without talking about the culture of Silicon Valley. In popular myth this is a place where boy geniuses create magical communication tools which bring us all closer together, tools which prove so irresistible to masses of people across the globe that the boy geniuses earn millions and billions of dollars—money with which they then invest in the ideas and futures of other boy geniuses.
Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis
"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration
one website had tallied: Philip Bump and Jaime Fuller, “The Greatest Hits of Jay Carney,” The Washington Post, May 30, 2014. In 1970, only 3 percent of members of Congress became lobbyists: Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap (New York: Penguin, 2019), 57. industry had leaned liberal: Margaret O’Mara, “How Silicon Valley Went from Conservative, to Anti-Establishment, to Liberal,” Big Think, August 14, 2019, https://bigthink.com/videos/how-silicon-valley-went-from-conservative-to-anti-establishment-to-liberal. “It was a blast”: Benjamin Wofford, “Inside Jeff Bezos’s DC Life,” Washingtonian, April 22, 2018. largest lobbying office of any tech firm: Luke Mullins, “The Real Story of How Virginia Won Amazon’s HQ2,” Washingtonian, June 6, 2019.
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So he had left, moving back with his family, Central American immigrants who had settled in California decades earlier. He lived with his older sister’s family in an exurb of San Francisco. If he left the house, he had to be home by eight-thirty every night so as not to disturb his brother-in-law, who woke at four-thirty every morning for his long drive to Silicon Valley, making him one of the more than 120,000 Bay Area workers who commuted more than three hours every day. After five months of this, Hector had accepted Laura’s offer to return, on the condition that he get a job, which he finally did half a year later, in June 2019. He was driving by the warehouse one day and saw a sign that they were hiring and pulled over and asked about it, and they said he could start the next day.
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Allen suggested they move the company—then a mere thirteen people—to Seattle. He missed home—the pine trees and water, the cool weather. He argued that the city’s climate was actually ideal for the company: “The rainy days were a plus,” he wrote later. “They’d keep programmers from getting distracted.” Gates was less committed to Seattle. The other obvious option was Silicon Valley, already a hub for micro-computing thanks to Stanford University’s leveraging of its considerable real estate holdings and Cold War defense spending. Seattle, on the other hand, was hardly a tech magnet. So it would take some persuading on Allen’s part. Finally, he struck on a winning tactic: he prevailed on Gates’s parents to work on their son, knowing how close they were.
Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar
And as we do so, the process of creation has often been reduced to a linear, mechanical process of funnels and inventories and inputs and outputs, all measured meticulously and continuously. The result, often, was incremental change—certainly good, but definitely not disruptive. Disruption comes most often from entrepreneurs and start-ups whose founders were themselves swept up in cultural change and social movement. What we’re witnessing in tech hubs like Silicon Valley or amid the growing start-up scene in New York isn’t all that different from what Csikszentmihalyi described in his writings about Renaissance Florence. Although many of today’s innovators are working on different canvases, the factors contributing to the explosion of creative output—a spirit of collaboration and competition, wealthy investors keen to be part of the next big thing—are similar.
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The only physical buttons on the Simon were the on/off and volume buttons. All the rest of the Simon’s functionality was accessed through a touch screen, one that covered the entire face of the phone. Most of us don’t remember Simon nor do we realize that touch screen technology existed two decades ago, but it was known in Silicon Valley when Ive began to work on Apple’s ill-fated Newton, one of the first PDAs. Buxton believes Simon to be a likely inspiration for both the Newton and the iPhone. Artists, dancers, and writers have long known the importance of mining the past. Vincent van Gogh was inspired by many artists, but perhaps none more so than Jean-François Millet.
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But compare Singapore with New York in 2013 and the differences are vast. Over the past fifteen years in New York City, vast networks of entrepreneurs, incubators, venture capitalists, universities, media companies, and artists have arisen to generate a new wave of creativity and entrepreneurialism. For the first time, New York rivals Silicon Valley in start-ups, concentrating more on content and culture than technology. Dial the clock back to the seventies, and you’d have witnessed a different kind of creative congestion—an art scene was burgeoning in SoHo; rappers, break dancers, and beat boxers from all the boroughs were creating a new kind of music and culture—but it wouldn’t necessarily have been the ideal place for someone looking to start up a new media company that required a thriving network of graphic designers and social media experts.
Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz
affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks
They made vivid the power of networked computing systems to collect vast amounts of personal data. They also demonstrated how these systems are antidemocratic and prone to co-option by governments. The global antisurveillance protests catalyzed by Snowden’s disclosures foretold the downfall of Silicon Valley’s “big data” doctrine: the idea that having more data collected by the likes of Google is universally beneficial. Scholars and media commentators began referring to Silicon Valley’s agenda as “surveillance capitalism,” arguing that Google’s practices exemplify the term.7 That platform companies were exploiting their users’ data for profit and political gain became commonsense. The proliferation of narratives about “Russian interference” in the U.S. presidential election of 2016—which identified Facebook and Twitter as major culprits—only reinforced this notion.8 Once viewed as somewhere between democratizing forces and benign entities, platform companies were now seen as potentially dangerous political actors.
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These narratives are tied to the forgery of universality: an article in the Atlantic magazine, for example, suggests that science is “in decline,” partly because the random nature of individual scientists’ “previous experiences” plays too large a role in scientific discovery—but that “outsourcing to A.I. could change that.”21 The viability of AI systems exceeding human thought is also conveyed through dystopian scenarios. The Guardian reported that Silicon Valley billionaires are “prepping for the apocalypse” by buying secure hideouts in New Zealand, the “apocalypse” being a situation of “systematic collapse” that may include nuclear war or “rampaging AI.”22 Similarly, Silicon Valley mogul Elon Musk has stated to considerable fanfare that current work on AI is “summoning the demon” and that AI is “our biggest existential threat.”23 These narratives are testament to the unstated consensus among experts that AI possesses transformative powers; this is why fantastical commentaries can pass without even referencing specific instantiations of AI or its history.
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The report highlights the role of “cloud computing” in enabling data interoperability across agencies. But as the report argues, cloud computing has been more than a data storage and processing service; it was also a way for Silicon Valley companies to more closely align with the national security state. Lobbying groups in Washington, backed by companies like Amazon and Microsoft, helped ensure that the government would adopt those companies’ cloud computing services. As the report notes, a “revolving door” between Silicon Valley companies and government was created. Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and the CIA-backed surveillance firm Palantir then went on to build critical cloud infrastructure for DHS.
A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger
Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar
Jobs’s interest in shoshin and other Zen principles has been chronicled in a number of places, including Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011); as well as Daniel Burke, “Steve Jobs’ Private Spirituality Now an Open Book,” USA Today, November 2, 2011; and my own article for Fast Company, “What Zen Taught Steve Jobs (and Silicon Valley) about Innovation,” April 9, 2012, http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669387/what-zen-taught-silicon-valley-and-steve-jobs-about-innovation. 8 a bit of ancient wisdom, brought to . . . As explained to me by Randy Komisar, in my interviews with him in the spring and fall of 2012. For more on Shunryu Suzuki, see his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2011). 9 Les Kaye is a Zen abbot . . .
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One of the most important things questioning does is to enable people to think and act in the face of uncertainty. As Steve Quatrano of the Right Question Institute puts it, forming questions helps us “to organize our thinking around18 what we don’t know.” This may explain why questioning is so important in innovation hotbeds such as Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs must figure out, seemingly daily, how to create new products and businesses from thin air, while navigating highly competitive, volatile market conditions. Sebastian Thrun, the engineer/inventor19 behind Google’s experimental self-driving X car and the founder of the online university Udacity, acknowledges the two-way relationship between technological change and questioning.
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But when I suggested to Meier that perhaps the establishment had caught up with her ideals—that, with our new hunger for innovation, we might be more willing today to tolerate, and possibly even teach, questioning—she had her doubts. She believes we continue to live in a society that wants questions to be asked by some, but not others. “Yes, we want a Silicon Valley,” she said, “but do we really want three hundred million people who actually think for themselves?” What is a flame?29 It seems such a simple question, but do you know the answer? Actor Alan Alda had been fascinated with that question as a child. Nearly seventy years later, Alda started the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York and he started off by organizing a contest to see who could best explain What is a flame?
Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson
Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work
If you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products, and not just grad students, the United States—and Silicon Valley in particular—has been lapping the field for the past twenty years. There are many potential explanations for that success, including the unique social chemistry of the Bay Area, with its strange cocktail of engineering geeks, world-class universities, and countercultural experimentation. But the organizational structure of most Silicon Valley firms also deserves a great deal of the credit. Early tech companies in the region—starting with Fairchild Semiconductor and its mammoth offspring, Intel—deliberately broke with the hierarchical social architecture of East Coast firms: in executive privileges, decision making, and compensation.
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Stock options, for instance, were distributed sparingly for most of the twentieth century, until the more egalitarian operations in the Bay Area began using them as a standard part of an employee’s compensation package. The options structure meant that the entire organization had a vested interest in the company’s success—and when things went well, a larger slice of the Silicon Valley population was free to experiment with new start-up ideas thanks to the payday from the first IPO. In the early 1980s, Esquire magazine sent Tom Wolfe out to Silicon Valley to profile Intel founder Robert Noyce and document the emerging culture of the region. The shift from hierarchy to peer network was visible even then, in the days before computer networks became essential to the region’s businesses: Corporations in the East adopted a feudal approach to organization, without even being aware of it.
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While most Americans are significantly healthier than they were a generation ago, childhood obesity has emerged as a meaningful problem, particularly in lower-income communities. An interesting divide separates these two macro-trends. On the one hand, there is a series of societal trends that are heavily dependent on non-market forces. The progress made in preventing drunk driving or teen pregnancy or juvenile crime isn’t coming from new gadgets or Silicon Valley start-ups or massive corporations; the progress, instead, is coming from a network of forces largely outside the marketplace: from government intervention, public service announcements, demographic changes, and the wisdom of life experience shared across generations. Capitalism didn’t reduce the number of teen smokers; in fact, certain corporations did just about everything they could to keep those kids smoking (remember Joe Camel?).
The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen
affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey
When it comes to transportation, mostly we are hoping to avoid greater suffering, such as worse traffic, cuts in bus service, or the rather dramatic declines in service quality experienced in the Washington, DC, Metro system. I argue that the physical world matters no less today, but we are in denial about its power and relevance. We seek to control it, to hold it steady, and to marginalize it ideologically by worshipping Silicon Valley and elevating the value and power of information. We’re much more comfortable with the world of information, which is more static, can be controlled at our fingertips, and can be set to our own speed. That’s very good for some people—most of all the privileged class, which is very much at home in this world—and very bad for others.
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During some of America’s worst times, such as the Great Depression, this extreme geographic mobility kept the unemployment rate from rising even higher than it did.3 If California ended up as the place where “the future happens first,” this was in part because the state was settled by restless migrants who wanted yet more migration on top of their earlier decision, or the earlier decisions of their ancestors, to move to the United States. This minination of migrants within a nation of migrants birthed Hollywood, a lot of the best of American popular music, the environmental movement, the social revolutions of the 1960s, and of course Silicon Valley and the personal computer, not to mention the revolutionary contemporary view that nerdiness is fundamentally cool. If you have a new idea and want to work and realize it, California probably is still the very best place in the world, a fact that shows the long-standing American connection between geographic mobility and innovation.
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A high-paying job combined with a cheap house presented a significant incentive to move, and so for a long time, the states of Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada were growing more quickly than average and also pulling in a lot of population. But the 1880 to 1980 phenomenon of regional catch-up has been gone for a few decades. The relative rank order of differing regions has become more static, and these days no one expects to find northern Louisiana gaining ground on Brookline, Massachusetts, much less Silicon Valley. That lock-in in turn has diminished the incentive to move house to another region, because the people from the poorer regions can’t afford the higher rents of the wealthier regions, nor do they have the skills to get the jobs there. This logic is self-reinforcing: Since fewer people are moving, it is harder for poorer regions to catch up because they can’t pull in the new talent.16 Another part of the economic story behind our moving less has to do with the much-discussed issue of rising inequality.
Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, Saul Singer
"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, Celtic Tiger, clean tech, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, immigration reform, labor-force participation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, pez dispenser, post scarcity, profit motive, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social graph, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Suez crisis 1956, unit 8200, web application, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War
If all this sounds similar to our description of the IDF’s role in fostering Israel’s entrepreneurial culture, it should. While a majority of Israeli entrepreneurs were profoundly influenced by their stint in the IDF, a military background is hardly common in Silicon Valley or widespread in the senior echelons of corporate America. As Israeli entrepreneur Jon Medved—who has sold several start-ups to large American companies—told us, “When it comes to U.S. military résumés, Silicon Valley is illiterate. It’s a shame. What a waste of the kick-ass leadership talent coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The American business world doesn’t quite know what to do with them.”11 This gulf between business and the military is symptomatic of a wider divide between America’s military and civilian communities, which was identified by the leadership of West Point over a decade ago.
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“Like the Greeks who sailed with Jason in search of the Golden Fleece,” Saxenian writes, “the new Argonauts [are] foreign-born, technically skilled entrepreneurs who travel back and forth between Silicon Valley and their home countries.” She points out that the growing tech sectors in China, India, Taiwan, and Israel—particularly the last two countries—have emerged as “important global centers of innovation” whose output “exceeded that of larger and wealthier nations like Germany and France.” She contends that the pioneers of these profound transformations are people who “marinated in the Silicon Valley culture and learned it. This really began in the late ’80s for the Israelis and Taiwanese, and not until the late ’90s or even the beginning of the ’00s for the Indians and Chinese.”8 Michael Laor at Cisco and Dov Frohman at Intel were classic new Argonauts.
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Cisco alone has acquired nine Israeli companies and is looking to buy more.14 “In two days in Israel, I saw more opportunities than in a year in the rest of the world,” said Paul Smith, senior vice president of Philips Medical.15 Gary Shainberg, British Telecom’s VP for technology and innovation, told us, “There are more new innovative ideas, as opposed to recycled ideas—or old ideas repackaged in a new box—coming out of Israel than there are out in [Silicon] Valley now. And it doesn’t slow during global economic downturns.”16 Though Israel’s technology story is becoming more widely known, those exposed to it for the first time are invariably baffled. As an NBC Universal vice president sent to scout for Israeli digital media companies wondered, “Why is all this happening in Israel?
The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr
Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche
And by processing all the streams of incoming information instantaneously—in “real time”—its onboard computers are able to work the accelerator, the steering wheel, and the brakes with the speed and sensitivity required to drive on actual roads and respond fluidly to the unexpected events that drivers always encounter. Google’s fleet of self-driving cars has now racked up close to a million miles, and the vehicles have caused just one serious accident. That was a five-car pileup near the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters in 2011, and it doesn’t really count. It happened, as Google was quick to announce, “while a person was manually driving the car.”2 Autonomous automobiles have a ways to go before they start chauffeuring us to work or ferrying our kids to soccer games. Although Google has said it expects commercial versions of its car to be on sale by the end of the decade, that’s probably wishful thinking.
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The people who have taken rides in Google’s car report that the thrill is almost otherworldly; their earth-bound brain has a tough time processing the experience. Today, we really do seem to be entering a brave new world, a Tomorrowland where computers and automatons will be at our service, relieving us of our burdens, granting our wishes, and sometimes just keeping us company. Very soon now, our Silicon Valley wizards assure us, we’ll have robot maids as well as robot chauffeurs. Sundries will be fabricated by 3-D printers and delivered to our doors by drones. The world of the Jetsons, or at least of Knight Rider, beckons. It’s hard not to feel awestruck. It’s also hard not to feel apprehensive. An automatic transmission may seem a paltry thing beside Google’s tricked-out, look-ma-no-humans Prius, but the former was a precursor to the latter, a small step along the path to total automation, and I can’t help but remember the letdown I felt after the gear stick was taken from my hand—or, to put responsibility where it belongs, after I begged to have the gear stick taken from my hand.
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The increasing use of computers and software has itself created some very attractive new jobs as well as plenty of entrepreneurial opportunities. By historical standards, though, the number of people employed in computing and related fields remains modest. We can’t all become software programmers or robotics engineers. We can’t all decamp to Silicon Valley and make a killing writing nifty smartphone apps.* With average wages stagnant and corporate profits continuing to surge, the economy’s bounties seem likely to go on flowing to the lucky few. And JFK’s reassuring words will sound more and more suspect. Why might this time be different? What exactly has changed that may be severing the old link between new technologies and new jobs?
Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart
2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game
Christopher Mims, “The Day When Computers Can Break All Encryption Is Coming,” Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-race-to-save-encryption-11559646737. 144. Amy Zegart and Kevin Childs, “The divide between Silicon Valley and Washington is a national-security threat,” Atlantic, December 13, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/growing-gulf-between-silicon-valley-and-washington/577963/. 145. They are Martin Heinrich, David Perdue, and Steve Daines. 146. The hearing was held April 10, 2018. For a transcript, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10/transcript-of-mark-zuckerbergs-senate-hearing/. 147. Zegart and Childs, “Divide between Silicon Valley and Washington.” Chapter 9: Intelligence Isn’t Just for Governments Anymore The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for the project on which this chapter is based. 1.
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In April 2015, I invited Secretary of Defense Ash Carter to Stanford, where he unveiled a new Pentagon cyber strategy in an auditorium packed with faculty, students, and Silicon Valley tech leaders. A few months earlier, Carter had just started a fellowship in the center I co-directed at Stanford. He was learning how to navigate the campus’s “circle of death” with undergraduates whizzing by on bicycles when he was tapped for the Pentagon’s top job. In April, he returned to campus to honor his longtime mentor, Stanford nuclear physicist Sidney Drell. But Carter had also traveled to Silicon Valley to make a point: the government needed help. New threats demanded urgent new collaborations between American tech and political leaders.
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Joseph Dunford was asked what he would tell engineers at companies like Google and Amazon, he replied, “Hey, we’re the good guys.… It’s inexplicable to me that we wouldn’t have a cooperative relationship with the private sector.”166 It’s hard to overstate just how foreign the worlds of Washington and Silicon Valley are to each other. At the exact moment when great-power conflict is making a comeback and harnessing technology is the key to success, Silicon Valley and Washington are still working on working together.167 Closing this divide is nothing short of a national security imperative. Intelligence Has Never Been More Important or Challenging Cyber threats are vastly different from traditional national security threats, with profound implications for intelligence.
Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge
accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator
“Superangel” investor Marc Andreessen, the coauthor of Mosaic, one of the first widely used Web browsers, is in favor of it. And so are New York–based Albert Wenger, another highly successful venture capitalist; start-up incubator impresario Sam Altman; and Elon Musk, the brash but congenial cofounder of PayPal and CEO of Tesla. Silicon Valley isn’t alone in its enthusiasm for UBI, but it is Silicon Valley’s digital and data-driven innovations that have given rise to the idea. There are innumerable variations, but the core idea is similar. Everyone receives a monthly check for a fixed amount that would be sufficient to pay for food, clothing, basic education, a warm, dry home, perhaps even some form of health insurance.
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“ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies”: Steve Yegge’s Google Plus post is archived, with his apparent permission, at https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX. demands placed on employees: Gregory Ferenstein, “Is Working at Amazon Terrible? According to Public Data, It’s the Same as Much of Silicon Valley,” Forbes, August 17, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregoryferenstein/2015/08/17/is-working-at-amazon-terrible-according-to-public-data-its-the-same-as-much-of-silicon-valley/#5b68ce4a5f89. they have no autonomy: See, for example, these reviews: https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Employee-Review-Amazon-com-RVW10200125.htm. “held accountable for a staggering array”: Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html.
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“Bezos is super smart; don’t get me wrong,” Yegge noted. “He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.” On Glassdoor, the website where employees can anonymously rate their employers and managers, Amazon has ranked notoriously low in job satisfaction compared to other darlings of Silicon Valley. Many reviews complain about the demands placed on employees and declare that they have no autonomy. A 2015 New York Times investigation of working conditions among office staff found that employees are “held accountable for a staggering array of metrics” about different aspects of the firm’s operations—running about fifty pages long—and are asked to explain detected inefficiencies in weekly and monthly business review sessions.
Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl
3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population
Tom Slee, What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy (O/R Books 2015), 27. The website itself seems to have gone offline at the time of final editing. 6. Anya Kamenetz, ‘Is Peers the sharing economy’s future or just a great Silicon Valley PR stunt?’, Fast Company (9 December 2013), http://www.fastcompany. com/3022974/tech-forecast/is-peers-the-sharing-economys-future-or-just-a- great-silicon-valley-pr-stunt, archived at https://perma.cc/6DMG-DGBJ 7. Andrew Leonard, ‘The sharing economy gets greedy’, Salon (1 August 2013), http://www.salon.com/2013/07/31/the_sharing_economy_gets_greedy/, archived at https://perma.cc/M9E6-EVF5.
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Uber’s investors did not put $13 billion into the company because they thought they could vanquish those incumbents under ‘level playing field’ mar- ket conditions; those billions were designed to replace ‘level playing field’ competition with a hopeless battle between small scale incumbents with no access to capital struggling to cover their bare bone costs and a behemoth company funded by Silicon Valley billionaires willing to subsidize years of multi-billion dollar losses. Given Uber’s growth to date, investor expectations that monopoly rents justifies the current level of subsidies and financial risks appears quite plausible.44 * * * 24 Work on Demand This account stands in stark contrast with the idea that the rise of gig- economy platforms will lead to increased competition, with lower prices and higher quality as the result: in the expensive pursuit of network effects, some platforms’ goal may well be to smother competition, rather than to encourage it.
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But some probing questions from a Bloomberg reporter on the call quickly established that ‘grassroots’ might not be the best word to describe Peers. Foster eventually admitted that Peers was launching with 22 partners, among whom were a number of companies oper- ating in the sharing economy space.7 Like many Silicon Valley ventures, Peers.org has undergone several pivots, or changes in its business model, and whilst the language is still that of ‘helping sharing economy workers’, at the time of writing it serves essentially as an entry portal to on-demand work, advertising a host of platforms and offering related services—notably, insurance.8 Portable benefits include health insur- ance, retirement savings plans, and even company contributions to benefits, whereby the ‘Companies you work for can contribute to the cost of your benefits—per job completed, sale made, ride given’—which feature, how- ever, was ‘coming soon’.
I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek
Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog
These buses provided transportation to people who lived in the city and worked at tech companies in Silicon Valley. They were private buses, which meant that they were available only to employees of companies in Silicon Valley. The name around town for these buses was Google buses, after Google, the company with which they were most associated. The Google buses worked on the theory that employees of tech companies had different ideas about life than their parents. They didn’t want to be in the suburbs and they didn’t want to own houses in Silicon Valley and they didn’t want to own cars. So the buses allowed these employees to work for giant corporations while living in the city and experiencing the rich tapestry of the urban environment and its pleasures.
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The event for Annie Zero was held downstairs. Because of the fictional conceits within Annie Zero, Baby was being mentioned alongside a certain class of contemporary writers. These writers were influential amongst the men who ran Silicon Valley. These writers were also influential amongst the men who worked in subservient positions to the men who ran Silicon Valley. Baby had joined the ranks of writers like William Gibson, who wrote Neuromancer. Baby had joined the ranks of Neil Stephenson, who wrote Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. Baby had joined the ranks of Cory Doctorow, who wrote fantasies about rebellion aimed at a teenaged audience.
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Some of Ayn Rand’s better known followers included: Paul Ryan, the 2012 Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States of America. Vince Vaughn, a dough-faced actor who had starred in such hilarious comedies as The Watch, Couples Retreat, Four Christmases, The Internship, and Delivery Man. The Internship was a film about two adults who receive internships at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, a billionaire weapons profiteer and incompetent hedge fund manager who wanted to build independent nation states on floating ocean platforms. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, an unprofitable website dedicated to the destruction of the publishing industry.
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
Swanson later jokingly referred to the experience as his postdoctoral training in financing and building companies.6 Impressed, his superiors chose him and a colleague to move west to open a San Francisco office for Citicorp Venture Capital. The plan was to exploit the rich opportunities for risk investment in the Bay Area. Arriving in 1970, Swanson encountered a thriving center of the microelectronics and computer industries in a region thirty miles south of San Francisco, soon to become known as Silicon Valley. It was without doubt the most entrepreneurial region in the world, boasting a refreshingly boundless, risk-tolerant, success-breeds-success culture in which an aspiring young person could spread his wings and try new things.7 Swanson had found his milieu. Inevitably, not every Citicorp investment went well.
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The company, in the contemplated research, was preparing to cross into virgin scientific, technological, and industrial territory. 3 Proving the Technology . . . a scientific triumph of the fi rst order. Philip Handler, President, National Academy of Sciences, statement in the U.S. Congress, November 19771 Swanson’s experience as a venture capitalist had centered on young Silicon Valley companies, each with products that had been prototyped and were nearing or on the market. Genentech presented a very different situation. Its fundamental technology was raw and industrially untested, and it lacked a single product in the pipeline or even on the near horizon. Moreover, Boyer and Swanson seemed to blithely disregard the fact that no one anywhere had succeeded in expressing a foreign protein in bacteria, let alone a protein of insulin’s complexity.
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A few miles south of San Francisco, the city offered reasonable rent and a quick commute to UCSF and Stanford, active centers of the science, techniques, and workforce the company needed. South San Francisco, Swanson noted, was also close to an international airport and a short drive to Kleiner & Perkins and to other venture capital partnerships around Stanford. Silicon Valley—with its high-tech industries, support services, and entrepreneurial culture—lay just to the south. Swanson and Perkins also weighed the local political situation. Unlike U.S. centers of unrest in San Francisco, Cambridge, Ann Arbor, and Berkeley, South San Francisco was not contemplating ordinances unfavorable to genetic engineering, and its citizens were unlikely to take to the streets in protest.
It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork
As part of the show’s rollout, HBO held a premiere at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City, California, in the cradle of Silicon Valley. Under dimmed lights, a passel of prominent venture capitalists, cast members, and masters of the tech universe watched the first two episodes. Afterward, Tesla’s Elon Musk, well on his way to becoming one of the richest humans on the planet, bristled at HBO’s uppity, unflattering depiction of the tech world. It was totally off base, he told Recode. “I really feel like Mike Judge has never been to Burning Man, which is Silicon Valley,” Musk said. “If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it.” Judge says he later became friends with Musk, but never made it to Burning Man, the annual arts festival and all-hours rave in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT When asked by: Diane Brady, “Time Warner Makes Strides in Digital Media,” Bloomberg Businessweek, February 14, 2013. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT drew inspiration for the series: “ ‘Silicon Valley’ Asks: Is Your Startup Really Making the World Better?” Mike Judge interview by Dave Davies, Fresh Air, NPR, April 17, 2014. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Judge reworked the humor: Lacey Rose, “ ‘Silicon Valley,’ Confronts a Darker Side of Tech Culture,” Hollywood Reporter, March 17, 2018. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “If you look at the history”: “Comedy Master Class with Casey Bloys and Jenni Konner,” Banff World Media Festival, June 27, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “If you look at the history”: “Comedy Master Class with Casey Bloys and Jenni Konner,” Banff World Media Festival, June 27, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jVOLp_DRtY. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Afterward, Tesla’s Elon Musk: Nellie Bowles, “At HBO’s Silicon Valley Premiere, Elon Musk Has Some Notes,” Recode, Vox, April, 3, 2014. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Some critics would: Esther Breger, “The Boring Sexism of HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley,’ ” New Republic, May 30, 2014. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In June 2014: Hadas Gold, “Rupert Murdoch’s Failed $80B Bid for Time Warner,” Politico, July 16, 2014. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT When news of the rebuffed effort: Andrew Ross Sorkin and Michael J. de la Merced, “Murdoch Puts Time Warner on His Wish List,” Dealbook, New York Times, July 16, 2014.
Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler
23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra
His face is slightly tanned, but there’s not a hint of lines or wrinkles or aging. “You in Pacific Heights?” he asks. “Oh, no, I live down in the Peninsula, near Palo Alto.” “Been there tons. Epicenter of Silicon Valley. You in the tech business?” “Sort of. More of a writer now.” “Now?” “I do some investing, but now mostly write stuff.” “Oh, like what?” Jeez. The Laphroaig isn’t making me any friendlier. “I wrote a book on medicine . . . ” “Oh.” Pause. So I continue. “Silicon Valley and chips for early detection of cancer or heart disease that will destroy doctors. That’s the Cliffs-Notes version anyway.” “Oh, how neat. I’m sort of in the medical business myself.
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They wanted to know what you were going to search for before you even knew yourself. I met Rupert Murdoch in the early nineties when he almost lost News Corporation under a siege of debt, and when he began transforming the entire media space, from newspapers to TV to film. I met Mark Cuban when he and his partner Todd Wagner were peddling AudioNet to anyone in Silicon Valley who would listen, before they sold the audio and video streaming company to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion. I met Mark Zuckerberg just as Facebook was crossing a few million users; he talked about lowering the cost of communications between groups of people. Today, a good chunk of the planet logs in to the site regularly to keep in touch with friends and family.
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No one ever wrote a set of rules to find things with enormous upside and enormous potential to change the world. How to find, create, leverage, and ride the Next Big Thing. So I broke my own rule, took matters into my own hands, and wrote my own set of Rules for Free Radicals. Inspired by the 99%ers (kinda) and by Saul Alinsky (sorta), I dug deep into my time in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, working with smart people, watching what works and what doesn’t, and thinking long and hard as to why, and I came up with a master list of 12 Rules (plus a baker’s dozen bonus rule). I’ll sum up the book you’re about to read as follows: You should be a scalable, wasteful, horizontal, edge-hugging, Tom Sawyer-ish, productive, human-adapting, people-eating, market-driven, exceptional, market-entrepreneuring, zero-marginal, virtual-pipecontrolling return maximizer.
Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar
"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator
, NBER Working Paper No. w24622 Lukianoff, Greg, and Haidt, Jonathan (2018), The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, London: Allen Lane Maçães, Bruno (2021), ‘After Covid, get ready for the Great Acceleration’, Spectator, accessed 15 March 2021, available at https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/after-covid-get-ready-for-the-great-acceleration Maddox, John (1999), What Remains to Be Discovered: Mapping the Secrets of the Universe, the Origins of Life, and the Future of the Human Race, New York: Touchstone Madrigal, Alexis C. (2020), ‘Silicon Valley Abandons the Culture That Made It the Envy of the World’, The Atlantic, accessed 21 January 2020, available at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/why-silicon-valley-and-big-tech-dont-innovate-anymore/604969/ Mahbubani, Kishore (2018), Has The West Lost It?: A Provocation, London: Allen Lane Mahon, Basil (2004), The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, Chichester: Wiley Mallapaty, Smriti (2018), ‘Paper authorship goes hyper’, Nature Index, accessed 19 October 2018, available at https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/paper-authorship-goes-hyper Malone, Thomas W. (2018), Superminds: How Hyperconnectivity is Changing the Way We Solve Problems, London: Oneworld Marcus, Jon (2018), ‘With enrollment sliding, liberal arts colleges struggle to make a case for themselves’, The Hechinger Report, accessed 9 January 2021, available at https://hechingerreport.org/with-enrollment-sliding-liberal-arts-colleges-struggle-to-make-a-case-for-themselves/ Martin, Richard (2015), ‘Weighing the Cost of Big Science’, MIT Technology Review, accessed 6 March 2019, available at https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/09/22/166155/weighing-the-cost-of-big-science/ Martinis, John, and Boixo, Sergio (2019), ‘Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor’, Google Blog, accessed 11 April 2020, available at https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/10/quantum-supremacy-using-programmable.html?
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My background is in the humanities, literature and publishing, which are not obvious starting points. But some years ago, watching technological change in the creative industries up close, I started to write about the history, theory and practice of technological, business and cultural transformation over a wide span of time and space, from ancient China to Silicon Valley. My research opened to a huge variety of interlocutors and perspectives. At the same time my work with writers had given me an enduring fascination with how people think and conjure the completely new. I began to study the role of imagination in society, from scientists to entrepreneurs, before getting sidetracked by an opportunity to work on the scientific and technical frontier as a consultant writer in one of the world's foremost technological research organisations.
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Technology comes with biteback: industrialisation led to climate change; DDT collapsed ecosystems; CFCs punched a hole in the ozone layer; communism was supposed to improve life for the masses, not a tiny cosseted elite; the cinema and television became a tool for totalitarian propaganda; social media did not bring people together so much as firm up their hostile tribes. Arguably the problem with Silicon Valley is its coupling of an infatuation with big ideas with the failure to grapple with their consequences. Moreover, especially today, technologies can introduce systemic vulnerabilities and existential risks; create new ethical alarms or shocks to the world order; exacerbate and produce inequalities.
The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot by Yolande Strengers, Jenny Kennedy
active measures, Amazon Robotics, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, cloud computing, cognitive load, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, data science, deepfake, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, game design, gender pay gap, Grace Hopper, hive mind, Ian Bogost, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, Masayoshi Son, Milgram experiment, Minecraft, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce
Yet it is also due to other dynamics, such as a protracted history of the gendering of technology as either masculine (think “brown goods” like TVs and remote controls) or feminine (think “white goods” like fridges).51 So potent is the gendered imbalance in computing that the journalist, producer, and author Emily Chang labeled the coding culture of Silicon Valley a “Brotopia.”52 She draws attention to the biased recruitment strategies of Silicon Valley tech companies, the members of which historically profiled and mostly hired typical male “geeks,” while more recently setting their sights on overconfident and charismatic men who could follow in the footsteps of information technology (IT) heroes like the late Steve Jobs.
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In addition, the AI industry has been called out by leading academics and commentators like Kate Crawford and Jack Clark for having a “white guy problem” in an industry characterized by a “sea of dudes.”53 Indeed, the AI Now Institute has identified a “diversity crisis” perpetuated by harassment, discrimination, unfair compensation, and lack of promotion for women and ethnic minorities.54 The institute recommends that “the AI industry needs to make significant structural changes to address systemic racism, misogyny, and lack of diversity.”55 This gender and racial imbalance filters down to the ways in which technologies are imagined and created.56 Scholars such as Safiya Umoja Noble have written about the “algorithms of oppression” that characterize search engines like Google, which reinforce racism and sexism.57 Likewise, web consultant and author Sara Wachter-Boettcher discusses the proliferation of “sexist apps” emerging from the masculine culture of Silicon Valley.58 There has also been considerable criticism leveled at digital voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Home, and other types of smart wives, for their sexist overtones, diminishing of women in traditional feminized roles, and inability to assertively rebuke sexual advances.59 For example, Microsoft’s Cortana and Mycroft assistants take their names as well as identities from gamer and sci-fi culture, respectively, both of which have been widely critiqued as highly sexist domains.60 Likewise, assistants like Microsoft’s Ms.
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To be geek and female typically involves abdicating one’s femininity (because smart women are unattractive, and beautiful women are dumb, naturally). In Geek Chic, Sherrie Inness and her collaborators demonstrate just how powerful these stereotypes remain in popular culture, despite recent challenges.86 In Brotopia, Emily Chang shows how the awkward male geek stereotype shaped the recruitment strategy for Silicon Valley tech giants until at least the 1980s through the widespread use of a personality test based on a “programmer scale” designed by two (male) psychologists to identify employees who liked to solve puzzles and didn’t “like people.”87 In our study of early adopting smart households, this extra tech work was not commonly seen as a burden or chore by men (and some women).
Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou
3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar
Quirky, whose headquarters are in Manhattan, has opened an office close to GE’s R&D headquarters in Schenectady, the city where Edison founded the company and gave the world electricity. Its proximity will allow GE engineers and scientists to work closely with Quirky staff to roll out new products fast. GE is also expanding in Silicon Valley, where Comstock frequently meets venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. In 2013, Comstock helped launch GE Ventures, a $150 million fund that invests in promising Silicon Valley start-ups specialising in software, energy, health care and advanced manufacturing. GE Ventures’ portfolio includes Rock Health (an accelerator of digital health-care start-ups), Stem (whose intelligent battery storage can reduce peak energy charges by 20%) and Mocana (a provider of embedded security systems for the industrial internet).
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Given TGV Lab’s limited resources and time constraints, Ternois says, it has no choice but to practise frugal innovation techniques, using rapid prototyping to design good-enough solutions, rather than over-engineered offerings, and working throughout with internal experts, customers and a variety of technology partners (including tech start-ups). As a result, TGV Lab is able to innovate faster, better and more cost-effectively than SNCF ever could. The lab is also allowed to carry out riskier projects, guided by the Silicon Valley innovation philosophy: fail early, fail fast and fail often. TGV Lab does the failing, so SNCF does not have to. Yet the Lab’s success rate is relatively high. Of its 30 pilot projects launched since 2008, over half have been successfully implemented and scaled up by SNCF. Its smartphone-based productivity tools are used by 10,000 TGV ticket inspectors.
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In addition to 3D printing, the plummeting cost of industrial robots – such as Baxter, a $25,000 humanoid robot sold by Rethink Robotics – is unleashing a wave of automation in factories that could not only boost manufacturers’ productivity and quality but also their agility. SRI International, a research institute based in Silicon Valley, is working on a project funded by DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) to develop nimbler, smaller and lighter robotic arms that will be ten times cheaper and consume 20 times less energy than existing industrial robots, and yet perform complex tasks in dynamic settings more reliably.
The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize
The same is very likely to be true for the New Space industries that are burgeoning around the world and will come on line in the next 5, 10 or 20 years. This pattern of new and totally unique developments seems to especially percolate through such places as Silicon Valley. These innovation ‘hot spots’ seem to grow up in proximity to major research universities, governmental research laboratories and aerospace, computer and networking centers. Where and How the New Gold Rush Will Begin Certainly Silicon Valley seems to represent the almost ideal conjunction of interacting intellects that spawns innovation almost like spontaneous combustion. This rather uncanny place—as represented by Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Intel, a host of computer, communications, and genetic research companies, NASA Ames, various aerospace companies, Stanford University, and the Singularity University—seems almost unique, although there are a plethora of wannabes being cultivated around the world.
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In the process, we have overlooked the great abundance available to us in the skies above. It is important to recognize there is already the beginning of a new gold rush in space—a pathway to astral abundance. “New Space” is a term increasingly used to describe radical new commercial space initiatives—many of which have come from Silicon Valley and often with backing from the group of entrepreneurs known popularly as the “space billionaires.” New space is revolutionizing the space industry with lower cost space transportation and space systems that represent significant cost savings and new technological breakthroughs. “New Commercial Space” and the “New Space Economy” represent more than a new way of looking at outer space.
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“New Commercial Space” and the “New Space Economy” represent more than a new way of looking at outer space. These new pathways to the stars could prove vital to human survival. If one does not believe in spending money to probe the mysteries of the universe then perhaps we can try what might be called “calibrated greed” on for size. One only needs to go to a cubesat workshop, or to Silicon Valley or one of many conferences like the “Disrupt Space” event in Bremen, Germany, held in April 2016 to recognize that entrepreneurial New Space initiatives are changing everything [1]. In fact, the very nature and dimensions of what outer space activities are today have changed forever. It is no longer your grandfather’s concept of outer space that was once dominated by the big national space agencies.
The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent
3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population
Between 2012 and 2014, employers in the San Francisco Bay Area added nearly 400,000 jobs, while the local housing stock grew by fewer than 100,000 units.29 Unsurprisingly, San Francisco housing prices rose by double-digit annual rates over that period.30 That was brilliant news for local homeowners, who captured an outsized share of the fruits of the local tech boom, but high housing costs shut off the region, and its jobs, to new workers. Firms might consider moving elsewhere, but they can only do so at great cost, because of the social nature of innovation in the digital era. Houses might be cheaper in Topeka than in Silicon Valley, but Topeka is a poor substitute for Silicon Valley; it lacks the Bay Area culture that translates the germ of an idea in a Stanford dorm room into a billion-dollar tech start-up. National borders create the starkest divide between the rich and the rest. No form of exclusion is as consequential. In America, a typical household of immigrants from the Philippines earns about $75,000 per year, or more than ten times what they’d earn in their home country.31 There is no anti-poverty programme in the world as effective as access to American society – to its institutions and economy and opportunities.
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The dot.com mania, as it turned out, was less entrepreneurial than one might have imagined: the rate of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley was below that of the rest of the American economy between 1996 and 2000.1 Conditions for workers at big firms were simply too cosy at the time to make jumping ship and starting a new company all that attractive, because workers were in desperately short supply. The unemployment rate in the Bay Area fell to about 2.5 per cent during the peak of the tech boom. Average earnings rose faster in Silicon Valley than elsewhere in California, or America as a whole, and to a level well above that in most other metropolitan areas.
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Some then partner with colleagues met along the way to found their own firms. Successful tech entrepreneurs participate in venture firms and sit on their boards, providing more advice and assistance. Silicon Valley supports patterns of behaviour – a culture – that cannot easily be replicated elsewhere in the world. At the same time, it supports the circulation of particular forms of know-how, to which outsiders cannot easily gain access. In 2013, a team of clever Silicon Valley programmers and entrepreneurs launched a product they called Slack. It was a platform for communication within firms, which they had developed for their own use, in the midst of a failed attempt to build an online game.
Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours by Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen, Franck Nouyrigat
Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, business climate, fail fast, hockey-stick growth, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, pattern recognition, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, transaction costs, web application, Y Combinator
The high cost of getting to first customers (the cost to build the product). 3. The structure of the venture capital industry (that there were a limited number of venture capital firms, each of which needed to invest millions per startup). 4. The expertise about how to build startups (which was clustered in specific regions like Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York). 5. The failure rate of new ventures (startups had no formal rules, and were frequently hit or miss propositions). 6. The slow adoption rate of new technologies by governments and large companies. Fortunately for us, many of these elements have changed drastically in recent years.
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And the cost of getting the first product out the door for an Internet commerce startup has dropped by a factor of 10 or more in the last decade. The New Structure of the Venture Capital Industry: The plummeting cost of getting a first product to market, particularly for Internet startups, has shaken up the venture capital industry. Venture capital used to be a tight club clustered around formal firms located in areas like Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York. While those firms are still there and growing, the pool of money that invests risk capital in startups has expanded, and a new class of investors has emerged. New groups of VCs called super angels, which are generally smaller than the traditional multihundred-million-dollar VC fund, can make the small investments necessary to help launch a consumer Internet startup.
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When founders discover the assumptions that are wrong, as they inevitably will, the result isn't a crisis; it's a learning event called a pivot—and an opportunity to change the business model. As a result, startups now have tools that speed up the search for customers, reduce time to market, and slash the cost of development. Consumer Internet Driving Innovation: In the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. Defense and Intelligence organizations drove the pace of innovation in Silicon Valley by providing research and development dollars to universities, and purchased weapons systems that used the valley's first microwave and semiconductor components. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, momentum shifted to the enterprise as large businesses supported innovation in PCs, communications hardware, and enterprise software.
The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work by Vishen Lakhiani
Abraham Maslow, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, performance metric, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social bookmarking, social contagion, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, web application, white picket fence, work culture
That’s because this is not a traditional book on entrepreneurship or business. The world is changing fast. When I started out teaching meditation in 2003, I had to hide my career from friends. Today meditation companies have valuations of over a billion. And today when I meet with the upper echelon of people in government, sports, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and business, they privately share their deep spiritual beliefs and how they no longer see their work and their career from a strict material point of view. Many have gone on record to publicly share this. My appreciation to the R&B star Miguel who spoke in Billboard magazine about using my 6-Phase Meditation before his concerts (more on this in Chapter 5).
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This book is an homage to the knowledge they’ve shared with me, as well as the lessons I’ve learned from my own team, many of whom have influenced me in ways they’ll never know. MY VOICE AND STORY The way I write is candid. I don’t hold back. I’ve shared stories here that I’m nervous to tell. But I don’t mind telling on myself to drive home the point that anyone can do what I’ve done. I quit Silicon Valley in 2003 to become a meditation teacher. I then started Mindvalley with $700 with no VC funding or investors. And as I’m writing this book we’re preparing to go for an IPO. And it didn’t happen without serious hurdles. My success started in a backroom of a warehouse in a ghetto neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
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Too many of us are running after what we think we want because we’ve been brainwashed to believe these are our needs. We take jobs that crush our soul. Or build businesses that have no resonance with our deepest longings. I know because I’ve been there. In 2010, I started a venture-backed start-up in the then-hot Silicon Valley digital coupon space. I had no interest in digital coupons. I only cofounded this company because I knew the space was booming. We closed a $2 million round of funding and the business took off. But six months in, I realized how miserable my life had become. I dreaded going to work. And I saw no value in our product.
Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud
autonomous vehicles, call centre, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, garden city movement, gentrification, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, manufacturing employment, market design, market fragmentation, megacity, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, rent control, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, zero-sum game
The support role involved in this top-down design is not trivial and requires good data and outstanding technical and financial skills, but a personal vision is not a requirement. It might rather be a hindrance. Where Did the Vision Come from in Silicon Valley? Silicon Valley has been the world’s most innovative urban concentration during the past half century. The creation of Silicon Valley is a perfect example of the advantages of a grassroots citizens’ vision, as opposed to a top-down mayoral vision. Silicon Valley was not created by a visionary mayor but by a large group of brilliant tinkerers, at times collaborating, but certainly not coordinating, their actions by implementing a common plan.
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The deans and provosts of Stanford University had vision, as they encouraged their students and researchers to start their own enterprises, and provided start-up incubator workspaces on land belonging to the university. But no visionary mayors or urban planners were involved in the creation of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley extends over about 18 municipalities. Maybe the limited size of the municipalities tempered the urban planners’ ambition to control what the brilliant tinkerers were doing. The fragmentation of municipal power prevented planners from creating a special zone where anybody dealing with electronics would have to operate. One shudders at the thought that the municipal planners in Silicon Valley could have circumscribed the coders to a special coder zone, like the zone reserved for artists created in New York, as described in chapter 7!
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One shudders at the thought that the municipal planners in Silicon Valley could have circumscribed the coders to a special coder zone, like the zone reserved for artists created in New York, as described in chapter 7! The planners of the various Silicon Valley municipalities deserve credit, though, for not having killed through land use regulations the activities of the emerging electronics industry. This industry, with its mix of coding, venture finance, and light manufacturing did not readily fit any traditional zoning district description. I have worked in a few cities where “visionary planners” pretended to include the design of new “Silicon Valley” satellite towns in their Master Plans. These visions never took off. By contrast, where some of Silicon Valley conditions are met—a great university next to open land with flexible land use—similar creative activities may emerge.
Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre
2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC
., The 2017 IARPA Face Recognition Prize Challenge (FRPC) (National Institute of Standards and Technology, November 22, 2017), 2, https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2017/NIST.IR.8197.pdf. 92Proponents of Chinese tech companies: Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (Boston: Mariner Books, September 1, 2018), https://www.amazon.com/AI-Superpowers-China-Silicon-Valley/dp/132854639X. 93strength of China’s technology sector: “The Companies,” Macro Polo, n.d., https://macropolo.org/digital-projects/chinai/the-companies/. 93China’s AI “national team”: Jeffrey Ding, “ChinAI #51: China’s AI ‘National Team,’” ChinAI Newsletter, May 20, 2019, https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-51-chinas-ai-national-team. 93“China’s Silicon Valley”: “China’s Silicon Valley Is Transforming China, but Not Yet the World,” The Economist, July 13, 2019, https://www.economist.com/china/2019/07/11/chinas-silicon-valley-is-transforming-china-but-not-yet-the-world; Meng Jing, “Zhongguancun: Beijing’s Innovation Hub Is at the Centre of China’s Aim to Become a Tech Powerhouse,” South China Morning Post, November 13, 2018, https://www.scmp.com/tech/start-ups/article/2172713/zhongguancun-beijings-innovation-hub-centre-chinas-aim-become-tech; “Zhongguancun, China’s Silicon Valley,” China.org.cn, December 12, 2002, http://www.china.org.cn/english/travel/51023.htm. 93employees expected to work “996”: Lin Qiqing and Raymond Zhong, “‘996’ Is China’s Version of Hustle Culture.
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Advantage,” Slate, June 13, 2019, https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/data-not-new-oil-kai-fu-lee-china-artificial-intelligence.html. 20China is “the Saudi Arabia of data”: “China May Match or Beat America in AI,” The Economist, July 15, 2017, https://www.economist.com/business/2017/07/15/china-may-match-or-beat-america-in-ai; Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (Boston: Mariner Books, September 1, 2018), 55, https://www.amazon.com/AI-Superpowers-China-Silicon-Valley/dp/132854639X. 20data is not a fungible resource: Husanjot Chahal, Ryan Fedasiuk, and Carrick Flynn, Messier Than Oil: Assessing Data Advantage in Military AI (Center for Security and Emerging Technology, July 2020), https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/messier-than-oil-assessing-data-advantage-in-military-ai/. 21surveillance capitalism: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, January 15, 2019), https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Frontier/dp/1610395697. 22900 million internet users as of 2020: “Number of Internet Users in China from 2008 to 2020,” Statista, 2021, https://www.statista.com/statistics/265140/number-of-internet-users-in-china/. 22750 million internet users in 2020: The Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicators: April–June, 2020 (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, November 9, 2020), https://trai.gov.in/sites/default/files/Report_09112020_0.pdf. 22400 million users: “Internet access,” in “Digital economy and society statistics—households and individuals,” Eurostat, September 2020, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Digital_economy_and_society_statistics_-_households_and_individuals#Internet_usage. 22290 million internet users: “Digital Population in the United States as of January 2021,” Statista, February 2021, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1044012/usa-digital-platform-audience/. 22Facebook has 2.7 billion users: Facebook, “Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2020 Results,” news release, October 29, 2020, https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2020/Facebook-Reports-Third-Quarter-2020-Results/default.aspx. 22YouTube over 2 billion: “YouTube for Press,” YouTube Official Blog, n.d., https://blog.youtube/press/. 22WeChat’s 1.2 billion: Monthly active users as of 30 September 2020.
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Talent,” New York Times, October 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/technology/artificial-intelligence-experts-salaries.html; Jeremy Kahn, “Sky-High Salaries Are the Weapons in the AI Talent War,” Bloomberg Businessweek, February 13, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-13/in-the-war-for-ai-talent-sky-high-salaries-are-the-weapons. 31Top AI researchers: Metz, “Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries.” 31“For much of basic AI research”: Mozur and Metz, “A U.S. Secret Weapon in A.I.: Chinese Talent.” 31AI deployment: Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (Boston: Mariner Books, September 1, 2018), https://www.amazon.com/AI-Superpowers-China-Silicon-Valley/dp/132854639X. 32national AI research cloud: Congresswoman Anna G. Eshoo, “Preeminent Universities and Leading Tech Companies Announce Support for Bipartisan, Bicameral Bill to Develop National AI Research Cloud,” news release, June 29, 2020, https://eshoo.house.gov/media/press-releases/preeminent-universities-and-leading-tech-companies-announce-support-bipartisan. 32increasingly concentrated in the hands of corporate-backed labs: Deep Ganguli et al., Predictability and Surprise in Large Generative Models (arXiv.org, February 15, 2022), https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.07785.pdf, 11. 32“do not have the luxury of a large amount of compute and engineering resources”: Anima Kumar, “An Open and Shut Case on OpenAI,” anima-ai.org, January 1, 2021, https://anima-ai.org/2019/02/18/an-open-and-shut-case-on-openai/. 32help academics stay engaged: Gil Alterovitz et al., Recommendations for Leveraging Cloud Computing Resources for Federally Funded Artificial Intelligence Research and Development (Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, National Science & Technology Council, November 17, 2020), https://www.nitrd.gov/pubs/Recommendations-Cloud-AI-RD-Nov2020.pdf; Hatef Monajemi et al., “Ambitious Data Science Can Be Painless,” Harvard Data Science Review, no. 1.1 (July 1, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.02ffc552. 32National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource: Division E, “National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource,” in William M.
For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game
Venture capital firms dominated the Silicon Valley tech scene in the 1990s and early 2000s and controlled vast pools of capital. Receiving an investment from one of the more established venture capital firms, such as Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins, was a mark of honor in Silicon Valley, one that signaled to the world that you had a “big idea.” By the summer of 2004, Zuckerberg realized that Facebook’s growth was taxing the server space the company had been renting, and he needed cash to keep the site functioning smoothly. So in August he met with Peter Thiel, one of the most prominent venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. Thiel ended up investing $500,000 in the company for a 7 percent interest.
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It has tended to make business leaders less reflective about society’s great problems and more intensely focused on extracting profit. It has contributed to the growth of financial capitalism, a species of corporate activity devoted to financial engineering rather than material production. It has also promoted the “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley, which values rapid technological growth over responsible behavior. And while corporate leaders occasionally pay lip service to their role as guardians of the public interest, with a few notable exceptions they appear less and less convinced of it. We are now witnessing a moment when corporations and the titans who run them wield an unimaginable amount of wealth and power—more than would have been conceivable at the time of the East India Company.
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For years, private equity raiders had been banging on the gates of corporate America. Now they had the keys to the kingdom, and they weren’t entirely sure what to do with them. The Age of the Raider centered on Wall Street and the world of finance. But the next great evolution in the corporation came from Silicon Valley, a place where computers and code mattered more than capital and carry. eight THE START-UP THERE ARE 7.8 BILLION PEOPLE ON EARTH; 3.3 BILLION OF them are on Facebook. No corporation in the history of the world has ever come anywhere close to the sheer size and scope of Facebook (or Meta, as it has now rebranded itself).
The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan
Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy
But whatever problems eBay and others encountered initially, the tinkerers and innovators of Silicon Valley did prevail. While asymmetric information—when the seller knows more than the buyer—complicates the job of turning the economy into an internet bazaar, eBay and its e-commerce brethren have found many ways to get the market to work reasonably well. And as we’ll see, their successes have provided economists with yet more fodder for their model building and experiments—often from within the companies themselves. E-Commerce Comes of Age Skoll came to Silicon Valley just as Omidyar and others were trying to figure out how to transform the World Wide Web into something that could serve as a platform for transparent market exchange.
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They preach the power of free markets—without ever appearing to consider any trade-offs, which is a little ironic, given that understanding trade-offs is at the center of economic analysis. Their arguments would be easy to dismiss but for two facts. First, many of them wield a surprising amount of power in the real world, in particular in politics or business (more than a few of those railing against big government can be found cozily holed up preaching cyberutopia in Silicon Valley). And why not? There’s something appealing about a clear story with a practical trajectory to solve the world’s ills, which is what the markets-as-salvation narrative provides. The market fundamentalists have another thing going for them: sometimes, they’re right—just ask a focus group of former POWs of camps in Germany and Japan.
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From Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776 to the worldly philosophers of the nineteenth century, economists went from reasoning with words about the state of the world; to using words and math to reason about the world, sometimes reasoning clearly, sometimes obfuscating their points; to a mathematical revolution in the mid-twentieth century that transformed economics and set the stage for economics to transform our existence.24 3 HOW ONE BAD LEMON RUINS THE MARKET THAT’S FOR ME TO KNOW AND FOR YOU TO FIND OUT (BUT ONLY WHEN IT’S TOO LATE) Joel Podolny is now the dean of Apple University, heading a group within the company devoted, according to one insider, to teaching people at the company to “think like Steve Jobs.” In an earlier chapter of his career, Podolny taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he shaped the thinking of other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Jeff Skoll, whose job as first president of eBay made him a multibillionaire, was one of them.1 As Podolny remembers it, the two ran into each other just before Skoll finished his MBA degree. Naturally, the question of what Skoll would be doing after graduation came up. Podolny recalls that Skoll had a number of options.
Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup by Brad Feld, David Cohen
An Inconvenient Truth, augmented reality, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, fail fast, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lolcat, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business
Both Jive and Filtrbox shared similar technology platforms and visions of how this could work, and Jive had established itself as one of the market leaders in enterprise social computing. We watched as Ari evaluated his options thoughtfully and then decided to join forces with Jive. Six months later, the acquisition looks like it is working out great. The Filtrbox team in Boulder is expanding quickly and has been fully integrated into Jive, which has offices in Silicon Valley and Portland. Filtrbox's product has been rebranded as the Jive social media monitoring solution and all indications are that it's being well received by many new customers. It's Just Data Bill Warner Bill is the founder of Avid Technology (the pioneer in video editing software) and Wildfire Communications.
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By continuing to focus on quality, we say no to a lot of opportunities but when we decide to go after something, we are confident we can do it well. We think all startups should think this way. Have a Bias Toward Action Ben Casnocha Ben is an entrepreneur and author of the book My Startup Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley. He has been a TechStars mentor since 2007. Learning experts agree that learning by doing is the best way to learn something. When you do something—when you pick up the phone and talk to a potential customer, launch a prototype, send out the first brochure—you learn infinitely more than if you think about doing it in the abstract.
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Always trim away what you don't need to be doing and ask yourself, “What is the thing that matters most to making progress right now?” Focus on these and let the other bright ideas sit on the sidelines until the company has proven that it's ready to tackle another opportunity. Obsess over Metrics Dave McClure Dave is an angel investor and has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for almost 20 years as a software developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor, blogger, and Internet marketing nerd. He's been a TechStars mentor since 2007. The ability to get real-time data and feedback is unique to the Internet. If you're smart, you can take advantage of that and build better products by collecting real-time usage metrics and by making decisions based on measured user data.
Makers by Chris Anderson
3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator
And those projects can become the seeds of products, movements, even industries. The simple act of “making in public” can become the engine of innovation, even if that was not the intent. It is simply what ideas do: spread when shared. We’ve seen this play out on the Web many times. The first generation of Silicon Valley giants got their start in a garage, but they took decades to get big. Now companies start in dorm rooms and get big before their founders can graduate. You know why. Computers amplify human potential: they not only give people the power to create but can also spread their ideas quickly, creating communities, markets, even movements.
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This nascent movement is less than seven years old, but it’s already accelerating as fast as the early days of the PC, where the garage tinkerers who were part of the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975 created the Apple II, the first consumer desktop computer, which led to desktop computing and the explosion of a new industry. Similarly, you can mark the beginnings of the Maker Movement with such signs as the 2005 launch of Make magazine, from O’Reilly, a legendary publisher of geek bibles, and the first Maker Faire gatherings in Silicon Valley. Another key milestone arrived with RepRap, the first open-source desktop 3-D printer, which was launched in 2007. That led to the MakerBot, a consumer-friendly 3-D printer that is inspiring a generation of Makers with a mind-blowing glimpse of the future of desktop manufacturing, just as the first personal computers did thirty years before.
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Later, when Jobs and his Apple cofounder, Steve Wozniak, were members of the Homebrew Computer Club, they saw the potential of desktop tools—in this case the personal computer—to change not just people’s lives, but also the world. In this, they were inspired by Stewart Brand, who had emerged from the psychedelic culture of the 1960s to work with the early Silicon Valley visionaries to promote technology as a form of “computer liberation,” which would free both the minds and the talents of people in a way that drugs had not. In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson describes Brand’s role in the origins of what is today the Maker Movement: Brand ran the Whole Earth Truck Store, which began as a roving truck that sold useful tools and educational materials, and in 1968 he decided to extend its reach with The Whole Earth Catalog.
Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo
3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K
To explain how this might happen, Romer invited us to think of the production of new ideas in a place like Silicon Valley, though his paper was written years before Silicon Valley achieved its iconic status.33 Firms in Silicon Valley are very similar to the firms in Solow’s world except in one important way: they use less of what we usually think of as capital (machines, buildings) and more of what economists call human capital, essentially specialized skills of different kinds. Many Silicon Valley companies invest in clever people in the hope they will come up with some brilliant and marketable idea, and sometimes this indeed happens.
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It was funded by some of the best-known billionaires in America (from Jeff Bezos to Eric Schmidt), to invest in states traditionally overlooked by tech investors. A bus tour (the Comeback Cities Tour) took a group of Silicon Valley investors to places like Youngstown and Akron, Ohio; Detroit and Flint, Michigan; and South Bend, Indiana. The fund promoters were quick to point out this was not a social impact fund, but a traditional money-making venture. In the New York Times, when reporting on the trip84 and the fund itself,85 many Silicon Valley investors emphasized the congestion, the insularity, the high cost of living in the Bay Area, and the great opportunities in the “heartland.”
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It is in the developing world, where growth is sometimes held back by an egregious abuse of economic logic, that we may have something useful to say, though, as we will see, even that is very limited. THE MILLION-DOLLAR PLANT The key ingredient of Romer’s happy narrative was the spillovers: the idea that skills build on each other and that putting skilled people together in one place makes a difference. Clearly, this is something people in Silicon Valley believe. There are many parts of California prettier than Silicon Valley, and most are cheaper. Why do companies still want to locate there? States and cities in the United States and elsewhere offer large subsidies to attract firms. In September 2017, Wisconsin gave at least $3 billion in fiscal advantages to Foxconn to have it invest $10 billion in an LCD manufacturing plant.34 This is $200,000 for every job they promised to create.
Free Ride by Robert Levine
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks
Therein lies the conflict. Most online companies that have built businesses based on giving away information or entertainment aren’t funding the content they’re distributing. In some cases, like blogs that summarize newspaper stories, this is legal; in others, it’s not. But the idea is the same: in Silicon Valley, the information that wants to be free is almost always the information that belongs to someone else. In economic terms, these businesses are getting a “free ride,” 23 profiting from the work of others. The fact that video can be distributed practically free on YouTube hasn’t really changed the amount of money it takes to make a television show.
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Record labels were even more involved, and they pushed for legislation that would require “Webcasters” to pay for recordings they played online, even though traditional radio stations only paid songwriters.15 Lehman laid out his agenda for online copyright regulation in July 1994 with A Preliminary Draft of the Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights, unofficially known as the Green Paper. The proposed anticircumvention policy caused a stir in the Silicon Valley start-up scene, which reacted as though the new guy from the corporate office confused his computer’s CD-ROM tray with a cup holder: Don’t these guys know that information wants to be free? But the Green Paper got much more attention in Washington for the way it began to define what would legally count as a copy.
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I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.20 The “Declaration” went on in that vein, mixing the wide-eyed utopianism of the New Left’s 1962 Port Huron Statement with the didactic tone of John Galt’s climactic speech from Atlas Shrugged. Since Barlow didn’t have any particular authority to represent the online world, his declaration had the same legal impact as a few college kids declaring their university a nuclear-free zone. But he tapped into a powerful strain of Silicon Valley libertarianism that rejects any form of Internet regulation—except, in most cases, when it happens to help the technology business itself. Whatever its logical flaws, Barlow’s thinking became influential in shaping the idea of “online rights” as somehow distinct from those in the physical world, a concept that lacks much real legal support.
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace
Albert Einstein, business climate, buy low sell high, complexity theory, fail fast, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Menlo Park, reality distortion field, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Wall-E
It would take a full year for the answer to emerge. From the start, my professional life seemed destined to have one foot in Silicon Valley and the other in Hollywood. I first got into the film business in 1979 when, flush from the success of Star Wars, George Lucas hired me to help him bring high technology into the film industry. But he wasn’t based in Los Angeles. Instead, he’d founded his company, Lucasfilm, at the north end of the San Francisco Bay. Our offices were located in San Rafael, about an hour’s drive from Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley—a moniker that was just gaining traction then, as the semiconductor and computer industries took off.
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The allure of getting rich was a magnet for bright, ambitious people, and the resulting competition was intense—as were the risks. The old business models were undergoing continual disruptive change. Lucasfilm was based in Marin County, one hour north of Silicon Valley by car and one hour from Hollywood by plane. This was no accident. George saw himself, first and foremost, as a filmmaker, so Silicon Valley wasn’t for him. But he also had no desire to be too close to Los Angeles, because he thought there was something a bit unseemly and inbred about it. Thus, he created his own island, a community that embraced films and computers but pledged allegiance to neither of the prevailing cultures that defined those businesses.
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Our offices were located in San Rafael, about an hour’s drive from Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley—a moniker that was just gaining traction then, as the semiconductor and computer industries took off. That proximity gave me a front-row seat from which to observe the many emerging hardware and software companies—not to mention the growing venture capital industry—that, in the course of a few years, would come to dominate Silicon Valley from its perch on Sand Hill Road. I couldn’t have arrived at a more dynamic and volatile time. I watched as many startups burned bright with success—and then flamed out. My mandate at Lucasfilm—to merge moviemaking with technology—meant that I rubbed shoulders with the leaders of places like Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics and Cray Computer, several of whom I came to know well.
Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay
3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game
In 1999, an earthquake in Taiwan knocked its semiconductor factories offline for a week, triggering a chain reaction that stretched from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. In 2000, a lightning strike at a Philips Electronics semiconductor plant in New Mexico destroyed the sole supply of a chip critical to Ericsson’s latest cell phones. Caught without a Plan B, the handset maker saw its stock price fall 50 percent. Now the biggest names in computing were staring down the barrel of another disaster, a man-made one. You could practically hear them in their Tokyo and Silicon Valley boardrooms resolving never to invest in Thailand again. Why won’t democracy stick in Thailand?
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Chicago broke all records for urbanization during the back half of the nineteenth century, absorbing two million residents drawn to the factories surrounding its railroad stations, the de facto gateways to the American West. Los Angeles and its highways became the template for the suburban good life, while Silicon Valley’s bandwidth enabled the Internet boom and the largest legal accumulation of wealth in history. Each one was a function of the fuel that fed it, whether wind or peat or coal or oil. Especially oil. The gravest threat to cities is the prospect of their pipelines of cheap oil running dry. Without oil, or a substitute that burns cleaner and just as brightly, the next form of cities may depend on the oxcart.
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Carpenter’s prediction of a Detroit-of-the-air had come to fruition, as a full third of Southern California’s jobs were directly or indirectly related to aerospace, earning it the nickname the “Warfare State.” Aerospace’s reach extended three hundred miles north to Palo Alto, where transistors made of silicon had just been perfected. A decade before Intel and before there was any Silicon Valley to speak of, the aerospace cartel arranged to buy integrated circuits as fast as their makers could etch them. In 1967, for example, seven out of every ten microchips were slated for Minuteman missiles and lunar landers, not mainframe computers. Based on this evidence, a few economists have persuasively argued that computing would have been set back for decades if the military hadn’t been there to hold its hand during those baby steps.
Big Data at Work: Dispelling the Myths, Uncovering the Opportunities by Thomas H. Davenport
Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, cloud computing, commoditize, data acquisition, data science, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, recommendation engine, RFID, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sorting algorithm, statistical model, Tesla Model S, text mining, Thomas Davenport, three-martini lunch
Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemewat, “MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters,” December 2004, http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce .html. 2. Jeanne G. Harris, Allan Alter, and Christian Kelly, “How to Run IT at the Speed of Silicon Valley,” Wall Street Journal blog post, May 14, 2013, http://blogs.wsj .com/cio/2013/05/14/how-to-run-it-at-the-speed-of-silicon-valley/. 3. E-mail correspondence with Christopher Ahlberg, May 26, 2013. 4. Discussion panel and e-mail correspondence with Jim Davis, May–June 2013. 5. A/B testing is described in Brian Christian, “The A/B Test: Inside the Technology That’s Changing the Rules of Business,” Wired, April 25, 2012, http:// www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_abtesting/. 6.
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I’d worked with well over a hundred companies on how to use analytics for competitive advantage. I confess that I initially thought that big data was simply old analytics wine poured into a new bottle. The term started to take off in the fourth quarter of 2010, and there weren’t many examples yet outside of Silicon Valley. So I assumed it was just another example of vendor, consultant, and technology analyst hype. I briefly considered taking my books on analytics, doing a global replacement with the term big data, and—voilà!—several new books (kidding!). I discovered that I was wrong to be skeptical after I began doing research on the topic in 2011.
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Chapter_06.indd 148 03/12/13 12:24 PM What It Takes to Succeed with Big Data 149 This sort of meritocratic empowerment is a personal philosophy of Hoffman’s: “I want to enable individual professionals to have more successful careers and to increase the productivity of mankind across entire industries and countries. I want a company that lives up to the original standard that Hewlett-Packard set for Silicon Valley—a great place for high-quality people to work that provides an experience that would continue to benefit them even after they move on to other things.”7 Of course, it’s still early days for talking about the culture of big data organizations—and every other attribute of them, for that matter.
Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America by Dan Conway
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, financial independence, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, holacracy, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, initial coin offering, job satisfaction, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, rent control, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart contracts, Steve Jobs, supercomputer in your pocket, tech billionaire, tech bro, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Uber for X, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vitalik Buterin
When the boom was on, I felt like Pablo Escobar, with a chirpy attitude and a closet full of dad jeans. But my story is messy and unconventional. I’m not a traditional tech bro who struck it rich by getting in early. I had a lot more to lose when I went down the rabbit hole. I was a forty-four-year-old father of three with a conventional life on the edge of the Silicon Valley bubble. My marriage was still recovering from my past battles with demons. I’ve always had a hard time distinguishing between living life to the fullest, and selfish, self- destructive behavior like drinking too much, risking too much, and obsessing too much on any one thing as a way to make me feel different.
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I was arrested for misdemeanor assault. The charges were eventually dropped, but I was sufficiently scared and ashamed to quit drinking for good. Or at least for ten years. During those sober years, I’d married Eileen. Together, we’d bought a nice three-bedroom, one-bath house in Burlingame on the northern edge of Silicon Valley. By 2007, we’d added two kids to the operation: two-year-old Danny and infant Annie. Eileen told me that by 2009, we’d have three kids. Suddenly, the urge to blow off steam was overwhelming. I was worn out by the one-two punch of parenting and trying to get ahead in my career. After my hour-long commute home through stop-and-go traffic, I was exhausted.
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By that time, many of the cypherpunks had created organizations that were fighting for libertarian policies in the courts and on the Internet. In Washington D.C., cypherpunk Mitch Kapor’s Electronic Frontier Foundation was battling AOL at the Federal Trade Commission, alleging AOL engaged in deceptive and unfair trade practices by disclosing the search queries of 650,000 users. In Silicon Valley, cypherpunk Bram Cohen’s peer-to-peer file sharing program, BitTorrent, had drawn blood from big telecom in 2006, after Comcast had throttled the BitTorrent service. Cohen, who self-diagnosed his Asperger’s Syndrome, sued and won a federal lawsuit, one of the first skirmishes in the net neutrality war.
The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job by John Tamny
Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, cloud computing, commoditize, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Downton Abbey, future of work, George Gilder, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Palm Treo, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra
The saying in Silicon Valley is that intelligence moves out to the edge of the network. Closer to you and me. We use it to think on a higher plain, moving around concepts instead of boxes and earth. The second thing that happened was that databases came along to allow money that was formerly managed by the sclerotic trust departments of stuffy Victorian banks to be sliced and diced into mutual funds and hedge funds and eventually exchange traded funds. Wall Street completely transforms. But this financial transformation also allowed risk capital to fund innovation, changing Silicon Valley from sleepy orchards into the innovation machine it is today.
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Having grown up with it, they understand how it’s evolving and appreciate the staggering commercial possibilities it is opening up. While Generation X made millions on the Internet back in the 1990s, exponentially greater global connectivity allows today’s twenty-somethings to pursue billions. In 2015, Silicon Valley was home to 124 “unicorns,”7—relatively young start-ups valued at more than a billion dollars. Will all of them survive? Of course not. Neither did most of the Valley companies from the 1990s. And that’s the point. Silicon Valley isn’t the richest region in the world because all of its companies succeed. It’s the richest precisely because many of its start-ups fail. Success is about information, which is embodied in the wins and losses in technology.
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We learned that anyone with a problem could pull a cord, stopping the line and causing music to play. This was an innovation by the Japanese (especially the classical music) to minimize defects. Better to stop the line and correct the problem cheaply in the factory than have a wheel fall off a vehicle after fifteen thousand miles. After years of investing in Silicon Valley tech companies and seeing incredible innovation every day, I stifled a chuckle when I saw that pulling a cord and playing music was the auto industry’s idea of innovation. Eventually, the tour found itself at the most complex stage of manufacturing: the installation of the engine, which had been assembled in Japan and shipped to California.
Industrial Internet by Jon Bruner
air gap, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, commoditize, computer vision, data acquisition, demand response, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, Google X / Alphabet X, industrial robot, Internet of things, job automation, loose coupling, natural language processing, performance metric, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart grid, smart meter, statistical model, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application
— Jon Bruner Chapter 1. The industrial internet The barriers between software and the physical world are falling. It’s becoming easier to connect big machines to networks, to harvest data from them, and to control them remotely. The same changes in software and networks that brought about decades of Silicon Valley innovation are now reordering the machines around us. Since the 1970s, the principles of abstraction and modularity have made it possible for practically anyone to learn how to develop software. That radical accessibility, along with pervasive networks and cheap computing power, has made it easy to create software solutions to information problems.
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slide=6 [34] http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/02/masking-the-complexity-of-the-machine.html [35] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermiling [36] https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2010/01/15/E9-31362/positive-train-control-systems#t-1 [37] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/100885/000119312513045658/d477110d10k.htm [38] A full description of the impact of data on health care is beyond the scope of this paper. For more information, see this primer: http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/08/data-health-care.html [39] http://hmi.ucsd.edu/pdf/HMI_Case_Neuroimaging.pdf [40] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db111.pdf Chapter 4. The role of Silicon Valley in creating the industrial internet A new kind of hardware alpha-geek will approach those areas of the industrial internet where the challenges are principally software challenges. Cheap, easy-to-program microcontrollers; powerful open-source software; and the support of hardware collectives and innovation labs[41] make it possible for enthusiasts and minimally-funded entrepreneurs to create sophisticated projects of the sort that would have been available only to well-funded electrical engineers just a few years ago — anything from autonomous cars to small-scale industrial robots.
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In complex, critical systems, clients will continue to demand the involvement of experienced industrial firms even while they ask for new, software-driven approaches to managing their physical systems. Industrial firms will need to cultivate technological pipelines that identify promising new ideas from Silicon Valley and package them alongside their trusted approaches. Large, trusted enterprise IT firms are starting to enter the industrial internet market as they recognize that many specialized mechanical functions can be replaced by software. But the job of these firms will increasingly be one of laying foundations — creating platforms on which others can build applications and connect nodes of intelligence.
The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein
Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler
Rather than Paris, Moscow, or Berkeley, the grand utopian movement of our contemporary age is headquartered in Silicon Valley, whose great seduction is actually a fusion of two historical movements: the countercultural utopianism of the ’60s and the techno-economic utopianism of the ’90s. Here in Silicon Valley, this seduction has announced itself to the world as the “Web 2.0” movement. Last week, I was treated to lunch at a fashionable Japanese restaurant in Palo Alto by a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who, back in the dot-com boom, had invested in my start–up Audiocafe .com. The entrepreneur, like me a Silicon Valley veteran, was pitching me his latest start-up: a technology platform that creates easy-to-use software tools for online communities to publish weblogs, digital movies, and music.
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It’s eerily similar to Marx’s seductive promise about individual self-realization in his German Ideology: Whereas in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. Just as Marx seduced a generation of European idealists with his fantasy of self-realization in a communist utopia, so the Web 2.0 cult of creative self-realization has seduced everyone in Silicon Valley. The movement bridges countercultural radicals of the ’60s such as Steve Jobs with the contemporary geek culture of Google’s Larry Page. Between the bookends of Jobs and Page lies the rest of Silicon Valley, including radical communitarians like Craig Newmark (of Craigslist.com), intellectual property communists such as Stanford Law professor Larry Lessig, economic cornucopians like Wired magazine editor Chris “Long Tail” Anderson, and new media moguls Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle.
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Instead of Mozart, Van Gogh, or Hitchcock, all we get with the Web 2.0 revolution is more of ourselves. Still, the idea of inevitable technological progress has become so seductive that it has been transformed into “laws.” In Silicon Valley, the most quoted of these laws, Moore’s Law, states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, thus doubling the memory capacity of the personal computer every two years. On one level, of course, Moore’s Law is real and it has driven the Silicon Valley economy. But there is an unspoken ethical dimension to Moore’s Law. It presumes that each advance in technology is accompanied by an equivalent improvement in the condition of man.
The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game
The 99: Emma Goss, “Hwy 99 Ranked ‘Deadliest’ Road in America,” Bakersfield Now Eyewitness News, May 7, 2018, https://bakersfieldnow.com/news/local/ca-99-ranked-deadliest-road-in-america. 37. Prep schools: Phil Beadle, “$40,500 for 8th Grade? Tuitions at Silicon Valley’s Largest Private Schools,” Silicon Valley Business Journal, December 2, 2014, www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/12/02/40-500-for-8th-grade-tuitions-at-silicon-valleys.html; Morgan G. Ames, “The Smartest People in the Room? What Silicon Valley’s Supposed Obsession with Tech-Free Private Schools Really Tells Us,” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 18, 2019, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-smartest-people-in-the-room-what-silicon-valleys-supposed-obsession-with-tech-free-private-schools-really-tells-us. 38.
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Meanwhile, the public schools increasingly enrolled the impoverished children of immigrants from Central America and Mexico.37 What did the beleaguered and shrinking middle class say in opposition to all of these state policies and socioeconomic trends? For the most part, little. Again, it preferred to leave the state in order to survive. In the twenty-five years between 1991 and 2016, California lost 423,700 manufacturing jobs, even as top-paying high-tech opportunities boomed in Silicon Valley. Otherwise, 80 percent of all the jobs created in California in the last decade paid less than the medium income. Quite logically, then, in high-tech, wealthy San Francisco, inequality still grew amid the general high-tech largess. Joel Kotkin and Michael Toplansky have emphasized the paradoxes: “According to a recent study by the California Budget Center, San Francisco ranks first in California for economic inequality; average income of the top 1% of households in the city averages $3.6 million, 44 times the average income of the bottom 99%, which stands at $81,094.”38 The state currently has a top marginal income tax rate of 13.3 percent—until recent increases in New York, the highest in the nation.
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Translated, that means that small-business operators relocated to more business-friendly states (for example, seventy thousand Californians on average have left for Texas alone each year of the last decade, and the rate is climbing to over eighty thousand per year), as did retirees on fixed incomes and young people shut out of the high-priced coastal housing market.39 Oddly the state rarely lamented the loss of its once thriving middle classes. The inference is that many of the evacuees were conservatives, so their departure only further ensured a monopoly of progressive elected officials. Or as Silicon Valley activist Shankar Singam put it, “If everyone in the middle class is leaving, that’s actually a good thing. We need these spots opened up for the new wave of immigrants to come up.” California for over a century had drawn in millions of immigrants from other states. Newcomers flocked to its Mediterranean climate, singular scenic geography, one-thousand-mile coastline, marquee public and private universities, reputation for top-flight public schools, brilliantly designed water transference system of lakes and dams, superb transportation system, affordable housing, and competent state government.
Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM by Paul Carroll
accounting loophole / creative accounting, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, Gary Kildall, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, popular electronics, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, thinkpad, traveling salesman
Michael Spindler, Apple’s new president, decided he w anted an intro duction to Kuehler in early 1990 just to see what lands of business dealings might be possible. In the intimate wofld of Silicon Valley, Spindler soon discovered that he could use Regis M cKenna as an inter mediary. M cKenna is a white-haired, grandfatherly sort, but he has a glittery presence in Silicon Valley because he has concocted daring marketing campaigns that have helped so many start-ups get estab lished, beginning with the strategies that let Apple catch the public imagination with the Apple II and that positioned the Macintosh as “the com puter for the rest of us.” As Silicon Valley’s m arketer to the 294 PAUL CARROLL stars, M cKenna— whose business card lists his title as “H im self’— seem ed to know everybody.
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His senior people began referring to the new IBM. The press began talking about the thirteen new units as the Baby Blues. The idea Akers was working toward made a lot of sense. The reason Silicon Valley companies had been clobbering IBM for years— while the feared Japanese had been doing much less well— was that they had had the kind of freedom and responsibility Akers was now trying to build into IBM. The Silicon Valley companies had owner-managers. The person at the top owned enough of the company that making the company succeed would make him rich, maybe filthy rich. He w anted to be filthy rich. H e would do anything necessary to be filthy rich.
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If that m eant taking a chance or pinching pennies or working ridiculous hours and sleeping under his desk, h e’d do it. And once h e’d made his fortune, h e’d do whatever he had to do to keep it, even if it meant firing a few friends. The Silicon Valley companies that had been eating at IBM didn’t contain people who were any sm arter than those at IBM. Most of the people didn’t even start out being more entrepreneurial than their counterparts at IBM. The Silicon Valley companies were just driven by a purer em otion than IBM was: greed. At IBM, people w anted to be important, not rich. Executives wanted big staffs, lots of employees, access to the corporate jet, a title.
Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman
23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day
Limiting this knowledge to “insiders” working in government, security, and Silicon Valley simply won’t do. Throughout my tenure in public service working with organizations that include the LAPD, the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service, and Interpol, it became increasingly obvious to me that criminals and terrorists were out-innovating police forces around the world and that the “good guys” were rapidly falling further and further behind. On a quest for deeper impact against the growing legions of criminals abusing cutting-edge technologies, I left government and moved to Silicon Valley to further educate myself on what would come next.
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I visited the scions of Silicon Valley and made friends within the highly talented San Francisco Bay Area start-up community. I was invited to join the faculty of Singularity University, an amazing institution housed on the campus of NASA’s Ames Research Center, where I worked with a brilliant array of astronauts, roboticists, data scientists, computer engineers, and synthetic biologists. These pioneering men and women have the ability to see beyond today’s world, unlocking the tremendous potential of technology to confront the grandest challenges facing humanity. But many of these Silicon Valley entrepreneurs hard at work creating our technological future pay precious little attention to the public policy, legal, ethical, and security risks that their creations pose to the rest of society.
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Such was the case with Nicholas Webber, who, while serving time in Her Majesty’s Prison Isis in south London, used his computer skills during his IT training class to hack the prison’s computer system. At the San Quentin maximum-security prison just outside Silicon Valley’s backyard, corrections officials have even created a start-up incubator for those behind bars with entrepreneurial ambitions. With the support of the local technorati, inmates take part in “demo days” and pitch start-up ideas judged by Silicon Valley executives for their potential. While the intent of these programs is commendable, from a practical perspective the results may turn out differently from those expected.
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog
He would later bristle whenever anyone referred to Paul and Clara Jobs as his “adoptive” parents or implied that they were not his “real” parents. “They were my parents 1,000%,” he said. When speaking about his biological parents, on the other hand, he was curt: “They were my sperm and egg bank. That’s not harsh, it’s just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more.” Silicon Valley The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs. The finance company where Paul worked as a repo man, CIT, had transferred him down to its Palo Alto office, but he could not afford to live there, so they landed in a subdivision in Mountain View, a less expensive town just to the south.
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Moore’s Law has held generally true to this day, and its reliable projection of performance to price allowed two generations of young entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to create cost projections for their forward-leaning products. The chip industry gave the region a new name when Don Hoefler, a columnist for the weekly trade paper Electronic News, began a series in January 1971 entitled “Silicon Valley USA.” The forty-mile Santa Clara Valley, which stretches from South San Francisco through Palo Alto to San Jose, has as its commercial backbone El Camino Real, the royal road that once connected California’s twenty-one mission churches and is now a bustling avenue that connects companies and startups accounting for a third of the venture capital investment in the United States each year.
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Worse yet, the sixth grade was in a different school, Crittenden Middle. It was only eight blocks from Monta Loma Elementary, but in many ways it was a world apart, located in a neighborhood filled with ethnic gangs. “Fights were a daily occurrence; as were shakedowns in bathrooms,” wrote the Silicon Valley journalist Michael S. Malone. “Knives were regularly brought to school as a show of macho.” Around the time that Jobs arrived, a group of students were jailed for a gang rape, and the bus of a neighboring school was destroyed after its team beat Crittenden’s in a wrestling match. Jobs was often bullied, and in the middle of seventh grade he gave his parents an ultimatum.
What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn
Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave
In Snow Crash, Hiro Protagonist satirically defines the icon of the hacker figure, working at the periphery of monolithic cultural systems to make crucial interventions through technical skill, idealistic motivation, and a blithe disregard for traditional mores. Hiro is a character right out of the trickster archetype that technology journalist Steven Levy chronicles in Hackers; a character who came to life around Silicon Valley pioneer Stewart Brand’s Hackers Conference in 1984.2 The computational systems of the novel, from the various security systems to the Metaverse itself, were created by hackers and are subject to their manipulations. As a high-water mark in the cyberpunk genre, Snow Crash both embellished and consecrated hackers as potent and capricious architects of computational reality.
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These changes will be effected not only in the material realm but in the cultural, mental, and even spiritual spaces of empowerment and agency. The algorithm offers us salvation, but only after we accept its terms of service. The important lesson here is not merely that the venture capitalism of Silicon Valley is the ideology bankrolling much of our contemporary cathedral-building, or even Bogost’s warning about computation as a new theology. The lesson is that it’s much harder to question a set of ideas when they are assembled into an interconnected structure. A seemingly complete and consistent expression of a system of knowledge offers no seams, no points of access that suggest there might be an outside or alternative to the structure.
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But, as Hayles puts it, “In the face of such a powerful dream, it can be a shock to remember that for information to exist, it must always be instantiated in a medium.”39 While Hayles’s reading of cybernetics pursues the field’s rhetorical ascent of the ladder of abstraction as she frames the story of “how information lost its body,” there is a second side to the cybernetic moment in the 1940s and 1950s, one that fed directly into the emergence of Silicon Valley and the popular understanding of computational systems as material artifacts. We can follow Wiener back down the ladder of abstraction, too, through a second crucial cybernetic term, the notion of “feedback.” The feedback loop, as Hayles notes, is of interest to Wiener primarily as a universal intellectual model for understanding how communication and control can be generalized across different systems.40 But the feedback loop was also a crucial moment of implementation for cybernetics, where the theoretical model was tested through empirical experiments and, perhaps more important, demonstrations.
The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan
"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar
Business executives seem resigned to the eventuality of persistent change, and especially change caused by digital technologies. Radical disruption, a concatenation of words that seems to suggest something quite avoidable in most situations, is a harbinger of wealth creation actively pursued by Silicon Valley investors. We have been nurtured by a steady diet of TED talks to expect bold claims about digital technologies being a catalyst for revolution, a panacea for the world’s big problems. I would therefore not be surprised if some readers met my assertion of impending transformation with weary skepticism.
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Or is there some clever new public-private partnership model that can make benefits portable and stabilize people’s incomes over time? BlaBlaCar—Global Infrastructure Built on Trust Interestingly, Lyft’s original business plan wasn’t about transforming urban and suburban transportation. Rather, it was started by Zimmer and CEO Logan Green as Zimride, a city-to-city ridesharing system, and “pivoted,” as the Silicon Valley folks say when shifting to a new business model, after the original idea didn’t gain traction fast enough in the United States. Meanwhile, the idea of using an app to hitch a ride to another city in a stranger’s car is hugely popular in Europe and other parts of the world. The company that dominates that market—by connecting drivers who have empty seats in their cars with passengers who want to buy them, and moving, as of 2015, more people every day than the US national rail system Amtrak—is France-based BlaBlaCar.
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Between 2014 and 2015, Mazzella’s company expanded by acquiring five of these companies in five different countries—including key competitor carpooling.com—leveraging capital infusions totaling over $300 million, the highest ever level of venture capital financing for a French startup. The company seems extremely well run—like a streamlined Silicon Valley software company, but with a decidedly French socialist sensibility. Even its whimsical name came out of careful market research (and allegedly has no connection, despite the striking similarity, to Le Bla-Bla, a restaurant two minutes from their headquarters). “We had 250 names,” Mazzella told me.
The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator
., 29, 30–41, 43, 78, 86, 301, 415; Bethlehem Steel and, 32–34; at HBS, 34–35, 37, 42 Taylor, Kenneth, 161 Taylorism, 29. 32–38, 81, 84, 212, 301 Teaching and the Case Method and Education for Judgment (Christensen), 279 “Teaching the Profession of Business at Harvard” (Baker), 49 technology: Clark and updating HBS’s infrastructure, 500; fast failure, 172; HBS and Silicon Valley, 319; MBAs in Silicon Valley, 10, 120, 514. See also Rock, Arthur; Silicon Valley Tedlow, Richard, 249, 263 Teele, Stanley (dean), 19, 139, 149–50, 162, 254, 255; admission of women and, 239–40; on business ethics, 434; case method and, 279; curriculum changes by, 215, 216; on faculty “inbreeding,” 195; on grading, 175–76, 180; pro-business views, 285; retirement as HBS dean, 286 Teradyne, 125, 341 Tercek, Mark, 561 Textron, 125, 127 Thain, John, 475–77, 548 theory of the firm, 4–5, 27, 57–58, 261, 366, 370, 412, 422–23, 562, 567 “Theory of the Firm” (Jensen and Meckling), 366 Thiel, Peter, 120, 121 Thompson, Clarence, 35 Thornton, Charles “Tex,” 192, 265–66, 270, 292 Thrift, Nigel, 490–91 Thunderbird School of Global Management, 551 Time Inc., 241; HBR editorships and, 302–3, 305, 306 Time magazine, 105, 135; business faculty and outside consulting, 401; Doriot profile, 126–27; MBAs at the DOD, 272; Nohria in, 569 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 12 Toyota, 450, 452 Trade Union Fellowship Program, 151, 160–66 Transnational Capitalist Class, The (Sklair), 388 Traub, Marvin, 169, 171 Trippe, Juan, 538 Tripsas, Mary, 404–5 True North (George), 315 Truman, Harry, 136, 467 Trump, Donald, 511, 575 Trumpbour, John, 432 Tuck School, Dartmouth, 11, 19, 38 Tufano, Peter, 235, 520 Turkish Institute of Business Administration, 30, 231 Turner, Ted, 430 Twain, Mark, 258 Tyco, 381, 491, 520 Universities (Flexner), 97 University of Chicago, 116, 260, 275, 378; free market tradition and, 366 University of London, School of Management, 311 USA (Dos Passos), 41 U.S.
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They were late to the junk bond boom, he pointed out, only arriving en masse in 1989, a year before Michael Milken went to jail. None of them went near Silicon Valley until 1999, he added, at which point “[graduates of] HBS perfectly timed the dot-com bubble.”1 It was all very entertaining, especially for non-MBAs. But it was also wrong. While Thiel was obviously generalizing about the herd behavior of MBAs, the experience of many HBS graduates, in particular, undercut those generalizations at their source. Fred Joseph (’63) was president of junk bond juggernaut Drexel Burnham Lambert during Milken’s heyday at the company. Arthur Rock (’51) is one of Silicon Valley’s most legendary moneymen, a founding investor of Intel in 1968, and also one of Apple’s early backers.
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Pusey informing him that he would be involuntarily retired as of August 31, 1966.11 But he would retire in glory: DEC went public on August 19, 1966, at $22 a share, valuing ARD’s original $70,000 stake at $38.5 million. When ARD finally liquidated its stake in the company, it was worth more than $400 million—the venture capital industry’s first major win. But it was more than that: DEC helped make Boston’s Route 128 the Silicon Valley of the East Coast before there was even much of a Silicon Valley of the West. Doriot’s ARD invested in more than 120 companies, delivering a 17 percent annual return over twenty-one years. His lieutenants went on to found many more, as did former students such as Thomas Perkins and Frank Caufield, two of the cofounders of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall
1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional
With the nation’s largest number of billionaires and its highest poverty rate (taking into account housing and other benefits), postindustrial California began to resemble a precapitalist society (Chapter 18). Freedom in America After conquering California, next was Washington, D.C. By mid-2010, Democratic leaders in Congress had given up on getting cap-and-trade legislation to the President’s desk. NGOs funded by Silicon Valley oligarchs and progressive foundations colluded with the EPA in a sue-and-settle strategy to “force” the Obama Administration to regulate power plant emissions. Preparations for the EPA’s European-style energy transformation started as a genuinely American energy transformation had already been under way for the best part of a decade.
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By powering America toward energy independence, it was slaying the national security argument against fossil fuels and destroying the running-out-of-oil argument environmentalists had been using since the 1970s. Politicians wanted fracking’s benefits, only their policies had nothing to do with getting them. They were a product of serendipity, of capitalism doing what it does best, yet Silicon Valley and foundation dollars were mobilized to stop it in its tracks. It was the beginning of a civil war within American capitalism (Chapter 19). The Clean Power Plan, finalized in 2015, was the Climate Industrial Complex’s single greatest triumph, but voters didn’t care much about global warming and protecting the environment.
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The former bears the sign of life, while the latter bears the sign of death Fritz Schumacher2 The power of the Clerisy stems primarily not from money or the control of technology, but from persuading, instructing, and regulating the rest of society. Joel Kotkin3 German energy policies, French labor regulation, Italian public debts, and a Scandinavian cost of living premium: Subtract Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and America’s most populous state has distinctly European features. California had been a pioneer in the preservationist movement dating back to John Muir and the founding of the Sierra Club in 1892, and for the better part of a century California had it both ways. Preservation of the Yosemite Valley, the Sierra Nevada, stretches of the coastline, and its redwoods did not put a brake on the state’s booming economy.
Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard
Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day
As Muzammil Hussain demonstrates, the pace of collaboration between the state department and Silicon Valley quickened after the Arab Spring.22 In its aftermath, information activism has grown more sophisticated, and moved into a transnational environment, as demonstrated by Western democracy–initiated stakeholder gatherings. AccessNow, the main organization that lobbied corporations to keep communications networks running and pressured technology companies to stop selling software tools to dictators, organized the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference in November 2011.23 The event was sponsored by Google, Facebook, Yahoo!
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See Syrian Electronic Army security: big data providing, 112, 140–45; expanding definition of, 66 security agencies, responsible behavior of, 108 security industry, 23–26 Segerberg, Alexandra, 138–39 Seliger Youth Forum, 197, 220 Serbia, protests in, 60 shadow networks, 244 Shahani, Arjan, 17–18 shell companies, 247 Shining Path, 81 Sholokov University, 197–98 Silent Circle, 26 Silicon Alley, 12–13, 16 Silicon Valley, 13, 16, 87; building products for dictators, 162; collaboration with the U.S. State Department, 165 Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference, 165 Silva, Rangel, 253 Sina Weibo, 127, 188, 192 Singapore, elections in, 133 Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 12 slums, 83–84, 88–89, 91 smart mobs, 84, 85–86 smartphones, apps for, 140 Smith, Adam, 241 SMS, 20, 127, 128 smuggling, 96 Snowden, Edward, xxii, 23–27, 43–44, 187, 235, 237 socialization, 130–31, 218 social life, patterns in, 241–42 social media: allowing maintenance of nonviolent strategies, 229; altruism and, 17–18, 21–22, 240; authoritarian regimes’ strategies for, 200–201; bringing stability, 68; competing, 220; constructing new institutions via, 68; as coping mechanism, 21–22; evolution of, 229–30; fact checking via, 135–36; mapping projects and, 91; marginalizing bad ideas, 130; monitoring governments via, 198–99; as news source, 207; political actors’ use of, 33; political change and, 38; reframing events through, 177; reprisals against, 20; in Russia, 197–200; taking down dirty networks, 99; U.S. politics and, 208–9 social-media mapping, 157–58 social movement: structure of, 171–72; success of, 42 social networks, digital media aligned with, 138 Social Physics (Pentland), 179 social problems, mapping of, 71 social scientists, new training for, 240–42 sociotechnical system, xxi, 179, 198, 222, 225, 240, 243, 297 Somalia, 80, 81; anarchy in, 94; piracy from, 98 South America, drug violence in, 177 South Korea, election in, 127–28 Soviet Union: collapse of, 79, 96; reforms in, 36 Spain: Madrid bombings in, 128; minorities in, building collective identity, 145 Spamhaus, 32 stability: cyberdeterrence and, 110, 153–57; economic, 54–55; empires and, 1, 5, 7, 14, 15, 146–47; internet of things and, 68, 88, 112, 158, 253; pax technica and, xix–xxii, 147, 214, 223, 230; resulting from new information infrastructure, 146–47; threats to, 93, 94, 214–16, 220, 223 steganography, 217 Stingray device, 133, 222 Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, 64, 164 Storm botnet, 31–32, 236 Stuxnet virus, 40, 115 subnationalism, 173–74 sub-Saharan Africa, banking in, 102–3, 159–60 Sudan, anarchy in, 94 Suharto, 60 supply chains, locking in, 226 surveillance, 157, 220, 236, 245; fighting against, 27–33; programs for, 133–34; promulgation of, 22–27 Swartz, Aaron, 235, 238 Syria, 28; autonomous zones in, 80; bots in, 205–7; civil war in, 45, 137, 168–69; cyberespionage by, 117; rebel victories in, 82; using Facebook, 43 Syrian Electronic Army, 116, 204–5 Tactical Technology Collective, 117, 119, 163, 239 Tajikistan, autonomous zones in, 80 Taliban, 96, 135 Tamil Tigers, 83 Tanzania, elections in, 122 tealeafnation.com, 191–92 Tea Party, xx technology: companies, 64–65, 233, 248; diffusion of, 34; design of, locations for, 12–13; dominance of, over ideology, 162; exchange value of, 55; government bans on, 118; ideology of, 125; leaking across markets and jurisdictions, 214–15; policies, reflecting political values, 133; power of, 8–9; sharing of, 215; standards for, 58–59, 148, 149; use of, as political act, 230–31 technology tithe, 244 Telecommix, 30, 164 Tencent QQ, 127 Thailand, computational propaganda in, 205 Tiananmen Square, protests in, 124–25 Tobin, James, 208 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 108–9 Tor network, 105, 163, 165, 252, 297 transparency, 133–34 Treaties of Westphalia, 63 trust networks, building of, 168 Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar, 217 Tsarnaev, Tamerlan, 217 Tufekci, Zeynep, 121 Tunisia: Arab Spring in, 50–51, 131, 137; corruption in, 216; dissidence in, 62 Turkey: autonomous zones in, 80; computational propaganda in, 205; coup-by-website attempt in, 116; Islamists moderating message in, 132; Twitter in, 45, 116; YouTube in, 116 Twitter, 9, 252; altruism and, 17–18; announcing ground battle, 59–60; attack on, 116; bots for, 29, 30–31, 203; clans and, 174; crisis data published on, 118; eggs, 203; governments requesting data from, 26; impact of, in global crises, 20–21; political bots and, 205–7; traffic statistics for, 30–31; in Turkey, 116 Uchaguzi, 170 UglyGorilla, 38–42 Ukraine, 238; computational propaganda in, 205; geotagged propagandizing in, 114–15; hacking by, 41; organized crime in, 97; protests in, 86 United Nations, 101; High Commissioner for Refugees, 8; investigating extrajudicial groups, 104; Organization for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 104 United States: buying data from internet service providers, 24; Defense Department, recognizing cyberterrorism threat, 43; hacking by, 40–41; losing control of digital project, 8; media targets in, 116; online content in, scanned and copied, 189; political campaigning in, 207–11; spying by, 118; State Department, 8; surveillance in, 133, 237; technology design in, 12–13, 14, 16; voter turnout in, 207; weak government performance in, 105.
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Some would say that the collapse of the Berlin Wall marked the peak of the Pax Americana, and that the internet is just an extension of America’s ability to wire up economic, political, and cultural life in other countries for its own benefit. Device networks now provide more of that structure than cultural exports. Today, governments and the technology industry have been closely collaborating on foreign policy. Indeed, in important ways, technology policy has become foreign policy. In recent years, the U.S. State Department and Silicon Valley have found more and more creative ways to work together. They fund and develop research projects together. They exchange personnel. And executives from the State Department and Microsoft, Google, Apple, and other big technology players often share the stage at public events. Increasingly, they subscribe to the theory that technology diffusion and democratic values reinforce each other and spread together.
Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen
Apple II, Brian Krebs, Burning Man, corporate governance, dumpster diving, Exxon Valdez, fake news, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, index card, Kickstarter, McMansion, Mercator projection, offshore financial centre, packet switching, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, traffic fines, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zipcar
Nobody knew his name—not his real one anyway. And nobody knew his past. Here, he wasn’t Max Butler, the small-town troublemaker driven by obsession to a moment of life-changing violence, and he wasn’t Max Vision, the self-named computer security expert paid one hundred dollars an hour to harden the networks of Silicon Valley companies. As he rode up the apartment building elevator, Max became someone else: “Iceman”—a rising leader in a criminal economy responsible for billions of dollars in thefts from American companies and consumers. And Iceman was fed up. For months, he’d been popping merchants around the country, prying out piles of credit card numbers that should have been worth hundreds of thousands on the black market.
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It was a year after his parole, and Max had come to San Francisco to start over. Tim and some of his friends from Idaho had been renting the house they called “Hungry Manor,” the name a reference to their first enterprise when they’d migrated to the Bay Area a year earlier. They’d planned to bootstrap into the Silicon Valley economy by forming a computer consulting business called the Hungry Programmers—will code for food. Instead, the valley quickly metabolized the geeks into full-time employment, and the Hungry Programmers morphed into an unofficial club for Tim’s friends from Meridian High and the University of Idaho, two dozen in all.
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The ISP noticed the drain on its bandwidth and traced Max’s uploads to the corporate offices of CompuServe in Bellevue, where Max had just started working a new temp job. Max was fired. Barely a year after his release from prison, his name was mud. That was when Max decided to start over again in Silicon Valley, where the dot-com economy was swelling to ripeness and a talented computer genius could pick up work without a lot of questions about his past. He’d need a new name, unstained by his past folly. Max had been known by a nickname in the joint, one abbreviated from a cyberpunk-themed ’zine he’d published from the prison typewriter: Maximum Vision.
Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat
AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day
—Eliezer Yudkowsky, Research Fellow, Machine Intelligence Research Institute Fourteen “official” cities comprise Silicon Valley, and twenty-five math-and-engineering-focused universities and extension campuses inhabit them. They feed the software, semiconductor, and Internet firms that are the latest phase of a technology juggernaut that began here with radio in the first part of the twentieth century. Silicon Valley attracts a third of all the venture capital in the United States. It has the highest number of technology workers per capita of any U.S. metropolitan area, and they’re the best paid, too. The country’s greatest concentration of billionaires and millionaires call Silicon Valley home. Here, at the epicenter of global technology, with a GPS in my rental car and another in my iPhone, I drove to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s home the old-fashioned way, with written directions.
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Banks, Bradford Cottel, Ben Goertzel, Richard Granger, Bill Hibbard, Golde Holtzman, and Jay Rixse. Introduction A few years ago I was surprised to discover I had something in common with a large number of strangers. They were men and women I had never met—scientists and college professors, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, engineers, programmers, bloggers, and more. They were scattered around North America, Europe, and India—I would never have known about any of them if the Internet hadn’t existed. What my network of strangers and I had in common was a rational skepticism about the safe development of advanced artificial intelligence.
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But remarkably, while the risks involved with sharing our planet with superintelligent AI strike many in the AI community as the subject of the most important conversation anywhere, it’s been all but left out of the public dialogue. Why? There are several reasons. Most dialogues about dangerous AI aren’t very broad or deep, and not many people understand them. The issues are well developed in pockets of Silicon Valley and academia, but they aren’t absorbed elsewhere, most alarmingly in the field of technology journalism. When a dystopian viewpoint rears its head, many bloggers, editorialists, and technologists reflexively fend it off with some version of “Oh no, not the Terminator again! Haven’t we heard enough gloom and doom from Luddites and pessimists?”
Money, Real Quick: The Story of M-PESA by Tonny K. Omwansa, Nicholas P. Sullivan, The Guardian
Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, cashless society, cloud computing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, democratizing finance, digital divide, disruptive innovation, end-to-end encryption, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, income per capita, Kibera, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, microcredit, mobile money, Network effects, new economy, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, software as a service, tontine, transaction costs
FOR MOBI ONLY: Get the Guardian and Observer on your Kindle every day. Subscribe now. ******ebook converter DEMO Watermarks******* Contents Introduction Chapter 1: THE INNOVATION Chapter 2: THE HUMAN NETWORK Chapter 3: BANKS DISRUPTED Chapter 4: IMPACT AT THE BASE OF THE PYRAMID Chapter 5: INCHING TOWARD “FINANCIAL INCLUSION” Chapter 6: SWAHILI SILICON VALLEY Chapter 7: CHANGE IS NOT EASY Chapter 8: KENYA ON STAGE Chapter 9: CASH IS THE ENEMY! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ******ebook converter DEMO Watermarks******* Introduction Changing Lives: Innovation, Disruption and Transformation “Mobile phone technology has in a few years of its existence demonstrated how financial inclusion can be leapfrogged on a major scale and in a short time span using appropriate technological platforms.”- Njungunua Ndung’u, Governor, Central Bank of Kenya “A world first, M-PESA is indeed a disruptive, leapfrog idea.
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Mama Edna feels that most people would like to acquire goods through such a layaway service—she considers bank loans a liability. She doesn’t like paying interest, and would rather save up and pay in advance as she did with ******ebook converter DEMO Watermarks******* her pump. “I am now the envy of the village, thanks to the amazing Super Money Maker.” ******ebook converter DEMO Watermarks******* Chapter 6 Swahili Silicon Valley “Safaricom is an innovative company. We came up with sambaza, to share minutes with others. We came up with “please call me,” to ‘flash’ people without using up minutes. We came up with various innovative low-cost, low-denomination scratch cards and the one with emergency credit, where you send an SMS and you get 50 bob credit—Okoa Jahazi.
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Companies with names like Symbiotic, Tangazoletu, Webtribe, Zege Technologies, Mobile Commerce Ventures, MTL Systems, Coretec Systems and Solutions, Verviant Consulting, Flexus Technologies, Intrepid, Kopo Kopo— and products with names like iPay, PesaPal, Moco, Spotcash, Jambopay, M-Payer, crowdpesa. This could be Silicon Valley, Swahili style! iHub in Nairobi hosts “pitch events,” linking startups to venture capitalists, much like Guy Kawasaki’s Garage.com in the U.S. in the go-go 1990’s, when entrepreneurs would give a 30-second “elevator pitch” to VCs. Agosta Liko, CEO of PesaPal, a tool for online merchants, refers to a “new commerce,” the integration of internet and mobile channels to build a larger, more inclusive payments ecosystem.
Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone
affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
For these companies, buzz has the same effect it does on nightclubs. The popular ones are very hard to get into. In Silicon Valley, outlandish benefits have about as long a history as tricky interview questions. Hewlett-Packard was one of the pioneers, offering free snacks, and expensive gifts for newlyweds and new parents. Many of Google’s perks were cribbed from other companies like Genentech (the informal Friday meetings) and Facebook (bring your dog to work). Today, free chef-prepared meals are the norm at Silicon Valley firms, and having a child is worth a mid-four-figure sum. As Larry Page said, “Our competitors have to be competitive on some of these things.”
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Backus described his creative process in terms much like Edison’s or Torrance’s: “You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.” In 1957, William Shockley, the most cantankerous of the three men credited with inventing the transistor, moved west to build and market electronics. His Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, the first Silicon Valley start-up, was in Mountain View, a bike ride from where the Googleplex now stands. Shockley was so nuts about using logic puzzles in hiring interviews that he timed applicants with a stopwatch. Maybe that should have been a tip-off. Shockley was a holy terror to work for. Mere months after they were hired, eight of his brightest employees—the “Traitorous Eight”—got so fed up they resigned.
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They went on to found companies like Fairchild Instruments and Intel. Ever since, brainteaser interviews have been part of hiring in the computer industry. Selling Sergey’s Soul to the Devil In July 2004, two enigmatic billboards went up on opposite sides of the country. One was in Harvard Square; the other, off Highway 101 in Silicon Valley. Each billboard was stark black text on a white background, reading: There was no mention of who had put up the billboards or what was being advertised. It was a test. As expected, the billboards drew publicity. A gaggle of mathematically inclined bloggers wrote about the billboards; then NPR did a piece on the mystery.
Microchip: An Idea, Its Genesis, and the Revolution It Created by Jeffrey Zygmont
Albert Einstein, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, computer age, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, invisible hand, popular electronics, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
Essex was located in Logansport, a Midwestern city far from the bustling hubs of semiconductor foment, situated amid Indiana's corn and soy fields some 1,000 miles north of Dallas and 2,300 miles east of Silicon Valley. But even at such a far remove, people at Essex International sidled into microelectronics to protect the lucrative position they held in switches, solenoids, relays, and related electrical parts. Those were all old-line products, called electro-mechanical because they turned electrical energy into mechanical action, or movement. They were heavier and far more muscular than the petite semiconductor elements that operated on mere whispers of current and that were more likely in 1970 to come from such places as Dallas and Silicon Valley. Relays pass heavy loads through fat wires, managing electrical currents that would burn through lesser junctions.
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MOS chips gave them a few strong incentives to eliminate all the sources diligently. The field-effect transistors in MOS circuits were smaller, simpler, easier to manufacture, and they Adding Contenders 97 burned less electricity than layered, bipolar transistors. When the Cal Tech project was just beginning in late 1965, the Silicon Valley start-up General Micro-electronics was already making chips with field-effect transistors just five percent the size of conventional bipolars. Therefore General Micro could pack a lot more of the tiny dynamos into an integrated circuit, providing more transistors per chip to accomplish more complex logic.
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Thus on July 18, 1968, the two former employees of Fairchild Semiconductor incorporated as Intel Corporation. The name came from a clever combination of the words integrated and electronics. Robert Noyce started as president and chief executive officer. Gordon Moore was executive vice president. The money behind the group came from venture capitalist Arthur Rock, who grew into a Silicon Valley icon for the start-ups he bankrolled. The new company's business plan was uncomplicated. It would make densely integrated microchips—that is, chips containing a lot of transistors—and it would make them in designs that it could sell to a lot of different customers. That way, the founders hoped, the ICs would sell in vast quantities.
The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler
Brand’s catalog, which sprang out of the back-to-the-land movement, was a favorite among California’s emerging class of programmers and computer enthusiasts. In Brand’s view, tools and technologies turned people, normally at the mercy of their environments, into gods in control of them. And the computer was a tool that could become any tool at all. Brand’s impact on the culture of Silicon Valley and geekdom is hard to overestimate—though he wasn’t a programmer himself, his vision shaped the Silicon Valley worldview. As Fred Turner details in the fascinating From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Brand and his cadre of do-it-yourself futurists were disaffected hippies—social revolutionaries who were uncomfortable with the communes sprouting up in Haight-Ashbury.
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INTRODUCTION A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. —Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. —Marshall McLuhan, media theorist Few people noticed the post that appeared on Google’s corporate blog on December 4, 2009. It didn’t beg for attention—no sweeping pronouncements, no Silicon Valley hype, just a few paragraphs of text sandwiched between a weekly roundup of top search terms and an update about Google’s finance software. Not everyone missed it. Search engine blogger Danny Sullivan pores over the items on Google’s blog looking for clues about where the monolith is headed next, and to him, the post was a big deal.
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They could see the attention crash coming, as the information options available to each person rose toward infinity. If you wanted to cash in, you needed to get people to tune in. And in an attention-scarce world, the best way to do that was to provide content that really spoke to each person’s idiosyncratic interests, desires, and needs. In the hallways and data centers of Silicon Valley, there was a new watchword: relevance. Everyone was rushing to roll out an “intelligent” product. In Redmond, Microsoft released Bob—a whole operating system based on the agent concept, anchored by a strange cartoonish avatar with an uncanny resemblance to Bill Gates. In Cupertino, almost exactly a decade before the iPhone, Apple introduced the Newton, a “personal desktop assistant” whose core selling point was the agent lurking dutifully just under its beige surface.
Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda
1960s counterculture, anti-pattern, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bash_history, Bill Atkinson, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, HyperCard, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lock screen, premature optimization, profit motive, proprietary trading, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Fadell, work culture , zero-sum game
And then there was the couch. It was not clean. When you sat down on it, you sank into the cushions as you would on a mangy sofa in a college frat house. In the half of the room behind the couch, there were a couple of forlorn bean bag chairs piled in the corner, an homage to an earlier age in Silicon Valley. On the whole, Diplomacy was a study in indifference. It was an important room, often used for CEO demos, but it was never the center of attention itself. By now, my glances around the room had killed a minute or two, but Steve showed no signs his call was about to end. I began to feel a self-conscious awkwardness that I was the only one in the room standing, but there was no more room on the couch after Henri sat back down, and Steve was sitting on the only chair.
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This “crystal ball” demo was set in the technology landscape of the early 2000s, a time when dot-com boom startups were still in business, Microsoft was the undisputed leader in computing, the Netscape web browser was the hottest new technology, and Apple was an underdog. It was also a time when many Silicon Valley software companies started experimenting with free software and plans for turning a profit by developing software they wouldn’t charge their customers to use. This seemingly paradoxical corporate strategy had its roots with Richard Stallman, a renowned programmer and technology activist, a man who believed all software should be free.
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Fast forward a couple months: No venture capitalist had written a check, and on the same day Eazel shipped Nautilus 1.0, the company fired two-thirds of its staff. Don and I were in the smaller group who held on for three more months as our execs tried to sell the company outright, but to no avail. Don and I were out of a job, but we had become friends, and when we weren’t strolling the fairways at several Silicon Valley golf courses, we looked for work. We soon heard that Apple was hiring. The Cupertino computer company held a job fair for former Eazel employees. I scored a couple of business cards from managers and planned to follow up. But Don, who was always more clever than me at pulling levers, had another idea.
How Democracy Ends by David Runciman
barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, Russell Brand, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, Yogi Berra
Even as the world has been transformed by these new forms of corporate power, familiar patterns of human behaviour persist. When Trump won the presidency, he summoned the heads of the dominant Silicon Valley firms to meet him at Trump Tower. Most of them showed up as asked. Zuckerberg couldn’t make it, but Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, was there. So were leaders from Google, Apple and Amazon. Some companies were deliberately snubbed. Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, was not invited. Twitter may be Trump’s megaphone, but he is not going to be beholden to anyone. Trump wanted to establish the traditional hierarchy. Silicon Valley might look like it has a kind of power and reach that Washington can only dream of, but no mere corporate chief gets to tell the president what to do.
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Just because Athenian democracy died at two hundred doesn’t mean that’s the natural condition of democracy. Even if American democracy is somewhere in the middle of its existence, we lack any reliable way of knowing whether it is nearer the beginning or the end. At the same time, doubts are starting to grow about the human side of this equation. In a few places, including Silicon Valley, a tiny number of privileged human beings are starting to contemplate the possibility of their own immortality. Technological advances mean that the first individuals to buck a natural life span – whether by extending their lives for two hundred years, or two thousand, or for ever – may already be alive.
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These corporations employ relatively few people. To work there is to belong to a super-elite that is barely integrated into the lives of the communities they are in the business of building. Google drives its employees to work in customised buses that connect the parts of San Francisco where no one else can afford to live to the parts of Silicon Valley where no one else is qualified to work. In the summer of 2017, to correct for the perception that he is somehow aloof from the everyday world, Zuckerberg embarked on a listening tour of the United States. His goal was to learn more about how ordinary people live. ‘My work is about connecting the world and giving everyone a voice,’ he wrote on Facebook in January.
The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen
23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game
But back then, the likelihood of two hyper-systemizers having children was much lower. Today, as more Eindhovens and Silicon Valleys take root and blossom in every country, bringing hyper-systemizers together who make families, what might we expect the future to hold? Chapter 9 Nurturing the Inventors of the Future Eindhovens and Silicon Valleys are springing up across the planet—from Silicon Alley in New York to Silicon Roundabout in London, Silicon Fen in Cambridge, Cyberabad in Hyderabad, and the Silicon Valley of India, Bangalore. This means that, as more and more people who are wired for hyper-systemizing are meeting and having children, we can expect more autistic children to be born in these communities.
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And there are more clues that this is the case. Psychologist Laurent Mottron found that autistic people were 40 percent faster than typical individuals at pattern detection using a nonverbal visual intelligence test, and that they showed more activity in visual areas of the brain while achieving this. And a study conducted in Silicon Valley in 2013 found that more autistic students were studying a STEM subject at university, compared to any other disability group, again suggesting that autistic people have hyper-systemizing minds.8 This was demonstrated back in 1972 by psychologist Uta Frith in her finding of superior pattern production by autistic children, even in those with a learning disability.9 Figure 3.4.
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Indeed, this genetic overlap was one of the intriguing connections that we glimpsed at the beginning of this book, between the minds of hyper-systemizers such as inventors and the minds of autistic people, both of whom are drawn to seek if-and-then patterns in the world. This leads to a very specific prediction: that hyper-systemizing parents are genetically more likely to have an autistic child. To test if this is true, we need to observe what happens when hyper-systemizers breed. And the perfect opportunity to do so is found in places like Silicon Valley, where hyper-systemizers flock to work, then meet and start to make babies. It’s a natural experiment. Chapter 8 Sex in the Valley Are hyper-systemizing couples, like those talented individuals who work in STEM fields, more likely to have an autistic child? Given that we now live in a world where individuals with good technology skills move to work in technology hubs, where they are more likely to meet each other, could these couples be contributing to the rising rates of autism?
The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance
Children Now Have One’, NPR Education, 31 October 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/10/31/774838891/its-a-smartphone-life-more-than-half-of-u-s-children-now-have-one; Zoe Kleinman, ‘Half of UK 10-year-olds own a smartphone’, BBC News, 4 February 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51358192. 56 ‘Most children own mobile phone by age of seven, study finds’, Guardian, 30 January 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jan/30/most-children-own-mobile-phone-by-age-of-seven-study-finds. 57 Nick Bilton, ‘Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent’, New York Times, 10 September 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/fashion/steve-jobs-apple-was-a-low-tech-parent.html; Chris Weller, ‘Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Raised Their Kids Tech-Free and It Should Have Been a Red Flag’, Independent, 24 October 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/bill-gates-and-steve-jobs-raised-their-kids-techfree-and-it-shouldve-been-a-red-flag-a8017136.html. 58 Matt Richtel, ‘A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute’, New York Times, 22 October 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html. 59 Nellie Bowles, ‘Silicon Valley Nannies Are Phone Police for Kids’, New York Times, 26 October 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/silicon-valley-nannies.html. 60 Nellie Bowles, ‘The Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What We Expected’, New York Times, 26 October 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/digital-divide-screens-schools.html. 61 This is amongst those who have devices.
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Screen-free lives It’s with such insights in mind that some parents are actively promoting screen-free lives for their kids. Ironically it is Silicon Valley parents leading the way. They are one of the groups most likely to prohibit smartphone usage amongst their children and send them to screen-free schools. Steve Jobs notoriously limited how much technology his kids used at home, whilst Bill Gates didn’t allow his kids to get mobile phones until they were 14 and even then set strict screen-time limits.57 As early as 2011, the New York Times reported on the growing popularity of screen-free, experiential learning education systems such as Waldorf schools in Silicon Valley and other areas densely populated with tech executives and their families.58 Many self-respecting Silicon Valley parents nowadays go as far as to include in their nannies’ contracts a clause in which they promise not to use their phones for personal use in front of their charges.
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_ga=2.6892788.710211532.1591291518-1056841509.1591291518. 48 Alison Lynch, ‘Table for one: Nearly half of all meals in the UK are eaten alone’, Metro, 13 April 2016, https://metro.co.uk/2016/04/13/table-for-one-nearly-half-of-all-meals-in-the-uk-are-eaten-alone-5813871/. 49 Malia Wollan, ‘Failure to Lunch’, New York Times, 25 February 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/failure-to-lunch.html; Olivera Perkins, ‘Eating lunch alone, often working at your desk: the disappearing lunch break (photos)’, Cleveland.com, 14 September 2015, https://www.cleveland.com/business/2015/09/eating_lunch_alone_often_worki.html. 50 Robert Williams, Kana Inagaki, Jude Webber and John Aglionby, ‘A global anatomy of health and the workday lunch’, Financial Times, 14 September 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/a1b8d81a-48f5-11e6-8d68-72e9211e86ab. 51 Stan Herman, ‘In-work dining at Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook causes spike in divorce rate’, Salon, 24 June 2018, https://www.salon.com/2018/06/24/in-work-dining-in-silicon-valley-companies-like-google-and-facebook-cause-spike-in-divorce-there/; Lenore Bartko, ‘Festive Feasts Around the World’, InterNations.org, https://www.internations.org/magazine/plan-prepare-feast-and-enjoy-tips-for-celebrating-national-holidays-abroad-17475/festive-feasts-around-the-world-2. 52 See for example the discussion in Anthony Charuvastra and Marylene Cloitre, ‘Social Bonds and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’, Annual Review of Psychology 59 (2008), 301–28. 53 The name of the city was not revealed in the original study to protect the firefighters’ identities.
The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin
affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional
Even if there was only five minutes left to a meeting, even if Google cofounder Sergey Brin himself was midsentence and expecting an answer from Katy, Mayer would say “Katy’s gotta go,” and Katy would walk out the door and answer the questions later by e-mail after the kids were in bed. I had always heard that Silicon Valley was the ultimate flexible workplace, so in 2011 I went to visit some of the biggest companies and also some start-ups. Successful women executives there told me stories that would make anyone struggling to manage a high-powered job and a life jealous. As a mother of three, Katie Stanton had found her job at the White House a nightmare.
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As Emily White, a Facebook executive, put it to me, “Forget the balance, this is the merge,” meaning that work and play and kids and sleep are all jumbled up in the same twenty-four-hour period. (White came up with this term after she finally managed a night out alone with her husband, and they spent half the dinner staring at their iPhones.) But the work culture was still a revelation. Without a lot of official committees and HR red tape, Silicon Valley is figuring out the single most vexing problem for ambitious working women, a problem everyone thought was unsolvable: how to let them spend time with their children without ruining their careers. The industry has by no means solved the ultimate problem, meaning that there are just as few female heads of companies as there are in any other elite sector.
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She compares them to her husband, who “to this day likes to go into the Whole Foods and go down the same aisle, every time, while I like to wander into new places. These more novel industries step in and they suddenly figure out how to do things differently.” All the problems that companies elsewhere agonize over, the Silicon Valley women seem to workshop informally and on the fly. Worried that the Katy rule stigmatizes mothers? Mayer had it apply to everyone. Now one of her young male executives leaves early every Tuesday for his hallowed potluck dinner with his old college dorm-mates. Life problems are not all that different from technological ones: With enough creative thinking, anything can be solved.
The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop, Robert G. Cushing
1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, big-box store, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, union organizing, War on Poverty, white flight, World Values Survey
Los Angeles wasn't balled up with those strong social connections that can kill gumption, trap new ideas, and suffocate innovation.43 Why, in the early 1990s, did Silicon Valley add more jobs and create more new businesses than the high-tech cluster along Route 128 in Boston? Thinking more like an anthropologist than an economist, AnnaLee Saxenian found the answer in the Wagon Wheel restaurant in Mountain View, California, where people from different firms would meet, mingle, and trade information. She noticed that people switched jobs in Silicon Valley often and with impunity. As they flitted from one office to another, they pollinated their new firms with ideas they'd gathered along the way.
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Proximity was becoming more important in the creation and transmission of ideas.46 In late 2006, a Silicon Valley business professor named Randall Stross wrote about the "twenty-minute rule" adopted by several venture capital firms. "If a start-up company seeking venture capital is not within a 20-minute drive of the venture firm's offices, it will not be funded," wrote Stross. Proximity translated into convenience, of course, but the venture capital firms also knew that frequent face-to-face contact was essential. And despite world-flattening technology, there was something magical about place. Craig Johnson, managing director of a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, told Stross that having all the entrepreneurial ingredients nearby created an intensity that was missing from more spread-out geographies.
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In Austin, public policy is often negotiated among interest groups, with government only ratifying decisions made behind the scenes.31 Or decisions once regularly made by government are offloaded entirely to utility districts, homeowners associations, and water or road authorities. Representation of the whole is avoided, replaced by negotiations among tribes. Silicon Valley economist Doug Henton describes the coalition of businesses, government officials, and interest groups that manages his region as a "network governance" model.32 In Austin and Silicon Valley, a democratically elected assembly is simply a single node on a crowded organizational chart. A patchwork democracy is emerging: caffeinated federalism, representation by interest groups, decision making by nonelected officials, and, for those who are financially able, philanthropy as direct action to promote a social outcome.
How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler
Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
HOW WE G O T H ER E A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets A Silicon Valley and Wall Street Primer To order a copy of this book, click: http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=andykessler20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0060840978&fc1=000000&=1&lc1=00 00ff&bc1=000000<1=_blank&IS2=1&f=ifr&bg1=ffffff&f=ifr ALSO BY ANDY KESSLER Wall Street Meat: Jack Grubman, Frank Quattrone, Mary Meeker, Henry Blodget and me Running Money: Hedge Fund Honchos, Monster Markets and My Hunt for the Big Score Coming in 2006: The End of Medicine: Tales of Naked Mice, 3D Guts and Rebooting Doctors How We Got Here A Silicon Valley and Wall Street Primer . A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology And Markets Andy Kessler Copyright © 2005 by Andy Kessler All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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This act single-handedly pushed the Japanese into the semiconductor business, but it is telling that it took government intervention to get permission for the license. This industrial policy of the Japanese would backfire years later. More often, innovation in digital technology took place in Silicon Valley because that was the end market for computers and network equipment. Small at first, this Silicon Valley innovation would fly under the radar of Japan’s MITI watchdogs, who often would allocate resources to companies to exploit these innovations years after they had played out. *** In the 1950s transistors were discrete devices, at $100-plus a pop.
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Stephenson insisted on malleable wrought iron in 15-foot lengths from the Bedlington Ironworks for the rail line. Of course, Stephenson created a virtuous circle. The Killingworth coal mine and the new Stockton-Darlington line helped to transport coal to the coke ovens of ironworks, so the company could produce better rail lines and deliver more coal. This is similar to Silicon Valley today, where companies race to produce faster computers that engineers use to design faster chips, so that companies can produce faster computers. It’s a tight circle, but those outside of it benefit from the improvements. *** In 1826, Robert Stephenson and Co. was asked to help design the 36-mile Liverpool-Manchester line.
European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain
3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar
Shazam, the most downloaded app developed in Britain, has been used to tag more than five billion songs. I doff my cap to them. But it is still troubling that none can match America’s global giants. Silicon Valley sparks off a diverse mix of dynamic people from around the world. More than half of start-ups founded there between 1995 and 2005 had a migrant as a chief executive or lead technologist.654 While a tightening of visa rules and the rise of China and India have reduced immigrants’ contribution somewhat, they still co-founded 43.9 per cent of Silicon Valley start-ups between 2006 and 2012.655 Companies co-founded by migrants – many of whom arrived as children, not through some pseudo-scientific government selection process – include stand-out successes such as Google, Yahoo, eBay, PayPal, YouTube, Hotmail, Sun Microsystems, Intel and WhatsApp.
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Across the US economy, migrants make an outsized contribution: a quarter of start-ups are co-founded by them.656 They co-founded a quarter of start-ups in manufacturing, defence and aerospace; more than a fifth in bioscience; and a fifth in clean tech.657 Many US-based entrepreneurs are European. There are about 50,000 Germans in Silicon Valley and an estimated 500 start-ups in the San Francisco Bay area with French founders. Pierre Omidyar, the co-founder of eBay, was born in Paris to Iranian immigrant parents who moved to the US when he was six. Eric Benhamou left Paris aged twenty and went on to co-found a computer network technology company that was bought by 3Com, of which he later became chief executive.658 Bernard Liautaud co-founded Business Objects, an enterprise software company, in Paris before opening up shop in Silicon Valley and then being bought out by SAP in 2007.
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With bigger firms firing people, well-qualified people are more willing to join a new one. In a presentation to Spanish entrepreneurs called “Why you should not move your company to Silicon Valley”, Varsavsky pointed out that salaries for software engineers are 70 per cent lower in Europe than in California. With luck, some of the European entrepreneurs who have struck it rich in the US can also be lured back to sprinkle some of their Silicon Valley ways in Europe. Europe should also do more to try to attract dynamic foreigners, not least with start-up visas for would-be entrepreneurs. Better still, they should open up their borders more generally.
Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity by Currid
barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Donald Trump, income inequality, index card, industrial cluster, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, place-making, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, prediction markets, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, rolodex, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Fry, the long tail, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, winner-take-all economy
Think about the dent in employment and tax revenue for these locales if all the stars packed up and headed to Missouri.7 Similarly, the structure of the mechanism by which the celebrity industry produces stars isn’t much different from the financial industry and its assemblage of analysts, market researchers, publicists, and lawyers orbiting a central CEO. And just like in Silicon Valley, where big tech companies find smaller firms to help them build microprocessors or semiconductors, a lot of one’s star power is outsourced to experts able to maximize base talent and cultivate media interest.8 There are five tiers that make up the celebrity industry.9 The first rung is the celebrities and aspiring stars.
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There is rarely a dull moment inside the Beltway, whether Congress is passing a contentious bill or some senator had an inappropriate relationship with an intern. Conversely, Star Trek hobbyists are much less intriguing to a mass audience (even if they are relative celebrities), and most technology geeks in Silicon Valley are certainly uninteresting to mainstream consumers of popular culture and political intrigue. An active media is the second important ingredient in a celebrity hub. The media needs to care, and the media located in these locales must be globally relevant in order to create megastars.12 A high-profile socialite in Dublin or Austin may be the talk of her town but rarely crosses over to mainstream stardom because Getty photographers or the New York Times or US Weekly are not showing up.
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Economists call this self-reinforcing process “cumulative advantage,” but it’s as simple as success begets success.14 Having the basic infrastructure and capital to get the process moving accrues more capital and more people and more infrastructure necessary to perpetuate success, so that over time this dominance as a hub solidifies. We see it in Silicon Valley’s reputation as the world’s leading technology hub and New York’s and London’s positions as global financial capitals, and New York’s and Paris’s domination of the fashion industry. And we see it plain and simple in the geography of stardom. Celebrity and the “Pseudo-Event” One spring afternoon in London, my boyfriend (now husband), Richard, and I were strolling along the South Bank of the Thames.
Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis
Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War
Until recently, the Bay Area – Silicon Valley – has been considered the mecca of all coders, hackers and technology entrepreneurs. People came from around the world to access the super-charged atmosphere and assorted expertise of the Santa Clara Valley: in 2010 it was calculated that 60 per cent of the scientists and technologists working there were born outside the US. Amongst the most successful group in Silicon Valley are from the Indian subcontinent, constituting approximately 28 per cent of the entire workforce. Between 1980 and 1999 15.5 per cent of all start-ups in Silicon Valley were run by entrepreneurs who had moved to the Bay Area from India; combined, these new companies generated $17 billion in annual revenue and 58,000 jobs.
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In November 2010 Prime Minister David Cameron came here and announced the launch of Tech City, an initiative that hoped to turn this stretch of east London – which starts in Shoreditch and in time has come to include the Olympic Park 3 miles to the east at Stratford – into the technology capital of Europe. In his speech he set out what the government could do to nurture a vibrant new economy based upon creativity and knowledge to challenge the rest of the world: Right now, Silicon Valley is the leading place in the world for high-tech growth and innovation. But there’s no reason why it has to be so predominant. Question is: where will its challengers be? Bangalore? Hefei? Moscow? My argument today is that if we have the confidence to really go for it and the understanding of what it takes, London could be one of them.1 As I walk up to street level, I am curious to see what has changed since I lived near this neighbourhood fifteen years ago.
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Between 1980 and 1999 15.5 per cent of all start-ups in Silicon Valley were run by entrepreneurs who had moved to the Bay Area from India; combined, these new companies generated $17 billion in annual revenue and 58,000 jobs. Today, however, many in the valley are nervous that the flow of dedicated, educated and ingenious coders from India is slowing down. It appears that one might not have to go all the way to San Francisco to make one’s fortune any more. India itself has developed its own Silicon Valley. In the 1990s Bangalore gained a reputation for IT services and today the city is a destination for thousands of educated young scientists every year. The talent pool is considerable, educated in a highly competitive and rigorous system; a 2009 Ernst and Young survey discovered that there are more scientists in India than anywhere else in the world: 2 million students overall, including 600,000 engineers, graduating from over 400 universities every year.
The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra
Ebola patient took place at an Epic facility, and the Texas hospital initially blamed its EHR for the error (a position that the hospital retracted the next day), athena’s prompt revision of its intake module was accompanied, unsurprisingly, by a press release that described the company’s cloud-facilitated nimbleness. 37 In February, 2015, athena and John Halamka’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (one of the few large hospitals still using a homegrown electronic health record) announced a deal to co-develop a cloud-based inpatient EHR. It will likely take two or three years. Chapter 25 Silicon Valley Meets Healthcare For thousands of years, guys like us have gotten the shit kicked out of us. But now, for the first time, we’re living in an era when we can be in charge. And build empires! We can be the Vikings of our day. —Richard Hendricks, lead character on HBO’s Silicon Valley, 2014 As you’ve seen, the people who complain that the HITECH incentive payments and the Meaningful Use regulations have locked in the incumbents also worry that they have locked out the young innovators.
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Gawande, “The Velluvial Matrix,” New Yorker, June 16, 2010. 232 In May 2014, activist investor David Einhorn Lopez and Penn, “Read David Einhorn’s Brutal Presentation.” Bush rebutted Einhorn in J. Wieczner, “Bush vs. Einhorn: How athenahealth’s CEO Met His Short-Seller,” Fortune, May 28, 2014. Chapter 25: Silicon Valley Meets Healthcare 235 “For thousands of years, guys like us” “Minimum Viable Product,” Silicon Valley (television series), HBO, 2014. 235 “Our investment convinced the IT world” Interview of David Blumenthal by the author, July 16, 2014. 236 “Health IT Sees First Billion Dollar Quarter” A. Gold, Politico Morning eHealth, July 17, 2014, available at http://www.politico.com/morningehealth/0714/morningehealth14675.html. 237 a … healthcare impresario named Matthew Holt Interview of Holt by the author, August 6, 2014. 237 He became interested in technology as a kid Interview of Nate Gross by the author, August 6, 2014. 238 One was Doximity www.doximity.com. 238 The other was Rock Health www.rockhealth.com. 240 The first is called Augmedix. www.augmedix.com.
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CHAPTER 10 David and Goliath CHAPTER 11 Big Data PART THREE The Overdose CHAPTER 12 The Error CHAPTER 13 The System CHAPTER 14 The Doctor CHAPTER 15 The Pharmacist CHAPTER 16 The Alerts CHAPTER 17 The Robot CHAPTER 18 The Nurse CHAPTER 19 The Patient PART FOUR The Connected Patient CHAPTER 20 OpenNotes CHAPTER 21 Personal Health Records and Patient Portals CHAPTER 22 A Community of Patients PART FIVE The Players and the Policies CHAPTER 23 Meaningful Use CHAPTER 24 Epic and athena CHAPTER 25 Silicon Valley Meets Healthcare CHAPTER 26 The Productivity Paradox PART SIX Toward a Brighter Future CHAPTER 27 A Vision for Health Information Technology CHAPTER 28 The Nontechnological Side of Making Health IT Work CHAPTER 29 Art and Science Acknowledgments Notes National Coordinators for Health Information Technology People Interviewed Bibliography Illustration Credits Index Preface In retrospect, we were bound to be disappointed.
The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence
Beyond the ideological differences, Facebook seemed an unlikely match for an even bigger reason: because for all intents and purposes, Oculus was a video game company—created to give players a way to “step into the game”—so selling to a console maker like Sony or Microsoft made sense. Even selling to a Silicon Valley titan like Apple or Google made some sense (after all, Apple and Google had a history of building successful hardware products). But Facebook? Zuckerberg had an answer to that very question when speaking to employees of his newly purchased company. “I think this has the potential to be—and you guys think about this too—to not just be the next gaming platform, but the next real computing platform.”
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But rather than plot out the possible permutations of what tomorrow might bring, Luckey decided that today—on this celebratory day; the day he sold his company to Facebook for more money than he could ever imagine—he would do something that he rarely ever did: he would stop looking forward and start thinking backward. Back to the beginning of how this whole crazy, extraordinary journey had started in the first place . . . Part 1 The Revolution Virtual Chapter 1 The Boy Who Lived to Mod April 10, 2012 UNLIKE SO MANY SILICON VALLEY SUCCESS STORIES, THE TALE OF OCULUS doesn’t begin in a garage, a dorm room, or a small skunkworks lab. Instead, in a twist befitting the humble origins and pragmatic eccentricities of its founder, the tale of Oculus begins in a trailer. More specifically: a beat-up, second-hand nineteen-foot camper trailer that, on the afternoon of April 10, was parked in the driveway of a modest, multifamily home in Long Beach, California.
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Even more especially in this case because integrating a panel that was 40 percent bigger would require Oculus to drastically redesign their product. “But problems like these,” Iribe waved off, “are just par for the course. We’ll get everything squared away and, when we do, it’s going to be absolutely incredible. You’ll see—let’s get you in a demo—and you’ll see that we’re going to change the world.” After nearly four years in Silicon Valley, Patel had become immune to this sort of hyperbole. Or so he thought. Because when Iribe made that claim, Patel found himself believing this guy whom he’d only just met. Perhaps it was because, in Iribe, Patel recognized a version of himself, a casual cocksureness that might have been off-putting if it weren’t buoyed by supreme confidence.
The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey
3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game
Summers, forthcoming, “Saving the Heartland: Place-Based Policies in 21st Century America,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. 45. B. Fallick, C. A. Fleischman, and J. B. Rebitzer, 2006, “Job-Hopping in Silicon Valley: Some Evidence Concerning the Microfoundations of a High-Technology Cluster,” Review of Economics and Statistics 88 (3): 472–81. 46. R. J. Gilson, 1999, “The Legal Infrastructure of High Technology Industrial Districts: Silicon Valley, Route 128, and Covenants Not to Compete,” New York University Law Review 74 (August): 575. 47. S. Klepper, 2010, “The Origin and Growth of Industry Clusters: The Making of Silicon Valley and Detroit,” Journal of Urban Economics 67 (1): 15–32. 48. T. Berger and C. B. Frey, 2017b, “Regional Technological Dynamism and Noncompete Clauses: Evidence from a Natural Experiment,” Journal of Regional Science 57 (4): 655–68. 49.
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The story begins in 1969, with a young engineer turning down a job offer at Hewlett-Packard in Menlo Park (in the heart of Silicon Valley) to move to the midsize town of Visalia, three hours’ drive away. At the time, many professionals were leaving cities for smaller communities, which were considered better places for family life. At the time, both places in California had prospering middle classes, similar rates of crime, and comparable quality of schools. And while incomes in Menlo Park were higher on average, America was on an equalizing path. Yet today, Menlo Park and Visalia are in different universes. As Silicon Valley has grown to become the world’s hub for innovation, Visalia has become a backwater.
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The location decisions of technology companies, which are at the forefront of digital technology, provide the best evidence of the value of in-person communication: “The fact that Silicon Valley is now the quintessential example of industrial agglomeration suggests that the most cutting-edge technology encourages, rather than eliminates, the need for geographic proximity.”34 The past two decades have supported that view, as geographic clusters like Silicon Valley remain strong, despite the abundance of long-range electronic communication tools. In fact, geography has become more important as new jobs have become more skill intensive.
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator
Today, small start-up teams can profoundly change behavior by guiding users through a series of experiences I call hooks. The more often users run through these hooks, the more likely they are to form habits. How I Got Hooked In 2008 I was among a team of Stanford MBAs starting a company backed by some of the brightest investors in Silicon Valley. Our mission was to build a platform for placing advertising into the booming world of online social games. Notable companies were making hundreds of millions of dollars selling virtual cows on digital farms while advertisers were spending huge sums of money to influence people to buy whatever they were peddling.
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Although every business had its unique flavor, I sought to identify the commonalities behind the winners and understand what was missing among the losers. I looked for insights from academia, drawing upon consumer psychology, human-computer interaction, and behavioral economics research. In 2011 I began sharing what I learned and started working as a consultant to a host of Silicon Valley companies, from small start-ups to Fortune 500 enterprises. Each client provided an opportunity to test my theories, draw new insights, and refine my thinking. I began blogging about what I learned at NirAndFar.com, and my essays were syndicated to other sites. Readers soon began writing in with their own observations and examples.
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The fact that we have greater access to the web through our various connected devices—smartphones and tablets, televisions, game consoles, and wearable technology—gives companies far greater ability to affect our behavior. As companies combine their increased connectivity to consumers, with the ability to collect, mine, and process customer data at faster speeds, we are faced with a future where everything becomes potentially more habit forming. As famed Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham writes, “Unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.”13 Chapter 6 explores this new reality and discusses the morality of manipulation.
The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE1 On, or about, January 2017, the global economy changed guard. The venue was Davos, the annual gathering of the world’s wealthiest recyclers of conventional wisdom – and consistently one of the last places to anticipate what is going to happen next. This time was different. The assembled hedge-fund tycoons, Silicon Valley data executives, management gurus and government officials were treated to a preview of how rapidly the world is about to change. Xi Jinping, the president of China, had come to the Swiss Alpine resort to defend the global trade system against the attacks of the newly elected US president, Donald Trump.
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We are still awaiting the productivity gains we were assured would result from the digital economy. With the exception of most of the 1990s, productivity growth has never recaptured the rates it achieved in the post-war decades. ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,’ said Robert Solow, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, who has controversially backed Donald Trump, put it more vividly: ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters [Twitter].’ That may be about to change, with the acceleration of the robot revolution and the spread of artificial intelligence. But we should be careful what we wish for.
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Tyler Cowen, who is perhaps the most lateral-thinking economist I know, talks of the rise of America’s ‘complacent classes’ – the creep of a risk-averse and conformist mindset. In a supposed age of hyper-individualism, eccentricity is penalised. Software screens out job applicants before they have a chance to show their faces. Matchmaking algorithms do the same for our love lives. Cowen detects conformism even in the liveliest Silicon Valley companies. Most of its denizens wear some variation on the casual hipster uniform and all dutifully strip the paint off their office walls. They litter their workplaces with the same multicoloured pouffes. ‘We are using the acceleration of information transmission to decelerate changes in our physical world,’ writes Cowen.
Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan
3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar
We were returning south to Menlo Park after meetings in San Francisco and continuing past our exit on Highway 101 didn’t immediately make any sense to them. “Just drive around”, I said; “I want to try to see something very important that you can only see in Mountain View”, knowing I probably sounded a little crazy. Mountain View is a small town of about 75,000 thousand people that is home to many of Silicon Valley’s most famous companies, but I was there to see its most famous non-human inhabitants. After my increasingly exasperated colleagues drove around seemingly aimlessly for about 15 minutes, I suddenly spotted what I had come to see - a Lexus SUV with a spinning dome on the roof. A car that could drive itself.
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Regardless of whether it’s 5, 10 or even 20 or more years away from daily reality, we can be confident it’s no longer purely the stuff of science fiction. These vehicles will be able to undertake journeys with no human control, signifying the first time in history that we have the chance to cede control to machines on the open road regardless of distance or destination. This is not another one of the over-hyped Silicon Valley solutions to first world problems like having your laundry delivered to you in less than an hour; this is a very definite (and many might say overdue) example of technology that will have a measurable, positive impact on improving human existence far greater than the plethora of apps vying to deliver luxury goods ever more rapidly.
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Generally, when discussing emerging technologies, we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run - this is known as Amara's Law.[4] For example, just 10 years ago, an assertion that 2 billion people would have a computer in their pocket with more power than a supercomputer and access to millions of apps would have seemed ludicrous. But it's only taken 10 years for the smartphone to reach this prevalence and now it seems perfectly normal. Driverless technology is not an area where there is a clear consensus on the way forward or the path to it. A partner at leading Silicon Valley investment house Andreessen Horowitz, Ben Evans, recently noted the “Huge variance in informed opinion as to how long fully-autonomous driving will take and what it needs.”[5] Each of the major car companies and new entrant technology companies have announced expected dates ranging from 2018 to 2025 and beyond - a pretty wide target.
The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo
Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks
They adopt a philosophy of ‘distributed organising’, to use the terms of Sanders’ staffers Becky Bond and Zack Exley10 to tap into the political labour of their diffuse support base, much in the same way in which social media companies extract value from the ‘free labour’ of their dispersed user base. However, this organisational revolution cannot be understood as stemming merely from strategic and economic considerations, as a translation of the ‘lean management’ and the ‘disruptive innovation’ philosophy adopted by several Silicon Valley firms to the political arena. Rather, it is also premised on, and justified by, the utopian vision of an online democracy using digital technology as a means to extend and deepen political participation, reintegrate in the polity many citizens who have for a long time been distant from the political arena and allow them to have a more direct and meaningful intervention in the political process.
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Continuing to the party’s top, it can be seen that these formations have a very light organisational structure, not only much smaller than the imposing bureaucracy of the mass party but also often tinier than the professionalised bureaucracy of consultants, spin doctors and policy advisors of more recent television parties. The political party comes to resemble the start-up companies of Silicon Valley, with their essential staffing, and the operations of digital advocacy groups such as MoveOn, which have very small central staff considering their scale of operation and large membership base. The process of disintermediation of the party decrees the death of the cadre, the old figure traditionally involved in the nitty-gritty work of organisation, propaganda and agitation on the party’s behalf, that is disposed of much in the same way as bookshops were outcompeted by Amazon or cab companies ‘disrupted’ by the diffusion of Uber.
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Never before has the spreading of information contributed to so many quick technical, cultural and economical advances, as well as having opened for new prerequisites and possibilities for participation and democracy.96 However, this transformation is far from being as overwhelmingly positive as Silicon Valley evangelists and followers of the New Age religion of ‘digitalism’ would want us to believe, in line with their ‘solutionist’97 narrative in which all problems, bar death, but perhaps eventually including it, may eventually be solved by wondrous digital tools. The digital revolution carries a worrying underside of growing surveillance, shrinking privacy, ballooning concentration of ownership, increasing causalisation of labour and declining economic conditions for the majority of the population in Western societies.
The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future by Levi Tillemann
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, car-free, carbon footprint, clean tech, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, gigafactory, global value chain, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, manufacturing employment, market design, megacity, Nixon shock, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, RFID, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, smart cities, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, zero-sum game, Zipcar
These funds range from a few tens of millions to perhaps a billion dollars for the biggest VC players. Most VCs trace their origins to the veterans of the tech companies of Silicon Valley (for example, Fairchild Semiconductor and Hewlett-Packard) where expecting a three-to-five-year return is entirely reasonable. But in the mid-2000s, some of these investors forged into the sectors like energy and autos—where investments often take significantly longer to mature. In 2009, this is exactly what was happening. Some of Silicon Valley’s most storied investment groups had bet heavily on green technology remaking the energy world. In 2007, two partners at KPCB penned an editorial for Fortune calling the transformation of the energy sector the “single largest economic opportunity of the 21st century.”
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The gasoline burns over 90 percent of his body were another story—and the heat of the blaze had also seared his lungs. Ten days later he died in the burn unit of the University of Colorado Hospital. My father was gone, but we wanted his dream to live, so at twenty-six years old I became CEO of IRIS Engines Inc. The company desperately needed cash, and I scoured Houston, Boston, New York, and Silicon Valley for investors. By early 2007, I had recruited a new advisory board and prototyped an early version of our design. A friend introduced me to FedEx CEO Fred Smith, who was willing to give us a chance. His conditions were simple: Smith would fund half of the engine’s development if we could convince one of his friends in the auto industry to go along for the other half.
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Before long, I came to understand that the rules of the global automotive industry had changed. This was not merely a race of corporate titans, but of the world’s industrial superpowers seeking to control a pivotal emerging market. Their strategies and machinations were driven by presidents and industrialists, but also by unexpected characters—nuclear scientists, Silicon Valley moguls, and rogue executives. It was, I realized, a new and possibly final season of the Great Race—a race to build the car of the future. State and Market in the Age of Carbon In this complex, multifaceted, and global race on the circuit of automotive innovation, the metrics for victory are more than market share, technology, or state power.
The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game
Because ingenuity is rampant as never before in this massively networked world and the rate of innovation is accelerated, through serendipitous searching, not deliberate planning.39 Pinker would have probably made similar claims in Enlightenment Now had he not devoted nearly the entirety of his chapter on science to vilifying the humanities.40 Even when not explicitly mentioned, they are nonetheless implied every time he downplays technological threats like AI or outright ignores the very real controversies over the growing power of Silicon Valley and its impact on democracy. If New Optimism sounds like one giant TED Talk by a hyper-optimistic tech guru or venture capitalist, it’s because it shares with these people the boundless overconfidence of a future we should be anticipating with dangerously few reservations. There would also probably not be much fightback from the New Optimist camp if Silicon Valley ideology insidiously becomes more mainstream. The success of Trump and his enablers in mainstreaming their New Right sympathies proves that it only takes one convert reaching a position of power to legitimize a belief system.
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., “Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956”, Pro Market, 9 May 2017, https://promarket.org/google-close-natural-monopoly-bell-system-1956/ 22 Griswold, A., “Rich Tech Bros are Super Liberal — Except for One Thing”, Quartz, 6 Sep. 2017, https://qz.com/1070813/the-tech-elite-are-extremely-liberal-except-for-when-it-comes-to-one-thing/ 23 Clark, B., “Bro Culture is Poisoning Silicon Valley”, The Next Web, 10 Mar. 2017, https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/03/11/bro-culture-poisoning-silicon-valley/ 24 Data from the Lobbying Database of the Center for Responsive Politics, https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/ 25 Calculation based on $1,843.7 billion in corporate profits after tax (without IVA and CCAdjin) in 2018. Data from St Louis Fed FRED (CP series) 26 Klummp T., Mailon, H. and Williams, M., “The Business of American Democracy: Citizens United, Independent Spending, and Elections”, The Journal of Law and Economics, 59(1), Feb. 2016, http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2312519 27 “The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2018 to 2028”, Congressional Budget Office, 9 Apr. 2018, https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53651 28 This term was used by the UK Conservative Party to criticize the Labour Party’s spending plans in the post-Brexit 2017 snap election.
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Vietnam also has similar levels of schooling than neighboring Thailand despite having only a third of its GDP per capita.53 Although they have lower levels of educational spending per head, the former communist bloc countries of eastern Europe beat out many of their richer western European peers in the OECD’s PISA school rankings.54 The Indian state of Kerala, run under a quasi-socialist/communitarian development model, has the country’s highest literacy rate at 93.9%. Neighboring Karnataka, whose capital Bangalore is known as “the Silicon Valley of India”, has a literacy rate of just 75.6%.55 Think about this the next time a tech company asks for tax breaks under the premise of improving the community (yes Amazon, that would be you). Another case in point is water and sanitation. Once again it is claimed that as economic growth lifts millions of people in the developing world out of poverty they are able to afford improved facilities like clean water and indoor toilets.
Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford
3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar
I personally welcome the fact that China is emphasizing economic development and entrepreneurship. When I was in China recently the tremendous explosion of entrepreneurship was apparent. I would encourage China to move in the direction of free exchange of information. I think that’s fundamental for this type of progress. All around the world we see Silicon Valley as a motivating model. Silicon Valley really is just a metaphor for entrepreneurship, the celebrating of experimenting, and calling failure experience. I think that’s a good thing, I really don’t see it as an international competition. MARTIN FORD: But do you worry about the fact that China is an authoritarian state, and that these technologies do have, for example, military applications?
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I’d recently become engaged, and I had also received an offer from McKinsey to join them in Silicon Valley; and I thought it would be a brief, interesting detour, to go to McKinsey. At the time, like many of my friends and colleagues, such as Bobby Rao, who had also been in the Robotics Research Lab with me, I was interested in building systems that could compete in the DARPA driverless car challenge. This was because a lot of our algorithms were applicable to autonomous vehicles and driverless cars and back then, the DARPA challenge was one of the places where you could apply those algorithms. All of my friends were moving to Silicon Valley then. Bobby was at that time a post-doc at Berkeley working with Stuart Russell and others, and so I thought I should take this McKinsey offer in San Francisco.
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Bobby was at that time a post-doc at Berkeley working with Stuart Russell and others, and so I thought I should take this McKinsey offer in San Francisco. It was a way to be close to Silicon Valley and to be close to where some of the action, including the DARPA challenge, was taking place. MARTIN FORD: What is your role now at McKinsey? JAMES MANYIKA: I’ve ended up doing two kinds of things. One is working with many of the pioneering technology companies in Silicon Valley, where I have been fortunate to work with and advise many founders and CEOs. The other part, which has grown over time, is leading research at the intersection of technology and its impact on business and the economy.
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator
My focus in college was security. I wanted to do crypto and stuff like that. I had already founded three different companies during college and the year after, which I spent in Champaign-Urbana, where I went to school. Then, in favor of not doing graduate school, I decided to move out to Silicon Valley and try to start another company. So I was hanging around Silicon Valley in the summer of ’98 and was not really sure what I was going to do with my life. I was living in Palo Alto, squatting 1 2 Founders at Work on the floor of a friend. I went to see this random lecture at Stanford—given by a guy named Peter, who I had heard about, but never met before.
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Now we have to have two Demo Days just to accommodate all the people who want to come. Jessica Livingston 451 What happened after that first batch? Livingston: The biggest milestone for Y Combinator after the first summer batch was when we decided to move out to Silicon Valley for the winter. I remember not being too excited about that idea at first. Paul said, “You know, we should do this out in Silicon Valley,” and I thought, “Dammit, we just got everything set up, working well here in Cambridge. Do I really want to uproot my entire life and move out to California?” But it turned out to be one of the best things we’ve ever done. I think we decided to do it in October, so we had only 2 months to renovate part of Trevor’s Anybot’s office to make space for Y Combinator.
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He designed the machine that crystallized what a desktop computer was: the Apple II. Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer in 1976. Between Wozniak’s technical ability and Jobs’s mesmerizing energy, they were a powerful team. Woz first showed off his home-built computer, the Apple I, at Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club in 1976. After Jobs landed a contract with the Byte Shop, a local computer store, for 100 preassembled machines, Apple was launched on a rapid ascent. Woz soon followed with the machine that made the company: the Apple II. He single-handedly designed all its hardware and software—an extraordinary feat even for the time.
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan
1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog
It might not be a straight one, but it is possible to draw a line connecting Al Hubbard’s arrival in Silicon Valley with his satchelful of LSD to the tech boom that Steve Jobs helped set off a quarter century later. The key figure in the marriage of Al Hubbard and Silicon Valley was Myron Stolaroff. Stolaroff was a gifted electrical engineer who, by the mid-1950s, had become assistant to the president for strategic planning at Ampex, one of the first technology companies to set up shop in what at the time was a sleepy valley of farms and orchards. (It wouldn’t be called Silicon Valley until 1971.) Ampex, which at its peak had thirteen thousand employees, was a pioneer in the development of reel-to-reel magnetic tape for both audio and data recording.
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Long before Leary, the shift in the objective of psychedelic research from psychotherapy to cultural revolution was well under way. * * * • • • ONE LAST NODE worth visiting in Al Hubbard’s far-flung psychedelic network is Silicon Valley, where the potential for LSD to foster “creative imagination” and thereby change the culture received its most thorough test to date. Indeed, the seeds that Hubbard planted in Silicon Valley continue to yield interesting fruit, in the form of the valley’s ongoing interest in psychedelics as a tool for creativity and innovation. (As I write, the practice of microdosing—taking a tiny, “subperceptual” regular dose of LSD as a kind of mental tonic—is all the rage in the tech community.)
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There was James Fadiman, the Stanford-trained psychologist who had done pioneering research on psychedelics and problem solving at the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, until the FDA halted the group’s work in 1966. (In the early 1960s, there was at least as much psychedelic research going on around Stanford as there was at Harvard; it just didn’t have a character of the wattage of a Timothy Leary out talking about it.) Then there was Fadiman’s colleague at the institute Myron Stolaroff, a prominent Silicon Valley electrical engineer who worked as a senior executive at Ampex, the magnetic recording equipment maker, until an LSD trip inspired him to give up engineering (much like Bob Jesse) for a career as a psychedelic researcher and therapist. Jesse also found his way into the inner circle of Sasha and Ann Shulgin, legendary Bay Area figures who held weekly dinners for a community of therapists, scientists, and others interested in psychedelics.
Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional
Saxenian points out that in its early years Silicon Valley’s great competitor on the East Coast, the Route 128 corridor in Massachusetts, was more than a match for the Valley in terms of access to research and venture capital. Yet by the late 1970s, the Valley had created more high-tech jobs than Route 128 had, and when both clusters slumped in the mid-1980s, the Valley proved far more resilient. The reason for this was that big East Coast firms such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Data General were self-contained empires that focused on one product, minicomputers, whereas Silicon Valley was much more decentralized, freewheeling, and porous: companies were constantly forming and re-forming.
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The reason for this was that big East Coast firms such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Data General were self-contained empires that focused on one product, minicomputers, whereas Silicon Valley was much more decentralized, freewheeling, and porous: companies were constantly forming and re-forming. Silicon Valley boasted more than six thousand companies in the 1990s, many of them start-ups. Even big companies, such as Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard, were informal affairs. People hopped from job to job and from company to company. Intel was formed when two of the traitorous eight, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, left Fairchild and recruited Andy Grove to join them. More than anywhere else in America, Silicon Valley was a living embodiment of the principle of creative destruction as old companies died and new ones emerged, allowing capital, ideas, and people to be reallocated.
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In 1940, America’s future looked dismal: the country had just been through a decade of economic stagnation and financial turmoil. Yet a decade later the economy was once again firing on all cylinders and America was by far the world’s most successful economy. One way to counter the growing mood of pessimism is to look at Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs are inventing the future of everything from smartphones to robotics. Another way is to look at the past. Two hundred years ago America’s settlers were confronted with problems that make today’s problems look quaint: how to make a living out of a vast unforgiving landscape and how to forge a political system that reconciled states’ rights with national government, individual initiative with collective responsibility.
Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay by Jonathan Shapiro, James Eyers
Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple Newton, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, book value, British Empire, clockwatching, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial deregulation, George Floyd, greed is good, growth hacking, index fund, Jones Act, Kickstarter, late fees, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, managed futures, Max Levchin, meme stock, Mount Scopus, Network effects, new economy, passive investing, payday loans, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Rainbow capitalism, regulatory arbitrage, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, short squeeze, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, tech bro, technology bubble, the payments system, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund
Dana Stalder, a general partner of Matrix, would join the Afterpay board, and become a mentor to Molnar. Stalder is a Silicon Valley native and has worked in technology companies his whole career. He helped to build one of the early internet browsers at Netscape in 1994. After running global customer acquisition at eBay, he joined PayPal in 2004, which eBay had acquired two years earlier, leading product, sales, marketing and technology. He joined Matrix in 2008, which had a 40-year history in the Valley and was an early investor in Apple. As part of the deal, an employee share-option plan was set up with the intention of luring Silicon Valley’s best and brightest to the Afterpay cause.
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The very first Afterpay backers were $7 million richer for each $10,000 they’d invested. Even if that amount had been invested in mid-March 2020, during the depths of the pandemic-induced panic, it would have generated a very healthy gain of $130,000. There was plenty of smart money willing to validate the model. Silicon Valley’s top venture funds, Wall Street’s most sophisticated hedge funds, and Chinese technology goliath Tencent had all invested in Afterpay. But they hadn’t been there from the start. Afterpay was not launched with money from vaunted venture capital funds but from private individuals, friends, associates and stockbrokers’ clients.
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The leading five companies, four of which are banks or miners, have a worth of more than $500 billion. That’s the same as the bottom-tier 430 companies in the All Ordinaries Index combined. The high concentration of large companies used to be unique to Australia. But the unstoppable rise of Silicon Valley’s top five has changed that. Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google have defied the laws of market gravity. As they have grown, their ability to generate sales and profits has not slowed. They now account for 15 per cent of the US share market’s value. But these dominant companies have a very different character to those of the Australian share market.
Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce
“That’s when we threw the strike,” Steinman recalls. “Sir, the future is going to be about software, not hardware, and we need an entity of the U.S. Navy in Silicon Valley.” A few months later, after other junior officers made similar cases about the importance of software, the CNO gave a speech advocating for the idea, which also circulated around the Pentagon. Not long afterward, the secretary of defense announced an embassy in Silicon Valley. Steinman leveraged what psychologist Robert Cialdini calls the foot-in-the-door technique, where you lead with a small request to secure an initial commitment before revealing the larger one.
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Still, we dare to ask: Can one individual make a difference? And, in our bravest moments: Could that one individual be me? Adam’s answer is a resounding yes. This book proves that any one of us can champion ideas that improve the world around us. FRIEND I met Adam just as his first book, Give and Take, was generating buzz in Silicon Valley. I read it and immediately started quoting it to anyone who would listen. Adam was not only a talented researcher but also a gifted teacher and storyteller who was able to explain complicated ideas simply and clearly. Then my husband invited Adam to speak to his team at work and brought him over for dinner.
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They know in their hearts that failing would yield less regret than failing to try. 2 Blind Inventors and One-Eyed Investors The Art and Science of Recognizing Original Ideas “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” Scott Adams At the turn of the century, an invention took Silicon Valley by storm. Steve Jobs called it the most amazing piece of technology since the personal computer. Enamored with the prototype, Jobs offered the inventor $63 million for 10 percent of the company. When the inventor turned it down, Jobs did something out of character: he offered to advise the inventor for the next six months—for free.
New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms
"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler
They despair of those who take their dusty places at the biweekly meeting of the standing deliberative committee on multi-sector-high-level-decision-making. More flash mob than United Nations, this philosophy stands in contrast to the twentieth century belief in managerialism and institutionalism as the way to get things done. At the extreme, the belief in “informal” governance manifests in those Silicon Valley–led dreams of floating island paradises, “an opt-in society, outside the US, run by technology.” This is the kind of place, as one prominent Valley entrepreneur has advocated, where a “Yelp for Drugs” replaces the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, with doctor ratings and patient testimonials supplanting regulations and formal protections.
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That’s consistent with Marilynn Brewer’s behavioral science concept of “optimal distinctiveness,” which suggests that the right recipe for building an effective group is making people feel like they are part of it and that they can stand out in it. Along with the new logo, Airbnb retooled its corporate language with a manifesto more like that of an alternative-living community than a Silicon Valley money machine: We used to take belonging for granted. Cities used to be villages. Everyone knew each other, and everyone knew they had a place to call home. But after the mechanization and Industrial Revolution of the last century, those feelings of trust and belonging were displaced by mass-produced and impersonal travel experiences.
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This approach horrified some more traditional groups—wouldn’t making it so easy to join just attract the weak-willed and the riffraff? Their sign-up forms required much more up-front information, and so by the time people worked their way through them attrition rates were high. GetUp’s mantra (which is also that of Silicon Valley) was to make it as easy as possible to get in the door. In doing so, the dynamic between organizer and participant was flipped. The onus was on GetUp to provide its members meaningful opportunities to increase their engagement, not on members to prove their undying commitment to the cause. An unlikely digital wunderkind has used the same basic logic to produce an enormous surge of new power.
The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding
affirmative action, air gap, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, disinformation, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Firefox, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job-hopping, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, undersea cable, web application, WikiLeaks
From this you could construct a complete electronic narrative of an individual’s life – their friends, their lovers, their joys, their sorrows. Together with GCHQ, the NSA had secretly attached intercepts to the undersea fibre-optic cables that ringed the world. This allowed the US and UK to read much of the globe’s communications. Secret courts were compelling telecoms providers to hand over data. What’s more, pretty much all of Silicon Valley was involved with the NSA, Snowden said – Google, Microsoft, Facebook, even Steve Jobs’s Apple. The NSA claimed it had ‘direct access’ to the tech giants’ servers. While giving themselves unprecedented surveillance powers, the US intelligence community was concealing the truth about its activities, Snowden said.
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Under the program, previously undisclosed, analysts were able to collect email content, search histories, live chats and file transfers. The Guardian had a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation, classified as top secret and not to be shown to foreign allies. It was apparently used to train analysts. The document claimed ‘collection directly from the servers’ of major US service providers. Silicon Valley would vehemently deny this. As the team reassembled the next morning there were still difficult editorial decisions to make. How many of the slides, if any, should the Guardian publish? Several gave details of previously undisclosed intelligence operations abroad. There was no public interest in betraying them.
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‘It was an extremely bizarre situation,’ Johnson says. The British government had compelled a major newspaper to smash up its own computers. This extraordinary moment was half pantomime, half-Stasi. But it was not yet the high tide of British official heavy-handedness. That was still to come. 10 DON’T BE EVIL Silicon Valley, California Summer 2013 ‘Until they become conscious, they will never rebel.’ GEORGE ORWELL, 1984 It was an iconic commercial. To accompany the launch of the Macintosh in 1984, Steve Jobs created an advert that would captivate the world. It would take the theme of George Orwell’s celebrated dystopian novel and recast it – with Apple as Winston Smith.
The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional
Most of the large car companies seem convinced that self-driving technology will be introduced gradually over many years, with adaptive cruise control and assisted parking bedding in during the lifetime of one model, and assisted overtaking being introduced gradually with the next model, and so on. That is far too slow for the tech titans of Silicon Valley. Google, Tesla, Uber and others are racing towards full automation as soon as it can be safely introduced. If Detroit does not join in it may find itself displaced. In the closing months of 2015, Detroit and its rivals seemed to wake up. Toyota announced a five-year, $1bn investment in Silicon Valley,[cci] Ford announced a JV with Google,[ccii] and BMW's head of R&D declared that in five years, his division had to transition from a department of a mechanical engineering company to a department of a tech company.
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Awarding it the 2015 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year, Lionel Barber, the Financial Times' editor, called it “a tightly-written and deeply-researched addition to the public policy debate … The judges didn’t agree with all of the conclusions, but were unanimous on the verdict and the impact of the book.” Ford is well-placed to talk about what technology will do to the world of work. He has a quarter-century of experience in software design, and he lives and works in Silicon Valley, where he runs a software development company. His writing is calm and measured, with an engaging humility. Exponentials and automation Ford opens “Rise of the Robots” with a dramatic illustration of the power of exponential increase – the cumulative doubling which is driving digital innovation.
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A Google car drove into a bus on Valentine’s Day 2016, but the facts of that incident remain somewhat ambiguous.[lxxiii] The world's automotive manufacturers are now scrambling to master the technologies involved in producing self-driving cars. Toyota is investing billions of dollars in research facilities in Silicon Valley,[lxxiv] and in December 2015, Ford announced a joint venture with Google.[lxxv] Elon Musk, CEO of the startlingly impressive upstart car manufacturer Tesla, said in December 2015 that its first fully autonomous cars would be sold in two years.[lxxvi] Of course it will take longer than that for regulators to catch up, and it will take years for enough of the old, human-piloted cars to be replaced for self-driving cars to deliver the tremendous benefits they are capable of.
After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood
"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game
Of course, these controls always beg a lot of questions—like why race should be brought in to explain gender gaps, when racial gaps themselves are products of discrimination; why the pay gap between young and old has widened so much over the last few decades; and why women are so often clustered in low-paying occupations and so frequently overlooked at promotion time.^^ So the eflfect of pure sex discrimination on pay is probably larger than 12%. Regional outlook It's worth a look at two regions that were microcosms of the "New Economy," insofar as there was such a thing: New York City and the Silicon Valley. While it doesn't have the high-tech concentration of the Silicon Valley (on which more in a moment). New York's economy is dominated by industries considered paradigmatic of the new order, like information 104 After the New Economy and finance. Old-line manufacturing left a generation ago, making the city a laboratory of the postindustrial future.
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Clothaire, 146 Reagan, Ronald, 8 recessions, political purpose, 182 regionahzation, 159 Reich, Robert, 71,74 retail trade, 64-66 Riflcin, Jeremy, 68 Robinson, Joan, 235 Robinson, William, 175-176 Rockefeller, David, 232 Rubin, Robert, 218 ruling class, global, 174—178 Russell, Marta, 100 sad militants, 185 Sakakibara, Eisuke, 228 Index Sale, Kirkpatrick, 168 Salomon Smith Barney, 197 scale, economic, 167-168 Scandinavia, very wired, 6 Schama, Simon, 23 Schrager, Ian, 233 Schwab, Klaus, 175-178 Seattle, anti-WTO protests, 32,160 sex, Gilder on, 11—13 sexual preference and pay, 100 sex discrimination, 94—101 international comparisons, 101—102 Shakespeare, 188 shareholder activism, 214 Shiller, Robert, 6-8,25-27,194 Shiva, Vandana, 162,168-169 Shorrock.Tim, 171 Sichel, Daniel, 57 Silicon Valley, income distribution, 105 Silicon Valley Toxics CoaUtion, 232 Sinai, Allen, 4 Singhne, Peter, 18 Skilhng, Jeffirey, 33 skills, job, 73-77 returns to, 86—87 skin shade and pay, 99 Smith, Adam, 109-110, 163,173 Smith, Patti, 183 Smith, Paul, 6 social democracy, 139-143,182 social movements, new, 179 Social Security, 227 Solow, Robert, 3 sovereignty, 170 space, shrinkage of, 146 speedup, 215, 229 Spencer, Herbert, 37 state, retreat of, 150-152 Stigbtz, Joseph, 193 Stiroh,Kevin,51,57 stock market 1990s bubble, history, 188-189 analysts' role, 194—200 anomalies, 194 book value, defined, 233 brokers' fees and salaries, 201-202 and corporate profitability, 203—204 and corporate restructuring, 214-215 economics of, 187-188,192-195 and evolution of the corporation, 212-217 excess volatiHty, 194 happiness of investors, 212 and managers' pay, 216—217 and pop culture, 187 psychology of, 25—26 trading frequency and returns, 190—191, 234,239 wisdom of, 35 see also finance stock options, 216—217 and wealth distribution, 126—127 stock ownership, distribution of, 24, 122-124 stress, management by, 25 stylish shoes, 165 Summers, Lawrence, 5,231 surveillance, 68,77—78 Survey of Consumer Finances, 118—119 Survey of Income and Program Participation, 118 symbolic analysts, 71,72 synergy vs. conflict, 197-200 Taylorism, 78 technology not evil, 2 and social movements, 179 telecommunications industry, 196—198 telegraph, 7 telemarketers, 68 TheGlobe.com, 189 269 TheStreet.com, 31 dme, acceleration of, 146 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 82,139 Tompkins, Doug, 161-162 total factor productivity.
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From immigrants and outcasts, street toughs and science wonks, nerds and boffins, the bearded and the beerbeUied, the tacky and the upright, and sometimes weird, the born again and born yesterday, with Adam's apples bobbing, psyches throbbing, and acne galore, the fraternity of the pizza breakfast, the Ferrari dream, the sihcon truth, the midnight modem, and the seventy-hour week, from dirt farms and redneck shanties, trailer parks and Levittowns, in a rainbow parade of all colors and wavelengths, of the hyperneat and the sty high, the crewcut and khaki, the ponytailed and punk, accented from Britain and Madras, from Israel and Malaya, from Paris and Parris Island, from Iowa and Havana, from Brooklyn and Boise and Belgrade and Vienna andVietnam, from the coarse fanaticism and desperation, ambition and hunger, genius and sweat of the outsider, the downtrodden, the banished, and the bviUied come most of the progress in the world and in Sihcon Valley. In compihng this catalog. Gilder forgot the teenage women going blind from soldering circuits in the PhiUppines, the low-wage workers packed six to a room in the Silicon Valley, the reporters and data-entry clerks paralyzed by repetitive strain injury, and, less melodramatically, the researchers in the nonprofit bureaucracies known as universities and in the once-protected monopoly of Bell Labs (v^here the transistor v^as invented). But that's not to take away firom Gilder's talents as a maker of Hsts, some of the most prodigious since Whitman.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, business intelligence, cloud computing, financial independence, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, new economy, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative
Whatever the case, when I opened the door to greet our dates, Felicia’s award-winning green eyes immediately fixed on the welt under my eye. Her first impression (told to me years later): “This guy is a thug. Coming here was a big mistake.” Fortunately, neither of us relied on our first impressions. We have been happily married for nearly twenty-five years and have three wonderful children. SILICON VALLEY During one summer in college, I got a job as an engineer at a company called Silicon Graphics (SGI). The experience blew my mind. The company invented modern computer graphics and powered a whole new class set of applications ranging from the movie Terminator 2 to amazing flight simulators. Everybody there was so smart.
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We incorporated the company and set out to raise money. It was 1999. — CHAPTER 2 — “I WILL SURVIVE” “Did you think I’d crumble? Did you think I’d lay down and die? Oh no, not I I will survive.” —GLORIA GAYNOR, “I WILL SURVIVE” Coming off the success of Netscape, Marc knew all the top venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, so we needed no introductions. Unfortunately for us, Kleiner Perkins, the firm that backed Netscape, had already funded a potentially competitive company. We spoke to all the other top-tier firms and decided to go with Andy Rachleff of Benchmark Capital. If I had to describe Andy with one word, it would be gentleman.
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We were hiring thirty employees a month and snagging many of the Valley’s smartest people. One of our new recruits had quit his job at AOL to spend two months mountain climbing, but instead he joined us; another forfeited millions to join Loudcloud when he resigned from another company on the day of its IPO. Six months in, we had nearly two hundred employees. Silicon Valley was on fire, and Loudcloud was billed in a Wired cover story as “Marc Andreessen’s second coming.” We traded our first office—where you’d blow a circuit if you ran the microwave and coffeemaker at the same time—for a fifteen-thousand-square-foot warehouse in Sunnyvale, which was too small for us by the time we moved in.
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg
affirmative action, business process, Cass Sunstein, constrained optimization, experimental economics, fear of failure, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, old-boy network, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social graph, Susan Wojcicki, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional
Technology was transforming communication and changing lives not just in the United States and developed countries, but everywhere. My long-term dream instinct kicked in. When President Clinton’s administration ended, I was out of a job and decided to move to Silicon Valley. In retrospect, this seems like a shrewd move, but in 2001, it was questionable at best. The tech bubble had burst, and the industry was still reeling from the aftershocks. I gave myself four months to find a job but hoped it would take fewer. It took almost a year. My Silicon Valley job search had some highs, like getting to meet my business crush, eBay CEO Meg Whitman. It also had some lows, like meeting with a high-level executive who started my interview by stating that her company would never even consider hiring someone like me because government experience could not possibly prepare anyone to work in the tech industry.
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Writing this book is not just me encouraging others to lean in. This is me leaning in. Writing this book is what I would do if I weren’t afraid. 2 Sit at the Table A FEW YEARS AGO, I hosted a meeting for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner at Facebook. We invited fifteen executives from across Silicon Valley for breakfast and a discussion about the economy. Secretary Geithner arrived with four members of his staff, two senior and two more junior, and we all gathered in our one nice conference room. After the usual milling around, I encouraged the attendees to help themselves to the buffet and take a seat.
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So perhaps one positive result of having more women at the top is that our leaders will have been trained to care more about the well-being of others. My hope, of course, is that we won’t have to play by these archaic rules forever and that eventually we can all just be ourselves. We still have a long way to go. In November 2011, San Francisco magazine ran a story on female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and illustrated it by superimposing the featured women’s heads onto male bodies.24 The only body type they could imagine for successful entrepreneurship was wearing a tie or a hoodie. Our culture needs to find a robust image of female success that is first, not male, and second, not a white woman on the phone, holding a crying baby.
Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game
Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell, the cofounders of cloud-based SQL database startup Cockroach Labs, are all Xooglers (as Google alums are called in Silicon Valley); Kimball and Mattis were a cofounder and a senior engineer at payments company Square. Before they founded Never Settle IT, cofounders Kenn Kelly, Shaul Hagen, and Andrew Lundquist worked eighty-hour weeks in “hyper-growth tech startups” and were “highly immersed in Silicon Valley culture.” John Peebles, CEO of SaaS training software company Administrate in Edinburgh, Scotland, “literally worked every waking minute” building his first startup.
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The percentage of workers employed in temporary work, gig-economy jobs, or zero-hours contracts has grown dramatically in the US, with other advanced economies following. Executives learned they could boost profits by shredding workforces, tapping global manufacturing and transportation networks, or using “disruptive innovation” to drive established companies out of business. The rise of Silicon Valley in the 1980s brought with it a new model of work and success that glamorized long hours, made workaholics into heroes, and turned overwork into a badge of honor. As a result, we now live in a fast-moving, unstable world in which overwork is a source of riches for some and a necessity for survival for the rest.
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Companies were constantly trying new things, evaluating their experience, and using lessons learned to improve their practices. Whether they explicitly did so or not, all these companies were taking the same approach to figure out how to shorten the workday, I realized. They were treating it as an exercise in design thinking. The discipline of design thinking evolved in Silicon Valley in the 1970s and 1980s, when industrial designers working on the first generation of personal computers were trying to turn cutting-edge but often hard-to-use technologies like personal computers, the computer mouse, and laser printers into products that everyone could use. For engineers accustomed to mastering difficult technologies, complexity represented power, not a problem, but most users didn’t want to join a priesthood in order to keep better inventory or write term papers.
How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture
Additionally, in order to help circumvent worker apathy, boards and management must strive to make the case for why people should want to work at their company and should make sure they are continuously matching employees with the work they enjoy. Michael Moritz, the former managing partner of Sequoia, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, has penned a number of spirited articles highlighting the risk that the US technology sector will become less competitive than China’s. In an article titled “Silicon Valley Would Be Wise to Follow China’s Lead,” Moritz argued that differences in attitudes about work-life balance between US and Chinese companies place the former at a distinct disadvantage. The Chinese work culture in tech start-ups, which can involve putting in fourteen-hour days six or seven days a week, stands in stark contrast to California’s tech scene, where companies juggle parental leave demands and workers prioritize the need for greater work-life balance.
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Milwaukee, WI: ManpowerGroup, 2018. https://go.manpowergroup.com/hubfs/TalentShortage%202018%20(Global)%20Assets/PDFs/MG_TalentShortage2018_lo%206_25_18_FINAL.pdf. Somerville, Heather. “Chinese Tech Investors Flee Silicon Valley as Trump Tightens Scrutiny.” Reuters, January 7, 2019. https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-venture-china-regulation-insight/chinese-tech-investors-flee-silicon-valley-as-trump-tightens-scrutiny-idUKKCN1P10CA. Sonnenfeld, Jeffery A. “What Makes Great Boards Great.” Harvard Business Review, September 2002. https://hbr.org/2002/09/what-makes-great-boards-great. Sorkin, Andrew Ross, and Floyd Norris.
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One solution to combat cannibalization is ring-fencing, or granting the new business its own financial and managerial lines that are clearly delineated from the existing mother ship. This approach defuses the competition for resources, thereby giving the new venture the opportunity to flourish. Western Union, for example, set up WU.com as a separate entity headquartered in Silicon Valley. This ensured that the new division would benefit from economies of scale and the local talent pool, while also remaining free from the established thinking, entrenched processes, and possible constraints of the larger company. When it comes to managing potential cannibalization, there is no hard evidence that one approach is better than another.
This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits
SCARED SUCCESSFUL During the Internet 2.0 era—which spanned about ten years and ended with the 2016 US presidential election—fast growth and big valuations defined the mainstream idea of success. In 2014, a New York Times article profiled an HR software start-up called Zenefits, which, the lead sentence explains, is “one of the fastest-growing companies in recent Silicon Valley history.” The profile glowingly notes the company’s fast growth, A-list Silicon Valley investors, and a recent $4.5 billion “unicorn” valuation. Zenefits was the newest zeitgeist-shaking success. But in the article, Zenefits’ founder and CEO, a man named Parker Conrad, gives a series of startling quotes that clash with the breathless tone.
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See also financial security self-coherence, 174, 201, 209, 214, 225, 243 self-interest affects other people, 127–28, 131 benefits society, 26–27, 31 broader notion of, 128, 133–34, 158, 225 and financial maximization, 134, 196 and “hockey stick” graph, 125–27, 200, 243 maximizing it, 31–32, 125–26, 130–33, 137 moving beyond it, 197 rational, 116–17, 128–30, 133–36, 146, 163, 169, 225 See also game theory self-worth, 93–95, 111, 113, 115 Semmelweis, Ignaz, 149–51 service, poor level of, 62, 67, 84 shareholders, 6, 23, 177 maximizing returns for, 70–72, 169–70 and stock buybacks, 67–70 See also economy: shareholder-centric Silicon Valley companies, 5, 95–96, 98 Silicon Valley HBO series, 96 Smith, Adam, xv, 26–27, 31, 92, 133, 151 Snow, John, 151 social responsibility, 60–61, 82, 101–3, 105, 180 services, 26, 114, 193 society, 15, 92 continuity of, 222–24 and financial maximization, xii, 197 free from domination, 238–40 and generational change, 180–84, 192 positive benefits for, 6, 25 and values, 25, 208, 210 wealth-centric, x–xi, 9, 26, 119 Songkick, 157–58, 162, 263 Soviet Union, 27–28, 31, 267 Spain, 194 specificity, 151, 162 Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Walzer), 237 sports industry, 159–62, 174, 179–80 Square, The, 13 Stanford, 61 Star Trek: The Next Generation, xv Star Wars, 11 start-ups, 52–54, 74, 79, 87–88, 95 status quo, 7–8, 75, 81, 98, 162 stock buybacks, 23, 67–73, 77, 84, 257 students life goals of, 89–92, 94 loans/debts of, 74–75 prioritize wealth, 89–92, 105, 180 success, 23, 93–97, 100–101 Sunstein, Cass, 19 sustainability, xv, 144–45, 168, 172, 174, 211 Swift, Taylor, 175 Tarantino, Quentin, 137.
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We didn’t want to be everything to everybody. The goal was to make something that mattered, and to do it for the long haul. We said publicly that we’d never sell the company or take it public. We would do what was best for Kickstarter’s mission, not use it to do what was best for us. Unlike Silicon Valley companies burning through piles of cash, we stayed small and lived within our means. Kickstarter began operating profitably in its fourteenth month in business. A bit more than one hundred people work out of Kickstarter’s office, an old pencil factory in Brooklyn that the company bought years ago.
Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind
3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler
And it will become even more important for the rest of us to engage critically with the work of tech firms, not least because tech working culture is notorious for its lack of diversity. Roughly nine out of every ten Silicon Valley executives are men.9 Despite the fact that African-Americans make up about 10 per cent of computer science graduates and 14 per cent of the overall workforce, they make up less than 3 per cent of computing roles in Silicon Valley.10 And many in the tech community hold strong political views that are way outside the mainstream. More than 44 per cent of Bitcoin adopters in 2013, for instance, professed to be ‘libertarian or anarcho-capitalists who favour elimination of the state’.11 As I will argue, we put so much at risk when we delegate matters of political importance to the tiny group that happens to be tasked with developing digital technologies at a given time.
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These are not the words of a politician.They’re from the voiceover to ‘Think Different’, a 1997 Apple advertisement featuring iconic footage of rebels including Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King. The ad embodies a worldview, widely held among tech entrepreneurs, that their work is of philosophical as well as commercial importance. ‘It is commonplace in Silicon Valley,’ explains Jaron Lanier, ‘for very young people with a startup in a garage to announce that their goal is to change human culture globally and profoundly, within a few years, and that they aren’t ready yet to worry about money, because acquiring a great fortune is a petty OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Introduction 7 matter that will take care of itself.’5 There is something attractive about this way of thinking, partly because it suggests that tech companies might not be as rapacious as they are sometimes made out to be.
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More than 44 per cent of Bitcoin adopters in 2013, for instance, professed to be ‘libertarian or anarcho-capitalists who favour elimination of the state’.11 As I will argue, we put so much at risk when we delegate matters of political importance to the tiny group that happens to be tasked with developing digital technologies at a given time. That’s true whether you admire the philosophical engineers of Silicon Valley or you think that most ‘tech bros’ have the political sophistication OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Introduction 9 of a transistor. We need an intellectual framework that can help us to think clearly and critically about the political consequences of digital innovation.
Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker
3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar
Damodaran called this “a mind-boggling sum for a young company with only a few hundred million in revenue.”1 He implied that the idea that Uber was worth this much—or even more, as some were claiming—was yet another mark of Silicon Valley hubris. Damodaran’s judgment was based on the classic tools of finance. He estimated the size of the global taxi market, Uber’s prospective market share, and the revenues this was likely to yield. Then he used risk-adjusted cash flows to come up with a company valuation of $5.9 billion. With admirable forthrightness, he even posted his spreadsheet online so others could examine and test his assumptions. Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark Capital and one of Uber’s Silicon Valley investors, took up the challenge. A venture capitalist famous for having been among the first to spot such technology skyrockets as OpenTable, Zillow, and eBay, Gurley argued that the $17 billion valuation was likely an underestimate, and that Damodaran’s figure could be short by a factor of 25.2 Gurley questioned Damodaran’s assumptions about both the total market size and Uber’s potential market share, basing his calculations on economist W.
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Barry Wacksman and Chris Stutzman, Connected by Design: Seven Principles for Business Transformation Through Functional Integration (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2014). CHAPTER 5: LAUNCH 1. Eric M. Jackson, “How eBay’s purchase of PayPal changed Silicon Valley,” VentureBeat, October 27, 2012, http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/27/how-ebays-purchase-of-paypal-changed-silicon-valley/. 2. Blake Masters, “Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Class 2 Notes Essay,” Blake Masters blog, April 6, 2012, http://blakemasters.com/post/20582845717/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-2-notes-essay. Copyright 2014 by David O. Sacks. Reprinted by permission. 3.
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Greenwood and Sunil Wattal, “Show Me the Way to Go Home: An Empirical Investigation of Ride Sharing and Motor Vehicle Homicide,” Platform Strategy Research Symposium, Boston, MA, July 9, 2015, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2557612. 7. John Coté, “SF Cracks Down on ‘MonkeyParking’ Mobile App,” SF Gate, June 23, 2014, http://blog.sfgate.com/cityinsider/2014/06/23/sf-cracks-down-on-street-parking-cash-apps/. 8. Kevin Roose, “Does Silicon Valley Have a Contract-Worker Problem?” New York, September 18, 2014, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/silicon-valleys-contract-worker-problem.html. 9. George J. Stigler, “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 2, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 3–21. 10. Jean-Jacques Laffont and Jean Tirole, “The Politics of Government Decision-Making: A Theory of Regulatory Capture,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 106, no. 4 (1991): 1089–1127. 11.
Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration
The bid collapsed, Yang was forced out, and in January 2009 Carol Bartz, a tough-talking Silicon Valley veteran, was offered the helm of Yahoo. She was more receptive to a simpler offer from Microsoft: that it would power Yahoo search and help serve advertisements. It seemed Ballmer had got what he wanted. (But even that soured: Facebook slurped up advertising revenue while Bartz slashed costs, so Yahoo’s revenue fell while its profits rose, and the Bing deal wasn’t profitable for either. The Yahoo board fired Bartz in September 2011 – and shocked Silicon Valley by hiring Mayer in July 2012.) Google’s identity Inside Microsoft, the awareness that it wasn’t winning in search became pervasive.
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An existing rival such as Sun Microsystems, or database maker Oracle, or web browser company Netscape? No, none of those, said Gates: ‘I fear someone in a garage who is devising something completely new.’ Obviously, he didn’t know where, or what, or who; as Auletta noted, ‘He just knew that innovation was usually the enemy of established companies.’1 Why a garage? Because Silicon Valley garages are famous breeding grounds for innovative, disruptive companies that could react faster to conditions and use the newest technology, buoyed by venture capital funding and not burdened with bureaucracy and quarterly earnings reports. Gates is the classic example of what the writer Malcolm Gladwell calls ‘outliers’:2 people who have spent enormous amounts of time learning and then refining their skills – in Gates’s case, programming.
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In October 1997, Michael Dell, chief executive and founder of Dell Computer, was asked what he would do if he were in Jobs’s position, leading a company that had just lost $1 billion on revenues of $7 billion. Dell could shrug off Apple’s existence: his business was more than five times bigger, was based in Texas rather than Silicon Valley, spent comparatively little on research and development, was not known for innovation, and sold PCs using Windows. Dell was the anti-Apple, Michael Dell the anti-Jobs. ‘What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders,’ Dell replied bluntly.8 The shareholders at the time would have received $5.49 per share – a total of $2.7 billion.
Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain
affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population
‘It’s so nice to be in a country where you feel you belong,’ said Disha.48 As the US turns away talented tech workers, Toronto’s appeal is growing. In 2017 it added more tech talent than the San Francisco Bay Area (which includes Silicon Valley), Seattle and Washington DC combined.49 Meanwhile, venture capital investment in Toronto-based start-ups more than quadrupled between 2013 and 2018.50 Among those flocking there are Canadians who had previously moved to Silicon Valley to work. Australia too is fast-tracking visa decisions for temporary skilled workers.51 But at the same time it has tightened visa requirements, while government rhetoric is much less welcoming than Canada’s.
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In rich ones, they are a much larger and rising share of the population – up from 9.3 percent in 2000 to 14 percent in 2019.8 Most of the increase in international migration since 2000 has been from poorer countries to rich ones, and to a lesser extent within Europe. While people also increasingly move between rich countries – think American bankers in London and European tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley – their numbers remain small as a share of the global total. Globally, almost as many migrants are women as men.9 Three-quarters are of working age.10 And while most migrants move to work or study, three in eight migrants in the rich countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are the spouses, children or relatives of migrants (who also often work once they arrive).11 In proportion When I first visited the Gulf region, I gamely tried out the few words of Arabic that I knew on taxi drivers and hotel staff, such as shukraan (thank you).
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And even dynamic models generally define away migrants’ contribution to innovation and enterprise because they assume that new technologies fall like manna from heaven, ignore the role of individual inventors and entrepreneurs, and fail to consider the creative boost of diverse people with different perspectives sparking off each other. Yet how can one explain technological progress if one ignores the role of Albert Einstein, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Silicon Valley? Fortunately, some economists are now trying to measure the gains from migration more broadly and realistically.13 Florence Jaumotte and co-authors at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) found that by raising the diversity of skills and ideas in advanced economies, migration tends to boost local living standards significantly.14 A one-percentage point rise in the share of migrants in the population tends to lift living standards (GDP per person) by 2 percent longer term.
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
Indeed, a significant part of the strategy of intangible-rich companies is combining and managing their intangibles in such a way as to minimize the spillovers and maximize the benefits they get from them. Someone who is unusually honest about the lengths businesses go to in order to stop others benefiting from their lovingly created intangibles is venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the so-called don of Silicon Valley’s PayPal Mafia. Thiel’s refreshingly candid book on entrepreneurship Zero to One makes it clear that the way to create very valuable start-ups is to create businesses that, as far as possible, have monopoly positions in big markets. In Thiel’s management philosophy, you create these defensible opportunities by investing in the right sorts of software, marketing, and networks of customers and suppliers (three classic intangibles) and by bringing them together in ways that competitors find hard to copy.
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It’s easy to imagine how low-skilled workers in developed countries might lose out if they don’t have the skills to work with computers, or if their jobs are threatened by lower-paid workers in other countries. But the way these changes would benefit only the very rich is less clear. Some of the very rich have gotten richer because of technology or because they employ cheap foreign labor. But certainly not all. For every Silicon Valley mogul or quantitative hedge fund owner, there are a lot of senior managers of what we’d think of as normal businesses among the new elite. Piketty, for example, estimates that between 60 and 70 percent of the top 0.1 percent are chief executives and other senior corporate managers. A third confounding fact is the role of housing in wealth inequality.
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(Witness the dozens of Silicon-soundalike names that have been coined around the world in homage to northern California’s tech cluster—from Silicon Roundabout in London and Silicon Wadi in Israel, to any number of more aspirational variants elsewhere.) Cluster policy is appealing in part because of the glamorous and well-publicized success of places like Silicon Valley and Israel’s tech sector—what politician wouldn’t want their country to be at the forefront of a technological revolution? Cluster policy can also be politically convenient: governments that for ideological reasons are anxious about seeming too interventionist can point out that they are only helping out clusters that are already there, not trying to create clusters from scratch; governments unable or unwilling to spend much money will find that when it comes to cluster policy, moral suasion and cost-effective networking events go a long way.
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
She began her project while spending a summer internship at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (the same place where, in 1979, Steve Jobs and a team of Apple engineers made a visit to view the original graphical user interface, a trip that became part of history when the ideas reemerged in the original Macintosh in 1984). Though Voida was not a Macintosh user and didn't even have an iPod then, many of her colleagues at PARC's Ubiquitous Computer Group were hard-core iTunes lovers, and they agreed to work on the project with her. Voida's test bed for study was a Silicon Valley tech company with about 175 employees (she promised to keep its identity confidential) that allowed her access to its computer network so she could track the playlists available and who looked at them. Then she in- Identity terviewed the heavy users among the twenty or so workers who participated in this benign musical surveillance.
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At one point the universal goal of the literate was to write the Great American Novel. Then it moved to the Great American Screenplay. And now, the Great American iTunes Library. Identity ^ A thousand songs—an entire record collection—in your pocket? It sounded like a dream. But a small team working for a big company in Silicon Valley understood that digital technology had put that far-fetched scenario within reach. They set out to create a supercool device that you could take on the road, then happily scan through oodles of songs transferred from your CD until you found the one you wanted. Or, if you preferred, you could shuffle through your whole library.
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But as the iPods rolled off the assembly line, the fun was just beginning. And what about the DEC computer scientists who worked on the Personal Jukebox? "In the back of our minds, it was 'Gee, this could've been Compaq,' " says Ted Wobber, who with Andrew Birrell now works at Microsoft's research facility in Silicon Valley. "But practically speaking, I'm happy for Apple and happy that such products are available on the market. They're very useful. And, you know, I enjoy owning one." The Perfect Thing 74 Cool J>Dr. Carl Rohde is a cultural anthropologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. He studies coolness.
The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain
airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks
After four years in the Chinese market, Google had shut down its Chinese search engine in 2010, in the midst of a dispute over a hack of the company and censored search results.45 “That doesn’t matter,” he explained. “We have our own search engine, Baidu. We have our own companies now. The world is changing, and I hope that Silicon Valley and the NSA will not dominate forever.” “But don’t you think if China wants to get to the level of Silicon Valley, it’ll have to open up the internet,” I asked him, “so researchers can get the information they need to make good technology?” “That doesn’t matter, either,” he said. “In China, our technology is connected to the future of our country.
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China Internet Network Information Center, “The Internet Timeline of China (2011),” February 19, 2013, https://cnnic.com.cn/IDR/hlwfzdsj/201302/t20130219_38709.htm. 9. Dave Gershgorn, “The Inside Story of How AI Got Good Enough to Dominate Silicon Valley,” Business Insider, June 28, 2018, https://qz.com/1307091/the-inside-story-of-how-ai-got-good-enough-to-dominate-silicon-valley/. 10. I am grateful to a former Google AI developer for illustrating the techniques and commercial applications of GPU technologies in an interview. 11. Allison Linn, “Microsoft Researchers Win ImageNet Computer Vision Challenge,” AI Blog, Microsoft, December 10, 2015, https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/microsoft-researchers-win-imagenet-computer-vision-challenge/. 12.
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Deep neural nets could control self-driving cars, help physicians diagnose patients, and detect credit card fraud.5 Until 2012, the idea of creating a deep neural network that could impact the market was dismissed as quackery. No matter how many times they tried, the computer scientists at Microsoft Research Asia, and other emerging companies, were hitting a wall. AI developers in China and Silicon Valley told me in 2012 that building a neural network would be a gold mine for Microsoft. Microsoft had acquired Skype, the popular visual calling and conferencing software used worldwide, for $8.5 billion in May 2011—its largest acquisition up to that time.6 If Skype or Microsoft Windows could secure the ability to recognize speech and faces, it would be a breakthrough.
Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance
When we look back on the period following the Great Recession, it will be remembered not as a time of great innovation, but of great exploitation, when tech companies reached “unicorn” status (valued over $1 billion) on the backs of employees they refused to even deign to label, let alone respect, as such. * * * The dynamics and overarching philosophy of Silicon Valley create the perfect conditions for fissured workplaces. Silicon Valley thinks the “old” way of work is broken. It loves overwork. Its ideology of “disruption”—to “move fast and break things,” as Mark Zuckerberg famously put it—is contingent on a willingness to destroy any semblance of a stable workplace. In the startup world, the ultimate goal is “going public”: creating a high enough stock valuation, and, afterward, unmitigated growth, no matter the human cost.
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., 185 Schulte, Brigid, 222, 224 second jobs, 79–81, 102–3, 144, 186 See also gig and freelance work; Uber and ride-hailing companies Second Shift, The (Hochschild), 211 sexual harassment, 109–11 Shafir, Eldar, 233 Sheehan, Dan, 3 Shell, Ellen Ruppel, 82, 132 Shils, Edward, 9 Shulevitz, Judith, 190 Silicon Valley, 73–74, 141, 172, 187 Skimm, 194–95 Slack, 130, 149–51, 158, 171–74, 176 sleep, lack of burnout and, xvi children, 34, 46, 58 motherhood and, 224 Silicon Valley, 73 stress and, 127–28 Small Animals (Brooks), 213 Snapchat, 156, 159 social media addiction to, 156–58, 170–71 anxiety from hatefulness, 168–69 digital labor, 172 dramatization of news, 169–70 social media influencer, 163 social networks, 199–202 Social Security early history, 7 freelancing and, 139 key economic risks, 8 minimal benefits, 14 postwar expectation, 13 Social Security Act, 13 Spire Stone, 133 Standing, Guy, 96–98, 145–46 Stephens, Bret, 10 Stevenson, David, 62–63 stock market, 103–4, 106, 112, 114 Stockton, Nick, 170 Stoller, Matt, 105 St.
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“Work wasn’t just work; it was their life’s passion,” Martin explains, “and they devoted every waking hour to it, usually to the exclusion of nonwork relationships, exercise, sleep, food, and sometimes even personal care.” Psychologists at Lockheed, one of the preeminent companies in what would become Silicon Valley, dubbed the particularly desirable worker mentality “the sci-tech personality,” Martin says, and molded their work cultures around them: Work whatever hours you want, for as long as you want, in whatever clothes you want, and we’ll make it happen. At HP, they brought engineers breakfast “so they would remember to eat”—an early iteration of the cafeterias and free meals and snacks that have come to characterize startup culture.
Coastal California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet
1960s counterculture, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, flex fuel, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, Lyft, machine readable, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar
The Peninsula South of San Francisco, squeezed tightly between the bay and the coastal foothills, a vast swath of suburbia continues toward San Jose. Dotted inside this area are Palo Alto, home of Stanford University, and Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the Bay Area’s tech industry. Don’t bother looking for Silicon Valley on the map – you won’t find it. Because silicon chips form the basis of modern microcomputers, and the Santa Clara Valley – stretching from Palo Alto through Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Cupertino to San Jose – is thought of as the birthplace of the microcomputer, it's nicknamed ‘Silicon Valley.’ It’s hard to imagine that even after WWII this was still a wide expanse of orchards and farms. Further west, the 70-mile stretch of coastal Hwy 1 from San Francisco to Santa Cruz is one of California's most bewitching oceanside drives.
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Be careful what you scoff at: from pet rocks to soy burgers, California’s flavor of the month is often next year’s global trend. To read more about the garage-workshop culture of Silicon Valley go to www.folklore.org, which covers the crashes and personality clashes that made geek history. High Tech Booms & Busts In the 1950s Stanford University in Palo Alto needed to raise money to finance postwar growth, so it built an industrial park and leased space to high-tech companies like Hewlett-Packard, which formed the nucleus of Silicon Valley. When Hewlett-Packard introduced the first personal computer in 1968, advertisements breathlessly gushed that the ‘light’ (40lb) machine could ‘take on roots of a fifth-degree polynomial, Bessel functions, elliptic integrals and regression analysis’ – all for just $4900 (almost $35,000 today).
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Beverly Hills 90210 (1990s) made that LA zip code into a status symbol, while The OC (2000s) glamorized Orange County and Silicon Valley (2014–now) satirizes NorCal start-ups. Reality-TV fans will recognize Southern California locations from Top Chef, Real Housewives of Orange County and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. A suburban San Francisco start-up changed the TV game in 2005, launching a streaming video on a platform called YouTube. With on-demand streaming services competing with cable channels to launch original series, we are entering a new golden age of California television. Netflix Studios (in Silicon Valley and LA), Amazon Studios (Santa Monica) and Hulu Studios (Santa Monica) are churning out original series, feeding binge-watching cravings with futuristic dystopias such as Stranger Things, Man in the High Castle and The Handmaid's Tale.
The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna
3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War
Roosevelt’s post-Depression New Deal created large professional bureaucracies such as the Social Security Administration, and President Harry Truman’s post–World War II Federal Highway Administration completed the nation’s transportation infrastructure. Silicon Valley became the epicenter of innovation not through the accidental comingling of sunny weather and venture capital but with strategic support from the Pentagon to develop industries from radar to semiconductors to the Internet and GPS. These are the technocratic foundations of America’s strength, even as they are now held in disdain by those who label professional bureacracies a “deep state.” If there is anything about the United States today that Asians want to emulate, it is not Washington’s politics but Silicon Valley’s story of “managed innovation.” Billions of people around the world are rightly amazed by the United States’ dynamism and resilience: no other nation in history, democracy or otherwise, has created such a high standard of living for 300 million people.
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Fact Sheet,” Sept. 8, 2017, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/fact-sheet/asian-americans-chinese-in-the-u-s/; United States Census Bureau, “Los Angeles County a Microcosm of Nation’s Diverse Collection of Business Owners, Census Bureau Reports,” Dec. 15, 2015, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-209.html. 10 López, Ruiz, and Patten, “Key Facts About Asian Americans.” 11 Shalene Gupta, “Big Fat Indian Weddings Get Bigger and Fatter,” Fortune, Aug. 8, 2014, http://fortune.com/2014/08/08/indian-weddings/. 12 Sari Horwitz and Emma Brown, “Justice Department Plans New Project to Sue Universities over Affirmative Action Policies,” Washington Post, Aug. 1, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justice-department-plans-new-project-to-sue-universities-over-affirmative-action-policies/2017/08/01/6295eba4-772b-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.808b27e06276. 13 Vivek Wadhwa, “The Face of Success, Part I: How the Indians Conquered Silicon Valley,” Inc., Jan. 13, 2012, https://www.inc.com/vivek-wadhwa/how-the-indians-succeeded-in-silicon-valley.html. 14 Ibid. 15 Jane Ciabattari, “Why Is Rumi the Best-Selling Poet in the US?,” BBC, October 21, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140414-americas-best-selling-poet. 16 Charles Lam, “The 115th Congress is History-Making for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders,” NBC News, Jan. 4, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/115th-congress-history-making-asian-americans-pacific-islanders-n703261. 17 Statistics Canada, “Data Tables, 2016 Census: Citizenship, Place of Birth, Immigrant Status and Period of Immigration, Age and Sex for the Population in Private Households of Canada, Provinces and Territories, Census Metropolitan Areas and Census Agglomerations, 2016 Census—25% Sample Data,” January 16, 2018, https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/dt-td/Rp-eng.cfm?
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Though the Trump administration has promoted more official visits and arms transfers with Taiwan, even the island’s current nationalist government has narrowed its political ambitions, focusing instead on attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) and tourists from beyond China, launching a new industrial policy around alternative energy, and even fashioning itself as a Silicon Valley–like tech hub. As with Japan, the outcome of a conflict with China, even in a scenario of a US-backed stalemate, would be a severe loss of confidence in Taiwan’s security. By the twentieth anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover in 2017, a Taiwanese official commented to me that China had really become “one country, three systems” given how strategically straitjacketed both Hong Kong and Taiwan are.
Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend
1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar
Founded in 1984 by husband and wife Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, who built Stanford University’s campus network in the early 1980s, Cisco has grown into the world’s leading supplier for the sophisticated switches and routers that power the Internet. Cisco’s products not only push bits around offices, schools, and homes, but also sling them back and forth across undersea cables that link continents. It’s one of Silicon Valley’s largest and most-watched bellwethers. For a brief period in March 2000, at the height of the telecom bubble, it was the most valuable company in the world. But with size comes stagnation. Finding growth opportunities has become a constant struggle for Cisco, and to make a dent on the bottom line it needs to have billion-dollar payouts.
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As Phillip Torrone described it on the blog of Make magazine, a kind of latter-day Popular Science for hardware hackers, “it’s nice to pay your dues and impress others with your massive Art of Electronics book, but for everyone else out there, they just want an LED to blink for their Burning Man costume.”34 The solution to physical computing’s steep learning curve came from Italy’s own Silicon Valley, the town of Ivrea. Best known as the hometown of pioneering Italian computer maker Olivetti, in the early 2000s Ivrea was the site of a short-lived but highly influential design school, the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII). Ivrea, like the Interactive Telecommunications Program, was a magnet for hardware tinkerers and attracted students who pioneered improvements on industrial microcontrollers, such as Colombian artist Hernando Barragán, whose Wiring prototyping platform was a huge step forward for nonengineers who wanted to experiment with physical computing.
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At the time, Intel’s Intellec-8 computer cost $2,400 in its base configuration (and as much as $10,000 with all the add-ons needed to develop software for it). The Altair used the same Intel 8080 microprocessor and sold as a kit for less than $400. But you had to put the thing together yourself.12 Hobbyists quickly formed groups like Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club to trade tips, hacks, and parts for these DIY computers. Homebrew was a training camp for innovators like Apple cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who would overthrow IBM’s dominance of the computer industry. (According to Wozniak, the Apple I and Apple II were demo’d at Homebrew meetings repeatedly during their development.)13 Never before had so much computing power been put in the hands of so many.
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
affirmative action, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, computer age, corporate raider, crew resource management, medical residency, old-boy network, Pearl River Delta, popular electronics, power law, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, union organizing, upwardly mobile, why are manhole covers round?
“If you put your Mac in that funny mode where you can see the code,” Joy says, “I see things that I remember typing in twenty-five years ago.” And do you know who wrote much of the software that allows you to access the InternetBill Joy. After graduating from Berkeley, Joy cofounded the Silicon Valley firm Sun Microsystems, which was one of the most critical players in the computer revolution. There he rewrote another computer languageJavaand his legend grew still further. Among Silicon Valley insiders, Joy is spoken of with as much awe as someone like Bill Gates of Microsoft. He is sometimes called the Edison of the Internet. As the Yale computer scientist David Gelernter says, "Bill Joy is one of the most influential people in the modern history of computing/' The story of Bill Joy's genius has been told many times, and the lesson is always the same.
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It's as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani. And when was Jobs born? Steve Jobs: February 24, 1955 Another of the pioneers of the software revolution was Eric Schmidt. He ran Novell, one of Silicon Valley's most important software firms, and in 2001, he became the chief executive officer of Google. Birth date? Eric Schmidt: April 27, 1955 I don't mean to suggest, of course, that every software tycoon in Silicon Valley was born in 1955. Some weren't, just as not every business titan in the United States was born in the mid-i830s. But there are very clearly patterns here, and what's striking is how little we seem to want to acknowledge them.
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All of the fourteen men and women on the list above had vision and talent. But they also were given an extraordinary opportu nity, in the same way that hockey and soccer players born in January, February, and March are given an extraordinary opportunity.'1" Now let's do the same kind of analysis for people like Bill Joy and Bill Gates. If you talk to veterans of Silicon Valley, they'll tell you that the most important date in the history of the personal computer revolution was January 1975. That was when the magazine Popular Electronics ran a cover story on an extraordinary machine called the Altair 8800. The Altair cost $397. It was a do-it-yourself contraption that you could assemble at home.
One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra
And you’d need antitrust regulators to clarify that while businesses in the same sector meeting to coordinate prices would be an illegal cartel, meeting to coordinate relocation concepts is encouraged. At the end of the day, media and publishing on their own just aren’t that big a deal economically, but a basically parallel situation exists in Silicon Valley, which is a huge deal. The global information technology industry is concentrated in a series of office parks not quite close enough to San Francisco to qualify as suburbs because once upon a time that region was the center of transistor manufacturing. Over the decades, Silicon Valley has been a fount of innovation and wealth creation. But it’s also become hellishly expensive. And the fundamentally suburban-style town layouts don’t suit the sensibilities of modern young technology workers, many of whom now make inconvenient commutes from the urban centers of San Francisco and Oakland.
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The effect is gender specific—girls are likely to grow up to be innovators only if their city includes an existing stockpile of female innovators (and similarly, if there are male role models for boys), underscoring the importance of role models and self-image. Particularly fascinating: The geographical aspects hold regardless of where you live as an adult. The Boston area has thriving industrial clusters in both information technology and medical devices. But Boston-area patent holders who grew up in Silicon Valley are very likely to have computer-related patents, whereas those who grew up in Minneapolis, where there’s a robust medical device industry, are likely to have medical device patents. In other words, it’s not just that people are likely to work in locally thriving industries—the specifics of childhood experience seem to matter.
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A convenient outcome for American society would be for the low price of Cleveland to attract investment, with various HQ2s or similar facilities replacing some of the surface parking lots that currently scar its downtown. But in practice we’ve seen that it doesn’t work that way. Google’s biggest office presence is in Silicon Valley, and its number two is in New York City. Amazon’s big expansion is coming to the DC area. And when companies do reach outside the big coastal cities, they tend to find that the most attractive candidates are places like Nashville and Austin—state capitals with a strong university presence and hip cultural scene rather than shrinking rust belt metros.
Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff
1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game
Even promising wealth redistribution ideas, such as universal basic income, are recontextualized by the technosolutionists as a way of keeping their companies going. In principle, the idea of a negative income tax for the poor, or a guaranteed minimum income for everyone, makes economic sense. But when we hear these ideas espoused by Silicon Valley’s CEOs, it’s usually in the context of keeping the extraction going. People have been sucked dry, so now the government should just print more money for them to spend. The argument merely reinforces the human obligation to keep consuming, or to keep working for an unlivable wage. More countercultural solutions, such as bitcoin and the blockchain, are no less technosolutionist in spirit.
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The most energetic billionaires are busy developing aerospace and terraforming technologies for an emergency escape to a planet as yet unspoiled by their own extractive investment practices. These oligarchs deploy an “insulation equation” to determine how much of their fortunes they need to spend in order to protect themselves from the economic, social, and environmental damage that their business activities have caused. Even the new headquarters of the biggest Silicon Valley firms are built more like fortresses than corporate parks, micro-feudal empires turned inward on their own private forests and gardens and protected from the teeming masses outside. Such expenditures, no matter how obscene, represent what investors consider a calculated “hedge” against bad times.
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The models would all work if only there weren’t people in the way. That’s why capitalism’s true believers are seeking someone or, better, something to do their bidding with greater intelligence and less empathy than humans. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 53. In the future envisioned by Wall Street and Silicon Valley alike, humans are just another externality. There are too many of us, asking for salaries and healthcare and meaningful work. Each victory we win for human labor, such as an increase in the minimum wage, makes us that much more expensive to employ, and supports the calculus through which checkout workers are replaced by touchscreen kiosks.
The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind
"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor
Peters, “The Rise of Finance and the Decline of Organized Labor in the Advanced Capitalist Countries,” New Political Economy 16, no. 1, p. 93, cited in Sayer, Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, pp. 187–88. 7. Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, “Why Do Cities Matter? Local Growth and Aggregate Growth,” Chicago Unbound: Kreisman Working Paper Series in Housing Law and Policy, 2015. 8. Shirin Ghaffary, “Many in Silicon Valley Support Universal Basic Income. Now the California Democratic Party Does, Too,” Vox, March 8, 2018; Candice Norwood, “Silicon Valley Is Helping Cities Test a Radical Anti-Poverty Idea,” Governing, July 16, 2018. 9. Barry C. Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly and the Economics of Destruction (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2010); Lina M. Khan, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” Yale Law Journal 126, no. 3, January 2017; Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019). 10.
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Instead, the emphasis in harmonization policy has been on common industrial standards, the liberalization of financial systems, and intellectual property rights, including pharmaceutical patents. These kinds of harmonization benefit transnational firms, investors on Wall Street or in the City of London, and the holders of intellectual property rights in Silicon Valley and the pharmaceutical industry. In many cases, this kind of regulatory harmonization makes sense—standardizing product safety measures or supply chain specifications, for example. But the new regulatory harmonization agreements produce a democratic deficit by removing whole areas of regulation from the realm of ordinary legislation.
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Lost in the hype, however, has been the important qualification of Hsieh and Moretti: “The assumption of inter-industry mobility is clearly false in the short run.”7 In other words, neither personal nor national productivity will necessarily be raised if a roboticist moves to Wall Street or a stockbroker moves to Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, a janitor or home health aide who moves from a small town to either New York City or the Bay Area to practice the same trade could be worse off because of the higher cost of living. * * * — SO MUCH FOR the neoliberal establishment panaceas of higher education, retraining, and geographic mobility.
A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator
Today, it is the innovation capital of the world, producing more patents, creating more high-tech jobs, and attracting more venture capital funding than anywhere else in the country by a long shot.29 Nor is it the case that Silicon Valley and places like it only produce the sort of high-skilled work that we tend to associate with large technology companies. Yes, it is true that, if you are a computer scientist, you are going to find the best-paid work in Silicon Valley: in places like Boston, New York, or Washington, DC, you might earn up to 40 percent less. But even if you are not high-skilled in that way, being near places like Silicon Valley has tended to be worthwhile in the past. San Francisco and San Jose, for instance, have some of the best-paid barbers and waiters in the United States, alongside many other roles.30 In fact, dense urban areas of all types have traditionally meant higher wages for everyone there, skilled or unskilled.
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Notably, while workers with a college degree have been outperforming those with only a high school education, those with postgraduate qualifications have seen their wages soar far more, as seen in Figure 2.3 here.12 The accelerating pace of the race explains, in part, why Silicon Valley responded to President Donald Trump’s immigration controls with such emphatic, collective disapproval. As part of his “America First” policy, Trump promised to restrict the “specialty occupation” H-1B visas that allow around eighty-five thousand foreigners into the United States each year, often to work at high-tech companies. Silicon Valley has a significant appetite for high-skilled workers and relies upon these visas to bring in foreign workers to satisfy this demand.
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Stories of technological progress are often tied up with tales of regional rise and fall: think of the Rust Belt versus Silicon Valley, for instance. From 2000 to 2010, the US areas with the biggest fall in population (aside from New Orleans, battered by Hurricane Katrina) were Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Toledo, and St. Louis. These Rust Belt cities, traditionally dependent upon manufacturing, lost up to 25 percent of their population as that sector was pushed into decline.28 In Silicon Valley, meanwhile, technological advances were responsible for stratospheric takeoff. Today, it is the innovation capital of the world, producing more patents, creating more high-tech jobs, and attracting more venture capital funding than anywhere else in the country by a long shot.29 Nor is it the case that Silicon Valley and places like it only produce the sort of high-skilled work that we tend to associate with large technology companies.
The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor
Owning your home became foundational to the American dream and to the growth in wealth of middle classes in Europe and Asia in the 20th century. In the United States, we put a thumb on the tax scale to enable this by making the interest on mortgages tax deductible. This began with retirement savings accounts like 401(k)s and should just be the beginning. Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley in significant part because one thing that drove talent from other places and industries, like finance and consulting, was employee ownership in the form of stock options. Labor unions ought to recognize that wages are not the only thing worth fighting for. Think about how much better off Uber drivers would have been if they were real beneficiaries of its IPO.
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The Chinese technology industry began as something of a counterfeit Silicon Valley, populated by copycat companies producing cheaper, less functional knockoffs of American technology, often with stolen intellectual property. But with close supervision and substantial assistance from Beijing, the industry came into its own. Today, companies like Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and Huawei are competing with Western technology giants for global market share. The US and China are near peers in technology, and in some areas the Chinese technology industry is outpacing Silicon Valley. Like the manufacturing boom of prior decades, the ascendance of the Chinese technology industry was engineered by government policy makers.
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But no matter their status or specialty, all tax havens offer their clients one thing: an escape from the laws of someplace else. For instance, when Google received €3.96 from the Ascani family, it likely would have avoided paying a dime to the Italian government. As soon as the transaction was completed, that money departed the country. The payment did not go directly to Google LLC, the corporation headquartered in Silicon Valley, nor to Alphabet Inc., the company that owns Google and its various side projects for self-driving cars, drone delivery, biotechnology, and the like. Instead, the Ascanis’ €3.96 worked its way through a chain of corporate entities scattered across three different countries, none of which played any role in getting Marco his belt.
Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game
Notes 1 “Top 5 Tech Giants Who Shape Shenzhen, ‘China's Silicon Valley,’” South China Morning Post, April 2015, https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/technology/enterprises/article/1765430/top-5-tech-giants-who-shape-shenzhen-chinas-silicon. 2 Interview with Liu Guohong by Peter Vanham, Shenzhen, China, June 2019. 3 Nanyang Commercial Bank, https://www.ncb.com.hk/nanyang_bank/eng/html/111.html. 4 “First Land Auction Since 1949 Planned in Key China Area,” Los Angeles Times/Reuters, June 1987, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-06-28-mn-374-story.html. 5 “The Silicon Valley of Hardware,” Wired, https://www.wired.co.uk/video/shenzhen-episode-1. 6 “Exclusive: Apple Supplier Foxconn to Invest $1 Billion in India, Sources Say,” Reuters, July 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-foxconn-india-apple-exclusive/exclusive-apple-supplier-foxconn-to-invest-1-billion-in-india-sources-say-idUSKBN24B2GH. 7 “Global 500: Ping An Insurance,” Fortune, https://fortune.com/global500/2019/ping-an-insurance. 8 “The World's Biggest Electric Vehicle Company Looks Nothing Like Tesla,” Bloomberg, April 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-16/the-world-s-biggest-electric-vehicle-company-looks-nothing-like-tesla. 9 “How Shenzhen Battles Congestion and Climate Change,” Chia Jie Lin, GovInsider, July 2018, https://govinsider.asia/security/exclusive-shenzhen-battles-congestion-climate-change/. 10 “China's Debt Threat: Time to Rein in the Lending Boom,” Martin Wolf, Financial Times, July 2018 https://www.ft.com/content/0c7ecae2-8cfb-11e8-bb8f-a6a2f7bca546. 11 “China's Debt-to-GDP Ratio Surges to 317 Percent,” The Street, May 2020, https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/chinas-debt-to-gdp-ratio-hits-317-percent. 12 “Climate Change: Xi Jinping Makes Bold Pledge for China to Be Carbon Neutral by 2060,” South China Morning Post, September 2020, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3102761/climate-change-xi-jinping-makes-bold-pledge-china-be-carbon. 13 “Current Direction for Renewable Energy in China,” Anders Hove, The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, June 2019, https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Current-direction-for-renewable-energy-in-China.pdf. 14 “Everyone around the World is Ditching Coal—Except Asia,” Bloomberg, June 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/the-pandemic-has-everyone-ditching-coal-quicker-except-asia. 15 “Statistical Review of World Energy 2020,” BP, https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html. 16 “World Integrated Trade Solution,” World Bank, 2018, https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/CHN/Year/LTST/TradeFlow/Import/Partner/by-country/Product/Total#. 17 “China Imports,” Comtrade, UN, 2018, https://comtrade.un.org/labs/data-explorer/. 18 “Does Investing in Emerging Markets Still Make Sense?”
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This view on competition had become ingrained not just in the psyche of Friedman's supporters but in the antitrust agenda of the US government and in the practices passed down at leading business schools. Since Silicon Valley mostly offered its products free to consumers, surely there was no problem? For people living in other parts of the world, the economic perspectives of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs always sounded strange. In Europe, regulators held the belief that monopolistic markets were problematic not just when there is an effect on consumer prices but also when there are other abuses of market power by the monopolist.
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American, European, and Japanese companies were among the prime clients of Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers or creating their own joint ventures. But China's original star performer didn't stand still. As time went by, the profile of Shenzhen's industrial activities changed. Known for cheap electronics manufacturing and homegrown copycat firms at first, the city became the Silicon Valley of hardware and the home to the “maker movement of technology,” as Wired put it.5 Start-up entrepreneurs from all over China, and increasingly the world, started to meet and exchange ideas in Shenzhen, building new and innovative companies along the way. Today, many foreign companies still have massive manufacturing bases in Shenzhen.
Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game
Notes 1 “Top 5 Tech Giants Who Shape Shenzhen, ‘China's Silicon Valley,’” South China Morning Post, April 2015, https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/technology/enterprises/article/1765430/top-5-tech-giants-who-shape-shenzhen-chinas-silicon. 2 Interview with Liu Guohong by Peter Vanham, Shenzhen, China, June 2019. 3 Nanyang Commercial Bank, https://www.ncb.com.hk/nanyang_bank/eng/html/111.html. 4 “First Land Auction Since 1949 Planned in Key China Area,” Los Angeles Times/Reuters, June 1987, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-06-28-mn-374-story.html. 5 “The Silicon Valley of Hardware,” Wired, https://www.wired.co.uk/video/shenzhen-episode-1. 6 “Exclusive: Apple Supplier Foxconn to Invest $1 Billion in India, Sources Say,” Reuters, July 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-foxconn-india-apple-exclusive/exclusive-apple-supplier-foxconn-to-invest-1-billion-in-india-sources-say-idUSKBN24B2GH. 7 “Global 500: Ping An Insurance,” Fortune, https://fortune.com/global500/2019/ping-an-insurance. 8 “The World's Biggest Electric Vehicle Company Looks Nothing Like Tesla,” Bloomberg, April 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-16/the-world-s-biggest-electric-vehicle-company-looks-nothing-like-tesla. 9 “How Shenzhen Battles Congestion and Climate Change,” Chia Jie Lin, GovInsider, July 2018, https://govinsider.asia/security/exclusive-shenzhen-battles-congestion-climate-change/. 10 “China's Debt Threat: Time to Rein in the Lending Boom,” Martin Wolf, Financial Times, July 2018 https://www.ft.com/content/0c7ecae2-8cfb-11e8-bb8f-a6a2f7bca546. 11 “China's Debt-to-GDP Ratio Surges to 317 Percent,” The Street, May 2020, https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/chinas-debt-to-gdp-ratio-hits-317-percent. 12 “Climate Change: Xi Jinping Makes Bold Pledge for China to Be Carbon Neutral by 2060,” South China Morning Post, September 2020, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3102761/climate-change-xi-jinping-makes-bold-pledge-china-be-carbon. 13 “Current Direction for Renewable Energy in China,” Anders Hove, The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, June 2019, https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Current-direction-for-renewable-energy-in-China.pdf. 14 “Everyone around the World is Ditching Coal—Except Asia,” Bloomberg, June 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/the-pandemic-has-everyone-ditching-coal-quicker-except-asia. 15 “Statistical Review of World Energy 2020,” BP, https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html. 16 “World Integrated Trade Solution,” World Bank, 2018, https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/CHN/Year/LTST/TradeFlow/Import/Partner/by-country/Product/Total#. 17 “China Imports,” Comtrade, UN, 2018, https://comtrade.un.org/labs/data-explorer/. 18 “Does Investing in Emerging Markets Still Make Sense?”
…
This view on competition had become ingrained not just in the psyche of Friedman's supporters but in the antitrust agenda of the US government and in the practices passed down at leading business schools. Since Silicon Valley mostly offered its products free to consumers, surely there was no problem? For people living in other parts of the world, the economic perspectives of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs always sounded strange. In Europe, regulators held the belief that monopolistic markets were problematic not just when there is an effect on consumer prices but also when there are other abuses of market power by the monopolist.
…
American, European, and Japanese companies were among the prime clients of Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers or creating their own joint ventures. But China's original star performer didn't stand still. As time went by, the profile of Shenzhen's industrial activities changed. Known for cheap electronics manufacturing and homegrown copycat firms at first, the city became the Silicon Valley of hardware and the home to the “maker movement of technology,” as Wired put it.5 Start-up entrepreneurs from all over China, and increasingly the world, started to meet and exchange ideas in Shenzhen, building new and innovative companies along the way. Today, many foreign companies still have massive manufacturing bases in Shenzhen.
The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear
air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog
Just like in high school and throughout his undergraduate years, he was able to sail through the politics and pressures of academic life through a combination of luck, magic, salesmanship, and chutzpah—he was the son of a car dealer, after all—and a mission-focus bullheadedness that made others stand back and wonder, How does he do it? “Publish or perish” would not be the Donald Bitzer Way. With him, the mantra became “PLATO or perish.” His approach fit more with the present-day Silicon Valley mind-set of build something, anything, get it up and running, and show it to other people as soon as possible. Silicon Valley calls it demo or die. Stop yakking and build the damn thing and prove it does what you say it is supposed to do. Compared to Bitzer’s bemused but detached view of the long history of PLATO, Alpert decades later seemed bitter about the story’s inaccuracies and could get downright cranky about the details of who did what, when, and why.
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The same week Bitzer gave this presentation, microcomputer hobbyists, including Steve Wozniak, who had already begun working on what would soon be known as the Apple I, were meeting at the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley. Despite the fact that CERL and Xerox PARC had opened their respective labs to each other and offered demos and hands-on experiences and dialogue, none of what was brewing in Silicon Valley either in corporate offices or hackers’ garages was affecting Bitzer’s vision. He was a true believer in the PLATO way, and he wanted to see it scaled to gigantic proportions. Go big or go home. “It is an entirely different game,” he told the audience, “when you consider the million-terminal network.
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Back at Stanford, September 1979, and Apple Computer’s Apple II personal computer sales were booming. The next big wave of microcomputers, from the Commodore 64, Radio Shack TRS-80, and IBM PC, was still months or years away. Steve Jobs had not yet made his visit to Xerox PARC—that would happen in December. Silicon Valley was ignorant of PLATO, focused instead on things PLATO users would have considered trifling. Silicon Valley start-up visionaries would not wake up to the online world for years to come. Most of the few who had seen PLATO brushed it off as an extravagant waste, a mainframe-based relic that had no relevance in the booming micro revolution that was under way.
Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day
Remember tug-of-war: Be careful when untangling the rope. Even what looks like de-globalization is actually still globalization. Apple is a perfect example of these complex realities. The Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti estimates that Apple is substantially responsible for sixty thousand jobs in Silicon Valley, only twelve thousand of which are employees in its Cupertino headquarters. “In Silicon Valley,” Moretti claims, “high-tech jobs are the cause of local prosperity, and the doctors, lawyers, roofers and yoga teachers are the effect.”2 What appears a thriving community is primarily the result of corporate innovation and global growth—not public investment.
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As the Columbia University professor Saskia Sassen has shown, globalization has enabled a proliferating set of networks—what Sassen calls “circuits”—that have a life of their own. Financial investors in New York and London and the capital pools they deploy in Asia, Swiss and Singaporean commodities brokers and the resource deposits they control in Africa and Latin America, Silicon Valley and Bangalore programmers and their global customers, German and American carmakers and their factories from Mexico to Indonesia—these are all cross-border circuits connected by way of supply chains. It is not countries as a whole that ascend value chains but such circuits of people who are attached to global nodes.
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The tipping point by which any of these flows topples the system can be as unpredictable as the precise location of a lightning strike.*11 These are all serious daily realities, yet rarely is the solution to “put up borders.” Taken too far, frictions can be self-defeating. For example, America’s restrictive immigration policy has frustrated Silicon Valley’s efforts to recruit highly skilled programmers from abroad. Similarly, when Mexico in 2013 decided to raise corporate taxes on mining profits, several global companies declared they would no longer make major investments there, undermining the country’s mining boom by depriving it of essential foreign capital and technology.
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, business climate, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, Edward Thorp, Fairchild Semiconductor, Henry Singleton, horn antenna, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Karl Jansky, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Picturephone, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Russell Ohl, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Teledyne, traveling salesman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
Early on, Bell Labs executives were aware of the vitality of California. At one point in the mid-1960s, for instance, Bill Baker and a New Jersey business consortium hired Frederick Terman, the Stanford engineering dean who had wooed Bill Shockley to Palo Alto in the mid-1950s. Terman is often credited as the father of Silicon Valley. (Shockley, by comparison, is sometimes called the Moses of Silicon Valley, since his failures prevented him from entering the Valley’s promised land of wealth and influence.) The hope was that Terman might be able to map out an innovation hub for New Jersey, based in part around the technological excellence of Bell Labs. One seemingly insoluble problem was that New Jersey was too geographically diffuse for the Palo Alto model to work there.
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It is likewise about why innovation matters, not just to scientists, engineers, and corporate executives but to all of us. That the story is about Bell Labs, and even more specifically about life at the Labs between the late 1930s and the mid-1970s, isn’t a coincidence. In the decades before the country’s best minds began migrating west to California’s Silicon Valley, many of them came east to New Jersey, where they worked in capacious brick-and-glass buildings located on grassy campuses where deer would graze at twilight. At the peak of its reputation in the late 1960s, Bell Labs employed about fifteen thousand people, including some twelve hundred PhDs.
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For those he liked, he promised grand adventures in a new industry and, at least to the silicon transistor inventor Morris Tanenbaum, twice his Bell Labs salary. Shockley only managed to woo one person from Bell Labs. Mostly, he located and hired some promising young scientists from other companies—most notably Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Jean Hoerni, and Eugene Kleiner, all four of whom would do much to put Silicon Valley on the map. None of the recruits seemed particularly aware of Shockley’s shortcomings as a manager. And even so, the attraction of working for his new company was obvious. Robert Noyce famously described what it was like for a young solid-state physicist, toiling in obscurity, to discover that Bill Shockley was calling him: “It was like picking up the phone and talking to God.”12 Even as Shockley was preparing to leave the Labs, Kelly, as a foreign member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, had lobbied for the transistor team, though now disbanded, to be awarded the Nobel Prize.13 For years there had been rumors they were in the running, and Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley heard on November 2, 1956, that they would indeed share a Nobel Prize.
Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America by Charles Murray
2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, centre right, correlation coefficient, critical race theory, Donald Trump, feminist movement, gentrification, George Floyd, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, invention of agriculture, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, publication bias, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, War on Poverty
If you live in a city of half a million people or more, it probably does. Otherwise, probably not. If you live in Corpus Christi, the percentage of Latinos in the table is far too low. If you live in Savannah, the percentage of Blacks is far too low. If you live in Fargo, the percentage of Whites is far too low. If you live in Silicon Valley, the percentage of East Asians is far too low. Table 1 America’s Detailed Racial and Ethnic Profile as of 2019 Non-Latino Latino White 60.0% 12.1% Black 12.4% 0.4% East Asian 2.4% 0.0% South Asian 1.5% 0.0% Filipino/Pacific Islander 1.1% 0.0% Native American 0.7% 0.2% Southeast Asian 0.6% 0.0% Other Asian 0.1% 0.1% Other Single Race 0.3% 4.7% White & Black 0.7% 0.1% White & Native American 0.5% 0.1% White & Asian 0.5% 0.1% Other Combination 0.8% 0.6% TOTAL 81.6% 18.4% NOMENCLATURE Should I refer to the groups in Table 1 as races?
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The map shows three obvious geographic groupings of American zip codes: Africans in the states that once formed the Confederacy; Latins in the southern half of Florida, the Southwest, much of California, and a few other western concentrations; and Europeans everywhere else. A less obvious grouping is the archipelago of zip codes with at least 25 percent Amerindians located on or near Amerindian reservations in the Southwest and Mountain West. A handful of gray zip codes that are at least 25 percent Asian, mostly in Silicon Valley and east of San Francisco, are invisible at the scale of this map. The zip codes associated with Amerindian reservations are geographically large but sparsely populated, containing just 530,046 self-identified Amerindians. The gray zip codes that you cannot see contain 390,843 Asians. The map drives home how radically differently Americans in various parts of the country have experienced the transformation in the national racial profile.
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The Deep South is biracial, with a European majority and a large African minority, but hardly any Asians and relatively few Latins outside the big cities. The Southwest and California up through the Central Valley are also biracial, but with a different pair of races and an even larger minority, Latins being more than a third of the total population. In this part of America, outside the big cities and Silicon Valley, Asians and Africans are a few percent of the population. The geographically vast area where Europeans are still dominant is monoracial in a surprising number of towns and small cities, and elsewhere is no more multiracial than America as a whole was in 1960. These are the bare bones of America’s racial structure.
Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg
2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional
Stanford, and several other universities, quickly set up nonprofit online ventures to supplement their offerings. The extraordinary enrollment numbers also attracted the attention of entrepreneurs in the technology industry, who saw MOOCs as a natural way to “disrupt” the roughly $500 billion higher-education market. Silicon Valley venture capitalists partnered with the first stars of online education, including Thrun and his Stanford computer science colleagues Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Soon several commercial, for-profit ventures were competing for student dollars, including Thrun’s start-up, Udacity, and Coursera, cofounded by Ng and Koller.
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After a few weekends of games around the Bay Area, other parents had invited our whole family to barbecues, beach trips, and holiday meals. Our daughter befriended the players’ sisters. We got advice about local schools, doctors, grocery stores, and after-school programs. We formed car pools, so that everyone could help each other get through the week. No one would mistake our team for a fully integrated community. Silicon Valley is astronomically expensive, and—as is too often the case in modern American youth sports programs—so was participating on the region’s travel team. But about 20 percent of the players lived in poor or working-class neighborhoods like East Palo Alto, a primarily minority community that’s physically separated from prosperous Palo Alto by a large highway.
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Traditional security experts don’t always appreciate the value of these programs, but scholars and international relief agencies believe they’re among the most effective ways to help women and children survive the region’s dangerous monsoons and floods. Poor, developing nations are not the only places experimenting with “floating infrastructure.” In 2017, several leading international design firms proposed building floating work and residential space in the bay water that runs along Silicon Valley. That same year, the New York Times reported on the rise of “seasteading” in areas threatened by rising sea levels—“Floating Cities, No Longer Science Fiction, Begin to Take Shape,” teased one headline—and high-profile investors including PayPal founder Peter Thiel are betting on the concept.
The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game
.* Again, some ideologies are hostile to the state. Marxists, who in practice imposed the most state-centric organization of society ever attempted, have a very different ostensible goal: the state is supposed to ‘wither away’. But the anti-state ideology currently most influential is that of the Libertarians of Silicon Valley. According to them, bitcoin will supplant the state provision of money as users walk away from official currencies. The supermen who own the new e-utilities will each individually determine how best they are used, ignoring or defeating state-imposed regulation. Globally enabled person-to-person connectivity will supplant the spatially bounded society of the nation state.
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Globally enabled person-to-person connectivity will supplant the spatially bounded society of the nation state. ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, leave us alone.’ Liberated from government, we will all blend into one gigantic whole: ‘privacy is no longer a social norm’.24 The outcome will be both morally and practically superior. Alas, I fear not. The Silicon Valley titans who have connected the world imagine that in doing so they are ushering in a global society that unites around their own Libertarian values. This is highly unlikely. The new technologies of person-to-person connectivity are displacing the networked groups that were driven by the chance of shared location, whether a local community or a nation.
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My prediction is that unless this divergence between our polities and our bonds is reversed our societies will degenerate, becoming less generous, less trusting and less co-operative. These trends are already underway. In principle, we could re-engineer our political units to be non-spatial. Presumably some of the techno-geeks of Silicon Valley have such a future as a gleam in the eye: the opt-in, opt-out polity with each individual free to choose regardless of where they happen to be living. Each could have its own currency – to each its own bitcoin. Each could have its own tax rates, welfare benefits, health scheme; there are schemes for floating islands outside any national jurisdiction.
After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy
1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar
The critics blame platform founders and venture capitalists for corrupting a good idea. And there’s plenty of evidence to support that charge. But curiously, faith in the positive possibilities of digital sharing got its start in Silicon Valley, among just those people. They believed their technology would automatically yield decent work and good social relations. Although things haven’t turned out as predicted, the Silicon Valley discourse was right about one thing. Technological innovation and cultural change have put a person-to-person economy, with its solution to the problem of work, within reach. That’s the view we started with, and after a decade of research we still believe in it.
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Cyberutopians jumped on the “free market” bandwagon,* combining “the free-wheeling spirit” of hippies with the “entrepreneurial zeal” of yuppies.13 In the process they came to believe in what Thomas Frank calls “market populism,” the view that “markets enjoyed some mystic, organic connection to the people while governments were fundamentally illegitimate.”14 Technology corporations were heralded as agents of revolution,15 and the task of those in the digital vanguard was to free the companies from the pesky regulations of government bureaucrats.16 The crucial intellectual move here was the conflation of individual liberty with freedom for corporations, an equivalence that made sense to cyberutopians who had been heavily engaged with Silicon Valley companies for years.17 The 1996 Telecommunications Act deregulated the sector, and platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon morphed into monopolies with virtually no opposition. Twenty years later, sharing platforms, many of which have been funded by the tech giants, would adopt the same antiregulatory stance and also become monopolies. While the path from New Communalism to the sharing economy is yet to be fully researched, there is a through line of location, people, and ideology.18 For some, the history of Silicon Valley is a case of genuinely transformative ideas and technologies gone awry.
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Unregulated markets frequently lead to monopolies, particularly in tech.19 The popular equation of democracy and the internet is also fatuous, as recent political events have made clear.20 And in retrospect we can see that entitlement played an important role in solidifying the Californian Ideology. Adherents were mostly white, highly educated, well-off men who lived in a bubble of privilege they failed to recognize. It’s not surprising they came to believe that technology would be sufficient to solve the problem of social inequality. Even as massive corporations came to dominate Silicon Valley, there was another option. Some programmers were building free and open-source software in a digital commons, engaging in what came to be known as peer production.21 This community avoided the determinism that had misled cyberutopians, holding instead to a middle ground in which digital tech made new social relations possible—but only if we chose to create them.
Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff
1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game
Lorenzo Vidino and Seamus Hughes, “ISIS in America: From Retweets to Raqqa,” Program on Extremism, George Washington University, December 2015, cchs.gwu.edu/sites/cchs.gwu.edu/files/downloads/ISIS%20in%20America%20-%20Full%20Report.pdf. 2. Ibid., 22. 3. Dustin Volz and Mark Hosenball, “White House, Silicon Valley to Hold Summit on Militants’ Social Media Use,” Reuters, January 7, 2016, www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-tech/white-house-silicon-valley-to-hold-summit-on-militants-social-media-use-idUSKBN0UL2H320160107. 4. Jim Acosta, “First on CNN: Government Enlists Tech Giants to Fight ISIS Messaging,” CNN, February 25, 2016, www.edition.cnn.com/2016/02/24/politics/justice-department-apple-fbi-isis-san-bernardino/index.html. 5.
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The country simply wasn’t prepared to think that rationally about terrorism; the media was too alarmist, and Obama was criticized for being too publicly blasé—the lack of public government alarm actually seemed to make people feel less secure. At the same time, agents in the field were living with the fallout from Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013. The leaks all but destroyed any trust and relationship between the US government and Silicon Valley, the companies whose websites housed this new wave of social media–inspired terror. We lived with almost daily examples of what was known as the “going dark” debate; terrorists were adopting encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram, WhatsApp, and Signal so that law enforcement couldn’t intercept their conversations even with a valid court order.
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What was being discussed? Where was the next target? The problem couldn’t have arisen at a worse time. For two years, the revelations from Edward Snowden salted the relationship between intelligence agencies and technologists, causing our requests and alarms to be met with instant skepticism and suspicion. These Silicon Valley companies built powerful, well-intentioned tools, and terrorists turned them against the American people. Yet those companies were so disillusioned with the government that initially they were barely willing to listen when we asked for help. Through 2015, we lived what amounted to tactical success but strategic failure—interdicting plots one by one, but failing to stem the tide of social media inspiration emanating from ISIL.
The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton
1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte
Demonstrating all three of these in various measure, venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan summarized the rationale of secession in his Internet-famous speech “Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit.”32 His address is worth examining for what it clarifies about the current state of the popular discourse on Cloud Polis, how that discourse is so strikingly inadequate, and how it is received and misunderstood. Srinivasan's key point was that as the loci of twentieth-century American power (in governance, media, finance, entertainment, education, military) are giving way to a new economic system based on Silicon Valley software, that the old order will inevitably defend its flagging legitimacy by blaming software macroeconomics for the world's problems.
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Srinivasan's key point was that as the loci of twentieth-century American power (in governance, media, finance, entertainment, education, military) are giving way to a new economic system based on Silicon Valley software, that the old order will inevitably defend its flagging legitimacy by blaming software macroeconomics for the world's problems. He argues that the best remedy is to allow for “free zones” in which the “world run by Silicon Valley” could be tried, tested, and demonstrated without interference for all to observe. “We need to run the experiment, to show what a society run by Silicon Valley looks like without affecting anyone who wants to live under the Paper Belt,” he implores. The inevitable success of this new polity will make it obvious that it is the sovereign platform of choice for anyone clear-minded enough to care. For this, he argues, the essential criterion of liberty is the right to withdraw from unworkable regimes.
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Hansen, Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 77. Peter Watts, Beyond the Rift (San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2013), 9. 78. James Bridle, “Do You Know This Person?” Render Search, http://render-search.com/. 79. Sarah Jaffe, “Silicon Valley's Gig Economy Is Not the Future of Work—It's Driving Down Wages,” Guardian, July 23, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/23/gig-economy-silicon-valley-taskrabbit-workers. 80. When I was a youngster, my dislike for the Canadian rock band Rush was confirmed by the song “Red Barchetta,” about a guy who drives around in his muscle car in defiance of climate and pollution laws.
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition by Steven Levy
"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, corporate governance, Donald Knuth, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, game design, Gary Kildall, Hacker Ethic, hacker house, Haight Ashbury, John Conway, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, Multics, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, popular electronics, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, software patent, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, value engineering, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator
He’d look for work elsewhere. He figured he could make it if he brought in eight thousand dollars a year. Because of the recession, work had been hard to find, but things were picking up. Fifty miles south of Berkeley, Silicon Valley was beginning to come alive. The twenty miles or so between Palo Alto on the peninsula and San Jose at the lower end of San Francisco Bay had earned the title “Silicon Valley” from the material, made of refined sand, used to make semiconductors. Two decades before, Palo Alto had been the spawning ground of the transistor; this advance had been parlayed into the magic of integrated circuits (ICs)—tiny networks of transistors which were compressed onto chips, little plastic-covered squares with thin metallic connectors on the bottom.
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He waited that January, he waited that February, and in early March the wait had become so excruciating that he drove down to the airport, got into a plane, flew to Albuquerque, rented a car, and armed only with the street name, began driving around Albuquerque looking for this computer company. He had been to various firms in Silicon Valley, so he figured he knew what to look for . . . a long, modernistic one-story building on a big green lawn, sprinklers whirring, with a sign out front with “MITS” chiseled in rustic wood. But the neighborhood where the address seemed to be was nothing like that. It was a shabby industrial area.
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Exchange information, swap ideas, help work on a project, whatever . . . The meeting was called for March 5, 1975, at Gordon’s Menlo Park address. Fred Moore and Gordon French had just set the stage for the latest flowering of the hacker dream. Chapter 10. The Homebrew Computer Club The fifth of March was a rainy night in Silicon Valley. All thirty-two participants in the first meeting of the yet unnamed group could hear the rain while sitting on the hard cement floor of Gordon French’s two-car garage. Some of the people at the meeting knew each other; others had come into random contact through the flier that Fred Moore had posted.
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells
agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator
Instead, they make parsimonious investments in green energy (Bill Gates aside) and fewer still philanthropic payouts (Bill Gates again aside), and often express the perspective, outlined by Eric Schmidt, that climate change has already been solved, in the sense that a solution has been made inevitable by the speed of technological change—or even by the introduction of a particular self-advancing technology, namely machine intelligence, or AI. Blind faith is one way of describing this worldview, though many in Silicon Valley regard machine intelligence with blind terror. Another way of looking at it is that the world’s futurists have come to regard technology as a superstructure within which all other problems, and their solutions, are contained. From that perspective, the only threat to technology must come from technology, which is perhaps why so many in Silicon Valley seem less concerned with runaway climate change than they are with runaway artificial intelligence: the only fearsome power they are likely to take seriously is the one they themselves have unleashed.
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In 2017, the same year the United States pulled out of the Paris Agreement, the country also approved a $2.3 trillion tax cut—primarily for the country’s richest, who demanded relief. The Church of Technology Should anything save us, it will be technology. But you need more than tautologies to save the planet, and, especially within the futurist fraternity of Silicon Valley, technologists have little more than fairy tales to offer. Over the last decade, consumer adoration has anointed those founders and venture capitalists something like shamans, Ouija-boarding their way toward blueprints for the world’s future. But conspicuously few of them seem meaningfully concerned about climate change.
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It is a strange evolutionary stage for a worldview midwifed into being, in the permanent counterculture of the Bay Area, by Stewart Brand’s nature-hacking bible, Whole Earth Catalog. And it may help explain why social media executives were so slow to process the threat that real-world politics posed to their platforms; and perhaps also why, as the science fiction writer Ted Chiang has suggested, Silicon Valley’s fear of future artificial-intelligence overlords sounds suspiciously like an unknowingly lacerating self-portrait, panic about a way of doing business embodied by the tech titans themselves: Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences?
Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler
3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game
This book was written as both a manifesto and a manual for today’s exponential entrepreneur, anyone interested in going big, creating wealth, and impacting the world. It is a go-to resource on accelerating technologies, thinking at scale, and utilizing crowd-powered tools. If you are an entrepreneur, in spirit or by experience, whether you live in Silicon Valley or Shanghai, whether you are in college or an employee of a multinational corporation, this book is for you. It’s about seriously leveling up your abilities and your ambition. It is about moonshot thinking and global impact. If, on the other hand, you are a manager, executive, or owner of the large and lumbering, your competition is no longer some multinational from overseas—it’s now the explosion of exponential entrepreneurs working out of their garages.
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How did Kodak—a hundred-year-old behemoth with 140,000 employees and a 1996 value of $28 billion—fail to take advantage of the most important photographic technology since roll film and end up in bankruptcy court? Simultaneously, how did a handful of entrepreneurs working out of the proverbial Silicon Valley garage go from start-up to a billion-dollar buyout in eighteen months, with a little more than a dozen employees? Simple: Instagram was an exponential organization. Welcome to the New Kodak Moment—the moment when an exponential force puts a linear company out of business. As we shall see over and over again, these New Kodak Moments are not aberrations.
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Having spent the previous twenty-three years working for the Sealed Air Corporation, the inventors of Bubble Wrap, Reichental didn’t know much about additive manufacturing. But what he did understand was innovation. “Sealed Air wasn’t your standard package goods company,” says Reichental. “It was more like a Silicon Valley start-up: totally entrepreneurial, always exploring new possibilities, always trying to crack open new markets.” As a result, Reichental worked dozens of different jobs during his Sealed Air tenure—eventually becoming the company’s fourth-ranking officer and helping grow the firm from a 400-person, $100 million business (when he joined), into an 18,000-person, $5 billion behemoth (when he left).
Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown
Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, DevOps, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, minimum viable product, multi-armed bandit, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, working poor, Y Combinator, young professional
MB: For Erika, Banks, and Audrey Grace Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication INTRODUCTION PART I : THE METHOD CHAPTER ONE: BUILDING GROWTH TEAMS CHAPTER TWO: DETERMINING IF YOUR PRODUCT IS MUST-HAVE CHAPTER THREE: IDENTIFYING YOUR GROWTH LEVERS CHAPTER FOUR: TESTING AT HIGH TEMPO PART II : THE GROWTH HACKING PLAYBOOK CHAPTER FIVE: HACKING ACQUISITION CHAPTER SIX: HACKING ACTIVATION CHAPTER SEVEN: HACKING RETENTION CHAPTER EIGHT: HACKING MONETIZATION CHAPTER NINE: A VIRTUOUS GROWTH CYCLE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES When I (Sean) got a call from Dropbox founder Drew Houston in 2008, I was immediately intrigued by the predicament the one-year-old start-up was in. The company’s cloud-based file storage and sharing service had built up a good early fan base, concentrated primarily among the tech-savvy community centered in Silicon Valley. Even before the product was completely built, Houston had pushed a video prototype online illustrating how the service would work, which had earned him the backing of the powerful Y Combinator start-up incubator and drawn a flood of early adopters. It became pretty clear that Houston was on to something when the waiting list he was keeping for the beta version grew from 5,000 to 75,000 in a blink of an eye when a second video was posted on news aggregator site Digg and went viral.1 The next wave of users who signed up after the public launch were happy with the service, but Houston was still running into a wall trying to break out beyond the tech elite.
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When Houston called me, he wanted to explore what I could do to help them grow beyond their very solid but not-yet-big-enough pool of early adopters. I was just wrapping up an interim VP of marketing role at Xobni, a start-up run by Drew’s good friend Adam Smith, when Adam suggested that we meet to discuss Dropbox’s challenges. I had developed a reputation in Silicon Valley as someone who could figure out how to help companies take off, particularly those facing fierce competition and limited budgets such as Dropbox was. I’d first had success driving growth at the online game pioneer Uproar, growing the site to one of the 10 largest on the Web, with more 5.2 million gamers at the time of IPO in March of 2000, all in the face of an aggressive push into gaming from Sony, Microsoft, and Yahoo!
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All this in just 14 months, and all achieved with no traditional marketing spend, no banner ads, no paid promotions, no purchasing of email lists, and, in fact, Dropbox didn’t even bring in a full-time marketer for another 9 months after I left at the end of my engagement with them in the spring of 2009.7 As all this was going on, this new approach to market growth and customer acquisition—one that discarded the old model of big marketing budgets and unscientific, unmeasurable tactics in favor of more cost-effective, consistent, and data-driven ones—was spreading across Silicon Valley. Innovators at other companies began developing similar approaches that involved rapidly generating and testing inventive growth ideas. In late 2007, Facebook set up a formal growth team of five people, called The Growth Circle, bringing together experts in product management (including their most tenured product manager, Naomi Gleit), Internet marketing, data analytics, and engineering.
Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler
Policy & Internet, 7(4):383–400, 2015. © 2015 Policy Studies Organization. Used with permission by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. All rights reserved. hmhbooks.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gray, Mary L., author. | Suri, Siddharth, author. Title: Ghost work : how to stop Silicon Valley from building a new global underclass / Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri. Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018042557 (print) | LCCN 2018044155 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328566287 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328566249 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358120575 (int. ed.)
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Now the selfie he took this morning—part of Uber’s Real-Time ID Check, rolled out in 2016 to authenticate drivers—doesn’t match his photo ID on record. It didn’t occur to Sam that a discrepancy between the two photos—one showing him with a beard, one without—would automatically suspend his account. But suddenly, and unbeknownst to him, his livelihood hangs in the balance. Meanwhile, overseas in Hyderabad, the Silicon Valley of India, Ayesha sits at her kitchen table, squinting at her laptop. She just accepted a job routed from Uber to CrowdFlower’s software, and now she is an invisible yet integral part of the ride. CrowdFlower and its competitors with similarly hip-techy names, like CloudFactory, Playment, and Clickworker, offer their platform’s software as a service to anyone who needs quick access to a ready crowd of workers.
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But as the permatemp case illustrated, it is not uncommon for companies to swell their temporary staffing budgets within weeks of layoffs. They “buy back” the labor of former employees through temporary staffing agencies to make it easier to close out both projects and labor costs at the same time. And younger companies, including numerous Silicon Valley startups, used to relying on contractors for everything from beta testing to viral marketing, could maintain their “lean” look on paper while employing the services of an equal number of staffing-agency-contracted temp workers to do what they do. Relying on outsourcing and contracting workers through staffing agencies as the “employers of record” primed the so-called platform economy.
Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman
algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game
In late 2020 and early 2021, as the market for cryptocurrencies exploded, FTX emerged as an industry leader. But it needed more money to keep growing, so it tapped Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, for more funds. Reportedly, Sequoia was blown away by Sam’s grand vision of FTX during a Zoom call with him, only to discover afterward that he had been playing the video game League of Legends while on the call. While normies like us might think that to be a bright red flag, that is not the mindset of VC firms in Silicon Valley seeking enormous returns. This guy was that brilliant and playing a video game at the same time? Quick, give him as much money as you can!
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If I understood the economics correctly, then the crypto industry needed to lure more average folks (retail investors) into the casinos in order to take their cut and keep the scam going. Most people wouldn’t risk too much and will avoid the worst of it, but others who went all in on this crypto madness could lose everything. Lives would be destroyed, and for what? So we could all gamble on fake money? So criminals and fraudsters and Silicon Valley venture capital firms and Wall Street hedge funds could make out at the expense of regular folks? What are we even doing anymore? It’s getting to the point that we, as a country, never hold white collar criminals or politicians accountable. Maybe we’re still in shock from 2016, I ventured. We were scammed by the biggest con man of them all, and our collective exhaustion was blinding us to an obvious, dangerous fraud happening right then, live on cable TV and Twitter and TikTok for all to see.
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To counter the feelings of isolation and depression in my quest for truth in crypto, I needed to finally meet some fellow skeptics in the flesh. I needed a team of my own. Crypto-skeptic nerds assemble! ° ° ° If you are new to crypto, you might be surprised by its mangled use of the English language. A lot of the industry jargon is boilerplate Silicon Valley nonsense. Crypto CEOs refer to the “ecosystem” or the “space” as though crypto were a fragile, but vital, thing or a cool place where you could chill and soak up vibes instead of a morass of competing businesses only bonded by the same goal: to make as much real money as possible out of the fake stuff.
Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel
Albert Einstein, Apple II, augmented reality, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, connected car, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, factory automation, Filter Bubble, G4S, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, lifelogging, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, ubercab, urban planning, Zipcar
In the pages that follow, we describe contextual computing, the latest development in the evolution of technological change, and discuss how it will affect nearly all aspects of your life and work. We are not caped crusaders, but we are here to prepare you for an imminent storm. Tumult and disruption will be followed by improvements in health, safety, convenience and efficiency. Who Are These Guys? We are two veteran Silicon Valley journalists, covering two interdependent communities: technology and business. We’ve been hanging out in tech circles for most of our professional lives and have spent many, many hours interviewing tech newsmakers. Robert Scoble has become one of the world’s best-known and most respected reporters of tech innovation.
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Steve Jobs had considered Google Android to be a direct rip-off of Apple’s iOS operating system. Could Apple Maps have simply been a crudely devised and poorly executed act of revenge against a powerful former ally? We think not. In our view, Apple made a huge mistake, but it was strategically motivated and not part of a petty Silicon Valley vendetta. Although Google and Apple historically had lots of good reasons to be allies, they were destined to become the rivals they now are. In the past, tech companies were pretty much divided between hardware and software, so an alliance between world leaders in each of the two categories was formidable, to say the least.
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Scoble wasn’t constantly staring at and tapping on the small screen of his phone, as he was so prone to do. Glass had improved the way we related to each other. SRI was an easy test. It is staffed by some of the world’s smartest technologists, many even geekier than Scoble. Next, the co-authors visited downtown Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley. This would not be equivalent to a field test in a Peoria shopping center, but at least it was less tech-centric than SRI. We sat at the bar at Tamarine, a fashionable Vietnamese restaurant. It was late afternoon and most patrons seemed more interested in adult beverages than cuisine. An older man stared at Scoble.
What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game
The guidelines were “a blueprint for radically weakening enforcement” against monopolies that would consequently be permitted to manipulate prices “with impunity,” and “make it nearly impossible to prosecute a case.”75 The de minimus antitrust profile of the Reagan era is ridiculed by European antitrust officials such as Mario Monti.76 Inventive Silicon Valley entrepreneurs agree. They are by nature impatient, not inclined to sit idly by and passively allow government officials to slow innovation and dictate their fortunes. Silicon Valley tackles challenges aggressively, and has come to rely on assertive European trustbusters to promote competition, especially in high technology. And their faith is justified: EU officials outright rejected the merger of General Electric and Honeywell after it was approved by the Bush administration.77 And overall, they imposed three times more price-fixing fines than the United States during the decade of the 2000s, according to reporter Mathilde Visseyrias in Le Figaro.78 European officials are more feared by colluding firms than US officials, because penalties can be imposed immediately on administrative fact finding, instead of being delayed by the judicial process.
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History will likely never record another transformational epoch of innovative genius such as the eighteenth-century Midlands, but Silicon Valley runs a close second. Yet innovation isn’t cheap and—far, far worse—it isn’t linear. That means government support is vital. Parsing protein folding is an exemplary public good, a vital key to plumbing diseases. And for years, medical researchers have desperately sought solutions to puzzles like the three-dimensional protein structure of the retroviral protease contributing to AIDs. But it proved too complex for Silicon Valley to unravel despite aggressive support from the national treasure called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
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Moreover, the short-termism of Reaganomics has settled into domestic research labs, truncating research time horizons. Silicon Valley experts agree. Judy Estrin traced the transition toward short-term, rather than long-term, investments there in her 2008 book, Closing the Innovation Gap. She explains that America’s cutting edge in innovation—venture capitalists, innovators, and technology wizards—have been supplanted by bankers who focus on starting new companies only in order to flip them; they seek quick profit rather than nurturing them and the underlying technologies for success in the longer term. “Starting in 1998,” she wrote, “there was such a shift in Silicon Valley toward chasing money and short-term returns.”50 Eroding domestic innovation from deindustrialization, offshoring, and short-termism is well documented.
Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game
There was the dream of great riches, yes, but also a boundless optimism and faith in human progress, a sense that the innovations flowing out of Silicon Valley would soon reshape the world for the better. Tech CEOs became rock stars because they promised a life of rising productivity, falling prices, and high salaries for generating ideas in the hip office pods of the knowledge economy, or for trading tech stocks from a laptop in the living room. It was impossible in those days to get investors interested in anything that did not involve technology and the United States, so some of us started talking up emerging markets as “e-merging markets,” while analysts spent a lot of time searching for the new Silicon Valley, which they dutifully but often implausibly discovered hiding in loft offices everywhere from Prague to Kuala Lumpur.
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Each began with a global mania for some big idea, some new change agent that reshaped the world economy and generated huge profits. In 1970 the mania was for the top U.S. companies like Disney, which had been the “go-go stocks” of the 1960s. In 1980 the hot play was natural resources, from gold to oil. In 1990 it was Japan, and in 2000 it was Silicon Valley. There were always a few doubters shouting from the wings, warning that other changes were overtaking the change agent—that spiking oil prices will self-destruct by strangling the world economy, that a patch of Tokyo real estate can’t be worth more than the entire state of California, that tech start-ups with zero earnings can’t possibly justify stock prices in the four figures.
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The United States has now overtaken Russia as the number one producer of natural gas, and could reemerge as a major energy exporter in the next five years. Basic American strengths—including rapid innovation in a highly competitive market—are producing the revival of its energy industry and extending its lead in technology; all the hot new things from social networking to cloud computing seem to be emerging once again from Silicon Valley or from rising tech hotspots like Austin, Texas. As some of the big emerging markets lose their luster over the next decade, the United States could appear quite resilient in comparison. For a truly rounded view of emerging markets, my approach is to monitor everything from per capita income levels to the top-ten billionaire lists, the speeches of radical politicians, the prices of black-market money changers, the travel habits of local businessmen (for example, whether they are moving money home or offshore), the profit margins of big monopolies, and the size of second cities (oversized capital cities often indicate excessive power in the hands of the political elite).
The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake
"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day
The whole of the cybersecurity technology landscape adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Silicon Valley is seldom accused of lacking ambition, but in the case of security, few pitches that promise to revolutionize anything in cybersecurity make it to a live meeting with investors. Instead, venture-capital firms have chased relatively quick wins from marginally improving existing cybersecurity products. The “10x” improvement that Google looks for in its venture investments has not been achieved even by Google, whose new cybersecurity platform, Chronicle, looks altogether undifferentiated. Instead, Silicon Valley and venture-capital firms around the country have funded thousands of cybersecurity companies with massive overlap in capabilities that are targeted to a small set of buyers in the financial sector.
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Long-standing problems created by government, such as barriers to information sharing, have been solved and companies are actually beginning to organize communities not only to share information, but also to provide mutual aid during crises. One chief information security officer (CISO) at a major bank we spoke with thinks that in five years his bank will largely be immune to cyberattacks as it upgrades from legacy systems that are inherently insecure to systems that are secure by design. Many leaders in Silicon Valley, where optimism is never in short supply, would tend to agree. Today, if you are a small-business owner, you can conduct most of your work online and do so with the support of cloud service providers that have dedicated thousands of people and billions of dollars to protecting your data. Automation and artificial intelligence have the potential to erase much of the attacker’s advantage.
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We knew the seriousness with which cyber threats were taken in Washington, but didn’t see the same level of concern in the private sector. Unfortunately, much of what we wrote about cyber threats turned out to be right, but things have also changed a lot since then, including our prescriptions. When we wrote Cyber War, Silicon Valley, still stuck in its “Don’t Be Evil” phase, wouldn’t accept that its inventions had the potential to cause real harm. Our intention was to scare government and corporate leaders into addressing the threat before the prospect of cyber war turned into a real cyber war. In the intervening decade, far too little has happened to respond to the threat, while many of our predictions on the emergence of war in cyberspace have regrettably come to be true.
Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.
2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator
What if we routinely let students who love math double down by increasing their math courses or taking classes at local colleges? Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk all dropped out of college or graduate programs. They were eager to test and apply their advanced skills in the marketplace, heading straight for Silicon Valley. But in Jobs’s case, at least, there was also a desire to skirt required courses in which he had no interest. I would wager that the curriculum on offer just wasn’t challenging enough for any of them. The Testing Trap “Is it going to be on the test?” That’s the feeble cry of students everywhere.
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In the autism community, there are big disagreements between parents of kids with severe autism and individuals on the spectrum who say autism is part of neurodiversity. To me, it is ridiculous that adults who cannot dress themselves have the same label as people with undiagnosed mild autism who work in Silicon Valley. I know families who cannot go to church or eat dinner in a restaurant because of a child who is nonverbal and has other problems such as epilepsy and outbursts. One mother shared that her adult son who is nonverbal breaks everything in her house. How did autism get into such a diagnostic mess?
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Job training programs put too much emphasis on interviewing and résumés. Recently, while visiting a major technology company, I had the opportunity to talk to a young man from the Midwest who worked on electronic hardware design. We were sitting in one of the company’s trendy little cafés. I asked how he ended up in Silicon Valley. One of his college professors had a contact with the company and had put him in touch. A formal internship program isn’t essential. The coveted internships at places like Google, Facebook, and Apple are great and well paid, but the acceptance rate is minuscule. Google, for instance, accepts a mere 1,500 of some 40,000 applicants in a given year.
Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall
Apple II, belly landing, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computer Lib, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Firefox, Ford Model T, game design, Gary Kildall, Great Leap Forward, index card, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ken Thompson, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, packet switching, pink-collar, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, vertical integration
“Some of their storage tanks leaked and it leached into the ground,” recalls Yannes. Paivinen kept the spill quiet, even from Peddle. “We didn’t join him until the summer of 1974, and they wouldn’t have told us about it anyhow,” he says. “With all due respect, they keep that stuff a lot quieter in Silicon Valley. There’s been a whole bunch of stories about breast cancer being much higher in Silicon Valley, and there’s a bunch of other anomalies.” As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) later determined, the leak was the source of groundwater contamination in the area.[3] The Valley Forge Corporate Center bordered a residential development that relied on well water, so there was cause for concern.
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[5] ComputerLand could not sell Tandy machines because Radio Shack stores sold TRS-80 computers exclusively. [6] Most accounts of this story say Mike Markkula pushed Apple to develop a disk drive. CHAPTER 10 Storming Europe 1978 After the January 1978 CES, Kit Spencer made the short trip to Silicon Valley to continue his education. “I went around in Silicon Valley with Chuck just listening to him,” he recalls. “He took me down to computer clubs and computer stores. I remember buying microcomputer books in a computer store before our PET ever came out.” Spencer focused intensely on gaining knowledge, since he would need to launch the PET in the UK soon.
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In reality, Commodore employees worked tirelessly to deliver state-of-the-art technology to its customers at prices far lower than Apple’s. PBS adapted Cringley’s book as a popular TV series, Triumph of the Nerds (1996). The adaptation ignored Commodore completely. Turner Network Television produced a movie called Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999), based on a more credible book, Fire in the Valley, by Paul Freiberger & Michael Swaine. Regrettably, the producers ignored much of the book and focused on Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and IBM. “The PC came out, we changed players, and the whole early history just got lost,” says PET designer Chuck Peddle.
Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City by Mike Davis
"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, edge city, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, invisible hand, job automation, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, market bubble, mass immigration, new economy, occupational segregation, postnationalism / post nation state, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, The Turner Diaries, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor
After analyzing the employment records of the thirty-three lead- ing Silicon Valey firms and interviewing hundreds of executives, academics and activists, the Chronicle concluded that massive un- derrepresentation of the region's Black and Latino populations in managerial and professional jobs was the result of the dearth of science and math education five factors: 1) in minority-majority schools; 2) failure to enforce federal affirmative action laws ("violators rarely tin pay fines and are almost never disqualified from government contracts"; 3) get- job recruiters' neglect of campuses with substantial minority enrollments; 4) absence of supportive "networks" ("there are virtually no top-ranking blacks and Lati- nos in Silicon Valley to inspire and mentor younger employees"); 5) pervasive image. racism on a scale that belies that Valley's progressive MAGICAL URBANISM 102 Table 9 The Digital Divide: Unequal Opportunity in Silicon Valley (Percentage of the Workforce) Silicon Bay Area Oracle^ Sun- white 56 61 73 71 Asian 21 28 20 22 Latino 14 7 3 4 8 4 3 3 Black * Percentages for 33 ^ VaUey* Mountain View, major high-tech firms. 11, 3 85 Source: San Francisco Chronicie, Indeed, ' Redwood Shores, some of May 4, been fined or sued the worst offenders are cyber-capital icons all of whom for racial discrimination or failure to federal diversity deadlines.
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Pueblos whose genius for adaptive mutation lowed them to endure, now find first al- the Conquest, then the Porfiriato, that cultural survival in an age of cyber-capital requires TRANSNATIONAL SUBURBS 81 two parts to sustain a Strategic mitosis, dividing themselves into single heredity. In his study of in how the rural municipio of Aguililla southwest Michoacan has cloned suburb of Redwood City, the Silicon Valley itself in Roger Rouse argues that "Aguilillans have become skilled exponents of a cultural bifocality that defies reduction to a singular order circuit as a Today whole rather than any one principal setting in Similarly, ... which it is locale that constitutes the Aguilillans orchestrate their lives."
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of single Latino 773 employees. 1998. Apple, Sun, Adobe, Netscape and Oracle, like 11, employees. official Three of the or manager. have meet largest firms lacked even "It is pretty clear," says UC Santa Cruz's Manuel Pastor, "that there's ethnic and occupation segregation going on in Silicon Valley." Locked out of the "New Economy," it is not surprising that Latinos are also the least likely to profit individually or through group membership from the fin de siecle stock market bubble. According to a January 2000 Federal Reserve fifth ally study, the bottom of Americans, as a result of exploding household debt, actu- had fewer to real estate assets and than in 1995.^^° White median wealth, thanks Dow Jones, is Latinos: $45,700 versus $4700.)^^^ now almost ten times that of 10 THE PUERTO RICAN TRAGEDY In the worst-case scenario, many of today's Mexican, Central American and Dominican immigrants may recapitulate the bitter experience of the Puerto Rican diaspora.
Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar
In 2013, the location was New Delhi. Singtel’s board of directors joined the act as well, holding meetings in Silicon Valley, Israel, and Boston. Group CEO Chua describes these visits as important components of strengthening her team’s understanding of local markets. “We can always get any number of speakers to come out here to speak, and give the board any amount of literature. But nothing beats going to the markets in which we operate, visiting the shops and talking to customers, or traveling to tech innovation hubs like Israel, Silicon Valley, or Boston to see what big tech companies and small startups are doing.” In parallel, Singtel’s human resources team regularly brings in fresh thinking.
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It might include people historically locked out of the market because they lack skills, wealth, or sophistication. It might include the teenagers and hackers who love to play. In a business-to-business context, it might include smaller businesses, or businesses in poorer markets. It certainly operates in global innovation hot spots where new businesses incubate and early adopters proliferate, such as Silicon Valley, Shanghai, Berlin, and London. As legendary science fiction writer William Gibson famously noted, “The future has already arrived. It is just not very evenly distributed.” TABLE 5-1 Early signals of disruption at three companies Early warning sign Aetna (2010) Netflix (2008) Turner (2007) Change in customer loyalty Not material, but insurance providers generally are not “loved” brands Not material Channel proliferation driving decrease in ratings Venture funding Health care IT had been funded aggressively for 10+ years New content models had been funded aggressively New content models had been funded aggressively Policy change Affordable Care Act Nothing material Nothing material Emergence of disruptors at the fringes Google and Microsoft attempting to create electronic medical records, new online-only insurance models YouTube, Hulu, and other online streaming services emerging Netflix, YouTube, and Facebook present but nascent Customer habit change Customers using web to diagnose; postrecession cost consciousness Fringe customers with high bandwidth watching on laptops and phones vs.
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Since 2010, in parallel with efforts to streamline and shift its core business from voice to data, something interesting has happened. The company has invested in dozens of startups and built several substantial new growth businesses. Senior leaders have all but given up wearing ties. Leaders have traveled to far-flung places such as Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley—not to visit Singtel operations in those geographies, but to get firsthand exposure to startups. In short, Singtel has demonstrated the curiosity to explore. Problems of Predictability One of our favorite party tricks is to come into a company we’ve never met before and proclaim omniscience.
The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More by Luke Dormehl
3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator
The Selfish Gene (Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 21 Consider, for instance, the way in which divorce cases are presumed—in their very “Smith v. Smith” language—to be adversarial, even when this might not be the case at all. 22 Fisher, Daniel. “Silicon Valley Sees Gold in Internet Legal Services.” Forbes, October 5, 2011. forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2011/10/05/silicon-valley-sees-gold-in-internet-legal-services/. 23 Casserly, Meghan. “Can This Y-Combinator Startup’s Technology Keep Couples Out of Divorce Court?” Forbes, April 10, 2013. forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2013/04/10/wevorce-y-combinator-technology-divorce-court/. 24 “After Beta Period, Wevorce Software for Making Every Divorce Amicable Is Now Generally Available Nationwide.”
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“From a Quantified Self standpoint,” Boyce notes, “I can . . . think about where it was that I surfed from a geospatial type of framework, or what equipment I was using, what the conditions were like . . . [It] represents me doing something in space and time.” In this way, Selfers return to the romantic image of the rugged individualists of the American frontier: an image regularly drawn upon by Silicon Valley industrialists and their followers. The man who tracks his data is no different from the one who carves out his own area of land to live on, who draws his own water, generates his own power, and grows his own food. In a world in which user data and personal information is gathered and shared in unprecedented quantities, self-tracking represents an attempt to take back some measure of control.
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Although the idea is certainly neat on one level, it can also have the unfortunate effect of excluding a significant number of people from diverse regional, social and cultural backgrounds. The other problem that Ming explains (and to a scientist this is almost certainly worse) is that previous hiring strategies have proven inaccurate when it comes to forecasting who will succeed in a workplace role. In a place like Silicon Valley, where the supposed objectivity of data-driven hiring is prized above all else, this is particularly unforgivable. Google, for example, employs what it calls the Lake Wobegon Strategy for hiring—named after American humorist Garrison Keillor’s claim that he grew up on the fictitious Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game
America’s shining technology and innovation hub—Silicon Valley—is relatively light on MBAs and heavy on engineers. MBAs had almost nothing to do with the two major developments in the American business landscape over the last forty years: the Japanese-style quality revolution in manufacturing and the digital revolution.21 Indeed, the top-down, hierarchical, financially driven management style typically taught in business schools is useless in flat, nimble start-up companies that create the majority of jobs in the country. Moreover, when that style is imposed on Silicon Valley firms, they typically falter (think of John Sculley, the Wharton MBA who made the ill-fated decision to oust Steve Jobs after his first tenure at Apple, or the reign of Carly Fiorina at HP, during which that company’s stock lost half its value).
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Indeed, finance has become more costly and less efficient as an industry as it deployed new and more advanced tools over time.16 It’s also telling that during the last few decades financiers have earned three times as much as their peers in other industries with similar education and skills.17 As Thomas Piketty put it in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, financiers are, in some ways, like the landowners of old. Instead of controlling labor, they regulate access to things even more important in the modern economy: capital and information. As a result, they represent the largest single group of the richest and most powerful people on earth. Even more so than Silicon Valley titans or petro-czars, financiers are truly masters of our capitalist universe. THE INSIDER ADVANTAGE As such, financiers get lots of special perks, including preferred access to policy makers. Perhaps the key reason that our Too Big to Fail problem is nowhere near being solved is that finance, the largest US corporate lobby (if you count together banking, insurance, asset management, and mortgage finance), has spent so much time and money watering down Dodd-Frank over the last few years.
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Sometimes, as in the case of GM’s ignition switch crisis, employees are so well trained to stay in their boxes that they simply don’t raise the alarm. Other times they just can’t swim against the tide of profit. The decline of the once-great technology firm Hewlett-Packard is a good example of a culture of innovation destroyed by bean counters. HP was the original Silicon Valley start-up, founded in a garage by two Stanford engineering students. Originally its culture, like Google’s today, was focused on engineering and innovation and was very entrepreneurial. Its structure was flat rather than hierarchical. Workers were given great freedom and good benefits; layoffs, even in down times, were mostly used as a last resort.
Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones, June Williamson
accelerated depreciation, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, Donald Shoup, edge city, gentrification, global village, index fund, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, knowledge worker, land bank, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, megaproject, megastructure, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, postindustrial economy, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game
See Bleakley Advisory Group, Survey and Analysis of Tax Allocation Districts (TADs) in Georgia: A Look at the First Eight Years (Atlanta, GA: Livable Communities Coalition, 2007). 55 Michael Brick, “Commercial Real Estate: Fire Destroys More Than a Mixed-Use Project,” New York Times, December 25, 2002. 56 Sharon Simonson, “Santana Row Model Is Flawed, Its Developers Say,” Business Journal (Silicon Valley/ San Jose), September 17, 2004. 57 Ibid. 58 Quoted in Brick, “Commercial Real Estate: Fire Destroys More Than a Mixed-Use Project.” 59 Simonson, “Santana Row Model Is Flawed.” 60 Anna Robaton, “Santana Row Bounces Back,” Shopping Center News, February 2004. 61 Sharon Simonson, “Santana Row Condo Prices Encourage Downtown,” Business Journal (Silicon Valley/San Jose), December 16, 2005. 62 Based on a presentation given by General Growth Properties executives at the Hotel Developers Conference in March 2007, according to Jim Butler, “What Is Lifestyle Hotel Mixed-Use Development All About?”
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Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 267. 6 Stanford Research Park’s influence has extended to Goa, India, where a new office park’s red roofs are a deliberate attempt to build up another Silicon Valley. For this and a more extensive history of the Stanford Research Park, see Margaret O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge, Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 7 See Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991). 8 Chris Leinberger, “The Favored Quarter: Where the Bosses Live, Jobs and Development Follow,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 8, 1997. 9 Quoted in Jane Gordon, “Collision of Cultures over a Building,” New York Times, March 20, 2005. 10 Geoffrey Booth et al., Transforming Suburban Business Districts (Washington, DC: The Urban Land Institute, 2001), 7. 11 Robert Lang, “Office Sprawl: The Evolving Geography of Business,” http://www.brookings.com. 12 Herschel Abbott, prepared statement to the U.S.
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No longer dominated by households with kids, our suburbs are where the majority of America’s new immigrants and elderly can be found. They’re also home to lots and lots of singles—young singles, never-been marrieds, and, well, re-singleds, as well as energetic empty-nesters. Suburban populations are diverse and interested in multitasking; suburban economies from Silicon Valley to Research Triangle are centers of innovation. But the physical environment of suburbia has not caught up with the new realities of suburban life. Too many people continue to work in soulless industrial parks and strip malls surrounded by acres of parking. And too often zoning codes, transportation investments, and lending practices have continued to perpetuate out of date, disconnected development patterns.
Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno by Nancy Jo Sales
Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital divide, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, global pandemic, helicopter parent, Jaron Lanier, Jeffrey Epstein, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, post-work, Robert Durst, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TikTok, women in the workforce, young professional
Google, Microsoft, and Twitter are among several major tech companies that have been the target of gender-discrimination lawsuits. A 2016 survey by a group of female tech investors found that 60 percent of women in tech reported being sexually harassed at work. For the technorati in Silicon Valley, the dating scene is reportedly as rapey as a night spent swiping on OkCupid. “As one Bay Area sex therapist told me,” Emily Chang wrote in Brotopia, her book on the “boys’ club of Silicon Valley,” “women are seen as sexual objects, and their objectification is everywhere.” And this sexist industry gave millennial men a digital revolution inordinately focused on delivering them an unceasing flow of sexualized images of women; infamously, the first ever image to be scanned and transmitted over the Internet was of a Playboy centerfold, Lena Söderberg.
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Part 2: The Physical and Psychological Consequences of Loneliness and Isolation.” Psychology Today, March 24, 2020. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-gravity-weight/202003/the-biology-loneliness. Kasperkevic, Jana. “Sexism Valley: 60% of Women in Silicon Valley Experience Harassment.” The Guardian, January 12, 2016. www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/12/silicon-valley-women-harassment-gender-discrimination. Keller, Julia. “To a Generation, Mademoiselle Was Stuff of Literary Dreams.” Chicago Tribune, October 5, 2001. www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2001-10-05-0110050007-story.html. Kelsey, Rick. “Dating Apps Increasing Rates of Sexually Transmitted Infections, Say Doctors.”
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“Why Is It OK for Online Daters to Block Whole Ethnic Groups?” The Guardian, September 29, 2018. www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/29/wltm-colour-blind-dating-app-racial-discrimination-grindr-tinder-algorithm-racism. Strimpel, Zoe. “The Boy Geniuses of Silicon Valley Are Totally Deluded if They Think They Can Fix Online Dating.” The Telegraph, October 17, 2016. www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/10/17/the-boy-geniuses-of-silicon-valley-are-totally-deluded-if-they-t/. Summers, Nick. “The Truth About Tinder and Women Is Even Worse Than You Think.” Bloomberg, July 3, 2014. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-02/the-truth-about-tinder-and-women-is-even-worse-than-you-think.
Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway
2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok
Media outlets that were supposed to be objectively covering Facebook were now on Facebook’s payroll, given the power to determine all the news that was fit to print. Whether or not the tech companies wanted to admit it, much of Silicon Valley’s anger over Trump’s victory was about their inability to control American opinion. In the past two elections, the tech industry had loudly and publicly taken credit for helping Obama’s two victorious campaigns. For years, the dreamers that built Silicon Valley had prided themselves on the potential of the internet to become a digital libertarian oasis that offered people a way of opting out of the institutions that had historically sought to control what they thought and did.
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Olivia Solon, “2016: The Year Facebook Became the Bad Guy,” The Guardian, December 12, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/12/facebook-2016-problems-fake-news-censorship. 14. Pilkington and Michel, “Obama, Facebook and the Power of Friendship.” 15. Laurie Segall, “Obama Campaign Opens Silicon Valley Field Office,” CNN, February 17, 2012, https://money.cnn.com/2012/02/17/technology/obama_silicon_valley/index.htm. 16. Hannah Parry and Chris Spargo, ‘ “They Were on Our Side’: Obama Campaign Director Reveals Facebook Allowed Them to Mine American Users’ Profiles in 2012 because They Were Supportive of the Democrats,” Daily Mail, March 19, 2018, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5520303/Obama-campaign-director-reveals-Facebook-ALLOWED-data.html. 17.
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Allum Bokhari, “ ‘The Smoking Gun’: Google Manipulated YouTube Search Results for Abortion, Maxine Waters, David Hogg,” Breitbart, January 16, 2019, https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/01/16/google-youtube-search-blacklist-smoking-gun/. 25. Alex Kantrowitz, “Silicon Valley’s Right Wing Is Angry and Punching Back,” BuzzFeed, July 15, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-silicon-valleys-angry-right-wing-sends-its-message-to. 26. Maxim Lott, “Google Pushes Conservative News Sites Far Down Search Lists,” RealClearPolitics, September 20, 2020, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/09/20/google_pushes_conservative_news_sites_far_down_search_lists_144246.html. 27.
Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution by Glyn Moody
barriers to entry, business logic, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, Donald Knuth, Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation, ghettoisation, Guido van Rossum, history of Unix, hypertext link, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Marc Andreessen, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, thinkpad, VA Linux
The summit and these decisions would have important long-term effects, but even in the short term they produced a heightened awareness among the media. That awareness was furthered at another meeting, which would also have direct and significant consequences, held in Silicon Valley three months later. Called the “Future of Linux,” it was organized on 14 July 1998 by the Silicon Valley Linux User Group (SVLUG) at the Santa Clara Convention Center, with support from Taos, a company offering interim staffing in the Unix and Windows NT fields, and VA Research. As the report on the user group’s Web site explained afterwards, it took the form of a panel discussion that offered “some frank talk about things Linux needs to be able to do and barriers Linux needs to break through.”
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But even when they interest me they tend to be incremental, which means that while I will enjoy doing them and while I will continue to support Linux, I want to make sure that I have something else to do on the side.” The company that was giving him this “something else to do on the side,” Transmeta, was based in Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley. This was attractive not so much because it would take him from the periphery to the center of computing but for quite a different reason. “The location was interesting more due to other concerns like weather,” he said shortly before moving there. About Transmeta, Linus would say nothing except that the company designed advanced computer chips.
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After 1996, even the most cynical and jaded observers of the technology scene were beginning to notice this. Free software, the Internet’s best-kept secret, was about to enter the mainstream. 10 Low-Down in the Valley IT WOULD BE MORE THAN THREE YEARS after he left Finland before the world discovered exactly what Linus was doing at Transmeta, down in Silicon Valley. All was finally revealed on 19 January 2000, at one of the most eagerly awaited and intensively reported launches in recent computing history. Transmeta’s founder and CEO Dave Ditzel announced the Crusoe family of processor chips designed for mobile computers. In their design, Ditzel asserted, Transmeta had “rethought the microprocessor,” and with some justice.
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath, Dan Heath
Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, Barry Marshall: ulcers, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, desegregation, Helicobacter pylori, Jeff Hawkins, low cost airline, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Pepto Bismol, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, telemarketer
To the east of Silicon Valley there is a set of brown hills that are the beginnings of a wilderness the size of Yosemite. The brown hills are an important watershed for the San Francisco Bay, but they are quickly being chipped away by Silicon Valley sprawl. Although the area is important ecologically, it is not like the redwoods or the coast, with beautiful visuals that engage people’s imaginations. The hills are covered with grass interspersed with a few oak trees. Most of the year, the grass is brown. Sweeney admits that it’s not very sexy. Even local groups in the Silicon Valley area that were interested in protecting open spaces weren’t paying attention to the brown hills.
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Identifying the area as a coherent landscape and naming it put it on the map for local groups and policymakers. Before, Sweeney says, Silicon Valley groups wanted to protect important areas close to their homes, but they didn’t know where to start. “If you say, ‘There’s a really important area to the east of Silicon Valley,’ it’s just not exciting, because it’s not tangible. But when you say, ‘The Mount Hamilton Wilderness,’ their interest perks up.” The Packard Foundation, a Silicon Valley institution created by one of the founders of the Hewlett-Packard Company, provided a large grant to protect the Mount Hamilton Wilderness.
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Whenever someone suggested another feature, Hawkins would pull out the wooden block and ask them where it would fit. Vassallo said that the Palm Pilot became a successful product “almost because it was defined more in terms of what it was not than in terms of what it was.” Tom Kelley, from IDEO, a prominent Silicon Valley design firm, made a similar point: “The real barrier to the initial PDAs … was the idea that the machine had to do nearly everything.” Hawkins knew that the core idea of his project needed to be elegance and simplicity (and a tenacious avoidance of feature creep). In sharing this core idea, Hawkins and his team used what was, in essence, a visual proverb.
Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans
4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K
Back in the early Women’s WIRE days, however, Ellen was less inclined to see the inherent value of online community—sustainable as it may have been, it was not lucrative. She’d come to Silicon Valley with an MBA, and saw Women’s WIRE as a startup like any other. She was keen to build something larger than a carpeted second-floor walk-up in South San Francisco could contain. In 1994, the year the Web broke, Ellen started rooting around the valley for venture capital to lay the groundwork for a Web play. “I always wanted to make this into something big,” she tells me. While she was out pitching, she was introduced to Marleen McDaniel, a thirty-year industry veteran, one of the few women at the top of the Silicon Valley food chain. Marleen was a technology industry Zelig: she cut her teeth as a computer girl, a systems analyst and programmer, in the 1960s and spent the 1970s hanging around with the Xerox PARC beanbag crowd.
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On the other side of the building was the Mount Vernon Cemetery. If the computer didn’t run, Grace Hopper joked, they’d throw it out one window into the junkyard and jump out the other. The narrative of enterprising young technology innovators striking out on their own to take risks and change the world is familiar to us now. Every garage-to-riches Silicon Valley story seems to follow the same approximate arc. But the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation was the first commercial computer company in the world. Until EMCC, computers had been one-off machines custom built for the calculations of war: ballistics, code-breaking, and the fluid dynamics of nuclear bombs.
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Her office had a view of the ocean, but she wrote utility code for a Prime microcomputer, about as dry a technical job as you could get in those days. She went to work at Xerox PARC in the mid-1980s. Even outside computing circles, PARC was known for its freewheeling, hothouse approach: engineers worked alongside anthropologists on a terraced campus built into a wooded hillside overlooking Silicon Valley, and important meetings were held in a room full of corduroy beanbag chairs, low and cozy enough that nobody would be tempted to jump up and attack anyone else’s ideas. After so many years of feeling like an outsider, Cathy worked hard to become part of Xerox PARC’s unorthodox workplace culture.
Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children by John Wood
airport security, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, British Empire, call centre, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, fear of failure, glass ceiling, high net worth, income per capita, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Marc Andreessen, microcredit, Own Your Own Home, random walk, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Ballmer
With a look of immense pride and a wide smile full of perfect teeth, he informed me that 183 families had contributed. It was a wonderful combination. A donor in California had done her part, and the village had done theirs. The amounts donated by each were quite different, but that was inconsequential. Many families—one in Silicon Valley and 183 in Benighat—had proven their commitment to education and had partnered in the construction of a new school. DURING SUBSEQUENT VISITS TO NEPAL, I WOULD CONTINUE TO HEAR stories about the power of these challenge grants. One of our projects, Himalaya Primary School, was located on the outskirts of Kathmandu, in a poor community whose economy depended on the local brick factories.
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We could set up our first two computer labs in Vietnam. We hugged, then got back to e-mails and the phones in hopes of continuing the momentum. On Wednesday, a grant arrived from the Tibet Fund to establish computer labs in predominantly Tibetan refugee communities in Nepal. On Thursday, a couple in Silicon Valley called to say that they had hosted a Room to Read party and raised $10,000. They planned to visit Nepal that year and wanted to see our work. But they did not want to be just tourists and thought it would be fun to help finance a project. My mind raced with thoughts of what would be possible if we could convince thousands of global travelers to follow this example.
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Over 500 children in Can Gio District needed me to find a donor. So I really had no choice but to ask and was confident that someone would feel that they had no choice but to say yes. Within 48 hours, we had not one yes, but two. One was from a senior executive at Microsoft, and the other from a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. I punched the air like a bad rock singer. Firing up my e-mail, I sent a short note to Erin: Good news. The eagle has landed. Don’t stop at one school. I have already sold two. Find a few more projects if you can—I know from what Vu and you have both told me that they are needed. We can get funding, as donors love this model of adopting an entire school for $10,000–12,000, and knowing exactly where their money goes.
The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal
A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar
Medium Bets: Many Sources of Funding Hamel also makes the case that most strategic initiatives rely on a small group of senior decision makers to allocate funding for innovation initiatives. He suggests finding ways to distribute the ability to fund innovation as broadly within the company as possible. As an example, he points to Silicon Valley’s rich pool of venture capital investors: Imagine what would happen to innovation in Silicon Valley if there were only one venture capital firm. It’s not unusual for a would-be entrepreneur to get turned down half a dozen times before finding a willing investor—yet in most companies, it takes only one nyet to kill a project stone dead. For medium bets, you want to think like a venture capitalist, spreading risk around by making a number of medium-sized bets, with the expectation that only one or two of them will really take off.
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The lesson for companies is that customers must always come first. Notes for Chapter Twenty One TED Jane Engle, “Flying the frugal skies can be fun,” The Los Angeles Times, March 21, 2004. IMMUNE SYSTEM ATTACKS “Keen On…How Yahoo Screwed Up and Lessons for Other Silicon Valley Giants,” Techcrunch TV, October 11, 2011, http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/11/keen-on-how-yahoo-screwed-up-and-lessons-for-other-silicon-valley-giants-tctv/. GOLDMAN SACHS “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” by Greg Smith, The New York Times, March 14, 2012. Chapter 22. Starting the journey You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
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To that end, the group was wildly successful and has been credited with the invention of laser printers, bitmapped graphics, the mouse, the graphical user interface (GUI), what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) text editors, and Ethernet. But when it came to introducing these innovations to the marketplace, Xerox faltered. Xerox PARC was based in Silicon Valley, a far remove from Xerox headquarters in Rochester, NY. While this gave researchers great freedom to pursue new ideas, it also made it more difficult for them to convey the opportunities to senior executives. At the time, copiers were generating huge profits, and Xerox still saw itself as a copier company.
Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade
Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce
It is difficul for the establishment to accept a change in culture or procedure.”29 Gradually, during the late 1970s, calculator technology slipped off the cutting edge. Unit costs for calculators shrank to insignifican e, and the brightest lights of the semiconductor fi ms moved on to newer challenges in and around Silicon Valley—at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Xerox-PARC, Apple Computers,and Atari.A quarter of a century later,when Palm Pilot inventor Jeff Hawkins left Palm to found Handspring, he described his decision as analogous to this shift in the calculator industry: “The organizer business is going to be like calculators.
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With the debut of Home Pong in 1975, Atari became the only game manufacturer to straddle both the arcade and home markets for video games. By the time of the annual toy industry show where it was firs introduced, Bushnell had completely sold out his stock of games. Out of the blue, Sears Roebuck’s most experienced buyer arrived on the doorstep of the modest Atari offi es in Silicon Valley. Tom Quinn knew that Magnavox’s Odyssey now represented a $22 million per year industry. He offered to buy every Home Pong game Atari could produce in 1975.When Bushnell told him that the company’s production ceiling was a mere 75,000 units, Tom Quinn doubled the figu e and arranged for financia backers so that Atari could enlarge its production line.
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When e-waste is burned anywhere in the world, dioxins, furans, and other pollutants are released into the air, with potentially disastrous health consequences around the globe.When e-waste is buried in a landfi l, PBTs eventually seep into the groundwater, poisoning it.1 As enforcement of the United Nations’ Basel Convention on the Control of Trans-Boundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal becomes stricter around the world,the United States will soon be prevented from exporting its discarded electronic products to developing countries for burning, burial, or dangerously unregulated disassembly. As the waste piles up in the United States, above and below ground, contamination of America’s fresh water supply from e-waste may soon become the greatest biohazard facing the entire continent. In 2001 the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition estimated that the amount of electronic consumer waste entering America’s landfi ls that year would be between 5 and 7 million tons.2 This represented a substantial increase over the 1.8 million tons of e-waste produced in 1999, the firs year that the EPA tracked hazardous waste from electronic products.3 But we have seen nothing yet.
Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog
More specifically, “the business model indicates how the firm will convert inputs (capital, raw materials, and labor) into outputs (total value of goods produced) and delivers a return to investors that is greater than the opportunity cost of capital. This means that a business model’s success is reflected in its ability to create returns that are greater than the (opportunity) cost of capital, invested by its shareholders and bondholders.” Much of the recent interest in business models flows from California in general, and Silicon Valley in particular. One of the peculiarities of the thinking coming from such places has been that some of the business models that have been most successful often started out by burning cash for much longer than would once have seemed desirable or viable. A prime case in point has been Amazon, where CEO Jeff Bezos has long argued that investing in future growth is much more important than hitting quarterly earnings targets, to the horror of many traditionalists on Wall Street.
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This possibility is increasingly reality, welcomed by many but feared by some of those who know most about the potential for misuse and abuse. Growing concerns are now being expressed about the potential unintended consequences—and ethics—of this emerging set of industrial revolutions. The prevailing “move fast and break things” philosophy in Silicon Valley has proved problematic as new technologies undermine fundamental things like democracy. The shuttering of Google’s much-vaunted Advanced Technology External Advisory Council almost as soon as it was formed was a worrying sign that such companies cannot be trusted to do this coherently on their own.2 This is a real problem, given that facial recognition is an object lesson both in how rapidly new technologies can sweep through our societies and how, in the process, they create consequences unforeseen by those who spawned them.
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You’re doing a brilliant job of listening, Jack, but can you actually dial up the urgency and move on this stuff?” That anger suggests a growing awareness of the Black and Gray Swan potentials of our fast-evolving electronic habitats. The day before Dorsey appeared at TED, interestingly, a well-known journalist had issued a challenge to all the “gods of Silicon Valley,” listing them—Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and, yes, Jack Dorsey. Carole Cadwalladr was the brilliant journalist who broke the story about the role of Cambridge Analytica in distorting the UK vote on Brexit.6 Here is what she had to say: “This technology you have invented has been amazing, but now it is a crime scene.
A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport
Cal Newport, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, fault tolerance, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Garrett Hardin, hive mind, Inbox Zero, interchangeable parts, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Nash equilibrium, passive income, Paul Graham, place-making, pneumatic tube, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, work culture , Y Combinator
Woodward began writing code and managing development teams in Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s, after completing his PhD in mechanical engineering at Stanford. His dissertation applied an efficient style of algorithm to run physics simulations relevant to the NASA space shuttle program. He remembers his first decade working in software development, a period of lumbering waterfall schedules and novel-thick feature specifications, as “frustrating.” In 2005, looking for a better way to write code, he managed to find a job at Pivotal Labs, a company that had developed a reputation among Silicon Valley insiders for its eccentric but outrageously productive approach to software development.
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When we shift these endeavors into the office setting, however, where retreating to a seedy hotel with a bottle of sherry would likely be frowned upon by even the most dedicated productivity hacker, the importance of the connection between focus and value begins to dissipate. Not long ago, for example, I heard from an engineer who wrote technical white papers for a Silicon Valley start-up. These papers were complicated to pull together but important for the company’s marketing efforts. As the engineer explained to me, he was having a hard time executing his job because the start-up embraced a hyperactive hive mind workflow. “If you didn’t respond quickly to a Slack message,” he said, “you were, ironically, considered to be slacking off.”
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As he explains in a column titled “I’m Joining the Open Office Hours Movement,” many Boston-area investment groups, including Flybridge, Spark Capital, and Polaris Partners, have taken to putting aside regular times each week in which anyone interested in technology start-ups can show up, “no strings attached,” to ask for advice, pitch an idea, or just make a connection.13 As I learned profiling a Silicon Valley–based venture capitalist named Mike Jackson for my 2012 book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, success in this industry depends on exposing yourself to lots of different ideas and people, but if this exposure is delivered through unsolicited email messages, you can accidentally drown trying to keep up.
The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb
Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork
The great transformation “Revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense…that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately” Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Seventeen years after Sergey Brin and Larry Page first launched Google in their friend Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California, HBO released the second season of Silicon Valley, its fictional comedy parodying the thriving industry that had grown out of those early garage start-ups. In the third episode, Gareth Belson – CEO of a company that has more than a few parallels with the one that Brin and Page had created – rather grandiosely likened Silicon Valley to Europe in the Renaissance. It was said for comic effect, but like all great jokes, it was pretty close to the truth. When John Watt and George White launched their start-up on the east side of the City of London in 1600, there were a lot of parallels with Silicon Valley in the late 1990s.
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What the public experienced, what seeped into the collective unconscious over time, was tech company after tech company being led by a desire to make something useful and good: Google’s drive to make information available to all, Wikipedia’s not-for-profit goal of engaging the whole world in sharing knowledge, Facebook connecting people and communities, even Angry Birds out to save you from the tedium of a boring teacher or bus ride home. It was not that these companies were simply out to do good – Silicon Valley is in many ways capitalism at its most raw – but that they were being led by their social mission to make and do something useful and good, rather than the single-minded pursuit of shareholder value and profit. In October 2013, Merck & Co announced it would be cutting 8,500 jobs and $1.5 billion off its costs. At the same time over in Silicon Valley, high-tech start-ups and giants like Google, Facebook, and Apple were drawing in talent and investment in the same way that Merck had when he opened his labs in 1929.
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Its inventory had become a confusing mishmash of uninspiring boxes that had begun to look suspiciously like dull corporate PCs, except they cost much more. And its share price was flatlining at the bottom of a deep three-year trough. As the summer turned to autumn, the company announced that it was laying off one-third of its workforce in an attempt to stem a spiralling cash-flow crisis. It was also putting its much-loved Silicon Valley factory up for sale, a clear acknowledgment that it was in deep trouble. When Michael Dell, then CEO of the most successful personal computer maker in the world, was asked what he’d do if he were invited to run Apple, he said: “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
90 percent rule, Albert Einstein, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, impact investing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Peter Thiel, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Vilfredo Pareto
FOCUS: What’s Important Now? 20. BE: The Essentialist Life Appendix Leadership Essentials Notes Acknowledgments Taking Essentialism Beyond the Page CHAPTER 1 The Essentialist THE WISDOM OF LIFE CONSISTS IN THE ELIMINATION OF NON-ESSENTIALS. —Lin Yutang Sam Elliot* is a capable executive in Silicon Valley who found himself stretched too thin after his company was acquired by a larger, bureaucratic business. He was in earnest about being a good citizen in his new role so he said yes to many requests without really thinking about it. But as a result he would spend the whole day rushing from one meeting and conference call to another trying to please everyone and get it all done.
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My mission to shed light on these questions had already led me to quit law school in England and travel, eventually, to California to do my graduate work at Stanford. It had led me to spend more than two years collaborating on a book, Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. And it went on to inspire me to start a strategy and leadership company in Silicon Valley, where I now work with some of the most capable people in some of the most interesting companies in the world, helping to set them on the path of the Essentialist. In my work I have seen people all over the world who are consumed and overwhelmed by the pressures all around them. I have coached “successful” people in the quiet pain of trying desperately to do everything, perfectly, now.
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My boundaries slipped away until work was all that was left.”4 Her story demonstrates a critical truth: we can either make the hard choices for ourselves or allow others—whether our colleagues, our boss, or our customers—to decide for us. In my work I’ve noticed that senior executives of companies are among the worst at accepting the reality of trade-offs. I recently spent some time with the CEO of a company in Silicon Valley valued at $40 billion. He shared with me the value statement of his organization, which he had just crafted, and which he planned to announce to the whole company. But when he shared it I cringed: “We value passion, innovation, execution, and leadership.” One of several problems with the list is, Who doesn’t value these things?
Long Game: How Long-Term Thinker Shorthb by Dorie Clark
3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Blue Ocean Strategy, buy low sell high, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, Google X / Alphabet X, hedonic treadmill, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Lean Startup, lockdown, minimum viable product, passive income, pre–internet, rolodex, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, solopreneur, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Levy, the strength of weak ties, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game
In the long term, though, the statistics are on your side: success comes when you make enough attempts. But in the midst of failure, and setbacks, and the sinking feeling that it may never work out, how do you keep pushing through? The Silicon Valley Strategy Entrepreneur and Stanford professor Steve Blank saw what was happening around him in Silicon Valley. Eager entrepreneurs, high on venture capital funding, would hire massive teams and burn through vast sums of money. But many of them discovered that their amazing plans, concocted in the basements and garages of startup lore, didn’t turn out to be so great once they hit the marketplace.
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What’s driving their awkward responses is often fear of the short-term consequences, whether it’s a hit to quarterly earnings, a dip in stock price, or a slashed year-end bonus. It takes courage to be a long-term thinker, and a willingness to buck the near-term consequences. But the payoff can be enormous. My friend Jonathan Brill is an innovation expert in Silicon Valley. The real risk for companies, he told me, “is that you hire smart people who know how to win—and you tell them to win at the wrong thing.” When all the incentives point toward short-term revenue goals, that’s what executives optimize for. “The result of that,” Jonathan says, “is that you can lose by winning.”
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Finally, in section three, “Keeping the Faith,” we’ll turn to what is often the hardest part about playing the long game: moving forward despite challenges or setbacks. In chapter 8, we’ll discuss strategic patience, the key to persevering when you’ve hit a plateau (or even, at times, when it feels like you’re slipping backward). Chapter 9 takes on failure, which usually feels awful and humiliating, Silicon Valley’s “fail fast” ideology notwithstanding. The secret is understanding the crucial difference between failure and experimentation—because if you’re learning, you’re not actually failing. Finally, in chapter 10, we’ll talk about the final step: reaping the rewards of your hard work. Ironically, that’s not always easy for successful people.
Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor
Put slightly differently: apart from a relatively small bump in the late 1990s, the continued success of San Jose was already set well before the birth of Silicon Valley. So rather than seeing Silicon Valley as generating the success of San Jose and lifting it up in the conventional socioeconomic rankings, this suggests that it was the other way around and that it was some intangible in the culture and DNA of San Jose that helped nurture the extraordinary success of Silicon Valley.8 It takes decades for significant change to be realized. This has serious implications for urban policy and leadership because the timescale of political processes by which decisions about a city’s future are made is at best just a few years, and for most politicians two years is infinity.
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It is perhaps telling that these projects are overwhelmingly funded from private sources rather than from traditional federal funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation or the National Institute on Aging (which is part of the National Institutes of Health). It is also not surprising that some of the most prominent of these are funded by Silicon Valley tycoons. After all, they have revolutionized society and not unreasonably want both themselves and their hugely successful companies to go on living forever and are willing to spend their money in trying to do so. Among the more prominent ones are Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, whose foundation has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on aging research; Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal, who has invested millions in biotech companies oriented toward solving the problem of aging; and Larry Page, a cofounder of Google, who started Calico (the California Life Company), whose focus is on aging research and life extension.
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Among the more prominent ones are Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, whose foundation has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on aging research; Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal, who has invested millions in biotech companies oriented toward solving the problem of aging; and Larry Page, a cofounder of Google, who started Calico (the California Life Company), whose focus is on aging research and life extension. And then there’s the health care mogul Joon Yun, who, though he didn’t make his fortune in classic high-tech, is based in Silicon Valley and is the sponsor of the $1 million Longevity Prize “dedicated to ending aging” through his foundation, the Palo Alto Institute. Although I remain quite skeptical that any of these will achieve any significant success, they are worthy efforts and a great example of American philanthropy at work, regardless of the motivation.
The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases
Between 1980 and 1990, nominal home values in Los Angeles County increased by 132 percent, or 35 percent after adjusting for inflation. Cities weren’t turning into ghost towns. But the most glaring fly in Toffler’s intellectual ointment was Silicon Valley. By the early 1980s, Silicon Valley’s set of geographically proximate, highly interactive companies had become the world’s leading example of industrial clustering. Countries everywhere were trying to create their own Silicon Alleys, Fens, Glens, Roundabouts, and Wadis. AnnaLee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage attributed Silicon Valley’s dominance to “the region’s dense social networks and open labor markets” that “encourage experimentation and entrepreneurship” through “informal communication and collaborative practices.”
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That communication was occurring face-to-face both in offices and at watering holes like Walker’s Wagon Wheel. Here was an industry that, as Toffler wrote, “can be described, in the words of one researcher, as nothing but ‘people huddled around a computer.’ ” Yet Silicon Valley belied his claim that “put the computer in people’s homes, and they no longer need to huddle.” Even with a server in every basement, there was still a great deal of huddling at work. Toffler had given himself an out that perhaps explained the Silicon Valley conundrum: “ ‘ultrahigh-abstraction’ workers—researchers, for example, and economists, policy formulators, organizational designers—require both high-density contact with peers and colleagues and ‘time to work alone.’ ” Toffler clearly viewed such workers as the rare exception, but that was changing in the decades after 1980, when computers and globalization were radically increasing the returns to skill and innovation.
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In the spring of 2020, the world was both isolated and unified. Families huddled alone—if they could—and avoided everyone else. But the entire world faced the same pandemic. Mothers in Kalamazoo and Kampala both worried about whether they could risk taking their sick children to see the doctor. Silicon Valley software engineers and Saigon street vendors were both putting on masks. Make no mistake, the pandemic was far deadlier and more economically harmful for the poor. We will return to that theme many times. Yet ultimately, no one was spared from the plague’s reach. Everyone—rich and poor alike—faced fear, dislocation, and discomfort.
Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann
Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits
In theory, a startup could be deemed a success from society’s perspective if it lost money for its investors but delivered positive spillover benefits to others that more than offset the investors’ losses. For example, team members may acquire skills, insights, and experience at failed startups that they can apply elsewhere, like the alumni of GO Corp, a failed 1990s pen-and-tablet computing startup, who famously went on to lead many successful Silicon Valley technology ventures, including Intuit (Bill Campbell), VeriSign (Stratton Sclavos), and LucasArts (Randy Komisar). Conversely, startups that fit this book’s definition of success—they made money for their early investors—might cause negative spillovers (accelerating ecological damage, exacerbating income inequality, and so forth), making them failures from society’s point of view.
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By contrast, Nagaraj projected that Triangulate could acquire a paying Wings user for only $45 and that an average paying user would have a lifetime value of $135, based on $15 in monthly revenue from coin purchases over a nine-month customer life. In March 2010, Triangulate closed a $750,000 seed round led by Trinity Ventures, a well-regarded Silicon Valley VC firm. Cash in hand, the co-founders hired their first employee, a graphic designer. Pivot #2: Wings Clipped; Engine Stalled. Once Wings went live, the team finally started getting the direct input from consumers that they’d mostly neglected up to this point. They became adept at using this feedback to add new features quickly to Wings—testing and learning, in the mode of a nimble Lean Startup.
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They add middle management layers within functional units, because frontline specialists need bosses who can tell them what to do and because top management wants someone within each function to be accountable for results and to serve as a conduit for top-down direction and bottom-up information flows. It’s tempting to assume that the types of employees found at startups would reject formal management structures, but that isn’t always the case. As the late Bill Campbell, a seasoned Silicon Valley executive and coach to many technology industry CEOs, put it, “Technical founders often think that engineering hires don’t want to be managed, but that’s not true. I once challenged a founder to walk down the hall and ask his engineers if any of them wanted a manager. To his surprise, they all said, ‘Yes, we want someone we can learn from and someone who can break ties.’ ” Tie-breaking is important not only within but also across functions.
Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo by Rebecca Walker
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, call centre, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, export processing zone, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, neurotypical, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator
But what I failed to understand is that my existential angst and material longing were in fact disguised, deep spiritual yearnings that no form of entrepreneurship, business, or creative project was ever going to satisfy. Yet, I was too green and ambitious to understand this: I only experienced it as fuel that propelled me toward achievements. I could not have found a better echo chamber to validate and encourage this worldview than Silicon Valley circa 2010, and I took to the start-up race like a millionaire to a Tesla. Unlike some of my Silicon Valley peers, I never had fantasies of wearing black turtlenecks, ringing the opening bell at Nasdaq, inventing software that would transform computer programming, or of historians committing my success story to history books. I scoffed at that kind of hubris and instead wanted something far more modest: to change the world.
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All I possessed in that moment was the deep, overriding certainty that for the first time in my life, I was exactly where I should be. How I got here was not obvious or easy and it would be disingenuous to suggest that I had much of a hand—at least consciously—in any of it. In this moment, I could only understand my transformation from a venture-funded Silicon Valley CEO to a woman on her knees with her hands clasped in prayer as a consequence of a series of great misfortunes. WORLDLY EXISTENCE It all started innocently enough. My goal was to start my first company before I was thirty. It’s easy now to see how many errors riddle that premise, but to a half-Chinese, half-Jewish Ivy League graduate in San Francisco in 2009, it felt like a divine mandate on the path to the pursuit of happiness.
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But by the following fall there were signs that the business wasn’t growing at the rate that investors required to give us another round of funding, and we weren’t yet making enough revenue to support our operations. My inner world began to collapse. Just eighteen months after successfully pitching a room full of some of the world’s best tech investors and being named one of Silicon Valley’s top ten start-ups, our future was not looking so bright. We had arrived at what start-up investors and entrepreneurs often refer to as “the valley of death,” where start-ups who can’t get another round of funding go to die. Unable to apprehend or accept this, I personally began to deteriorate.
For the Win by Cory Doctorow
anti-globalists, barriers to entry, book value, Burning Man, company town, creative destruction, double helix, Internet Archive, inventory management, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, New Journalism, off-the-grid, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, post-materialism, printed gun, random walk, reality distortion field, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, time dilation, union organizing, wage slave, work culture
He finished speaking and she found herself staring at her computer’s screen. Her hands were gripping the laptop’s edges so tightly it hurt, and the machine made a plasticky squeak as it began to bend. “I can’t do that, Jimmy. This is stuff that Silicon Valley needs to know about. This may not be what’s happening in Silicon Valley, but it sure as shit is what’s happening to Silicon Valley.” She hated that she’d cussed—she hadn’t meant to. “I know you’re in a hard spot, but this is the story I need to cover right now.” “Suzanne, I’m cutting a third of the newsroom. We’re going to be covering stories within driving distance of this office for the foreseeable future, and that’s it.
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She knew these stories from Detroit: she’d filed enough copy with varying renditions of it to last a lifetime. Silicon Valley was supposed to be different. Growth and entrepreneurship—a failed company was just a stepping-stone to a successful one, can’t win them all, dust yourself off and get back to the garage and start inventing. There’s a whole world waiting out there! Mother of three. Dad whose bright daughter’s university fund was raided to make ends meet during the “temporary” austerity measures. This one has a Down’s Syndrome kid and that one worked through three back surgeries to help meet production deadlines. Half an hour before she’d been full of that old Silicon Valley optimism, the sense that there was a better world a-borning around her.
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Jimmy wasn’t the most effusive editor she’d had, but it made his little moments of praise more valuable for their rarity. “Suzanne,” he said again. “Jimmy,” she said. “It’s late here. What’s up?” “So, it’s like this. I love your reports but it’s not Silicon Valley news. It’s Miami news. McClatchy handed me a thirty percent cut this morning and I’m going to the bone. I am firing a third of the newsroom today. Now, you are a stupendous writer and so I said to myself, ‘I can fire her or I can bring her home and have her write about Silicon Valley again,’ and I knew what the answer had to be. So I need you to come home, just wrap it up and come home.” He finished speaking and she found herself staring at her computer’s screen.
The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits
8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game
These numbers have been checked for accuracy by comparing them to various online reports posted in student forums and other places that collect college admissions news and gossip. four to five times the national average: See Hanna Rosin, “The Silicon Valley Suicides: Why Are So Many Kids with Bright Prospects Killing Themselves in Palo Alto?,” Atlantic, December 2015, accessed July 18, 2018, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/. Hereafter cited as Rosin, “The Silicon Valley Suicides.” “like the cannon that goes off”: See Rosin, “The Silicon Valley Suicides.” higher rates of drug: See Suniya Luthar and Karen D’Avanzo, “Contextual Factors in Substance Use: A Study of Suburban and Inner-City Adolescents,” Development and Psychopathology 11, no. 4 (December 1999): 845–67.
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Another study reports that more than two-thirds of overworked professionals do not sleep enough. Hewlett and Luce, “Extreme Jobs,” 54. just the first half of the 1980s: Schor, The Overworked American, 11. 260 annual days of sunshine: Jeffrey M. O’Brien, “Is Silicon Valley Bad for Your Health?,” Fortune, October 23, 2015, accessed November 18, 2018, http://fortune.com/2015/10/23/is-silicon-valley-bad-for-your-health/. “personal matters”: See Laura Noonan, “Morgan Stanley to Offer Paid Sabbaticals to Retain VPs,” Financial Times, June 2, 2016, accessed November 18, 2018, www.ft.com/content/d316dc38-28d2-11e6-8ba3-cdd781d02d89.
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Although meritocratic energy, ambition, and innovation have transformed the mainstream of human history, meritocracy concentrates these vibrant wellsprings of creativity in a narrower and narrower elite, farther and farther beyond the practical and even the imaginative horizons of the broad middle class. Meritocracy makes the Ivy League, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street into arenas for elite ambition. Innovators in these places can remake the life-world, transforming the internet (at Stanford and Google), social media (at Harvard and Facebook), finance (at Princeton and Wall Street generally), and a thousand other smaller domains. But a middle-class child, consigned to the backwaters of the meritocratic order, will more likely be buffeted by the next great invention than build it.
Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area by Nick Edwards, Mark Ellwood
1960s counterculture, airport security, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, period drama, pez dispenser, Port of Oakland, rent control, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, transcontinental railway, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional
European-style hotel in the heart of downtown Palo Alto, featuring a winning combination of affordable rates and comfortable rooms, some with shared bathrooms. $80. Coronet Motel 2455 El Camino Real, Palo Alto t 650/326-1081, wwww.coronetmotel.com. 329 The origins of Silicon Valley The Pe n i ns ul a | South along the Bay 330 Though the name “Silicon Valley” is of relatively recent origin, Santa Clara county’s history of electronic innovation reaches back to 1909, when Lee de Forrest completed work on the vacuum tube – a remarkably simple device that made possible numerous technological achievements from television to radar – at Stanford University.
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When the school decided to raise some cash for post-World War II expansions, Terman helped convince the university to lease land to two students’ fledgling local company, Hewlett Packard, and helped found the Stanford Industrial Park, earning himself the nickname “Father of Silicon Valley.” The unique public–private partnership between the school and its alumni made the Valley central to development of radar, television, and microwave products, attracting a free-thinking engineering community that thrived in the region’s hothouse intellectual environment. It was from these roots that the modern Silicon Valley bloomed in the late 1970s, when the local folks at Intel invented first the silicon semiconductor and then the microprocessor, both radically smaller and more efficient than vacuum-tube technology, and initiated the computer revolution.
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German director Wenders, never known for keeping things short and sweet, financially ruined Coppola’s Zoetrope production company with this tribute to Dashiell Hammett’s quest for material in the back alleys of Chinatown. Pirates of Silicon Valley (Martyn Burke 1999). Made-for-TV docudrama about the rivalry and rise of Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs during the early days of Silicon Valley. Surprisingly, Gates comes off the better of the two. c onte xt s Groove (Greg Harrison, 2000). Fastpaced but hit-and-miss (the creaking dialog constantly jars), this movie is set on a single night in the San Francisco rave scene; whatever its virtues as a film, the soundtrack is superb.
Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans
David Brooks, fail fast, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, impact investing, invention of the printing press, iterative process, knowledge worker, market design, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, TED Talk
She came up with three very different plans for her future, each a little more risky and innovative, but all involving some kind of community building. Her three plans were: doing her first Silicon Valley–style start-up, becoming the CEO of a nonprofit working with at-risk kids, and opening a fun and friendly neighborhood bar in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where she lived. Note that each example has a six-word headline describing the plan, a four-gauge dashboard (we really like dashboards), and the three questions that this particular alternative plan is asking. Example 1 Title: “All In—The Silicon Valley Story” Questions 1. “Do I have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?” 2.
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College, law school, marriage, career—everything in her life had turned out exactly as she had planned, and her willpower and hard work had given her everything she wanted. She was the picture of success and achievement. But Janine had a secret. Some nights, after driving home from the law firm that bore one of the most recognizable names in Silicon Valley, she would sit out on the deck as the lights of the valley came on, and cry. She had everything she thought she should have, everything that she thought she wanted, but she was profoundly unhappy. She knew she should be ecstatic with the life she had created, but she wasn’t. Not even close. Janine imagined that there was something wrong with her.
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That’s right, 90 percent of us are using a method that might only work 5 percent of the time. Kurt had just completed a two-year fellowship after getting his master’s in design in our program at Stanford—on top of one he already had from Yale in sustainable architecture—when he and his wife, Sandy, discovered their first baby was on the way. They decided to relocate from Silicon Valley to Atlanta, Georgia, to start their family near Sandy’s folks. Kurt was finally ready for all those shiny degrees to go to work and provide him a career that he could love and that would pay the bills. Kurt knew how to think like a designer, but when he first arrived in Georgia, he felt he needed to prove to himself (and to his wife and his in-laws) that he was serious about landing a job—and fast.
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
In the pages that follow you will likely see yourself or perhaps fellow builders you work with or are inspired by. Most importantly, we hope that as you close the final page, you will feel equipped to become a stronger builder for growth. A Builder Personality Tour through Silicon Valley Let’s see these personalities in action by taking a quick spin through the heart of Silicon Valley. Take a look at how each Builder Personality has shaped the structure, growth trajectory, and culture of four iconic companies.7 Apple’s Driver Our first stop is on everybody’s short list of startup-to-standout success stories. Leaving aside how revolutionary Apple 1.0 was in transforming the computer industry when Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs got started, consider the stamp the prodigal Jobs himself left on this company after his return in 1997 to spearhead the stunning revival of the company.
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Both of Google’s businesses are essentially search engines: one for what is, and the other for what might be. And each reflects the more accomodating style of their Crusaders, builders who are comfortable with a great deal of experimentation. Their Crusader visions are bold and broad. HP’s Captains We end our tour where Silicon Valley arguably began, not far from the famous one-car garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard launched their eponymous company with $568. They had a vision for not just their technology, but also for the kind of company they wanted to build. Their combination of technical wizardry and leadership wisdom put a distinctive stamp on their creation for more than half a century.
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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.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
airport security, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital nomad, Douglas Hofstadter, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Floyd, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, Inbox Zero, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kanban, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Parkinson's law, profit motive, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs
As with other manifestations of the efficiency trap, freeing up time in this fashion backfires in terms of quantity, because the freed-up time just fills with more things you feel you have to do, and also in terms of quality, because in attempting to eliminate only the tedious experiences, we accidentally end up eliminating things we didn’t realize we valued until they were gone. It works like this: In start-up jargon, the way to make a fortune in Silicon Valley is to identify a “pain point”—one of the small annoyances resulting from (more jargon) the “friction” of daily life—and then to offer a way to circumvent it. Thus Uber eliminates the “pain” of having to track down a number for your local taxi company and call it, or trying to hail a cab in the street; digital wallet apps like Apple Pay remove the “pain” of having to reach into your bag for your physical wallet or cash.
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When this whole system reaches a certain level of pitiless efficiency, the former Facebook investor turned detractor Roger McNamee has argued, the old cliché about users as “the product being sold” stops seeming so apt. After all, companies are generally motivated to treat even their products with a modicum of respect, which is more than can be said about how some of them treat their users. A better analogy, McNamee suggests, is that we’re the fuel: logs thrown on Silicon Valley’s fire, impersonal repositories of attention to be exploited without mercy, until we’re all used up. What’s far less widely appreciated than all that, though, is how deep the distraction goes, and how radically it undermines our efforts to spend our finite time as we’d like. As you surface from an hour inadvertently frittered away on Facebook, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the damage, in terms of wasted time, was limited to that single misspent hour.
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As the technology critic Tristan Harris likes to say, each time you open a social media app, there are “a thousand people on the other side of the screen” paid to keep you there—and so it’s unrealistic to expect users to resist the assault on their time and attention by means of willpower alone. Political crises demand political solutions. Yet if we’re to understand distraction at the deepest level, we’ll also have to acknowledge an awkward truth at the bottom of all this, which is that “assault”—with its implications of an uninvited attack—isn’t quite the right word. We mustn’t let Silicon Valley off the hook, but we should be honest: much of the time, we give in to distraction willingly. Something in us wants to be distracted, whether by our digital devices or anything else—to not spend our lives on what we thought we cared about the most. The calls are coming from inside the house. This is among the most insidious of the obstacles we face in our efforts to use our finite lives well, so it’s time to take a closer look at it. 6.
DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You by Misha Glenny
Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, BRICs, call centre, Chelsea Manning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, James Watt: steam engine, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pirate software, Potemkin village, power law, reserve currency, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Stuxnet, urban sprawl, white flight, WikiLeaks, zero day
It is almost a relief when I meet Corey Louie, Google’s Trust and Safety Manager, because people involved in security have a no-nonsense air and a penchant for secrecy, regardless of who they are working for. His demeanour is a welcome contrast to Google’s vibe of Buddhist oneness. A smart Asian American in his thirties, with a brisk but warm manner, Louie cut his cyber teeth not among the lotus eaters in Silicon Valley, but in the much more abrasive and masculine world of the United States Secret Service. He had been recruited to Google two and a half years before my visit, in late 2006. And by the time he left law enforcement Corey Louie was in charge of the Secret Service’s E-Crimes Unit. There was little he did not know about attacks on networks (so-called intrusion or penetration), credit-card fraud, the pervasive Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks (capable of disabling websites and networks) and the malware that soon after the millennium began multiplying like rats in a sewer.
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The more companies you visit to discuss security, the more ex-government agents you meet from the FBI, the US SS, the CIA, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the US Postal Inspection Service. An entire phalanx of erstwhile spooks and undercover cops have migrated from the clinical surroundings of DC to live the good life in Silicon Valley, attracted by the same gorgeous conditions that lured the movies to Hollywood. This flow from state agencies into the private sector results in a distinct disadvantage for the government. The Treasury ploughs money into educating cyber investigators who, with a few years’ experience under their belt, then leave for more pleasant climes.
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In 2002 the company’s Piracy Protection Unit noticed that a seller in the Ukraine was offering brand-new versions of one of Autodesk’s design programs on eBay for a bargain $200, when in the shops exactly the same product was retailing at $3,500. ‘Hmm,’ they thought, ‘something’s not right here!’ Silicon Valley suffers from the same problem as the Hollywood studios. The making of motion pictures often involves resources comparable to those required in the development of complex software programs. As production costs rise, the emergence of a global network of counterfeit DVD manufacturers, frequently linked to organised-crime syndicates, has reduced revenues from movies.
The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone
2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar
“One thing is certain,” the authors conclude, “if we choose to treat phase change as business as usual, we will become its victims.” The Autonomous Revolution INTRODUCTION DIGITAL LEVIATHAN IT IS HARD NOT TO SENSE that something vast and unsettling is emerging from beneath modern life. Even here in Silicon Valley, where we have become accustomed to continuous change, this time it somehow seems different—a change so sweeping and complete as to be unlike anything we have ever before experienced. But it isn’t just here that this change is becoming apparent; the harbingers are everywhere. Institutions upon which we have rested our faith, some of them for centuries, now seem to be deeply troubled, with no obvious remedy short of dissolution and replacement.
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Having been present at the birth of social networking, massive multiplayer games, autonomous vehicles, modern artificial intelligence, and all of the other defining new technologies of the twenty-first century, we have watched with growing dismay, even horror, at how many of these developments have morphed into increasingly malevolent threats to human privacy and liberty. Living in Silicon Valley, we watched firsthand, with growing trepidation, the effects of the modern networked, digital—virtual—world on its most passionate users. Like millions of other people, we found ourselves increasingly dismayed and frightened at how the world we once knew seemed to be going off the rails right before our eyes.
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It can be a world with a universally high standard of living, longer life spans, robots that will free us from drudgery, safer communities, and access to a fascinating and exciting virtual universe. All of these things are tantalizingly within reach; some are here already. They may not be enough to create Utopia, but they can bring us a lot closer to it than we are today. Surprisingly, a primitive form of that ideal world once existed in Silicon Valley. The Ohlone tribe lived largely unmolested for thousands of years in what is now the southern San Francisco Bay Area. Then as now, the geography was gentle and the weather kind. But unlike today, when Valleyites are famous for their long work hours, intensity, and ambition, the Ohlone lived a life of comparative leisure.
The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game
See the work of Alan Finlayson on “Bonoism.” 8Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 1:181, 1990, 110. 9The 2006 film written by and starring Žižek, A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, offers a concise explanation of his views on ideology. 10Pierre Bourdieu, “A Reasoned Utopia and Economic Fatalism,” New Left Review 1: 227, 1998, 125–30, quoted in Weeks, The Problem with Work, pp. 180–81. 1 Sheryl Sandberg and the Business of Feminism Fifteen years ago Silicon Valley was inhabited by packs of brogrammers slouching around in hoodies and sandals, hacking code on bean bag chairs, and regurgitating South Park jokes. In the intervening years the start-up scene has changed—a bit. Computer technology has been mainstreamed, and women have joined the high-tech gold rush. Tech mammoths like Facebook, IBM, Yahoo!, Hewlett-Packard, and Google all employ women in leading roles. But despite the power of women like Sheryl Sandberg, Ginni Rometty, Marissa Meyer, Meg Whitman, and Susan Wojcicki, the gender balance in Silicon Valley and the larger corporate world remains highly skewed, and most leadership positions are held by men.
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From her position of power atop the ping-pong tables and mini-fridges of tech-land, “feminism’s new boss” (as Gloria Steinem likes to call her) is exhorting more women to “lean in,” scale the “corporate jungle gym,” and not stop until they reach the top. Sandberg’s manifesto is a New York Times bestseller and has sold over a million and a half copies. Sandberg has been pushing women to be more ambitious for a number of years, through female networking events in Silicon Valley, Women’s Leadership Day at Facebook, and monthly dinners for women at her home. In 2010 she extended her message through a TED Talk that went viral, and followed up with an equally popular 2011 commencement speech at Barnard College. Lean In revisits and expands the themes in these speeches and argues that women need to stop being afraid and start “disrupting the status quo.”
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Knopf, 2013. 2Sandberg, Lean In, pp. 146–7, 63, 157–8. 3Miguel Helft, “Sheryl Sandberg: The Real Story,” Forbes, October 10, 2013. 4Ibid. 5These data come from an excellent two-part article by Gerald Friedman, “The Wages of Gender,” in Dollars and Sense, September/October 2013 and November/December 2013. 6Jodi Kantor, “Harvard Business School Case Study: Gender Equity,” New York Times, September 7, 2013. 7See www.domesticworkers.org for a series of reports and analyses. 8Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, New York: W.W. Norton, 1997 [1963], p. 164. 9Friedan, Feminine Mystique, p. 296. 10Sandberg, Lean In, p. 9. 11Ibid., p. 17. 12Ibid., p. 23. 13Sandberg, Lean In, pp. 24–5. 14Ken Auletta, “A Woman’s Place: Can Sheryl Sandberg Upend Silicon Valley’s Male-Dominated Culture?” New Yorker, July 11, 2011. 15Sandberg, Lean In, p. 58. 16Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” New Left Review 2: 56, 2009, 98. 17Sarah Jaffe, “Trickle-Down Feminism,” Dissent, Winter 2013. bell hooks also criticized Sandberg for privileging a white, heteronormative vision of relationships and family. 18Sandberg, Lean In, pp. 8–9. 19Sandberg, Lean In, pp. 8–9. 20Ibid., p. 7. 21Ibid., pp. 4, 7, 11. 22Yvonne Roberts, “Mentoring Scheme Gives Women Keys to Gates of Power, Guardian, September 18, 2013. 23Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” Atlantic, June 13, 2012. 24Ibid. 25Jennifer Skalka Tulumello, “Hillary Clinton Makes a Splash in Chicago, But Not an Overtly Political One,” Christian Science Monitor, June 13, 2013. 26Sandberg, Lean In, pp. 171–2. 27Kara Swisher, “‘Physically Together’: Here’s the Internal Yahoo No-Work-from-Home Memo for Remote Workers and Maybe More,” All Things D, February 22, 2–13. 28Susan Faludi, “Sandberg Left Single Mothers Behind,” CNN Opinion, March 13, 2013. 29Kate Losse, “Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning In?”
The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey
3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game
Blockchain technology could help achieve what some commentators are calling the promise of “Internet 3.0,” a re-architecting of the Net to assert the core objective of decentralization that inspired many of the early online pioneers who built the Internet 1.0. It turned out that simply giving networks of computers a way to share data directly wasn’t enough to prevent large corporate entities from taking control of the information economy. Silicon Valley’s anti-establishment coders hadn’t reckoned with the challenge of trust and how society traditionally turns to centralized institutions to deal with that. That failure was clear in the subsequent Internet 2.0 phase, which unlocked the power of social networks but also allowed first-mover companies to turn network effects into entrenched monopoly power.
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These people included Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and co-creator of the first commercial Web browser, Netscape, who told authors Don and Alex Tapscott that people like him suddenly recognized it as “the distributed trust network that the Internet always needed and never had.” As Andreessen and others in Silicon Valley’s moneyed classes started to throw money at developers working on Bitcoin and its clones, the sheer breadth of what Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology might achieve became apparent. For many of the new technologies that innovators are rolling out today, designers are thinking about how blockchain concepts will be part of the general enabling framework: • Internet of Things solutions will require a decentralized system for machine-to-machine transactions; • Virtual reality content creation, by which future imaginary worlds will be collaboratively produced by writers and coders, could use a blockchain system for divvying up royalties via smart contracts; • Artificial intelligence and Big Data systems will need a way to assure that the data they are receiving from multiple, unknown sources has not been corrupted; • “Industry 4.0” systems for smart manufacturing, 3D printing, and flexible, collaborative supply chains need a decentralized system for tracking each supplier’s work processes and inputs.
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There’s a plan, for example, to deliver a small amount of BATs to the integrated Brave wallet whenever there’s a unique new download of the browser. In this way, the token is designed as a tool to bootstrap adoption, to foster network effects. “Early on we saw this as something that would allow us to stake users with initial grants,” says Brave CEO Brendan Eich. The strategy was shaped by Eich’s decades in Silicon Valley, where the veteran engineer created the ubiquitous Web programming language JavaScript in the nineties and later went on to co-found browser developer Mozilla. Over time, he realized that venture capitalists were reluctant to fund the marketing cost of acquiring users and that tapping new equity or debt to do so was dilutive to the founders’ and early investors’ ownership stakes.
Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford
affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche
In 1994, over three decades after Jane Jacobs set out this idea, AnnaLee Saxenian, an economist and political scientist, published a study comparing two famous technology clusters, Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128. I say “famous,” but Route 128, once regarded as the leading technology hub in the world, was so comprehensively overshadowed by Silicon Valley that it is now just the name of a strip of tarmac around Boston.15 Saxenian found that the technology companies of Route 128—companies such as Wang, Raytheon, and Sun—kept themselves in tidy silos, specializing in narrow fields of excellence. The fledgling companies of Silicon Valley sprawled into one another, engineers constantly gossiping with each other or moving in informal networks that had little to do with the corporate structures that employed them.
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.* The Basel Accord was simply an international agreement that banks wouldn’t borrow too much—or wouldn’t become too highly “leveraged.”* While Basel I was celebrated as a first step toward financial stability, it was a crude rule because it did not do justice to the fact that different banks take very different risks. For example, a bank that lends $100 million to a Silicon Valley start-up is taking much more risk than a bank that lends $100 million to the U.S. government. It seems rash to have capital rules that are designed to safeguard against risks but which ignore what the risks might be. Basel I did allow for five different categories of risk, and the capital requirement varied according to how much business the bank was doing in each of these five areas.
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Because they were near the car when the virtual shutter clicked.7 The photographs of Mr. Katz-Lacabe’s cars—and children—were sent, with millions of others, to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, which is run by the U.S. federal government. A hundred million license plate photographs a second can be searched, thanks to software developed by Silicon Valley’s Palantir Technologies. The crime-fighting potential of such a vast and easily analyzable dataset is obvious. So, too, is its potential to be used in less palatable ways: as Katz-Lacabe mused to Andy Greenberg of Forbes magazine, the government could wind back the clock through its database of photos to see if someone has been “parked at the house of someone other than their wife, a medical marijuana clinic, a Planned Parenthood center, a protest.”
Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture
Whenever someone likes or comments on a post or photograph, we . . . give you a little dopamine hit.” Both adults and children are susceptible to Internet addiction although the phenomenon is particularly evident in children who become glued to their screens at a time when they should be developing social and reading skills. It has reached the point where some Silicon Valley titans won’t let their kids use phones or at least strictly reduce their access to these devices. Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now the chief executive of a robotics and drone company—hardly a Luddite—expounded upon children and screen use in a New York Times interview: “On the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it’s closer to crack cocaine.
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Gise had deep experience in the way the government worked and was privy to some of the most advanced and secretive technology of his day. During those summers on the ranch, Bezos says that his grandfather would tell him stories about the missile defense systems he worked on during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. That made a deep impression on the young Bezos. Today, among the Silicon Valley titans, he is one of the most pro-government CEOs. Amazon’s cloud computing business has won multibillion-dollar contracts from the Pentagon and the CIA. The significance of that business to Amazon is one reason why, in 2018, Bezos put his new second headquarters in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and why he paid $23 million for an old textile museum in D.C.’s swish Kalorama area—his neighbors are the Obamas and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump—and is converting it into the city’s largest single-family home at 27,000 square feet.
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One former Amazon manager who spent three years at the company in the mid-2010s says the six-page memo process works like an internally funded venture capital firm. “Amazon has all these smart young people with great ideas. It encourages people—if they have a good idea—to pitch it. Bezos is hiring the best brains from Silicon Valley and has created a system to fund the best ideas that those people have. Yes, they will have failures, but they are willing to kill things fast and are good at limiting their downside.” When a team brings a six-pager to a meeting, Bezos insists that everyone spend the first twenty minutes or so carefully absorbing the memo so no one can fake having read it.
New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale
affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day
Julia Powles, “The Case That Won’t Be Forgotten,” Loyola University Chicago Law Journal 47 (2015): 583–615; Frank Pasquale, “Reforming the Law of Reputation,” Loyola University Chicago Law Journal 47 (2015): 515–539. 58. Michael Hiltzik, “President Obama Schools Silicon Valley CEOs on Why Government Is Not Like Business,” Los Angeles Times, October 17, 2016, https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-obama-silicon-valley-20161017-snap-story.html. 59. Case C-131 / 12, Google Spain SL v. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD), (May 13, 2014), http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=152065&doclang=EN. 60.
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For example, Nikil Goyal has argued that standardization congealed in the early twentieth century, when factory labor and repetitive office tasks became a template for standardized classrooms.14 Education expert Audrey Watters has explored how behaviorist paradigms of education have come to inform a “Silicon Valley narrative” of higher education.15 She has excavated extraordinary documents and plans from the early twentieth century. The first US patents for “teaching machines” were issued over a hundred years ago. Sidney Pressey, a psychologist at Ohio State University, achieved notoriety for developing an “automatic teacher” in 1924.16 The Pressey Testing Machine let students choose one of five options and offered immediate feedback as to whether the choice was right or wrong (via an indicator at the back that recorded the number of correct answers).17 Each press of a button (or answer) would advance a mimeographed sheet further along, to reveal the next question.
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Without such protections, why should anyone trust a data-gathering apparatus that has already proven perilous in so many contexts?51 Individual families can, of course, try to avoid such tracking and evaluation if they have enough resources, searching out schools with a different approach. Indeed, many parents in Silicon Valley send their own children to low-tech, high teacher-student ratio schools, while building the technical infrastructure for high-tech schooling elsewhere. Yet it is easy to overestimate the power of the individual to resist or exit. Once a critical mass of students is constantly tracked and monitored, those who opt out start to look suspect.
Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar
"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War
When rapid technological change arrives, it first brings turmoil, then people adapt, and then eventually, we learn to thrive. Yet I have chosen to write this book because we presently lack the vocabulary to make sense of technological change. When you watch the news, or read the blogs coming out of the longstanding capital of tech, Silicon Valley, it becomes apparent that our public conversation around technology is limited. New technology is changing the world, and yet misunderstandings about what this tech is, why it matters and how we should respond are everywhere. In my view, there are two main problems with our conversation about technology – problems that this book hopes to address.
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We often assume that tech is somehow independent of humanity – that it is a force that brought itself into being and doesn’t reflect the biases and power structures of the humans who created it. In this rendering, technology is value-free – it is made neutral – and it is the consumers of the technology who determine whether it is used for good or for evil. This view is particularly common in Silicon Valley. In 2013, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt wrote, ‘The central truth of the technology industry – that technology is neutral but people are not – will periodically be lost amid all the noise.’6 Peter Diamandis, an engineer and physician – as well as the founder of a company that offers tech courses, Singularity University – wrote that while the computer ‘is clearly the greatest tool for self-empowerment we’ve yet seen, it’s still only a tool, and, like all tools, is fundamentally neutral’.7 This is a convenient notion for those who create technology.
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This, according to Snow, had disastrous implications: ‘When those two senses have grown apart, then no society is going to be able to think with wisdom.’9 Today, the gap between the two cultures is wider than ever before. Except now it is most pronounced between technologists – whether software engineers, product developers or Silicon Valley executives – and everyone else. The culture of technology is constantly developing in new, dangerous and unexpected directions. The other culture – the world of humanities and social science, inhabited by most commentators and policymakers – cannot keep track of what is happening. In the absence of a dialogue between the two cultures, our leading thinkers on both sides will struggle to offer the right solutions.
The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis
Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, chief data officer, cloud computing, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, low interest rates, machine readable, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Bannon, tail risk, the new new thing, uranium enrichment
He’d take the car keys off some unsuspecting grown-up, move his car, then return the keys to the guy’s jacket pocket. In the eighth grade he hacked the English teacher’s computer and changed the grades—and never got caught. In ninth grade, a prank gone wrong set an entire hillside in a well-to-do Silicon Valley neighborhood on fire. DJ ended up listening to a cop read him his rights. The landowner agreed not to prosecute if DJ agreed to spend the next few months at hard labor, restoring the hillside. While he was doing that he got himself suspended from his English class for exploding a stink bomb, and a few months after that from math class for . . . at that point it hardly mattered.
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After that, they sent him to Iraq, to help rebuild the school system. All of the work was interesting, and a lot of it useful, but it didn’t have much to do with his deep ambition. “People still didn’t really appreciate how you can use data to transform,” he said. To his surprise, this was true even of people back home where he had grown up, in Silicon Valley, to which he soon returned. Even there he couldn’t get a job doing what he wanted to do with data. “I was just trying to figure out where I could be helpful,” he said. “Google passed on me. Yahoo! passed on me.” His mom knew someone at eBay and so he finally was hired the undignified way. At eBay he tried, and failed, to persuade his superiors to let him use the data on hand to find new ways to detect fraud.
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“He’d seen the power of data in his campaign,” said DJ, “and he knew there was a new opportunity to use it to transform the country.” When the White House asked him if he wanted to bring his wife to the meeting, DJ figured that Obama was looking for more than a conversation. Inside of eight years he’d gone from being a guy who couldn’t get a job in Silicon Valley to being a guy the president of the United States wanted to offer a job he couldn’t refuse. When Obama did ask DJ to move to Washington, it was DJ’s wife who responded. “How do we know if any of this will be of any use?” she asked. “If your husband is as good as everyone says he is, he’ll figure it out,” said Obama.
The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman, Rod A. Beckstrom
Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Burning Man, creative destruction, disintermediation, experimental economics, Firefox, Francisco Pizarro, jimmy wales, Kibera, Lao Tzu, Network effects, peer-to-peer, pez dispenser, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing
He had another problem too: he had to raise money from bankers who knew even less about the new technology than he did. Sitting by the beach in Santa Cruz, California, ten years later, Dave tells us the story. "I was actually recruited into the Internet space by a headhunting firm in Palo Alto [in Silicon Valley]. I didn't understand what the Internet was, but at the time, the company was running out of cash, and we had to go back to the THE STARFISH AND THE SPIDER public market for a secondary round of fund-raising. So I was learning about it in the limousine between fund-raisings." Remember, in 1995 the few people who even knew what the term "online" meant were having enough trouble navigating Web pages ("How do I go 'back'?")
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Like a good catalyst, Auren has launched a variety of networks. The Silicon Forum is a network of leading thinkers and business executives that convenes to discuss social issues; the CIO Symposium holds regular conference calls in which chief information THE STARFISH AND THE SPIDER officers from top companies share issues of importance to them; the Silicon Valley 100 enables marketers to get their products in the hands of the "biggest influences in the San Francisco Bay Area." Auren's most interesting role, however, is as a catalyst-for-hire. His firm, Stonebrick, allows companies to create and draw upon decentralized networks. "Sometimes I can't believe people actually pay me for this," he said when describing his work.
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Welch's method ensured that each unit was being run profitably, while allowing unit heads significant flexibility and independence. The plan worked. GE's market value skyrocketed. Valued at $12 billion in 1981, it was valued at $375 billion twenty-five years later. Decentralization can indeed produce higher financial returns. THE STARFISH AND THE SPIDER Just ask Tim Draper, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who runs Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), one of the world's most successful venture capital firms. Draper's involvement with Hotmail made him keenly aware of the possibilities of networks. The traditional venture capital model is a lot like a castle. The members of the court convene in one place, and gaining access to them is nearly impossible unless you know the right people.
That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum
addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks
Sridhar, the principal co-founder of Bloom Energy, which employs 1,000 workers in California plants making a fuel-cell technology that helps power Google and other Silicon Valley firms, knows a lot about the trials and tribulation of innovating and manufacturing in America. The most important thing that government can do to help accelerate the development of new technologies and industries, he says, is to use its buying power and standards-setting power to help budding manufacturers get across what he calls “the second valley of death.” This is an important but little understood problem in start-up manufacturing. In the lexicon of Silicon Valley, “the valley of death” refers to the point at which someone has invented something that works beautifully in a laboratory but is still unproven as a product that can become commercially viable and offer customers economic value.
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But she had a very capable science teacher interested in DNA, the principal explained, and the principal was also aware that Singapore was making a big push to expand its biotech industries, so she thought it would be a good idea to expose her students to the subject. A couple of them took Tom’s fingerprints. He was innocent—but impressed. Curtis Carlson, the CEO of SRI International, a Silicon Valley innovation laboratory, has worked with both General Motors and Singapore’s government, and he had this to say: “Being inside General Motors, this huge company, it felt a lot like being inside America today. Adaptation is the key to survival, and the people and companies who adapt the best, survive the best.
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While no one wants to encourage bankruptcy, there was not a lot of stigma attached to bankruptcy in America—at least compared to Europe, where a single bankruptcy was a mark of Cain that usually meant the end of your business life. American bankruptcy laws emphasized rehabilitating debtors rather than punishing them. Europeans have long marveled at how easy it is for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to try something, fail, declare bankruptcy, try again, fail again, try again, and then strike it rich. The easier it is to go under, the easier it is to start over. All these regulations, notes the Stanford University historian David Kennedy, “were not about creating more state control and less private ownership.
Women Leaders at Work: Untold Tales of Women Achieving Their Ambitions by Elizabeth Ghaffari
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Bear Stearns, business cycle, business process, cloud computing, Columbine, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark matter, deal flow, do what you love, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, follow your passion, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, high net worth, John Elkington, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Oklahoma City bombing, performance metric, pink-collar, profit maximization, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional
So, I introduced a bill that would require all of the legislative information be put on a dial-up bulletin board. At the time, that was the only mechanism I was aware of. My bill was based on what the City of Santa Monica had done with their planning board agendas and materials. After I introduced that bill, two guys from Silicon Valley showed up in my office saying, “There’s a better way to do this.” Jim Warren was the main guy—somebody with a major interest in, and a long history working on, First Amendment issues. The other was Ray Kidde, a programmer from Apple. We worked on that bill together and got huge editorial support, as you can imagine, from all the newspapers.
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Kay was the founder and CEO of USA Network, a cable television network. She built it from the ground floor to become a $5 billion enterprise before it was sold to NBC. Kay was very connected and, among her many roles, served on the board of Oracle Corporation. She was very interested in what was going on in Silicon Valley at the end of the nineties and wanted us to learn more about women’s involvement in the business scene there. We were co-hosting workshops in California with the Federal Reserve on access to capital and invited some women technology-entrepreneurs to join us. The women said, “You know, the funding source you are talking about is bank lending, and that’s irrelevant to us.
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They weren’t necessarily interested in women entrepreneurs, but, in 2000, they released a study called the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, about economic and entrepreneurial activity in many countries, focusing on what are the determining factors of success or impact. The results indicated that the number of women engaged in entrepreneurship in each country was a determining factor of the health of that country’s economy. You might say that Kauffman was our angel investor. Ghaffari: How did the venture forums grow? Millman: After Silicon Valley, we traveled to Washington, DC, and partnered with AOL to produce a forum and from there to Boston and Harvard. All these venues were places in which we had connections and a team of people who were committed to helping to produce a forum in their region. The end of 2000 was another election year, and I found myself out of a job with the loss of Al Gore to George Bush.
Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik
Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, business cycle, Charles Babbage, computer age, creative destruction, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, index card, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, L Peter Deutsch, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, oil shock, popular electronics, reality distortion field, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game
“But at the time it seemed great, the proper next step, as second systems often do.” Their exuberance made Berkeley Computer, by all accounts, a jolly place to work, its scientists and engineers propelled by pure hubris into working the kind of inhuman hours that would become a Silicon Valley cliché—when Silicon Valley came into its own fifteen years later. They believed they were breaking new ground in computer design, and they were right. Among other things, their machine incorporated “virtual memory,” a system for swapping jobs from disk to memory and back again that enabled it to accommodate much more activity than its physical specifications otherwise would, like a house with the exterior dimensions of a bungalow but the interior floor plan of a regal palace.
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Seven of its most influential engineers, including Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker, and Peter Deutsch, will sign on to work at PARC. January: Gary Starkweather is transferred from Rochester to PARC, bringing with him the concept of the laser printer. January: Journalist Don Hoefler, in a series of articles for the weekly newsletter Electronics News, popularizes the term “Silicon Valley.” February: Design work begins on PARC’s cloned PDP-10 computer, known as MAXC. June-August: Kay and a hand-picked team complete the first version of their revolutionary object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk, which will heavily influence such modern programming systems as C++ and Java.
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In retrospect you can really see that the path has been plotted years in advance, and you’ve been following his footsteps all along.” Not long after that retirement party Taylor invited me to visit him at his home in Woodside, a bedroom community for high-tech executives and entrepreneurs that overlooks Silicon Valley from atop a thickly forested ridge. “Leave plenty of time,” he said. “It’ll take you a good hour to get here from where you are.” One reaches his home via a steep climb up a hillside to the west of Palo Alto, past the ridgetop thoroughfare known as Skyline Drive. It was terrifying to imagine him careening around those hairpins in his new BMW, the one with the license plate reading THE UDM (for “The Ultimate Driving Machine”).
Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product
Sixty-two percent of Americans: Elisa Shearer and Jeffrey Gottfried, “News Use across Social Media Platforms 2017,” Pew Research Center/Journalism.org, September 7, 2017, http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/. Leading by example: Franklin Foer, “When Silicon Valley Took Over Journalism,” Atlantic, September 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/when-silicon-valley-took-over-journalism/534195/. By October inbound traffic: Justin Osofsky, “More Ways to Drive Traffic to News and Publishing Sites,” Facebook, October 21, 2013, https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-media/more-ways-to-drive-traffic-to-news-and-publishing-sites/585971984771628.
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Looking back, he told me with a note of nostalgia in his voice, “Everything was disposable.” Publishing serious news ran completely counter to BuzzFeed’s founding model. But Peretti was becoming a more sober person. His wife had given birth to twins. He was the head of a company with employees who depended on him. He was about to meet with executives and potential investors from Silicon Valley, like Marc Andreessen, to begin a new round of fundraising. He’d become a businessman who now cared about money. Peretti and BuzzFeed were beginning to grow up. As more people discovered BuzzFeed’s mysterious mechanical acuity and infectiously wacky sense of humor, word of its success started generating interest in venture-capital circles, and before long, potential big-ticket investors started visiting the cramped and roach-ridden digs.
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As more people discovered BuzzFeed’s mysterious mechanical acuity and infectiously wacky sense of humor, word of its success started generating interest in venture-capital circles, and before long, potential big-ticket investors started visiting the cramped and roach-ridden digs. One early believer was Andreessen, whose venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, was probably the most important funder in Silicon Valley. “BuzzFeed was set up as a virtuous feedback loop,” he told me, where tech, content, and advertising all blended. This struck him as a new model, and his firm eventually made a first investment of $50 million. Andreessen loved newspapers. He had started reading them when he was four, he said, beginning with comics, then the sports pages, then the stock tables.
The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game
But in the coming age of integrated circuitry, Pake main- tained, it would become the epicenter of computing. "Now, here's where you have to give George credit," says an admiring Gold- man. "He really saw the Silicon Valley phenomenon emerging." In truth, it would have been pretty hard to miss. No one was calling the area Silicon Valley yet, except maybe as a kind of in-joke; the name wouldn't appear in print until January 1971, when the periodical Electronic News ran a three-part series on the region entitled "Silicon Valley USA." But it was already high-tech heaven by the time Goldman and Pake went out to visit it-and indeed, it had been developing that status for more than three decades.
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Meanwhile, Tracy's dad was also gambling on a soft-spoken, rather lonely guy who had approached him on practically his first day at the Pentagon, and whose ideas on "augmenting the human intellect" had proved to be identical to his own notion of human-computer symbiosis. Douglas Engelbart had been a voice in the wilderness until then; his own bosses at SRI International, in what would soon become Silicon Valley, thought he was an absolute flake. But once Tracy's father had given him his first real funding-and vigorously defended him to his higher-ups-Engelbart, with his group, would go on to invent the mouse, on- screen windows, hypertext, full-screen word processing, and a host of other in- novations.
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Arguably, in fact, the SAGE system was obsolete almost from the day it was commissioned, since by that point the United States and the Soviet Union were hard at work on inter- continental ballistic missiles that could deliver a nuclear warhead across the North Pole in under an hour. But in hindsight there is no uncertainty whatso- ever about the project's enormous impact on the history of computing. First, it helped catalyze the formation of the Silicon Valley of the East. In the summer of 1953, Lincoln Laboratory moved from the MIT campus into a shiny new complex in suburban Lexington, Massachusetts, not too far from a major ring road around Boston, Route 128. In July 1958, when SAGE was about to come on line and it was time to start integrating new jet fighters and missiles into the system, Lincoln Lab spun off its Division Number 6 as a whole new indepen- 120 THE DREAM MACHINE dent consulting firm just to deal with that task, renaming it the MITRE Corpo- ration.
Powerful: Teams, Leaders and the Culture of Freedom and Responsibility by Patty McCord
call centre, data science, future of work, job satisfaction, late fees, Silicon Valley, Skype, subscription business, the scientific method, women in the workforce
Because the company was so much smaller than others I’d worked at, I began to learn more about the nitty-gritty of the business, and I could get to know more employees. As I became familiar with software engineers, in particular, and observed how they work, I realized that it’s a misconception that more people make better stuff. With our teams at Pure, and all around Silicon Valley, I could see the power of small, unencumbered teams. The typical approach to growth in business is to add more people and structure and to impose more fixed budgetary goals and restraints. But my experiences at fast-growth companies that successfully scaled showed me that the leanest processes possible and a strong culture of discipline were far superior, if for no other reason than their speed.
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With the company growing like mad and the nature of the business changing so fast—we could see streaming rapidly approaching—we knew we had to build an organization that would always have a really strong talent pipeline. At the time, when I hired a manager, they typically wanted to work with their favorite headhunter, and I knew I had to change that. We needed to be more strategic. I could have tried to get the five best headhunters in Silicon Valley to work for me exclusively. But I decided to throw out the traditional recruiting practice and create a headhunting firm within the company. Instead of hiring people who had worked in other companies internally, I started hiring people who’d worked for headhunting firms to build that capability inside.
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When he got to me, shortly after we started talking he turned bright red. I asked him if he was okay, and he said, “You’re going to make me an offer, aren’t you?” And I said, “Yes, we are.” He said, “And you’re going to pay me a lot of money, right?” And I said, “Well, you’re not programming for a bank anymore. You know, you’d be here in Silicon Valley and it’s expensive to live out here. We’re going to pay you commensurate with what it will take for you to have a great life with your family here.” He seemed overwhelmed, and I asked again if he was all right. He said with amazement, “You’re going to pay me a lot of money to do what I love to do!”
Unleashed by Anne Morriss, Frances Frei
"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Black Lives Matter, book value, Donald Trump, future of work, gamification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Jeff Bezos, Netflix Prize, Network effects, performance metric, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture
By the time Arianna Huffington, the sole woman on Uber’s board at the time, came in to offer her perspective, Frances was open to the idea that we could be useful. Huffington was just coming from a heated session with female employees, and you could tell she had absorbed a lot of pain. The scene was the opposite of what we had come to expect from hands-off, Silicon Valley boards. Huffington was in the trenches with Kalanick, and her sleeves-up commitment moved us. Retreating back to our home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we debated whether to take on the project. There were lots of reasons to stay away from it. The work would be hard and its outcome uncertain, to say nothing of the brutal commute.
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In reviews of male and female managers of equal caliber, women were regularly, well, skewered, while their male peers were often left unscathed and even celebrated, sometimes for the very same behaviors. The short explanation for this pattern is that people are more likely to say, well, dopey things about women, particularly when they have the chance to do so anonymously (see internet). A case experiment famously asked MBA students to evaluate the profiles of Heidi Roizen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur known for her assertive style, and her male alter ego, “Howard.”21 The case asked, “Should your VC firm hire this candidate?” Some classes received Heidi’s profile, others received Howard’s. Apart from the name and gender of the protagonists, the profiles were identical, containing descriptors like “aggressive,” “independent,” and a “captain of industry.”
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She socialized new recruits on these behaviors in a famous hundred-slide presentation on Netflix’s unique culture, and then reinforced them constantly, for example, invoking “honesty” (number eight) if colleagues withheld feedback from each other. (Sheryl Sandberg described McCord’s presentation, known as the Netflix Culture Deck, as “the most important document ever to come out of [Silicon] Valley.”5) McCord also challenged employees to question each other’s actions if they were inconsistent with Netflix culture, an act she explicitly labeled an expression of “courage” (number six). By the time McCord left the company after more than a decade in her role, Netflix was behaving exactly as she and CEO Reed Hastings had designed it to behave: curious (number four), innovative (number five), and passionate (number seven).
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
It’s just one of the strangely “in-between” aspects of my experience, first of all as a biracial person, and secondly as one who makes digital art about the physical world. I have been an artist in residence at such strange places as Recology SF (otherwise known as “the dump”), the San Francisco Planning Department, and the Internet Archive. All along, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Silicon Valley as the source of my childhood nostalgia and the technology that created the attention economy. Sometimes it’s good to be stuck in the in-between, even if it’s uncomfortable. Many of the ideas for this book formed over years of teaching studio art and arguing its importance to design and engineering majors at Stanford, some of whom didn’t see the point.
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The festival, which started as an illegal bonfire on Baker Beach in San Francisco in 1986 before moving to Black Rock Desert, has become an attraction for the libertarian tech elite, something Sophie Morris sums up nicely in the title of her piece on the festival: “Burning Man: From far-out freak-fest to corporate schmoozing event.” Mark Zuckerberg famously helicoptered into Burning Man in 2015 to serve grilled cheese sandwiches, while others from the upper echelon of Silicon Valley have enjoyed world-class chefs and air-conditioned yurts. Morris quotes the festival’s director of business and communications, who unflinchingly describes Burning Man as “a little bit like a corporate retreat. The event is a crucible, a pressure cooker and, by design, a place to think of new ideas or make new connections.”7 While Felix and Poswolsky may have been old-school Burners who disdained corporate yurts with AC, the direction Camp Grounded was headed in when Felix passed away was not without its similarities.
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First, as relatively recent versions of this experiment, the communes exemplify the problems with any imagined escape from the media and effects of capitalist society, including the role of privilege. Second, they show how easily an imagined apolitical “blank slate” leads to a technocratic solution where design has replaced politics, ironically presaging the libertarian dreams of Silicon Valley’s tech moguls. Lastly, their wish to break with society and the media—proceeding from feelings I can sympathize with—ultimately reminds me not only of the impossibility of such a break, but of my responsibility to that same society. This reminder paves the way for a form of political refusal that retreats not in space, but in the mind
Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow
3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration
Then the bagpipes started, and everyone got drunk. Oscar Wilde once said, “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.” The mourners at Startup Funeral are among the many people in the American technology culture who regularly celebrate said experience. Since the rise of the Web, the Silicon Valley crowd has decided that failure in the quest to build a business is not only OK, but cool. “Fail often” is a guiding aphorism. Research shows that Americans, in general, are more tolerant of business failure than people in any other country. They don’t have a higher rate of business success, but the low social consequences for failing make risks easier to justify, and therefore many people take them.
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And then the school has students continuously parlay up to harder audiences and harsher feedback as they grow more comfortable. This forces them to both toughen up and push creative boundaries. With this process, The Second City transforms failure (something that implies finality) into simply feedback (something that can be used to improve). Hundreds of times a week. The Silicon Valley mantra “fail often” actually has a second part to it. More often than not, Valley startups will say, “fail fast and fail often.” This gets at the principle of rapid feedback. But failing implies a finality, a funeral, an amen. And according to The Second City, that’s not necessary. THE SECOND CITY MANAGES to accomplish three things to accelerate its performers’ growth: (1) it gives them rapid feedback; (2) it depersonalizes the feedback; and (3) it lowers the stakes and pressure, so students take risks that force them to improve.
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This is a twist on the classic networking advice, which advocates boldly meeting people and asking them for things. Building relationships through giving is more work than begging for help, but it’s also much more powerful. And there’s a simple way that companies can do it, too. . . . III. In 2006 a Silicon Valley engineer named Aaron Patzer quit his job to start a company called Mint Software, Inc., an online service that helped people simplify their personal finances. Mint users could collect all their bank accounts and credit card information in one place and track their spending and savings with nice charts.
100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison
23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize
What we desperately need is a new story—a true story—to help make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. MY GOOD FRIEND Sonia Arrison offers a new story that makes more sense of the world by replacing solace with a challenge. From her perch as a technology analyst at the Pacific Research Institute in Silicon Valley, Arrison has been at the nexus of the future for the better part of two decades. Over the years the two of us have debated and discussed many of the cutting-edge questions in the technology world, but our conversations have always returned to the most important of questions: of how technology will change the balance between life and death.
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Keirstead explains that he was able to repair the rats by taking human embryonic cells, coaxing them into becoming cells that form myelin to protect neurons of the spinal cord, and then injecting them into the rats. This major milestone led to clinical trials in humans, with the first patient receiving treatment in October 2010 at the Shepherd Center, a spinal cord and brain injury hospital in Atlanta.43 The human trials are being conducted by the Silicon Valley–based company Geron, and the Shepherd Center patient is the first of ten whom the company intends to enroll. But just because the therapy worked in the animal model does not guarantee that it will work in humans, and as with any new therapy, there is always the risk that unforeseen and damaging results could occur.
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As Malcolm Gladwell describes it, this type of connector is “more an observer, with the dry, knowing manner of someone who likes to remain a little bit on the outside.”43 Klein doesn’t make a lot of noise, but he does have a lot of friends, and he is willing to go out of his way to help people in need. He has been known to open his home to health extension colleagues getting settled in Silicon Valley, and he and his wife, Susan, were instrumental in helping Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis pull together Singularity University’s first group of core supporters.44 When Klein explained how he keeps track of the thousands of contacts he has, he said, “I keep a master spreadsheet updated,” and out of 5,000 or so people, there are “probably between 300 to 500 true ‘friends’ that I could call on to help.”45 That’s a strong social network, which Klein has leveraged many times over the years.
Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty by David Kadavy
Airbnb, complexity theory, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Hacker News, Isaac Newton, John Gruber, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, web application, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator
Thanks to all of you, to the first person to ever discover how to start a fire, and to anyone who ever did anything novel and creative thereafter and taught someone else about it. This book probably never would have been written were it not for an unlikely chain of events that brought me the privilege of living and working in Silicon Valley during one of its most exciting periods. That time exposed me to the most creative cowboys and cowgirls I’ve ever encountered, so thank you to all of you and to everyone I ever met who was like you but didn’t happen to live in Silicon Valley. So, thank you to Jeff Cannon and Jon Stevenson for getting me there. Also, thank you to Vinnie and Kristine Lauria, Noah Kagan, Paul Bragiel, and Ramit Sethi for being inspiring in your own ways.
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Small teams of young developers flocked to Silicon Valley to start companies and try to secure funding. These teams included designers (myself included) who were eager to try out their new bag of tricks. These small teams could call all the shots themselves. Some of the developers on these teams had quit their jobs at big companies, while others were straight out of college – or had even dropped out. Still others had fallen victim to the recent economic downturn and couldn’t find jobs anyway. All of them were excited to build things on their own terms. Silicon Valley in 2006 had the atmosphere of a really geeky frat party – or maybe even 1860s Café Guerbois.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 978-1-119-99895-2 Set in 11pt Adobe Garamond Pro by Wiley Composition Services Printed in the United States by CJ Krehbiel About the Author David Kadavy is president of Kadavy, Inc., a user interface design consultancy with clients including oDesk, PBworks, and UserVoice, and mentor at the 500 Startups seed fund. Previously, David led the design departments of two Silicon Valley startups and an architecture firm, taught a college course in typography, and studied ancient typography in Rome while earning his BFA in graphic design at Iowa State University. David’s design work has been featured in Communication Arts magazine, and he has spoken at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference.
The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton
active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game
Around two-thirds of foreigners with science and engineering doctorates from U.S. universities in 2005 remained 2 years after graduation. Anna Lee Saxenian has documented how in the initial phase, doctoral graduates from Taiwan and India often headed to jobs in Silicon Valley and Route 128 on the eastern seaboard, building up business know-how, industry contacts, and an understanding of the innovative process. In Silicon Valley, companies founded by immigrants produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers.27 This experience led them to explore opportunities to link up with entrepreneurs or set up businesses in their home countries.
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There had been a power shift from muscle power to brainpower. In this new age of human capital, the prosperity of individuals, companies, and nations would rest on the skills, knowledge, and enterprise of all rather than the few that drove industrialization in the twentieth century. Smokestack industries had given way to California’s Silicon Valley and Route 128 in Boston. Working-class occupations were in decline as a larger share of the workforce joined the burgeoning ranks of knowledge workers. Peter Drucker, a leading management guru, wrote of another power shift from the owners and managers of capital to knowledge workers, as the prosperity of individuals, companies, and nations came to depend on the application of knowledge.
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Costs had mushroomed during the good times so while “it may be a difficult moment for a lot of people,” he concluded that “in the end it was needed.”4 The need for a fundamental shift in employee expectations was also voiced by Pat House, who is currently the CEO of the software company C3 and a stalwart of Silicon Valley. She believes that a “psychic change” is underway that will result in a new model of venture capital and entrepreneurship, bringing to an end what she called the “entitlement generation.” Venture capital firms no longer hand over millions of dollars to start-ups, employing recent university graduates with “a fantastic salary and flying first class, and having an expense account, and not needing to be accountable for revenue while they build fantastically cool, not necessarily cash generating businesses.”
The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum by Temple Grandin, Richard Panek
Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, David Brooks, deliberate practice, double helix, ghettoisation, Gregor Mendel, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, Khan Academy, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, twin studies
You might be comfortable with your diagnosis but worry that it will define you in the eyes of others. What will your boss think? Your coworkers? Your loved ones? Half the employees at Silicon Valley tech companies would be diagnosed with Asperger’s if they allowed themselves to be diagnosed, which they avoid like the proverbial plague. I’ve been to their offices; I’ve seen the work force up close. Many of the hits on my home page come from Silicon Valley and other areas with a high concentration of tech industries. A generation ago, a lot of these people would have been seen simply as gifted. Now that there’s a diagnosis, however, they’ll do anything to avoid being ghettoized.
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One way is to apply the three-ways-of-thinking model that I discussed earlier: picture thinker, pattern thinker, word-fact thinker. That model, I believe, can help fundamentally change education and employment opportunities for persons with autism. Education When I give lectures in Silicon Valley, I see a lot of people who are solidly on the autistic spectrum, and then when I travel around the country and speak at schools, I see a lot of similar kids who will never get the chance to work in Silicon Valley. Why? Because their schools are trying to treat the kids like they’re all the same. Putting kids who are on the spectrum in the same classroom as their nonautistic peers and treating them the same way is a mistake.
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Maybe, I thought one day, putting the origami back on the windowsill, people who are really good at math think in patterns. Once I realized that thinking in patterns might be a third category, alongside thinking in pictures and thinking in words, I started seeing examples everywhere. After I gave a talk at one high-tech firm in Silicon Valley, I asked some of the folks there how they wrote code. They said they actually visualized the whole programming tree, and then they just typed in the code on each branch in their minds. And I thought, Pattern thinkers. I recalled my autistic friend Sara R. S. Miller, a computer programmer, telling me that she could look at a coding pattern and spot an irregularity in the pattern.
The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by Ben Mezrich
4chan, Asperger Syndrome, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Carl Icahn, contact tracing, data science, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, gamification, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Hyperloop, meme stock, Menlo Park, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, security theater, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Two Sigma, value at risk, wealth creators
Chapter Five Christ, I hate unicorns, Emma Jackson thought to herself as she tried to find a comfortable sitting position on the ultramodern sofa in the center of the vast waiting area of the shiny, absurdly modern, brand-spanking-new Menlo Park headquarters of one of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley. It was a difficult task, considering that the sofa was way too short, which meant Emma’s knees were almost to her shoulders. She’d never thought a piece of furniture could be pretentious before she’d started working with Valley Internet companies, but by her sixth year in the rapidly growing fintech industry, she’d visited enough headquarters to know that anything—and she really meant anything—could be pretentious.
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Still, every unicorn-led company had one, and Robinhood’s was as storybook and accessible as a magical forest full of cats. Emma had already heard much of the Robinhood myth since she’d arrived at the waiting area, parceled out in perfectly practiced answers—mostly from Vlad—to the softballs hurled by the fawning journalist. A fairy tale, for sure, Silicon Valley style: Vlad and Baiju had been two immigrant kids—Vlad from Bulgaria and Baiju from India—who had met as undergrads at Stanford, bonding over the fact that they were both only children of professorial parents, and that they shared majors in physics and math. In 2008, Vlad had matriculated to a graduate program at UCLA, planning to become a mathematician, while Baiju had gone to work at a trading firm near San Francisco.
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She didn’t fault him for that, either; she was used to that reaction. No doubt her meeting with Vlad and Baiju would be short, and way less fun than a photo shoot. Unlike the journalist, she wasn’t there to talk democracy or Occupy Wall Street or cats playing medieval dress-up. She wasn’t from Silicon Valley, she was from Chicago, and she was there to talk nuts and bolts. And as little as Vlad wanted to talk payment for order flow, he’d want to discuss her specialty even less. Not because it involved some uncomfortable truth that would be hard for the public to swallow about how Robinhood made its money; but because what Emma did for a living was, to an outsider, torturously boring.
The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Anthropocene, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, creative destruction, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, failed state, fixed income, Frank Gehry, global pandemic, Google Earth, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Large Hadron Collider, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, negative emissions, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons
“Makoko Floating School, Beacon of Hope for the Lagos ‘Waterworld.’” The Guardian, June 2, 2015. 22. 250,000 used plastic bottles: “The Island in Cancun Built on Recycled Plastic Bottles.” BBC News, April 2, 2016. 23. Seasteading Institute: Kyle Denuccio. “Silicon Valley Is Letting Go of Its Techie Island Fantasies.” Wired.com, May 16, 2015. Accessed March 5, 2017. https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silicon-valley-letting-go-techie-island-fantasies/ 24. “serious blow”: Cynthia Okoroafor. “Does Makoko Floating School’s Collapse Threaten the Whole Slum’s Future?” The Guardian, June 10, 2016. 25. 300,000 people: Unofficial estimate, provided by Megan Chapman of Justice & Empowerment Initiatives in Lagos. 26. issued an order: Ben Ezeamalu.
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If no significant action is taken, global damages from sea-level rise could reach $100 trillion a year by 2100. But it is not just money that will be lost. Also gone will be the beach where you first kissed your boyfriend; the mangrove forests in Bangladesh where Bengali tigers thrive; the crocodile nests in Florida Bay; Facebook headquarters in Silicon Valley; St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice; Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina; America’s biggest naval base in Norfolk, Virginia; NASA’s Kennedy Space Center; graves on the Isle of the Dead in Tasmania; the slums of Jakarta, Indonesia; entire nations like the Maldives and the Marshall Islands; and, in the not-so-distant future, Mar-a-Lago, the summer White House of President Donald Trump.
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In Asia, you could walk from Thailand to Indonesia, and then take a boat down to Australia. And people did. One wave of migration, as every American kid learns in middle school, brought humans across the land bridge between Asia and North America, thus laying the groundwork for the birth of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Exactly why and when human beings made the trip across the land bridge in the first place is much debated. Until recently, the best guess for the date of the arrival of humans in North America was 13,200 years ago. Many anthropologists believed it couldn’t have been much earlier than that because although the land bridge was open, much of North America was covered in an ice sheet until then, making it virtually impossible for even the most intrepid early explorers to travel down into the interior of the continent.
Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross
8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor
Alana Semuels, “How Amazon Helped Kill a Seattle Tax on Business,” The Atlantic, June 13, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/how-amazon-helped-kill-a-seattle-tax-on-business/562736/. 34. Edward Ongweso Jr., “Silicon Valley Owes Us $100 Billion in Taxes (At Least),” Vice, December 3, 2019, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59n7e8/silicon-valley-owes-us-dollar100-billion-in-taxes-at-least. 35. After Amazon unsuccessfully backed its own candidates to the tune of $1.5 million in the fall 2019 elections, the city council finally passed a modified head tax on corporations with payrolls of more than $7 million and employees with salaries above $150,000.
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While they fervently resist new taxes, the tech companies also avoid paying their fair share of existing ones, depriving local, state, and federal authorities of money they might use to address the housing crisis. Large corporations in general are notorious for tax dodging, of course, but even among that crowd the tech companies stand out. According to an estimate from the UK organization Fair Tax Mark, six Silicon Valley favorites—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft—managed to avoid paying more than $100 billion in taxes between 2010 and 2019.34 In 2019, in a major PR blitz, big tech launched a series of its own housing initiatives. That January, Microsoft announced it would invest $500 million on projects for low- and middle-income housing in the Seattle metro region.
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That January, Microsoft announced it would invest $500 million on projects for low- and middle-income housing in the Seattle metro region. In June, Google made a billion-dollar commitment to help address the chronic Bay Area housing crisis; this was followed, in October, by a billion-dollar pledge from Facebook. In November, Apple upped the ante with its announcement of a $2.5 billion plan to tackle the housing crunch in Silicon Valley. Amazon belatedly joined the others in January 2021 with the announcement of a $2 billion commitment to three locations—Nashville, Seattle, and Northern Virginia—where it has large offices. But these sizable sums of money did not come in the form of philanthropic contributions. They are mostly for-profit investments or loans, and only a small share are being offered as outright donations or grants.
Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman
Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, FedEx blackjack story, Ford Model T, game design, industrial cluster, Jean Tirole, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, school choice, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, work culture , zero-sum game
And only 4.3% of venture-funded companies are run by women. Women do create Internet firms, but many of them are home-based and on a shoestring, financed with credit cards and personal loans. The evidence contradicts Silicon Valley’s image of itself as a pure meritocracy, free of bias. The usual suspects blamed for the lack of venture-funded female entrepreneurs are that (1) most women are not like Sandy Lerner, with an advanced degree in engineering; and (2) Silicon Valley shuts women out of the networking opportunities prerequisite for start-up creation. The boys don’t actually like the Sandy Lerner-types, who are just as stubborn and hardheaded as they are.
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That plastic clamshell your phone charger came in, or the foil blister pack your heartburn pill pops out of, or the six-pack box of bouillon-cube dice in your pantry—there’s a good chance the machine that pressed it came from Packaging Valley. This little region has become the world’s leader in packaging innovation. The rise of Packaging Valley has led people to wonder what its secret is, much like they wonder why Silicon Valley has dominated high technology. One of the main reasons that so many packaging machines get exported from Italy today is the intense feelings of rivalry between specific companies located right there in Packaging Valley. There are about 200 companies in the valley that make industrial packaging machines.
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As one engineer told Boari, “Some of our rivals sent charming ladies here, trying to steal our best technicians, but they did not succeed. Here we are able to make beautiful machines and to motivate our technicians.” One could argue that the cross-country move of Facebook, from Cambridge to Palo Alto—memorialized in The Social Network—was crucial not just for the access to venture capitalists and programmers in Silicon Valley, but also because it stirred up deeper, rivalrous feelings between Facebook employees (then in Palo Alto) and Google employees (next door in Mountain View). When Top Dog is at stake—not just in some abstract way, but every time you make a reservation for dinner, every time you open the newspaper, every time you tell someone at a party where you work—and they nod, knowingly—employees take the competition more seriously.
The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game
The more Musk studied, the more he realized that there had been very little advancement in rocket technology in the past forty years. The rockets being flown by the Russians and the United States at the early part of the twenty-first century were very similar to those used during the Apollo era. To a self-made Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, this was stunning. “The computer that you could have bought in the early ’70s would have filled this room, and had less computing power than your cell phone,” he said during a speech at Stanford in 2003. “Just about every sector of technology has improved. Why has this not improved?
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As Musk, then thirty-two years old, parked his rocket outside the headquarters of the FAA, tourists who were headed to the National Air and Space Museum stopped to gawk at the streetside exhibit, even in the freezing temperatures. A shiny, white missile that stretched seven stories long, squatting in the real estate usually reserved for hot dog vendors. A cabbie stopped, agog, as the trailer took up an entire lane of traffic—at rush hour. The spectacle was pure Silicon Valley swagger, like an Apple product unveiling, but before Steve Jobs had perfected the art of hyping a new gadget to the masses. This was Musk’s opportunity to show off what his little startup had accomplished—to NASA; to the congressional staffers clamoring for free drinks; to the press, eager for a glimpse—even if it had yet to fly.
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Musk’s engineers in Central Texas were making as much of a ruckus as the lawyers he had hired to take on the establishment in Washington. Musk was putting on quite a show—the high-profile lawsuits, the police-escorted parade down Independence Avenue, the congressional hearing, and the crescendo of the fiery rocket tests—hosted by Silicon Valley’s newest boy wonder. The company had yet to fly, and it wasn’t clear whether the company would ever amount to anything. Early on, Musk pegged his chance of success at 10 percent. But his full-throttle performance was at least beginning to achieve one of his early goals—to reinvigorate interest in space.
Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos
Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!
With his role as midwife to the birth of a new company mostly complete, Winarsky elected to remain behind at SRI. But he took a seat on the board and played matchmaker between the founders and potential investors. To get Active Technologies off the ground, the founders needed money. Shawn Carolan, a partner at the prominent Silicon Valley investment firm Menlo Ventures, remembers the pitch from the three guys who were making an assistant AI named after a sci-fi antihero. From an investment standpoint, AI was a dicey bet. For decades, the technology had been hailed as the Next Big Thing, and yet the future had never quite arrived—especially not in a way that reliably generated profits.
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Being able to speak to Siri instead of just typing “was the magical feature that made it something really different,” Kittlaus recalls. Every one of the board members emailed him after the meeting, saying things that included, “I feel like I witnessed history tonight” and “unbelievable.” Around Silicon Valley, the buzz was building. One of the companies that wanted to try out the product before its official launch was Apple, which was potentially interested in a deal to help distribute the Siri app. When the founders arrived at Apple headquarters to do a demonstration, they faced a table crowded with people eager to see what they had built.
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He told Siri, “Give me two tickets for the Cubs game,” and the speech recognition service interpreted his utterance as “The circus is going to be in town next week.” The founders were subsequently able to convince Apple that the speech-recognition glitch was only temporary. But they remained on edge in the months leading up to the launch of the Siri app. At least one prominent Silicon Valley investor had told the founders that the notion of talking to your phone rather than simply using an app or doing a web search was, well, stupid. The investor just couldn’t imagine people wanting to do that. Winarsky, in particular, stressed that the launch needed to go spectacularly well. The company wasn’t simply aiming for an incremental improvement over some preexisting product.
Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland
agricultural Revolution, Alexander Shulgin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Burning Man, classic study, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, experimental economics, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, hive mind, invention of agriculture, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, lateral thinking, lockdown, lone genius, meta-analysis, microdosing, Picturephone, placebo effect, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, search costs, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Zenefits
As the writers John Markoff and Michael Pollan have documented, psychedelics—primarily pharmaceutical-grade LSD provided by a mysterious, colorful figure named Al Hubbard—played a central role from the very beginning of Silicon Valley’s rise.22 Ampex, an innovative, but now mostly forgotten, Silicon Valley–based manufacturer of storage devices, has been dubbed the “world’s first psychedelic corporation” because of the weekly workshops and retreats it organized around LSD use in the 1960s. LSD was instrumental in the creative design process that gave rise to circuit chips, and Apple founder Steve Jobs claimed that his experiments with LSD ranked as some of his most important life experiences.23 The synergy between San Francisco drug-based hippy culture and Silicon Valley innovation has been replayed in other places around the globe, from Berlin to Beijing, where intoxicant-heavy underground or bohemian cultures have rubbed shoulders with new industries dependent on creative insight rather than manufacturing muscle.24 A modern twist in hallucinogen use—a trend pioneered, as one might expect, in Silicon Valley—is making psychedelics easier to integrate into everyday life through the practice of “microdosing.”25 Microdosing involves taking frequent but small amounts of purified LSD or psilocybin, on the order of one-tenth of the normal dose, to induce mild, but sustainable, highs.
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Iain Gately notes that in ancient Persia no important decision was made without being discussed over alcohol, although it would not actually be implemented until reviewed sober the next day. Conversely, no sober decision would be put into practice until it could be considered, by the group, while drunk.7 From ancient China and ancient Greece to modern-day Silicon Valley, communal thinking and group drinking have always gone hand in hand. Gately has also argued that more recently the “water trade,” the infamously alcohol-soaked, after-hours but mandatory drinking sessions endured by Japanese salarymen (and they were almost all men), was a key driver of Japanese industrial innovation in the 1970s and ’80s.
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The removal of the playground monitor allows confused and promiscuous cross-talk between brain regions that normally communicate through carefully regulated channels.21 The result is mostly spatial disorientation, wildly confused perception, and conceptual nonsense. But the thoroughly shaken brain sometimes finds itself resettling into a usefully different configuration. When attempting to explain the rise of Silicon Valley, where ideas and inventions that have thoroughly transformed the modern world were hatched, pundits typically cite the presence of Stanford University, or the mild climate capable of attracting bright people from all over the world. Less commonly mentioned, but probably no less important, is its proximity to America’s psychedelic epicenter, San Francisco.
Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan
4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise
Behind Brexit, Trump and a host of other unforeseen ruptures is a paradigm shift in the nature of political communication. The digital world offers voters the opportunity to live in echo chambers where their political prejudices are confirmed and reinforced daily. We can all choose a tribe now and decide not to hear any voices critical of our choice. As politics is increasingly mediated through Silicon Valley tech giants, falsehoods and mistruths spread at light speed. So far, few political leaders have been willing to back down in a digital arms race in which every potential advantage is seized upon. The communications revolution has changed our politics in ways we are still struggling to understand.
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Like the author of The Prince, he has a piercing stare and a prematurely receding hairline. The mastermind behind the unexpected vote for Brexit in 2016, Cummings presented himself as a British political strategist with an uncanny knack for tapping into voters’ deepest desires. He read military historians, was inspired by Silicon Valley technocrats and wrote voluminous blog posts on everything from the Apollo space programme to Otto von Bismarck. Where others obsessed about appealing to the news media, Cummings – despite his well-heeled Oxbridge background – talked about opposing established elites. When then prime minister David Cameron described him as a “career psychopath”, it only served to feed the Cummings mythology.
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“Don’t let’s go out of our way to help small businesses, agriculture, the unions, coloured people, women,” Whetstone declared before being drowned out by a band playing ‘God Save the Queen’.104 A libertarian streak runs through the Whetstone family. Linda’s daughter, Rachel, worked for Tory central office before becoming a senior executive at some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. Rachel’s husband, Steve Hilton, was director of strategy for David Cameron before joining the think tank Policy Exchange. He later became a vocal Trump supporter, hosting a weekly show on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Network. In Buckingham, Linda Whetstone delivered a session for IEA staff on “the freedom fighters who put themselves on the line to spread the free market word”.
Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
Air France Flight 447, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, digital map, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, index card, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, meta-analysis, new economy, power law, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War
As the pharaohs example shows, and other projects by us and other researchers, people can acquire a prior in various ways beyond direct experience with a class of events, including being told things, making analogies to other classes of events, forming analogies, and so on.” “the Poker Brat” Eugene Kim, “Why Silicon Valley’s Elites Are Obsessed with Poker,” Business Insider, November 22, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/best-poker-players-in-silicon-valley-2014-11. “bluff when it matters” In response to a fact-checking email, Hellmuth wrote: “Annie is a great poker player, and she has stood the test of time. I respect her, and I respect her Hold’em game.” He folds In response to a fact-checking email, Hellmuth wrote: “I think she was trying to tilt me (get me emotional and upset) by showing a nine in that situation.
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This book’s chapters describe the correct way to set goals—by embracing both big ambitions and small-bore objectives—and why Israel’s leaders became so obsessed with the wrong aspirations in the run-up to the Yom Kippur War. They explore the importance of making decisions by envisioning the future as multiple possibilities rather than fixating on what you hope will happen, and how a woman used that technique to win a national poker championship. They describe how some Silicon Valley companies became giants by building “commitment cultures” that supported employees even when such commitment gets hard. Connecting these eight ideas is a powerful underlying principle: Productivity isn’t about working more or sweating harder. It’s not simply a product of spending longer hours at your desk or making bigger sacrifices.
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But there were few papers showing how a company’s culture impacted profitability. So in 1994, they embarked on a multiyear project to see if they could prove their assertion right. First, though, they needed to find an industry that had lots of new companies they could track over time. It occurred to them that the flurry of technology start-ups appearing in Silicon Valley might provide the perfect sample. At the time, the Internet was in its infancy. Most Americans thought @ was something to ignore on a keyboard. Google was still just a number spelled “googol.” “We weren’t inherently interested in tech and we had no idea the companies we were studying would become big deals,” said Baron, who now teaches at Yale.
Coastal California by Lonely Planet
1960s counterculture, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, electricity market, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, Mason jar, McMansion, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Wozniak, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar
THE PENINSULA South of San Francisco, squeezed tightly between the bay and the coastal foothills, a vast swath of suburbia continues to San Jose and beyond. Dotted within this area are Palo Alto, Stanford University and Silicon Valley, the center of the Bay Area’s immense tech industry. West of the foothills, Hwy 1 runs down the Pacific coast via Half Moon Bay and a string of beaches to Santa Cruz. Hwy 101 and I-280 both run to San Jose, where they connect with Hwy 17, the quickest route to Santa Cruz. Any of these routes can be combined into an interesting loop or extended to the Monterey Peninsula. And don’t bother looking for Silicon Valley on the map – you won’t find it. Because silicon chips form the basis of modern microcomputers, and the Santa Clara Valley – stretching from Palo Alto down through Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino and Santa Clara to San Jose – is thought of as the birthplace of the microcomputer, it’s been dubbed ‘Silicon Valley.’
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HIGH-TECH BOOMS & BUSTS In the 1950s, Stanford University in Palo Alto needed to raise money to finance postwar growth, so it built an industrial park and leased space to high-tech companies like Hewlett-Packard, which formed the nucleus of Silicon Valley. In 1971 Intel invented the microchip, and in 1976 Apple invented the first personal computer, paving the way for the global internet revolution of the 1990s. By the late 1990s, an entire dot-com industry had boomed in Silicon Valley, and companies nationwide jumped on the dot-com bandwagon following the exponential growth of the web. Many reaped huge overnight profits from start-ups, fueled by misplaced optimism, only to crash with equal velocity at the turn of the millennium.
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THE RICHMOND Aziza CALIFORNIAN, NORTH AFRICAN $$ ( 415-752-2222; www.azizasf.com; 5800 Geary Blvd; mains $16-29; 5:30-10:30pm Wed-Mon; ) Mourad Lahlou’s inspiration is Moroccan and his produce organic Californian, but his flavors are out of this world: Sonoma duck confit melts into caramelized onion in flaky pastry basteeya (savory phyllo pastry), while sour cherries rouse slow-cooked local lamb shank from its barley bed. Namu KOREAN, CALIFORNIAN $$ ( 415-386-8332; www.namusf.com; 439 Balboa St; small plates $8-16; 6-10:30pm Sun-Tue, 6pm-midnight Wed-Sat, 10:30am-3pm Sat & Sun) Organic ingredients, Silicon Valley inventiveness and Pacific Rim roots are showcased in Korean-inspired soul food, including housemade kimchee, umami-rich shitake mushroom dumplings and NorCal’s definitive bibimbap: organic vegetables, grassfed steak and Sonoma farm egg served in a sizzling stone pot. Ton Kiang DIM SUM $ ( 415-387-8273; www.tonkiang.net; 5821 Geary Blvd; dim sum $3-7; 10am-9pm Mon-Thu, 10am-9:30pm Fri, 9:30am-9:30pm Sat, 9am-9pm Sun; ) Don’t bother asking what’s in those bamboo steamers: choose some on aroma alone and ask for the legendary gao choy gat (shrimp and chive dumplings), dao miu gao (pea tendril and shrimp dumplings) and jin doy (sesame balls) by name.
Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson
3D printing, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital twin, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, friendly AI, fulfillment center, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Benioff, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, personalized medicine, precision agriculture, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, software as a service, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telepresence robot, text mining, the scientific method, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics
Laura Heller, “Walmart Launches Tech Incubator Dubbed Store No. 8,” Forbes, March 20, 2107, https://www.forbes.com/sites/lauraheller/2017/03/20/walmart-launches-tech-incubator-store-no-8/. b. Phil Wahba, “Walmart Is Launching a Tech Incubator in Silicon Valley,” Fortune, March 20, 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/03/20/walmart-incubator-tech-silicon-valley/. The company decided to not only test the concept in-house, but launch a store that had high-volume traffic. Critically, it selected its own employees as the test market. Its employees, already steeped in the company’s use of minimal viable products and A/B testing techniques to understand customer needs, provide helpful feedback and, unlike regular customers, aren’t put off if the technology occasionally fails.
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Chapter 5 1.Melissa Cefkin, “Nissan Anthropologist: We Need a Universal Language for Autonomous Cars,” 2025AD, January 27, 2017, https://www.2025ad.com/latest/nissan-melissa-cefkin-driverless-cars/. 2.Kim Tingley, “Learning to Love Our Robot Co-Workers,” New York Times, February 23, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/magazine/learning-to-love-our-robot-co-workers.html. 3.Rossano Schifanella, Paloma de Juan, Liangliang Cao and Joel Tetreault, “Detecting Sacarsm in Multimodal Social Platforms,” August 8, 2016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.02289. 4.Elizabeth Dwoskin, “The Next Hot Job in Silicon Valley Is for Poets,” Washington Post, April 7, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/04/07/why-poets-are-flocking-to-silicon-valley. 5.“Init.ai Case Study,” Mighty AI, https://mty.ai/customers/init-ai/, accessed October 25, 2017. 6.Matt Burgess, “DeepMind’s AI Has Learnt to Become ‘Highly Aggressive” When It Feels Like It’s Going to Lose,” Wired, February 9, 2017, www.wired.co.uk/article/artificial-intelligence-social-impact-deepmind. 7.Paul X.
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The human + machine revolution has already begun, but there are still many questions to answer and paths to forge. That’s the goal of the remaining chapters, so let’s continue our journey. 5 Rearing Your Algorithms Right Three Roles Humans Play in Developing and Deploying Responsible AI Melissa Cefkin has an interesting job. As a principal scientist at Nissan’s research center in Silicon Valley, she works alongside traditional car designers in developing the next generation of self-driving vehicles. Her role is to ensure a smooth collaboration between human and machine (that is, between driver and automobile), and that’s why she has a background in anthropology. “You need to understand humans if you want to provide them with an automated partner,” she contends.1 Cefkin’s role at Nissan is to think about things that most car designers might not consider.
Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed by Alexis Ohanian
Airbnb, barriers to entry, carbon-based life, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, Hans Rosling, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Occupy movement, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, software is eating the world, Startup school, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, unpaid internship, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler
As for the Internet, we had a chance, with all the momentum we gained from pummeling SOPA and PIPA back in 2012, to educate our politicians about how important Internet freedom is to every single one of their constituents. Every member of the House and Senate represented a digital district—it wasn’t a red or blue issue, but something that even the most divisive districts could agree on. Despite what you may’ve heard or read, it wasn’t just Silicon Valley that cared about this; it was all of America. I hope you’ve read in your history books about Silicon Valley and all the burgeoning startup communities around the country at that time. We were one of the few sectors hiring back then; in fact, we couldn’t hire enough. Some of your parents might have even been part of that scene. Geez… hmm… this probably isn’t what you need to hear right now, given the bleak state of the economy you’re graduating into.
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We left soon thereafter, fired up our Metallica mix CD (yes, I know), and took our rental car back to SFO. Back in Boston, I printed out a new piece of paper that would become the centerpiece of my wall. It had only five words on it: YOU ARE A ROUNDING ERROR. Those five words still motivate me to this day. And that executive is still working in the ranks of Silicon Valley, still (I hope) fueling the fire inside more founders like me. You Can’t Make Progress When You’re Not Taking Steps It’s not all “up and to the right” (the direction of the line on a traffic chart that tracks soaring logarithmic growth) for startups. Most of them will never enjoy that kind of growth.
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There are others who invest just because they’re fascinated by the industry and can offer some extra insights (this is what people mean when they say they’re “value-add investors”—but everyone says that, so you need to figure out specifically what that means). A community of these early-stage investors is important for a startup hub to develop in a particular geographical region, because investment can become a virtuous cycle. Silicon Valley is what it is precisely because of this: some geeks got rich and invested in more geeks, some of whom got rich and did the same. But it’s happening all over the world now, and as the costs for starting a company fall, many more companies are getting funding. It seems obvious, but companies die because they run out of money.
Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere by Tsedal Neeley
Airbnb, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discrete time, Donald Trump, future of work, global pandemic, iterative process, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lockdown, mass immigration, natural language processing, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Silicon Valley, social distancing
Nonwork communication on social tools lubricates work communication, and both leaders and employees should engage in social chatter on company-wide social tools. Chapter 5 How Can My Agile Team Operate Remotely? In the popular sitcom TV series Silicon Valley, about a group of six software developers working on what they hope will be the next big product in Silicon Valley, California, the members of what’s essentially an agile team live together in one house. Their impromptu conversations to hash out issues as they arise—be they tech related, logistical, or interpersonal—are as apt to take place in the kitchen, driveway, hallway, or yard as they are at scheduled meetings in their living room office.
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These rapid changes were unprecedented, but the remote work format is not new. Domestic and global companies have had virtual work arrangements for nearly thirty years. Unsurprisingly, technology companies were the first to see the opportunities that remote work offers. The prominent technology company Cisco launched one of the first systematic remote work programs in Silicon Valley in 1993. Employees worked from home or kept flexible hours by using broadband technology to communicate with the main office from any remote location. Cisco reported saving $195 million in 2003, as well as an increase in employee productivity, both of which it attributed at least in part to its remote work arrangements.
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By modern, I mean virtual professional engagements that are enabled by digital tools (not the distributed work of the late 1600s, in which London-based merchants sailed across the Atlantic to coordinate with colonists on the North American coast, just for clarification). As mentioned in the Introduction, makers of technology products were first to experiment with modern remote teams. When Cisco launched a remote work program in the Silicon Valley area in 1993, more than 90 percent of their employees participated in the grand experiment to work from anywhere. People had the freedom to choose their desired place to be on the job—coffee shops and kitchen tables, as well as the office, were acceptable options. It didn’t take long for Cisco to reap the financial benefits from the savings on hefty real estate upkeep with fewer bodies at the official workplace.
The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve
Secular stagnationists couldn’t explain why the collapse in productivity across the developed world only became marked in the years after Lehman’s failure. The fever for start-ups didn’t spread far beyond Silicon Valley. In fact, new business formation in the United States fell sharply after 2008. In 2016, business deaths outnumbered births for the first time since the Census Bureau started keeping records in 1978. Furthermore, the new businesses that appeared were concentrated in a small number of counties (including Silicon Valley). Regulatory red tape played a part in discouraging entrepreneurs.40 By trapping excess capacity in place and, in effect, raising barriers to entry, unconventional monetary policies were probably more influential.
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Aileen Lee, ‘Welcome to the Unicorn Club: Learning from Billion-dollar Startups’, TechCrunch, 2 November 2013. 33. Paul Glader, ‘Will 2016 be the Year of the Unicorn Apocalypse in Silicon Valley?’, Forbes, 16 January 2016. 34. James Grant, ‘Standing on a Box’, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, 37 (7), 5 April 2019. 35. Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (New York, 2017), p. 24. 36. Details of the Theranos story from John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (London, 2019). 37. Hubert Horan, ‘Uber’s Path of Destruction’, American Affairs, 3 (2), Summer 2019. Uber was not the only loss-making ride-hailing app.
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Easy money encourages people to invest in projects whose returns lie in the distant future.31 Residential property is a long-duration asset and construction booms facilitated by low interest rates are a common form of ‘malinvestment’. After the US real estate bubble imploded in 2006, housebuilding was depressed for several years. With interest rates lower than ever, investors went in search of other types of long-dated investments. Silicon Valley was only too happy to supply their needs. In 2013 venture capitalist Aileen Lee came up with the term ‘unicorn’ to describe start-up companies valued at more than a billion dollars. Lee called these firms ‘unicorns’, she said, because ‘it means something extremely rare, and magical.’32 Their valuations may have been magical, but unicorns soon became much less rare.
Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age by Michael Wolff
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Carl Icahn, commoditize, creative destruction, digital divide, disintermediation, Golden age of television, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Joseph Schumpeter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, telemarketer, the medium is the message, vertical integration, zero-sum game
On November 14, 2007, Kevin Morris, a forty-four-year-old entertainment lawyer, given to penumbral debates about modern culture and the state of media, and with a roster of major Hollywood clients, convened a daylong meeting in his law firm’s Los Angeles offices in the Creative Artists Agency building on the Avenue of the Stars. A year after Google bought YouTube, Morris was wrestling with the increasingly fraught relationship between the traditional media business, which almost all of his clients were part of, and the new, aggressive posture of digital media, located 350 miles north, and a world away, in Silicon Valley. Morris, aware as everybody was of what had happened to the music industry, saw this as something of an emergency moment. At the same time, Morris felt that logically both sides had a set of common interests, and in the end certainly needed a working understanding. His collegial idea was to assemble interested players on both sides to discuss this shared ground, because, as he said optimistically in his invitation: “It’s about the story.
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On the digital side, you had a less august but significantly more cocky group: Jordon Hoffner of YouTube; Kurt Abrahamsen and Adam Stewart from Google in Los Angeles (the home office had passed on the invitation); Mark Kvamme of the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, which had backed the Web series Funny or Die; and Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape, on his way to being among the most significant and influential venture capital figures in Silicon Valley The imbalance was notable and uncomfortable for everyone— or at least for everyone on the old media side. There was, even, a kind of slack-jawed response—perhaps not least of all because Hollywood power is not used to being challenged—to the certainty, impatience, and what rather seemed like the advanced intelligence of the tech side.
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Very little in this particular piece was new. Rather, the approach here—putting a lot of well-known sources on the record in support of the current and popular thesis—is meant to solidify, rather than challenge, a widespread impression, and to thereby stand as the definitive statement. It is an instructive example of a kind of Silicon Valley agitprop that is so often retailed through traditional reporters and that then becomes the conventional wisdom adopted by the financial community as well as by other journalists. “Television,” says Auletta, as his pro forma thesis, “is undergoing a digital revolution.” “We are to cable networks as cable networks were to broadcast networks,” Auletta quotes Hastings.
America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System by Steven Brill
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, asset light, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, business process, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, crony capitalism, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, obamacare, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, the payments system, young professional
Because biologics could not be patented, Waxman thought, they didn’t deserve patent-like protection to preserve the drugmakers’ outrageous profits.*8 Beier had worked hard to turn this into a broader Silicon Valley debate about entrepreneurship, innovation, and protecting valuable (and lifesaving) inventions. He had enlisted the support of Democrat Anna Eshoo, the congresswoman representing Silicon Valley, while broadening that base with support from groups representing patients with diseases treated by products invented by Amgen and other biologic companies—groups that were often, though not always, funded by the drug companies.
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“It looked awfully spikey,” Ryan Panchadsaram, the White House innovation fellow, remembered. “The question was whether we could ride that bull. Could we fix it?” The team went home at about 2:30 A.M. on Saturday, October 19. CALLING SILICON VALLEY At the White House, the decision had still not been made whether to save or scrap HealthCare.gov. Jeffrey Zients wanted still more eyes from Silicon Valley on the problem. At about six in the morning on Saturday, October 19, 2013, he emailed John Doerr, a senior partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, the Menlo Park–based venture capital powerhouse whose investments include Amazon, Google, Sun, Intuit, and Twitter.
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When Obama called out Dickerson and his crew, the room spontaneously erupted in a chant, “Tech team, tech team.” A few weeks later, White House CTO Todd Park described to me how a new version of the website—“Marketplace 2.0”—was being staffed by alumni of the tech team and some of their Silicon Valley colleagues. It was, he said, being built in modules “according to Silicon Valley best practices,” and designed for any and all mobile screens. And it was going to be tested on 1 percent of the population and then broader test groups before being rolled out for the 2015 enrollment year that would begin November 15. That radical change in approach was not the only lesson learned from the October 2013 debacle.
The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population
, have faded away, while those connected to hot new mobile Internet apps—including Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Eric Lefkofsky of Groupon, and Jan Koum of WhatsApp—have risen up to the billionaire list in recent years. Though Silicon Valley has seen protests over the growing disparity between techies and low-paid service workers, on the national stage tech tycoons are treated as celebrities. The billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, whose interests range from electric supercars to space tourism, is celebrated in scholarly reviews on how he is “changing the world.” There are many billionaire folk heroes from Silicon Valley, largely because consumers love the services they provide. WhatsApp gained seven hundred million followers in its first six years in business, which is more than Christianity gained in its first nineteen centuries, as Forbes magazine has pointed out.
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For decades, the United States has benefited from brain gain, which has helped to fuel the entrepreneurial energy of American society. Today immigrants make up 13 percent of the total U.S. population, but they account for 25 percent of the new business owners and 30 percent of the people working in Silicon Valley. Of the top twenty-five U.S. tech companies in 2013, 60 percent were founded by first- or second-generation immigrants. Steve Jobs at Apple: second generation from Syria. Sergey Brin at Google: first generation from Russia. Larry Ellison at Oracle: second generation from Russia. Jeff Bezos at Amazon: second generation from Cuba.
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While many of these founders with immigrant roots hail from countries mired in war or economic dysfunction, quite a few come from families that left the heavily regulated economies of Europe, including old East Germany (Konstantin Guericke of Symantec), France (Pierre Omidyar of eBay), and Italy (Roger Marino of EMC). In recent years Silicon Valley tycoons have become increasingly concerned that the United States was closing its doors to highly skilled foreigners, putting the country at a disadvantage in the talent wars. Since 2000 the United States has let in more and more foreigners to study but not to work. The number of student visas rose to nearly half a million over that period, but the number of employment or H1B visas held steady at around 150,000.
Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State by Barton Gellman
4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, active measures, air gap, Anton Chekhov, Big Tech, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, Debian, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, financial independence, Firefox, GnuPG, Google Hangouts, housing justice, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, off-the-grid, operational security, planetary scale, private military company, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Robert Gordon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, standardized shipping container, Steven Levy, TED Talk, telepresence, the long tail, undersea cable, Wayback Machine, web of trust, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP
Are citizens equipped to hold their government accountable? Are they free to shield themselves from an unwanted gaze? Can anyone today draw a line, say, “None of your business,” and make it stick? There is an origin story for this book, and it antedates Snowden. In 2011, I shared a stage in Silicon Valley with Google’s Eric Schmidt. He asked, “Wouldn’t you like to be able to say to your Android phone, ‘Where are my car keys?’” Good God, no, I told him. Maybe I’m in a casino. Maybe the bartender took my keys and I’m sleeping it off in a room upstairs, never mind whose. I’d be glad to have my phone track my life, but I don’t want you to know.
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When tougher targets called for bespoke tools, TAO collection managers turned to their elite unit, the Remote Operations Center (ROC). “The Rock” employed some of the most talented hackers on the planet. In a culture that loved its puns, they were “ROC stars.” The then FBI director, Robert Mueller, once told me that intelligence agencies lured those men and women away from Silicon Valley with a matchless offer. Come test yourself against the world’s toughest adversaries. Feel free to invent cracking tools that would land you in prison if you were dumb enough to try them at home. Snowden was not immune to that temptation. “To a lot of people, that’s really exciting,” he said. “Because you’re hacking.
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Acquire, analyze, report. Fetch, etch, retch. Rick lived on the “Fetch It” side of the house. He displayed evident pride in PRISM and made sure to spread the word. In April 2013, Rick was traveling from office to office in the corridors of S2, regaling analysts with tales of treasure to be had from Silicon Valley and the Microsoft empire east of Seattle: email, voice and video chat, instant messages, photographs, budget documents, travel and medical records, technical drawings, contact lists, and more. He drew upon a “corporate portfolio” of nine companies, listed in order of entry into the PRISM apparatus: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”
Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy
Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, disinformation, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, information security, invention of the telegraph, Jim Simons, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knapsack problem, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mondo 2000, Network effects, new economy, NP-complete, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise
Just a few years earlier, when IBM used its vast resources to make history by putting DES on a chip, it had been inconceivable that a few academics could attempt such a feat without a passel of deep-pocketed investors. Back then, such a feat would have been about as unlikely as a few grad students in some random engineering department deciding to launch a rocket to the moon. But in the interim, a Caltech professor named Carver Mead had changed all that. Mead, a veteran of the Silicon Valley semiconductor industry, was the guru of Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI), a technology that shrank what was once a huge computing machine into a thumbnail-size silicon chip. Eager to encourage research in the field, Mead had not only published a book on the subject, but helped set up a fabrication facility—known as a fab—to help academics actually build their own chips.
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Nine days later the fledgling company paid MIT the $150,000 (plus 5 percent of all its future revenues) for exclusive rights to the patent. With a real investment and control of its intellectual property, it was time to begin behaving like a business, creating and selling uncrackable cryptographic tools to anyone with a computer. With the remainder of Kelly’s investment, they set up an office in Silicon Valley and hired a professional manager to run the company. His name was Ralph Bennett. He had an impressive résumé—he’d worked at respectable companies like Fairchild Semiconductors—and from the point of view of the MIT professors, this fifty-something businessman seemed as good as anyone else around.
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In any case, the state of the young enterprise was, to say the least, precarious when Bart O’Brien called upon an old Paradyne friend of his named Jim Bidzos to help out with sales for RSA. At the time, it seemed like just one more random call. But the entrance of Jim Bidzos not only changed the future of the company, but the technology itself. Crypto had found its first supersalesman. And the repercussions would ripple from Silicon Valley to Fort Meade. Jim Bidzos was an unlikely savior for public key cryptography. The closest he came to processing algorithms was figuring out backgammon odds in the high-stakes Las Vegas tournaments he liked to frequent. Bidzos was then thirty-one, a Greek national born on February 20, 1955, in a mountainous region near the Albanian border: “A very, very small village in the middle of nowhere, no roads, maybe seventy people,” he says.
Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar
"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, Donald Trump, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, fear of failure, financial deregulation, hiring and firing, income inequality, junk bonds, light touch regulation, locking in a profit, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, medical residency, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, p-value, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Predators' Ball
At the same time that high finance was inventing a nearly incomprehensible new array of financial products and instruments, collateralizing mortgages and other debt and turning it into securities, traders were finding new ways to cheat. When it came to innovating financial crime, hedge funds were like Silicon Valley. Government intervention had made matters worse, in a classic example of unintended consequences. In 2000, New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer launched an investigation of research departments at Wall Street investment banks, ultimately charging them three years later with manipulating their buy and sell ratings on stocks, the same ratings that many investors in the market turned to as guides when evaluating the health of various companies.
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The SAC approach, he quickly learned, was to seek out investment opportunities where a specific event like an earnings announcement would move the price of a stock up or down. The trick was to figure out what that event was and how to set up a long or short position to benefit from it. Horvath built elaborate spreadsheets and earnings models. He had an apartment in San Francisco, near Silicon Valley, and he traveled back and forth between New York and the West Coast as well as to investment conferences and technology companies all over the world, trying to learn everything he could about his companies. Horvath had been at SAC for only a few months when, in early 2007, there were stirrings of trouble in the economy.
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As the former SEC chairman launched into a meditation about the dangers of using outside expert network consultants because they might inadvertently disclose confidential information, a small drama was playing out elsewhere in SAC’s offices. A corporate announcement appeared on the news wires just before 5 P.M.: Brocade Communications Systems, a data networking company based in Silicon Valley, revealed that it was buying Foundry Networks, which produced switches and routers for Internet service providers. SAC’s CR Intrinsic unit owned 120,000 shares of Foundry stock—an investment that had been recommended by the analyst Ron Dennis, who was a member of Jon Horvath and Jesse Tortora’s “fight club” of information-sharing.
SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi
"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional
David Streitfeld, “Lawsuit Shakes Foundation of a Man’s World of Tech,” New York Times, June 2, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/technology/lawsuit-against-kleiner-perkins-is-shaking-silicon-valley.xhtml. Adam Lashinsky and Katie Benner, “A tale of money, sex and power: The Ellen Pao and Buddy Fletcher affair,” Fortune, October 25, 2012, http://fortune.com/2012/10/25/ellen-pao-buddy-fletcher/. 17. Maya Kosoff, “Ellen Pao Is Writing a Tell-All About Silicon Valley’s ‘Toxic Culture,’” Vanity Fair, June 8, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/ellen-pao-memoir-silicon-valley-toxic-culture. CHAPTER 12 1. Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York: Random House, 2001), Kindle locations 575-6, Kindle edition. 2.
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Carolin Strôbele, “Mit 50plus ist für Karrierefrauen Feierabend,” Karriere.de, July 7, 2015, http://www.karriere.de/karriere/mit-50plus-ist-fuer-karrierefrauen-feierabend-167863. 11. Tracey Lien, “Why Are Women Leaving the Tech Industry in Droves?” Los Angeles Times, February 22, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-women-tech-20150222-story.xhtml. 12. Nina Burleigh, “What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women,” Newsweek, January 28, 2015, http://www.newsweek.com/2015/02/06/what-silicon-valley-thinks-women-302821.xhtml. 13. Bair, Bull by the Horns, 98. 14. Pamela Ryckman, Stiletto Network: Inside the Women’s Power Circles That Are Changing the Face of Business (New York: AMACOM, 2013), Kindle edition; Sara Murray, “Ex-Banker Heads Up ‘Broad’ Effort at Boosting Women in Business,” Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304856504579340971127508490; Diane Brady, “Sallie Krawcheck and the Value of Women’s Networks,” Bloomberg Businessweek, May 16, 2013, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-16/sallie-krawcheck-and-the-value-of-womens-networks. 15.
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Joseph DiMartino, chairman of the Dreyfus Family of Funds and former senior adviser to Fletcher Asset Management, soon quit after believing that Fletcher was not sufficiently focused on his day job.10 Fletcher’s wife-to-be, Ellen Pao, had been an overachiever throughout her life. After graduating with an engineering degree from Princeton University, she went on to Harvard Law School and later to Harvard Business School. She began her career in Silicon Valley and eventually accepted a position at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Kleiner Perkins is a highly respected venture capital firm with a mind-blowing track record of successful investments, including Amazon, Google, Netscape, and Genentech. There, Pao became head of staff for billionaire John Doerr, one of Kleiner Perkins’s most successful partners.
The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future by Michael Levi
addicted to oil, American energy revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, crony capitalism, deglobalization, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, manufacturing employment, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, stock buybacks
The Focus Electric has a range of only seventy-six miles, and that’s after using up what looks like half its trunk space to fit in more electric cells. Atul Kapadia, the Silicon Valley battery executive who in Chapter 2 bragged to me about his natural gas car, is determined to change that. Kapadia worked most of his life in the information technology business. In the seven years he spent as a venture capitalist at Bay Partners, the firm made dozens of investments, backing everything from shopping software and semiconductor manufacturing to online poker. Only twice, though, did it venture into energy.35 In 2007, as oil prices skyrocketed, THE CAR OF THE FUTURE • 117 Silicon Valley was swept by energy fever; for a time, it seemed as if every investor and entrepreneur who had made it big in information technology was getting into the game.
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Meanwhile gains of nearly two hundred thousand barrels a day in U.S. crude production were eclipsed by even bigger declines in U.S. oil consumption—and both trends would intensify in the following year. (At the time, the United States consumed about twenty million barrels of oil every day, and produced slightly over five million.) Money was pouring into clean-energy startups in Silicon Valley, and prices for alternative technologies continued to fall. Here, said opponents of oil and natural gas, was the real way to deliver the jobs, prosperity, environmental protection, and energy security that Americans desired. Oil and gas enthusiasts, by and large, were as enamored of this vision as those who had rallied in Columbus were about one of plentiful fossil fuels.
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Before the shale gas boom, the biggest hurdle to deploying electric vehicles was the cost of the cars themselves, not the fuel; now that shale gas has taken off, the same barriers remain. There are two other prospects that are unique to natural gas. On a visit to California, I met Atul Kapadia, the chief executive of Envia Systems, one of the hottest developers of battery technology for electric cars in Silicon Valley. Kapadia, who still carries a light Indian accent despite his decades in the United States, speaks calmly but with the conviction of someone who has succeeded before. Battery CEOs typically brag to you about their new electric vehicles or about how they’ve had their cars retrofitted to run off electric power.
Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar
By June 2011, as the Wall Street Journal reporter Lynn Cowan noted, it had “31 websites in 11 languages with rentals located in more than 145 countries.”2 I spent much of the 2009 Davos conference searching for an optimistic CEO. And I did find one: Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn. Hoffman may seem atypical for a Silicon Valley player. Friendly and not intimidating, he has a shambling mien and a body type that suggests he doesn’t spend his weekends winging around the Los Altos hills on a $6,500 road bike. Yet he exemplifies the Silicon Valley mentality, continually plugging into infrastructure to create new types of businesses. Hoffman was an early executive at PayPal, which piggybacked on the success of eBay, one of the Internet’s new economic ecosystems.
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An Italian accounting firm, a Swedish conglomerate, Turkish Airlines, and the People’s Daily of China have all checked in, paying significantly higher rents. “We’re now doing leases at the base of the building that average $49 to $50, and at the top we’re getting into the $60s,” said Malkin. In May 2011 the Empire State Building scored its biggest coup: LinkedIn, the Silicon Valley networking startup, whose growth demonstrates the ability of the U.S. economy to develop highly valuable, global companies at warp speed, took the entire twenty-fifth floor at a “high $40-per-square-foot range.” “Five years ago, I never would have believed we would have had a tenant like this,” Malkin told Crain’s New York Business.
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Rather than dismantle production capacity vacated by General Motors, new users have taken it over, with different cost structures and with different types of vehicles in mind. In April 2010 a large factory in Fremont, California, belonging to NUMMI, a joint venture of GM and Toyota, was closed, putting 4,500 people out of work. But Tesla, the Silicon Valley start-up that makes high-end electric sports cars, took it over in May 2010. In July 2009 GM closed the Boxwood Road plant in Newport, Delaware, where it had been making vehicles since 1947. In June 2010, armed with a $528.7 million loan from the U.S. government and $175 million of its own money, Fisker Automotive, an electric vehicle manufacturer based in Anaheim and founded by two former BMW executives, bought the plant for $10 million.
Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle
active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar
A BROKEN PROMISE In Design: The Invention of Desire by designer and theorist Jessica Helfand, the author mentions that hack, a much-loved Silicon Valley–ism, stands for “horse’s ass carrying keys” and is prison slang for “guard.”98 Outside of the technological realm, to “hack” something is to gash, cut, and break it, like a person with a machete. In Silicon Valley, to hack is based on the arrogant view that perceived value is “only in that which you contribute, fundamentally eviscerating the person or process that preceded your intervention. In this view—and it is not insignificant—the idea of hacking comes from a position of arrogance.”99 Likewise, Silicon Valley’s favorite phrase, “let’s break shit,” is part of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” a theory of economic progress in which new business rises like a phoenix from the ashes of old business.100 Creative destruction has also been described as an early version of Clayton Christensen’s hypothesis of “disruptive innovation,” in which economies flourish when start-ups replace established firms.101 And of course, to disrupt the status quo of established industries is part of the goal of the sharing economy.
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I am unlikely to spend much time interacting with a maintenance worker who changes the fluorescent bulbs in my office, but if that same worker comes into my home to change the filter on my air conditioner, I will probably offer him or her a glass of water and make a comment about the weather. The private-home aspect also changes the equation. As the work happens behind closed doors, behavior that would not be acceptable in a workplace—such as asking about one’s sexual interests—appears more acceptable. Additionally, the male-dominated environs of Silicon Valley seems to have a particular issue with sexual harassment. “In the same way that female engineers and start-up founders struggle to report harassment for fear of retaliation or lost funding, gig economy workers are in precarious positions,” says Sam Levin.20 Workers who report sexually uncomfortable situations risk being viewed as problem workers and often note their own concerns about the possibility of being deactivated for complaining.21 Finally, because of the lip service paid to community and trust, when workers experience situations that appear to be sexual harassment they don’t identify it as such.
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While Camp had made a fortune selling StumbleUpon, he still felt nearly a grand was too steep a price for one night of convenience. He had been mulling over ways to bring down the cost of black car services ever since” (Shontell 2014). Camp realized that splitting the cost with a lot of people—say a few dozen elite users in Silicon Valley—could make it affordable. The idea morphed into Uber, essentially the equivalent of nightclub bottle service for the taxi industry, a premium service for high-end customers. 76. Shontell (2014). 77. Kolodny (2010). 78. Worthman (2011). 79. Chen (2012). 80. Wright (2015). 81. Licea, Ruby, and Harshbarger (2015). 82.
Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success by Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, Rob Wertheimer
3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, airport security, asset light, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Boeing 747, business cycle, business process, clean water, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Elisha Otis, Elon Musk, factory automation, fail fast, financial engineering, Ford Model T, global pandemic, hydraulic fracturing, Internet of things, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, low cost airline, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, Michael Milken, Network effects, new economy, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, software is eating the world, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, value engineering, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy
Most industrials aren’t situated next to innovation centers: only one in five industrial companies has an office in or near Silicon Valley. That limits immersion in the buzz of innovation via employee networks, as well as opportunities for cross-pollination from hiring. Stanley Ventures aimed to sync with that ecosystem. The company partnered with leading accelerator TechStars to create an external accelerator in Hartford, Connecticut, near SDB’s headquarters in New Britain. The accelerator was focused on 3D printing and packaging, thereby investing in SBD’s community and in advanced manufacturing at the same time. Internally Stanley Black & Decker created an Exponential Learning Unit in Silicon Valley, both to attract talent from that area and to serve as an incubator of ideas.
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And now a recession has put many businesses on the brink of collapse, even businesses that were not all that long ago thought of as invincible. In the stock market, investors have spent much of the last decade bidding up technology giants to levels that make sense only if these firms face limited competition and amazing profitability for decades. Market share has become the primary goal in a winner-take-all economy. Far beyond Silicon Valley, companies have been spending heavily on growth and paying little attention to how they’ll actually make money once they get there. With all the talk about disruption and market dominance, you might think the laws of business had been repealed. It’s as if the hard-learned lessons from the 2008–2009 financial crisis have already been long forgotten, even as we encounter a new crisis that could have even deeper impacts.
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If this pace of disruption has caught auto leaders or investors by surprise, they most certainly must have been out of touch in more ways than we can imagine. Meanwhile, few expected the computing power we have today and the pervasive impact of the internet and smartphones. Netscape cofounder and Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen noted in 2011 that “software is eating the world.” That prediction sure seems accurate. Few could have dreamed of the impact that software has already had. But that prediction was ignored by most and stands out as being unusually prescient. Even the best CEOs are kidding themselves if they think they can consistently predict more than a little bit forward.
Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia
Data scientists know that, with a large enough dataset, projecting trends with gross accuracy is easy, but it’s near impossible to reduce from that to pinpoint accuracy for an individual. Philosophical questions abound – and not only about who owns the data and for what purposes. The rhetoric flowing from Silicon Valley casually assumes that a person is simply an aggregation of data. Accepting this begs questions of what aspects of existence can’t be standardised and measured, and therefore the value and importance of what gets left out. Does anyone seriously propose a standardised measurement of how much I love my partner or my child?
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Just like financial forecasts, these heuristics contain an agenda; they might purport to be objective or scientific, but they can’t be. Are you willing to sign up for Dr Ming’s definition of success, without knowing what it is or where it comes from? MUSE could be dismissed as just another example of Silicon Valley hype, saying whatever will attract investors and customers. But the hype isn’t cost-free. The app can distract parents from their children.5 Parents ended up feeling a slave to it, rather than learning first-hand about their own child. The more anxious they became and the more time they spent on the app, the less they could read their own kids.
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In 2013, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation pledged $50 million to the school. In a city that was economically the most segregated in America, the dream now was to make Austin the healthiest. The new dean, Clay Johnston, came from California to launch the school for one reason only: to reinvent American healthcare. Unlike Silicon Valley salesmen, he didn’t pitch the vision that the only way to do that was by eliminating doctors and replacing them with machines. Current models of healthcare fail because they don’t focus on keeping patients well. He hoped, he said, that ‘Starting from scratch, we can design a medical school that empowers doctors to work collaboratively and embrace new technologies and perform cutting-edge research.
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets From Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar, Bill Carr
Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business logic, business process, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fulfillment center, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, late fees, loose coupling, microservices, Minecraft, performance metric, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, web application, why are manhole covers round?
The only way we had a chance at success was to put in place strong leaders, so Steve set out to find a subject matter expert with knowledge of the industry to lead our team in creating a great hardware device. In September 2004, Steve hired Gregg Zehr, a Silicon Valley veteran who had been a VP of hardware engineering at Palm Computing and Apple. Gregg would set up a separate office in Silicon Valley, not Seattle, in order to tap into the Silicon Valley technical talent pool, which was much deeper than in Seattle, particularly for hardware developers. It would be an important step in our effort to hire outside leaders who could bring new capabilities to our company and to develop centers of excellence away from our home base.
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Unlike today, where the vast majority of Amazon’s workforce is based outside the Seattle HQ, there were at the time only two or three other remote development centers, so it was still a relatively new concept for Amazon and felt risky. We saw a remote operation like this one as a means to an end, not an end in itself. We needed talent, and Silicon Valley was where the talent was. There was considerable risk by putting so much on the shoulders of senior external hires like Gregg Zehr. How could we be sure that he would become Amazonian? The culture of Silicon Valley is markedly different from Amazon’s culture. How would he learn and adapt to our peculiar processes like Bar Raiser, PR/FAQs, and six-pagers? These were issues that we addressed through the Bar Raiser process itself, which was the same whether you were a new college hire or a VP.
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They are in it to make a fast buck for themselves, they don’t have the organization’s best interests at heart, and they don’t have the resolve to stick with your company through challenging times. Missionaries, as Jeff defined the term, would not only believe in Amazon’s mission but also embody its Leadership Principles. They would also stick around: we wanted people who would thrive and work at Amazon for five-plus years, not the 18–24 months typical of Silicon Valley. And so, in 1999, we set about to develop a hiring process to help us identify and hire people who fit this description. It is impossible to quantify how successful this process, which we called the Bar Raiser, has been or to establish its importance, relative to other factors, in Amazon’s rapid growth.
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
In fact, this helpful attitude is the number one networking “secret” he offered in a list to accompany a Forbes magazine profile of him: with no expectation of anything in return, you should always be willing to help others with an introduction or a bit of your time, he told the magazine.9 “If you do that for long, you create a reputation,” he explained to me. “Silicon Valley is a small town—everybody knows each other.”10 It is certainly true that reputational information travels quickly through small, tight-knit networks. In fact, that’s why such networks can sustain a high level of cooperation: when people know there’s a good chance that their honesty, kindness, and generosity will become well known to others (and potentially reciprocated), they’re much more likely to engage in such altruistic behavior.11 In a vast, sparsely connected environment like a big city or, worse, an anonymous online forum, Nozad’s advice to always be willing to help others would actually backfire, making you a chump who always bears the costs of helping without a chance to reap the benefits.
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It is not all about the size or density of a network: in well-run online communities, in which users must go by their real names and can see each other’s behavior, individuals can build a reputation, which promotes helping and deters incivility even on a massive network like LinkedIn. Typically, though, that is because a middleman Enforcer—a role we will get to in another chapter—plays an active part. In reality, Silicon Valley is both a small town and a big city: not everybody in the Valley knows each other, of course—especially at times like these, when new players are emerging every day. This truth is evident from Nozad’s own experience: if everyone actually knew each other, there’d be no need for Nozad’s introductions.
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Setting Shared Standards * * * In looking at research into how third parties keep others honest, I became intrigued by the work of Riccardo Boero, an economist and sociologist working at Los Alamos National Labs who had run several experiments on the Investment Game. Boero was motivated, he explained, by important economic changes in his native Italy.43 Thousands of small firms, usually family-owned, had long sustained a prosperous economy in the country’s industrial districts. Boero likens these industrial districts to Silicon Valley without the focus on technological innovation. Each firm cared about its own financial well-being while also acting like a good citizen with others in the district. There were norms about how to treat suppliers, workers, customers, and so on. For a long time, these shared norms created a high level of trust that gave the districts an edge over competitors who operated in a less organized ecosystem.
Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits by Kevin Roose
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, East Village, eat what you kill, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, fixed income, forward guidance, glass ceiling, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hedonic treadmill, information security, Jane Street, jitney, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Michael Milken, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, plutocrats, proprietary trading, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tail risk, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, two and twenty, urban planning, We are the 99%, work culture , young professional
I’ll be at the Ace Hotel from 7 to 10 p.m., and you’re welcome to stop by if you’re curious to hear more about what we’re doing. No reservation required. In 2011, as Wall Street banks were still struggling to turn profits in the post-crisis era, they had a new stealth threat passing right under their noses: Silicon Valley tech companies, who were staging a massive land grab for their junior analysts. Typically, tech firms compiled lists of analysts at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other top firms and blasted out messages to large groups of analysts at once, inviting them for a drink and a sales pitch. Those pitches proved to be catnip to disgruntled spreadsheet jockeys.
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Those pitches proved to be catnip to disgruntled spreadsheet jockeys. “I just e-mailed a bunch of people at Wall Street firms and said, ‘I’ll have a table at such-and-such restaurant, come out,’” one surprised tech executive told me. “And I got like fifty people.” The timing of Silicon Valley’s siren song to Wall Street’s young workers couldn’t have been better for the tech industry, or worse for the banks. In late 2011, the technology sector was the hottest thing going. Facebook was preparing to go public the following year, at a valuation that many people expected could reach $100 billion. Apple had become the biggest consumer-facing company in the world, and venture capitalists were throwing money wantonly at brand-new tech start-ups, in a manner reminiscent of the dot-com boom of 1999 and 2000.
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Given the choice between crunching Excel spreadsheets at a bank in a shrinking and reviled industry and working at a beloved tech company where they could wear jeans to work, get perks like free catered lunch and massages at work, and live on a much less demanding schedule while still making lucrative wages, many bank analysts were finding the balance tipping in Silicon Valley’s favor. “The new status jobs aren’t at Goldman Sachs,” one bank analyst, who was himself considering making the jump to tech, told me. For Wall Street analysts, the tech world seemed to represent everything finance wasn’t. Tech companies appeared democratic, nonhierarchical, and unconcerned with appearances.
Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner
23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day
Harsher anti-hate-speech measures imposed by mainstream social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have provoked extremists to move to other platforms and establish substitute channels to network, coordinate and crowdsource their activities. Many controversial activists – on the right, the left and the religious extremist fringes – have moved to alternative platforms: I’d rather have Putin have my data than one of those SJW [Social Justice Warriors] in Silicon Valley Generation Identity leader Martin Sellner, spring 2018 Extremists who were kicked off popular social media due to their violent language have replaced Twitter with Gab, Facebook with VK or Minds, and Patreon with Hatreon. Gab, the alt-right’s Twitter equivalent, gained over 400,000 users in just eighteen months.
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In the wake of the Charlottesville rally in the summer of 2017, Twitter shut down hundreds of white supremacist accounts, the gaming app Discord closed several related channels and the world’s most prominent neo-Nazi webpage Daily Stormer received twenty-four hours’ notice before losing its domain. A #DailyStormerNeverDies campaign was sparked on Twitter and a mass exodus started. Permanently banned users and libertarian developers have formed alliances and started a coordinated attempt to build a parallel social media ecosystem to put an end to Silicon Valley’s hegemony. ‘This is war.[…] The Free Speech Tech revolution has begun,’ announced the Alt-Tech Alliance in August 2017. The movement self-identifies as ‘a passionate group of brave engineers, product managers, investors and others who are tired of the status quo in the technology industry’.5 Its members frame themselves as the sole defenders of ‘free speech, individual liberty, and truth’.6 Their unique selling proposition is that – unlike Facebook and Twitter – they condone racist, inflammatory and even violence-inciting posts: an offer that has made them an appealing place of refuge for extremists whose accounts were removed from mainstream platforms, but also for freedom-of-speech warriors who are upset with the take-down measures of the big Silicon Valley companies.
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The movement self-identifies as ‘a passionate group of brave engineers, product managers, investors and others who are tired of the status quo in the technology industry’.5 Its members frame themselves as the sole defenders of ‘free speech, individual liberty, and truth’.6 Their unique selling proposition is that – unlike Facebook and Twitter – they condone racist, inflammatory and even violence-inciting posts: an offer that has made them an appealing place of refuge for extremists whose accounts were removed from mainstream platforms, but also for freedom-of-speech warriors who are upset with the take-down measures of the big Silicon Valley companies. In the weeks leading up to the creation of the Alt-Tech Alliance, it was not only Charlottesville’s neo-Nazis who faced a crackdown by the social media companies. Figures with more appeal to mainstream audiences, such as the prominent British anti-feminist YouTuber Sargon of Akkad, were temporarily suspended from Twitter, causing outrage among libertarians and some conservative sympathisers.
Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart
2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration
according to a survey conducted in 2020 by the Pew Research Center: Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, and Anna Brown, “About Half of Lower-Income Americans Report Household Job or Wage Loss Due to COVID-19,” Pew Research Center, April 21, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/04/21/about-half-of-lower-income-americans-report-household-job-or-wage-loss-due-to-covid-19/#many-adults-have-rainy-day-funds-but-shares-differ-widely-by-race-education-and-income. “a knot in your stomach, a rash on your skin, are losing sleep, and losing touch with your wife and kids”: Nitasha Tiku, “The Gospel of Hard Work, According to Silicon Valley,” Wired, June 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/06/silicon-valley-still-doesnt-care-work-life-balance/. scholar Tressie McMillan Cottom observes: Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Hustle Economy,” Dissent, Fall 2020, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-hustle-economy. additional job: As Malcolm X wrote, “everyone in Harlem needed some kind of hustle to survive,” which could mean anything from running the numbers to a side business.
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This ideology of bootstrapping, filtering through American politicians ranging from former president Donald Trump, with his faux self-made mindset, to ultraright Senator Josh Hawley and Tim Boyd, the now-former mayor of Colorado City, Texas. (During a period in 2021 when unusually frigid temperatures ravaged his state, Boyd boomed his bootstrapping views in response to a population that was in some cases freezing to death: “Sink or swim, it’s your choice!”) The pulling-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ideology also suffuses Silicon Valley companies and punitive local school boards. It is present when an unholy number of people buy into accusatory narratives around other people’s instability and form a nasty conclusion: why should taxpayers support the poor? In this equation, those in economic need are somehow always already ethically benighted.
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That movement centered around nature and was influenced by Romanticism, with some more radical ideas swirled in. And the two men’s preoccupation with the meaning of individualism helped to some extent to define the American way. But did the high-literary figures of 150 years ago really help define the sentiments of, say, the Silicon Valley rich who live in Walden Monterey, a luxury Bay Area development named after Thoreau’s book? Could these thinkers have influenced the bootstrapping Trump voters or even the titans of industry, including the man who invented the computer I am typing this on? Yes, and yes, as did a number of other authors who exulted in self-making, like Horatio Alger.
The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld
Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
It was the Apple II that really broke loose, in 1977, attracting a huge user base, and establishing Jobs and Wozniak as the first publicly lauded millionaire whiz kids of Silicon Valley. As important as their early success with the Apple II was, however, their greatest impact came seven years later, when they took the inspiration of people like Engelbart and Kay, and created a mass-market personal computer that set a new standard for participation. Before we get to that, we need to return to 1976, and move from Silicon Valley to New Mexico, where Gates and his partners, including former Harvard friends Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer, were writing programs for the Altair computer.
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After Bush’s concerted push, these efforts shifted to laboratories based on academic campuses.3 148 HOW THE COMPUTER BECAME OUR CULTURE MACHINE The military would be guaranteed the research infrastructure necessary for waging technologically and informationally complex air and ballistic missile conflicts, and the public, at least in theory, would benefit from a steady stream of support for basic scientific research and associated, nonmilitary, spinoff technologies.4 The spin-offs from these military-funded research and development university projects spurred the development of Route 128 outside Boston (home to companies like Raytheon and the Digital Equipment Corporation), which was in turn the model for Silicon Valley (where Stanford’s engineering and computer science departments led to everything from Hewlett-Packard to Intel to Yahoo! to Google). But all of this intertwining of knowledge and destruction had an impact on the Patriarchs’ thinking. Bush in particular wanted to use the new technologies to improve our capacity to process and understand information.5 In “As We May Think,” an article published in the Atlantic Monthly just after the war ended in 1945, Bush wrote about an imaginary machine that he called the Memex, which simulated the human brain’s capacities for associative thinking.6 Bush’s article remains an amazing read all these years later.
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Kay was a central figure in the development of Xerox PARC’s Altair personal computer—a machine that the executives at corporate headquarters, three thousand miles east of Palo Alto, could not figure out how to market. The tension between the “suits” in the corporate suites on the East Coast and the techs in their experimental labs on the West Coast was a key conflict in the Aquarian period, and the legacy of those battles continues to animate the discourses of Silicon Valley to this day. Even if Kay had not accomplished all of this, he would be remembered for creating the concept of “personal dynamic media.” Kay and a team at PARC created a conceptual prototype they called the “Dynabook,” and set a mark for all the laptops, personal computer tablets, and mobile computing devices to come.
Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
affirmative action, Airbnb, cognitive bias, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, digital map, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Magic , global pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Sam Altman, science of happiness, selection bias, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systematic bias, Tony Fadell, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, Y Combinator
The average NBA jump shooter, it turns out, is twice as likely to miss a shot too short as opposed to too long. And, when he shoots from the corner, he is more likely to miss to the side away from the backboard, perhaps because he is too afraid of hitting it. Players have utilized such information to correct these biases—and make more shots. Silicon Valley firms have been built largely on Moneyball principles. Google, where I formerly worked as a data scientist, certainly believes in the power of data to make major decisions. A designer famously quit the company because it frequently ignored the intuition of trained designers in favor of data. The final straw for the designer was an experiment that tested forty-one shades of blue in an ad link on Gmail to collect data on which one would lead to the most clicks.
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Fadell was not some serial entrepreneur who was a born risk-taker and incapable of having a boss; nor was he some career failure taking his last swing at career success. By the time Fadell started Nest, he had worked as a diagnostics engineer at General Magic, a director of engineering at Philips Electronics, and a senior vice president at Apple. By the time he started Nest, in other words, he had among the best employee résumés in Silicon Valley. And crucially, this decade-plus of experience rising as an employee at blue-chip companies gave Fadell deeply relevant and specific skills related to the business he created on his own. When he had his the-world-needs-a-less-clunky-thermostat epiphany, he had experiences that directly prepared him to follow through on his idea.
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Chesky and Gebbia, never lacking in scrappiness, took a couple of trips in hopes of saving their business. They went to the South by Southwest conference in Austin, thinking that the enormous number of guests in town might give their business a big boost. It didn’t. The two young men, however, did meet and befriend a well-connected man in Silicon Valley named Michael Seibel. Chesky and Gebbia went to Denver for the 2008 Democratic convention, thinking that the enormous number of guests in town might give their business a big boost. It didn’t. The two young men, however, did design and sell cereal based on the presidential candidates—Obama O’s (“The breakfast of change”) and Cap’n McCain’s (“A maverick in every bite”).
Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar
The Telegraph, 15 February. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/12149894/Mapped-Why-negative-interest-rates-herald-new-danger-for-the-world.html (accessed 22 May 2016). Kim, Eugene. 2016. ‘Dropbox Cut a Bunch of Perks and Told Employees to Save More as Silicon Valley Startups Brace for the Cold’. Business Insider. 7 May. http://uk.businessinsider.com/cost-cutting-at-dropbox-and-silicon-valley-startups-2016-5 (accessed 22 May 2016). Klein, Matthew. 2016. ‘The US Tech Sector Is Really Small’. Financial Times, 8 January. http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/01/08/2149557/the-ustech-sector-is-really-small (accessed 30 June 2016).
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Likewise, a major reason why mobile phones have become essential in developing countries is that they are now indispensable in the process of finding work on informal labour markets.64 The gig economy simply moves these sites online and adds a layer of pervasive surveillance. A tool of survival is being marketed by Silicon Valley as a tool of liberation. We can also find this broader shift to non-traditional jobs in economic statistics. In 200565 the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) found that nearly 15 million US workers (10.1 per cent of the labour force) were in alternative employment.66 This category includes employees hired under alternative contract arrangements (on-call work, independent contractors) and employees hired through intermediaries (temp agencies, contract companies).
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Morozov, Evgeny. 2015b. ‘The Taming of Tech Criticism’. The Baffler, 27. http://thebaffler.com/salvos/taming-tech-criticism (accessed 22 May 2016). Morozov, Evgeny. 2016. ‘Tech Titans Are Busy Privatising Our Data’. The Guardian, 24 April. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/24/the-new-feudalism-silicon-valley-overlordsadvertising-necessary-evil (accessed 22 May 2016). Murray, Alan. 2016. ‘How GE and Henry Schein Show That Every Company Is a Tech Company’. Fortune, 10 June. http://fortune.com/2016/06/10/henry-schein-ge-digital-revolution (accessed 30 June 2016). National Venture Capital Association. 2016.
Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville
A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game
It was not an easy book to write, and if its reading makes you uncomfortable, then perhaps it has met my ambition. Organization of This Book This book should be read in linear style from start to end. It’s divided into chapters, but of course they are all intertwingled. Chapter 1, Nature Explores the nature of information in systems from the wolves of Isle Royale to Uber in Silicon Valley. Explains why systems thinking is essential if we hope to create sustainable change. Chapter 2, Categories A deep dive into classification and its consequences. Flows from organizing for users to organizing ourselves (governance). Covers embodied cognition, meditation, and moral circles. Chapter 3, Connections The history of links from hypertext and navigation to planning and prediction.
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That’s why I’m writing outside my category about the nature of information in systems. It’s not all about information architecture, and I’m a long way from library school. But this inquiry is important. Connectedness has consequences. Information changes everything. That’s why I’m willing to travel. Systems Thinking I’m in Silicon Valley. I’m in a cab headed to my hotel. Actually, that’s not true. I’m hitchhiking and plan to sleep with a stranger named Sophie. Okay, that’s not quite right either. But that’s how our eleven year old daughter explained my experiment with Uber and Airbnb to my wife. Yes, once again, I’m making myself uncomfortable.
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Galileo was found “gravely suspect of heresy” for confirming the Copernican re-classification of the universe, Joan of Arc was burned to death for “dressing as a man” and Nelson Mandela was categorized as a domestic terrorist by South Africa and the United States for defying the taxonomy – black, white, coloured, Indian – of apartheid. Mostly what we do isn’t quite so heavy. But it’s unwise to ask certain questions before understanding politics and culture. In all organizations, from libraries, nonprofits, and government agencies to Fortune 500s and Silicon Valley startups, visible categories are built on invisible fault lines. So speak softly and carry some Silly String, because the dark paths that wander betwixt taxonomies and org charts are riddled with tripwire. xxxii Organizing for Users Of course, since users are the center of our universe, it’s our duty to take risks on their behalf.
Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss
Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game
He really taught me to think deeply about things, and I think that’s something I have not forgotten.” TF: This week, try experimenting with saying “I don’t understand. Can you explain that to me?” more often. (See Malcolm Gladwell’s mention of his father on page 573.) Building a Startup Outside of Silicon Valley “It’s pretty amazing how when you’re talking to people [from Silicon Valley at industry events], it really does seem like the average tenure of a person in one of these [startup] companies is like a year and half. . . . Whereas for us [in Pittsburgh], people really don’t leave. Because in terms of startups, we’re not exactly the only game in town—that’s unfair to say—but there aren’t very many games in town.”
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Or 61°F, or 75°F? If you’re cold, you can increase the temperature of the ChiliPad underneath you instead of throwing a thick blanket on top that’s going to make your partner sweat to death. It can modulate between 55 and 110°F. Experiment and find your silver bullet. Several of my close friends in Silicon Valley sheepishly admitted that, of all the advice I’ve ever given in my books and podcasts, the ChiliPad had the biggest impact on their quality of life. Several others have said the same about honey + ACV, described next. Honey + Apple Cider Vinegar or Yogi Soothing Caramel Bedtime Tea or California Poppy Extract * * * Your mileage may vary, but usually at least one of these will work.
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The other majors include Naval Ravikant (page 546), Kevin Rose (page 340), and Mike Maples, who got me started (see the Real-World MBA on page 250). Chris mentioned several books when he appeared on my podcast, including I Seem to Be a Verb by Buckminster Fuller. 48 hours later, used copies were selling for $999 on Amazon. Are You Playing Offense or Defense? Despite the fact that people refer to Chris as a “Silicon Valley investor,” he hasn’t lived in San Francisco since 2007. Instead, he bought a cabin in rural Truckee, Tahoe’s less-expensive neighbor, and moved to prime skiing and hiking country. It is no tech hotbed. Back then, Chris hadn’t yet made real money in the investing game, but he had a rationale for buying the getaway: “I wanted to go on offense.
Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner, Rupert Stadler
Airbnb, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, connected car, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, deep learning, demand response, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, global supply chain, industrial cluster, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer rental, precision agriculture, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Zipcar
Following Uber’s acquisition of its China unit, the ridehailing giant Didi is now conducting research into self-driving. In 2017, the company opened its own artificial intelligence lab in the Silicon Valley, in order to develop intelligent driving systems. K e y T a ke a w a y s Car manufacturers, suppliers, and technology companies are developing autonomous vehicles in varying alliances and cooperative ventures. Particular attention must be paid to Chinese startups, which are developing radically new vehicle concepts with enormous capital and in cooperation with technology companies from Silicon Valley. The idea to establish Uber was born one cold night in Paris. This shows once again how big ideas are preceded by small but significant market failings.
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If we succeed in using autonomous driving to move people faster and further, they can find better work, escape poverty and take control of their lives. Walter Brenner, Professor of Information Management, is fascinated by the speed and intensity of automotive digitisation. In collaboration with colleagues in start-ups in Silicon Valley and at Stanford University, he has found out that information technology will no longer be added to the car, but that the car will be built around the information technology. Many employees, colleagues, experts and outstanding personalities in the fields of politics, business and society have collaborated on this book. xiii Preface xiv We thank them all for contributing their knowledge and experience.
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Car manufacturers will have to become more like technology companies in their culture, organisation and processes, and must absorb the spirit of this industry [147]. It is no coincidence that the traditional American car-plant sites in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana are in difficulty, while a completely new mobility industry arises in Silicon Valley. APPLICATIONS A crucial point for the further development of automated vehicles is that they are able to master a diverse range of traffic situations. These cars are robots, so the software can only master those situations that were previously programmed or learnt through machine-learning algorithms.
Cable Cowboy by Mark Robichaux
AOL-Time Warner, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Bear Stearns, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, corporate raider, cotton gin, estate planning, fear of failure, financial engineering, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, oil rush, profit maximization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, vertical integration
We would all be foolish to allow that to happen. Bill has to accept the fact that he cannot have quite the dominance in supplying our industry that he developed in supplying the PC industry.” “ We have to push [the standards] in Silicon Valley, and when the smoke clears we still own it,” Malone told his audience. At the same time, said Malone, a host of other Silicon Valley leaders, including Oracle and Netscape, were looking at the standards, and “there is going to be a tug of war. There needs to be a single, open standard, and it doesn’t have to be Windows CE, or whatever Bill 9486_Robichaux_03.f.qxd 8/28/02 9:54 AM Page 217 Tr o j a n Ho r s e ?
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The three industries that could inf lict the heaviest damage on one another (cable companies, long-distance companies, and local telephone companies) were let loose and allowed to go into previously protected businesses. Cable companies could offer telephone service. Local phone companies could offer long distance. Phone companies could buy cable companies. The Silicon Valley firms would befriend them all. Long term, Malone knew that telephone companies posed the bigger threat because of their enormous wealth, but the new minidish competitors were far more dangerous at the moment. Investors seemed to lose interest in cable altogether, avoiding TCI’s stock more than any other.
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His $1 billion (a mere one-tenth of the cash on hand that Microsoft had at the time) bought an 11 percent stake in Comcast, while an equal slice of Microsoft would have cost about $18 billion (and far more in later years). Gates’s investment came after a behind-the-scenes courtship that was initiated largely by John Malone, who organized a cadre of cable cowboys for a technology tour to Silicon Valley and elsewhere. As the new century crept closer, new technologies from the cumulative innovations of the recent past—microprocessors, wireless, cable, fiber optics, the Internet, and digital compression—were coalescing, forcing unparalleled change in the way products and services were bought, sold, and used.
The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet by Justin Peters
4chan, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Alan Greenspan, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bayesian statistics, Brewster Kahle, buy low sell high, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, Free Software Foundation, global village, Hacker Ethic, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, machine readable, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Open Library, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, social web, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator
In the fall of 2003, during what would have been his senior year at North Shore Country Day, Swartz prepared to reenter the world of mainstream education. Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California, seemed like the most promising option. Lawrence Lessig had relocated there. It sat at the heart of Silicon Valley and was close to San Francisco and all of Swartz’s friends in that city’s free culture scene. So Swartz applied. Tim Berners-Lee wrote him a letter of recommendation. On the day Swartz received his acceptance letter, he noted the occasion on his blog with exaggerated glee: “so, like, i totally asked Stanford out, like a whole month ago, and today she said YES!
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Clarke’s famous Third Law states, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It is also true that any sufficiently advanced technology encourages magical thinking. New technologies are indistinguishable from magic wands, imbued with great and implausible powers that can transcend societal barriers and the laws of thermodynamics. Silicon Valley is rife with examples of aspiring messiahs touting the world-historical potential of their products. These promises are generally unfalsifiable, which is why they are simultaneously so attractive and so empty. The informaticists Rob Kling and Roberta Lamb have argued that “talk about new technologies offers a new canvas in which to reshape social relationships so they better fit the speaker’s imagination.”28 Since his early teens, Swartz had imagined a world free from “laws that restrict what bits I can put on my website,”29 a world where culture could not be owned.30 Occasionally—only just—Swartz encountered other people his age who felt the same way.
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In 2006, though, Swartz didn’t foresee this massive popularity—or, if he did, he wasn’t about to wait five years for the site to find its legs. A list of links wasn’t what Swartz had left college to work on. “You can say a site is cool, stupid, popular, a flop, innovative, or clichéd,” Swartz wrote on his blog. “But the one thing you can’t say, the one thing that everybody skips over, is that these sites aren’t anything serious.”39 Silicon Valley seemed, to Swartz, to operate on an inverted moral calculus that granted start-ups rewards disproportionate to the value they added to the world. Swartz was leery of acculturating to that sort of environment. The summer before he enrolled at Stanford University, Swartz had read a book called Moral Mazes, an ethnographic study of middle management at several large corporations.
The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan
1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game
Even as many states went on a prison-building binge through the '80s and '90s, and even as the federal government provided billions of dollars in new funds to help localities hire more police officers, and even as federal spending on the "war on drugs" approached $20 billion a year under President Clinton, strapped investigators on the white-collar beat often found themselves with little choice but to let high-level wrongdoers off the hook. The losing battle against securities fraud is a case in point. Wherever this battle was fought in the past decade—be it Silicon Valley or Wall Street—government investigators were hopelessly outgunned. In the late 1990s, more money was being made—and stolen—in Silicon Valley than anyplace else on earth. Following Netscape's extraordinary IPO in 1995, hot IPOs came fast and furious. It seemed that anyone with a half-decent business plan could raise millions, and that any company with a half-baked technology product could become worth billions in the stock market.
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Prosecutors did not bring many criminal cases, and they lost when they did."21 This pattern was repeated as the technology boom of the 1990s gathered steam. Despite a growing number of complaints alleging financial misfeasance by Silicon Valley companies, few new resources were added to combat the problem. By 1998, the Justice Department had exactly one assistant U.S. attorney working full-time in San Francisco on investment fraud, a profoundly beleaguered young prosecutor named Robert Crowe. Many criminal referrals from the SEC and FBI were not prosecuted. Crowe already had a huge backlog of Silicon Valley cases and was barely able to successfully bring to trial the few cases that he did go after. At one point, when he was preparing a securities fraud case against California Micro Devices, Crowe found himself deluged with 600,000 pages of documents and yet his office lacked a clerk to help sort and photocopy the materials.
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Executives who met the expectations of Wall Street analysts, even if only for a year or so, could make tens of millions of dollars exercising stock options and then cash out of the company for some other excellent adventure. Those who issued earnings reports that didn't meet these expectations felt like they were "signing their own corporate death warrants," in the words of ACFE's Joseph Wells. The lure of easy riches was a recipe for bad behavior. In a story line that has since become familiar, many Silicon Valley companies started cooking their books with a variety of scams to misrepresent earnings and pump the value of their stock. Prosecutors in northern California found themselves totally overwhelmed by the crime wave. Even simple acts of securities fraud, such as releasing false earnings reports, are extraordinarily complex to prosecute.
The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional
FEDERAL HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATION. (2012, December). “Traffic Volume Trends,” http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring/12dectvt/12dectvt.pdf. FEHRENBACHER, Katie. (2013, June 21). “London’s tech startup scene is hot—just don’t compare it to Silicon Valley,” Gigaom, http://gigaom.com/2013/06/21/londons-tech-startup-scene-is-hot-just-dont-compare-it-to-silicon-valley/. FERGUSON, Rick and PEAKE, Richard. (2013). “Born This Way: The Australian Millennial Loyalty Survey,” Aimia. FESUS, Gabriella, et al. (2008, November). “Regions 2020: Demographic Challenges for European Regions,” Commission of the European Communities, http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/sources/docoffic/working/regions2020/pdf/regions2020_demographic.pdf.
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The notion that innovation needs to take place in dense urban settings is now widely accepted. Yet in reality, as the study’s authors note, their findings were about the population of an area, not the density, and had little to do with the urban form.14 After all, many of the nation’s most innovative firms are located not in downtown cores but in sprawling regions, whether that’s in Silicon Valley, the north Dallas suburbs, or the “energy corridor” west of central Houston. Dense San Francisco proper has seen a significant boom in high-tech-related business services in recent years, yet neighboring San Mateo County still holds more than five times as many jobs in software publishing as San Francisco.15 And despite the recent expansion of tech-related business in San Francisco, the majority of the Bay Area’s total employment remains 10 miles from the city center—and is more dispersed than even the national average.16 Likewise, most STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) employment, a large driver of economic growth, remains firmly in suburbanized areas with lower density development and little in the way of mass transit usage.17 Lower density regions as diverse as Durham, Madison, Denver, Detroit, Baltimore, Colorado Springs, and Albany are among the places with the highest shares of STEM jobs, and in many cases, they are creating new STEM jobs faster than the high-tech stalwarts.
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Additionally, as an important entertainment hub, London ranks second globally in total spending by international visitors.52 London’s geographic centrality and long-standing protections for corporations continue to make it a popular location for the regional headquarters of many multinationals. Yet at the same time, it has also emerged as Europe’s top technology start-up center, according to the Startup Genome project.53 The city has upward of 3,000 tech startups54 as well as Google’s largest office outside of Silicon Valley.55 New York similarly benefits from a long historical legacy, albeit considerably shorter than that of its British rival. The city is home to most of the world’s top investment banks and hedge funds and retains its primacy in stock market volume (value of trading), according to the World Federation of Exchanges.
Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin
AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP
Not only was it the year of the devastating terrorist attacks on the United States, but it was also the year that the technology industry was left reeling from the bursting of the dot-com bubble. These two seemingly unrelated events each set in motion a chain of events that created the legal and technical underpinnings of today’s dragnets. For the U.S. government, the terrorist attacks showed that its traditional methods of intelligence gathering weren’t working. And for Silicon Valley, the crash showed that it needed to find a new way to make money. Both arrived at the same answer to their disparate problems: collecting and analyzing vast quantities of personal data. Of course, each had a different purpose. The government was seeking to find and extract terrorists who might be hiding within the population.
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And in 2012, the Justice Department authorized the National Counterterrorism Center to copy entire government databases of information about U.S. citizens—flight records, lists of casino employees, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students—and examine the files for suspicious behavior. Previously, the agency had been barred from storing information about U.S. residents unless the person was a terrorism suspect or was related to an investigation. Suspicionless dragnets had become the new normal. * * * The terrorist attacks of 2001 also ushered in an era of dragnets in Silicon Valley. Until the late 1990s, the consumer software industry was a retail business. Software was sold in shrink-wrapped boxes on store shelves. Of course, companies also bought industrial-grade software wholesale. But the popular market—consisting mostly of games and office productivity tools—was a retail business.
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In 1998, Internet Explorer surpassed Netscape in market share, and by 2008 Netscape’s software was officially abandoned. The first truly mass-market software had been built. But it hadn’t made any money. The lesson was clear: the retail software market was dead. But technology requires software. How was it going to be financed? At first it seemed that advertising might be the answer. In the late 1990s, Silicon Valley was awash in dot-com businesses, many of them based on the premise that advertising would support their efforts. But the bubble burst in 2000. Yahoo!, whose revenue came mostly from online advertising, saw its market capitalization plummet from $113.9 billion in early 2000 to just $7.9 billion a year later.
file:///C:/Documents%20and%... by vpavan
accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Bogle, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, margin call, Mary Meeker, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, payment for order flow, price discovery process, profit motive, risk tolerance, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, tech worker, technology bubble, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-coupon bond, éminence grise
A gentle letter from the committee chairman signaled the start of a skirmish. Face-to-face visits were next followed by hearings, press releases, and ultimately a drawn-out, costly battle. When the FASB, for example, tried to stop abusive practices in the way that many companies accounted for mergers, two of Silicon Valley's VIPs, Cisco Systems Inc. CEO John Chambers and venture capitalist John Doerr, tried to persuade me to rein in the standard-setters. When I refused, they threatened to get "friends" in the White House and on Capitol Hill to make me bend. When we proposed new rules to make sure that auditors were truly independent of corporate clients, some fifty members of Congress promptly wrote stinging letters in rebuke.
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No Wall Street firm wanted to be left behind, so the pressure grew on analysts to praise companies that had no revenues, no earnings— in fact, nothing more than nonpaying visitors to a Web site— in order to get investment banking deals. Some firms required analysts to submit their reports to the bank's deal makers before publication. Credit Suisse Group's Credit Suisse First Boston unit breached the Chinese Wall altogether and had some of its tech analysts report to Frank Quattrone, its high-profile investment banker to Silicon Valley. Morgan Stanley's corporate finance director summed up the prevailing view as far back as 1990, when he wrote in a memo to the research department: "Our objective is . . . to adopt a policy, fully understood by the entire Firm, including the Research Department, that we do not make negative or controversial comments about our clients as a matter of sound business practice. . . ."
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By the time I arrived that summer, nearly all of corporate America was vehemently fighting the FASB proposal. The standard-setters, called the gnomes of Norwalk by some in the corporate community, were under siege. Corporate lobbyists persuaded Congress to hold hearings to condemn the FASB proposal. The pressure from Silicon Valley's high-tech industry, whose lack of revenues and weak profits made cash compensation difficult, was particularly intense. Hundreds of tech executives flew to Washington to lobby. At one point, tech workers held a noisy "rally in the valley," complete with "Stop FASB" signs and T-shirts, to show off their anger.
Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston
Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War
Which one of them came up with the name is still a matter of dispute, but putting a name to their unfinished program allowed Fylstra to start promoting it in earnest.27 Fylstra kicked off the VisiCalc marketing campaign with a cryptic advertisement in the May 1979 issue of Byte magazine. At the foot of a spread promoting Personal Software’s other products, a single line read: “VISICALC—How did you ever do without it?”28 Fylstra toured Silicon Valley with VisiCalc diskettes in hand to ask journalists, industry insiders, and potential sales partners the same question.29 Bricklin and Frankston showed off VisiCalc at conferences such as the 1979 West Coast Computer Faire, held in San Francisco,§ and where, two years earlier, Apple had launched the machine on which VisiCalc ran.30 It was not always an easy sell.
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Mitch Kapor, who had worked for Bricklin’s publisher, stole the spreadsheet crown with his own program, Lotus 1-2-3, and with it gave the IBM PC one of its first killer apps. That PC, of course, was powered by an Intel CPU—a chip made by the same company whose deal with Busicom, a Japanese calculator manufacturer, had saved the American firm and paved the way for the founding of Silicon Valley. Masatoshi Shima and Federico Faggin, two of the engineers who worked on the Intel–Busicom tie-up, went on to design their own chipset that in turn made its way into countless models of pocket calculator. If it is hard to untangle who influenced whom, or which products foreshadowed which others, it is rather easier to pick out some winners and losers.
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Troutman, “A History of the Invention of the Transistor and Where It Will Lead Us,” IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits 32, no. 12 (1997): 1858–1861, https://doi.org/10.1109/4.643644. 46 “The Nobel Prize in Physics 1956” (Nobel Prize Outreach AB, 2021), https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1956/summary/. 47 Brinkman, Haggan, and Troutman, “History of the Invention of the Transistor,” 1860; Tom Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley,” Esquire, 1983, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12149389/robert-noyce-tom-wolfe/. 48 Ceruzzi, Reckoners, 99. 49 Thomas A. Fackler et al., “How Antitrust Enforcement Can Spur Innovation: Bell Labs and the 1956 Consent Decree” (London, January 2017), 1–2, https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?
Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar
Adding insult to injury, Google was now using publicly funded bus stops as loading stations for its very private transportation system. Rents close to those bus stops were 20 percent higher than those in comparable areas,1 which were themselves doubling every few years to accommodate not only Google’s employees but those of Facebook, Twitter, and the other Silicon Valley darlings. And so on the same day Google’s stock happened to be reaching a new high on Wall Street, a dozen scrappy, yellow-vested protesters managed to paralyze one of the tech giant’s now infamous buses. Onto its side they plastered an Instagram-friendly banner that read “Gentrification & Eviction Technologies” in a perfect, multicolored Google font.
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At least some small part of me smiled in solidarity with their critique. A few weeks later, there was nothing to smile about. Protesters in Oakland were now throwing rocks at Google’s buses and broke a window, terrifying employees. Sure, I was as concerned about the company’s practices as anyone, and frustrated by the way Silicon Valley’s rapid growth seemed to be displacing instead of enriching the people of San Francisco and beyond. But I also had friends on those buses, trying to make a living off their hard-won coding skills. They may have made $100,000 a year, but they were stressed-out, perpetually monitored, and painfully aware of their own perishability.
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A typical online retirement calculator insists that a person who earns $50,000 a year will require at least $1.5 million to retire at age sixty-seven, and a single unexpected medical bill can turn any of us into one of America’s 1.7 million annual health-related bankruptcies. Not even Google’s investors, officers, or the infamous 1 percent are to blame for the growing inequalities of the digital economy. Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists are simply practicing capitalism as they learned it in business school and, for the most part, meeting their legal obligation to the shareholders of their companies. Sure, they are getting wealthier as the rest of us struggle, and yes, there’s collateral damage associated with the runaway growth of their companies and stocks.
The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game
The appetite for ideas is rapacious: ideas from local businesses (there are two hundred field-study centers in the Yangtze River delta, including a mini CELAP campus in Kunshan city); ideas from various national universities; ideas from Western management thinkers. When the Chinese modernized their economy, they turned to the West for inspiration, and the leadership academy still sends people to Silicon Valley to look at innovation. Government is a different story. There is talk of CELAP being “China’s Kennedy School,” and Joseph Nye, the former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has given a talk there. But there are also hints that Harvard is a little too theoretical for what China needs now.
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And from that point of view there are better places to look than gridlocked America—most notably Singapore. The city-state may be tiny, but it has delivered most of the things that the Chinese want from government—world-class schools, efficient hospitals, law and order, industrial planning—with a public sector that is proportionately half the size of America’s. For the Chinese, it is the Silicon Valley of government. Even the idea at the heart of CELAP—training an elite civil-service cadre—is based on a Singaporean model, though the Chinese boast that their requirements are more onerous. So it is not surprising that the leadership academy proudly features pictures of its senior figures attending meetings in Singapore and of Singapore’s creator, Lee Kuan Yew, visiting the campus.
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PART TWO FROM THE WEST TO THE EAST CHAPTER FIVE THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS—AND ONE GREAT VIRTUE—OF CALIFORNIA GOVERNMENT THERE IS NO MORE VIVID EXAMPLE of the problems of Western government than the contrast between Sacramento and Palo Alto. The two cities are only ninety miles apart as the crow flies. But they live in different centuries. Sacramento is merely the capital of the state. Palo Alto is the capital of Silicon Valley, a city that is in the business of inventing the future, not just in cyberspace but also in manufacturing, robotics, and biology. Entrepreneurs have regarded it as a beacon ever since two Stanford students, Bill Hewlett and David Packard, set up a computer company in a garage there in 1938. Since then the Valley has spawned Apple, Oracle, Google—and almost every government in the world has tried to create its own version of this miracle machine.
Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman
AI winter, Air France Flight 447, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, digital map, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hive mind, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, lone genius, Lyft, megacity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philippa Foot, precision agriculture, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, warehouse robotics
Ina Fried, “Apple’s Jeff Williams: The Car Is the Ultimate Mobile Device,” at a re/code Conference, May 27, 2015, http://recode.net/2015/05/27/apples-jeff-williams-the-car-is-the-ultimate-mobile-device/ 3. Automotive research facilities in Silicon Valley, Auto News website interactive map, http://www.autonews.com/section/map502 4. Mike Ramsey, “Ford, Mercedes-Benz Set Up Shop in Silicon Valley,” Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/ford-mercedes-set-up-shop-in-silicon-valley-1427475558 5. “Autonomous Vehicles: Self-Driving—the New Auto Industry Paradigm,” Morgan Stanley Research, December 6, 2013. 6. Industrial Robot Statistics, World Robotics 2015, March 19, 2016, http://www.ifr.org/industrial-robots/statistics/ 7.
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Adding to the speculation, in a recent speech at a tech conference, Apple vice president Jeff Williams cryptically described cars as “the ultimate mobile device.”2 In response, car companies are pouring billions of dollars into software development and the epicenter of automotive innovation has moved from Detroit to Silicon Valley. At the time this book was written, Mercedes-Benz’s Silicon Valley Division employed nearly 300 people working on advanced engineering projects and user experience design. Volkswagen had 140 engineers, social scientists, and product designers integrating Google Earth maps into Audi’s navigation system and developing new infotainment systems.3 Toyota announced that it would invest $1 billion over the next several years in artificial-intelligence research, with a laboratory near Stanford and another in Massachusetts, near MIT.
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Deep learning has transformed the study of artificial perception and is being applied with great success to speech recognition and other activities that require software to deal with information that presents itself in quirky and imperfect ways. In the past few years, in search of deep-learning expertise, entire divisions of automotive companies have migrated to Silicon Valley. Deep learning is why software giants like Google and Baidu, already armed with expertise in managing huge banks of data and building intelligent software, are giving the once-invincible automotive giants a run for their money. Deep learning has been so revolutionary to the AI community that its reverberations are still unfolding as we write this book and will likely continue to unfold in the years ahead.
I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne
Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game
The lesson was clear—combat veterans with capable legacy equipment were simply no match for the new American high-tech way of war. The innovations built on America’s growing dominance in information technologies, and the strong links between its university research community, the Pentagon, defence contractors, and even the more freewheeling high-tech community in Silicon Valley.1 Thirty years earlier, President Eisenhower had soberly warned of a ‘military industrial complex’ that might test the social contract in America. But its unique blend of finance, research and defence had also ensured America’s post-Cold War emergence as the world’s sole superpower. And here it was in a new guise, readying America for a new generation of war.
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Those air forces stimulated new intellectual thinking about war, as happened in the RAND Corporation of the 1950s and 60s, where much thought went into theorising nuclear war and designing forces accordingly. And now, there is nascent change in western armed forces in response to advances in AI. The US Defense Department has worked to deepen its existing ties with Silicon Valley, to accelerate the development and adoption of new technologies. Notably its Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) has produced a stream of thinking on operational and ethical implications of AI. New suppliers and more rapid procurement cycles promise to shape up sclerotic defence acquisition processes.
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It’s clearly been food for thought for some in the Pentagon. The team behind the poker engine has since brought its approach to defence, with their start-up company Strategy Robot awarded a multi-million dollar contract from the Defence Innovation Unit, a branch of the Pentagon tasked with accelerating the adoption of cutting-edge Silicon Valley technologies. Separately, DARPA is soliciting for computational game theoretic approaches to military decision-making. Their project envisages applications that can handle ‘multiple interacting agents, extremely large search spaces, sequential revelation of information, use of deception, continuous resource quantities, stochastic outcomes, and the ability to learn from past iterations’.30 It sounds like a strategic AI.
Northern California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet
Airbnb, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, gentrification, gigafactory, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, Port of Oakland, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the built environment, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional
The Peninsula South of San Francisco, squeezed tightly between the bay and the coastal foothills, a vast swath of suburbia continues toward San Jose. Dotted inside this area are Palo Alto, home of Stanford University, and Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the Bay Area’s tech industry. Don’t bother looking for Silicon Valley on the map – you won’t find it. Because silicon chips form the basis of modern microcomputers, and the Santa Clara Valley – stretching from Palo Alto through Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Cupertino to San Jose – is thought of as the birthplace of the microcomputer, it's nicknamed ‘Silicon Valley.’ It’s hard to imagine that even after WWII this was still a wide expanse of orchards and farms. Further west, the 70-mile stretch of coastal Hwy 1 from San Francisco to Santa Cruz is one of California's most bewitching oceanside drives.
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Megabus Low-cost bus service to San Francisco from Los Angeles, Sacramento and Reno. SamTrans Southbound buses to Palo Alto and the Pacific coast. Train Easy on the eyes and light on carbon emissions, train travel is a good way to visit the Bay Area and beyond. Caltrain ( GOOGLE MAP ; www.caltrain.com; cnr 4th & King Sts) connects San Francisco with Silicon Valley hubs and San Jose. Amtrak (%800-872-7245; www.amtrakcalifornia.com) serves San Francisco via stations in Oakland and Emeryville (near Oakland), with free shuttle-bus connections to San Francisco's Ferry Building and Caltrain station, and Oakland's Jack London Sq. Amtrak offers rail passes good for seven days of travel in California within a 21-day period (from $159).
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Cross the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County and visit wizened ancient redwoods body-blocking the sun and herds of elegant tule elk prancing along the bluffs of Tomales Bay. Gray whales show some fluke off the cape of the wind-scoured Point Reyes peninsula, while hawks surf the skies in the shaggy hills of the Marin Headlands. On the cutting edge of intellectual thought, Stanford University – near the tech powerhouse of Silicon Valley and the University of California, Berkeley in the East Bay – draws academics and students from around the world. The city of Berkeley sparked the state's locavore food movement and continues to be at the forefront of environmental and left-leaning political causes. South of Sahn Francisco, Hwy 1 traces miles of undeveloped coastline and sandy pocket beaches as it slowly winds south to Santa Cruz.
Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer
affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-bias training, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, George Floyd, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, white flight, working poor, young professional
Maybe adults could adapt to meeting co-workers on Zoom—some might even like it so much that they’d never come back from the Internet—but I knew instinctively that remote learning would mean little or none at all. You had only to be familiar with the glazed depression on the face of a boy who’s just surfaced from half a day of gaming, the fierce oblivion of a girl pawing at her social media apps, to understand that the devices would take them away from the world and give too little back. Silicon Valley tech moguls forbid their own children to use them. They know better than anyone the addictive properties that make their inventions so lucrative. Teachers—essential workers, though they no longer went into school buildings—were as capable of heroism or dereliction as workers in any other sector.
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Eventually the American people made clear their preference for taking pleasures where they wanted and the first faded, while the end of the Cold War rendered the second obsolete. But libertarianism stretches all the way to the present. The names Russell Kirk and James Burnham are mostly forgotten, but I’ve met Ayn Rand fanatics all over—among Silicon Valley venture capitalists, at the office of the Tampa Bay Tea Party, even on a road paving crew. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (who read Atlas Shrugged in high school) brought her pitiless philosophy of egoism to policymaking on Capitol Hill. Libertarianism speaks to the American myth of the self-made man and the lonely pioneer on the plains.
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The narrative of Free America shaped the parameters of acceptable thinking for Smart America. Free trade, deregulation, economic concentration, and balanced budgets became the policy of the Democratic Party. Culturally it was cosmopolitan, embracing multiculturalism at home and welcoming an increasingly globalized world. Its donor class on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley bankrolled Democratic campaigns and was rewarded with dominant influence in Washington. None of this appealed to the party’s old base. Culture usually beats class in American politics, and a tolerant, inclusive Democratic Party would have needed better policies and politicians to hold on to culturally conservative voters.
The New Kingmakers by Stephen O'Grady
AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, DevOps, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Prize, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator
Translated, this means that even Google, with all its success, its world-class food, its 20% time, and its high-end recruiters, cannot hire enough talent to meet its growth targets. Schmidt was as good as his word, as Google’s recent acquisitions include startups Aardvark, AppJet, Apture, Like.com, reMail, and Slide. None of the products of those startups remain available. Nor is Google alone. Virtually all of the Silicon Valley consumer technology firms have begun to engage in this practice. Industry sentiment, for example, suggests that Facebook acquired Beluga, Daytum, Digital Staircase, Drop.io, FriendFeed, Gowalla, Hot Potato, MailRank, Parakey, Snaptu, and Strobe for their employees rather than their technology.
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These agreements might not have been legally enforceable, but they nevertheless stalled the technology employment market for years. Six large technology vendors eventually settled with the DOJ, and developers were once more free to move at will. The rationale behind these extra-legal machinations was simple: developers had become too valuable. In a market where employees were able to move without restriction from one Silicon Valley company to another, standard recruitment practices would logically result in both higher turnover and an unsustainable salary escalation. Instead, according to the DOJ, vendors colluded to artificially depress the developer marketplace by limiting employee mobility. Besides being illegal, this practice is perhaps the best indication yet of the value attached to technologists, as companies are in effect saying: “developers are so valuable we will act illegally to retain them.”
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Besides being illegal, this practice is perhaps the best indication yet of the value attached to technologists, as companies are in effect saying: “developers are so valuable we will act illegally to retain them.” The non-hiring pact seems to suggest that companies like Apple, Google, and Intel agree with the high valuation Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg place on the most skilled developers, but what about the world outside of Silicon Valley? There, too, the valuation of developers is at an all-time high. In New York City, for example, traditional financial services employers are competing with industries like advertising, healthcare, and even defense over developers with strong quantitative analysis skills. Why? Because virtually every business today is a technology business on some level.
San Francisco by Lonely Planet
airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar
Street performers on a float, Lunar New Year Parade (Click here) ROBERTO GEROMETTA / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Competitor in costume, Bay to Breakers (Click here) GREG GAWLOWSKI / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © With Kids Rainforest dome, California Academy of Sciences (Click here) SABRINA DALBESIO / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © San Francisco has the fewest kids per capita of any US city and, according to SF SPCA data, about 19,000 more dogs than kids live here. Yet many locals make a living entertaining kids – from Pixar animators to video game designers – and this town is packed with attractions for kids. Techies Silicon Valley engineers encourage their kids’ scientific curiosity at SF’s hands-on discovery museums. San Francisco Children’s Creativity Museum ( Click here ) allows future tech to moguls design their own video games and animations, while the Exploratorium’s MacArthur Genius Grant– winning interactive displays (Click here ) help kids figure out the physics of skateboarding for themselves, and kiddie gearheads are riveted by vintage steamships at the Hyde St Pier Historic Ships Collection ( Click here ).
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The Mission, SoMa & Potrero Hill (Click here) The best way to enjoy the Mission is with a book in one hand and a burrito in the other, amid murals, sunshine and the usual crowd of documentary filmmakers and novelists. The Mission is difficult to define and never entirely exclusive: largely Latin American 24th St also attracts Southeast Asians, lesbians and dandies. Silicon Valley refugees take to Potrero Hill, while barflies and artists lurk in the valley below. Some are drawn to South of Market (SoMa) for high technology, others for high art, but everyone gets down and dirty on the dance floor. The Castro & Noe Valley (Click here) Rainbow flags wave their welcome to party boys, career activists and leather daddies in the Castro, while over the hill in Noe Valley, megastrollers brake for bakeries and boutiques, as moms load up on sleek shoes and strong coffee.
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Today, skateboarders do tricks of a different sort in the park, under the watchful eye of Beniamino Bufano’s 1929 pink granite and steel statue of Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. Chinese Telephone Exchange Historical Building Offline map Google map (743 Washington St; Stockton St; California St) California’s earliest adopters of advanced technology weren’t in Silicon Valley, but right here in Chinatown. This triple-decker tiled pagoda caused a sensation in 1894 not for its looks, but its smarts. To connect callers to the right person, switchboard operators had to speak fluent English and five Chinese dialects as well as memorize at least 1500 Chinatown residents by name, residence and occupation.
San Francisco by Lonely Planet
airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar
Street performers on a float, Lunar New Year Parade (Click here) ROBERTO GEROMETTA / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Competitor in costume, Bay to Breakers (Click here) GREG GAWLOWSKI / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © With Kids Rainforest dome, California Academy of Sciences (Click here) SABRINA DALBESIO / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © San Francisco has the fewest kids per capita of any US city and, according to SF SPCA data, about 19,000 more dogs than kids live here. Yet many locals make a living entertaining kids – from Pixar animators to video game designers – and this town is packed with attractions for kids. Techies Silicon Valley engineers encourage their kids’ scientific curiosity at SF’s hands-on discovery museums. San Francisco Children’s Creativity Museum ( Click here ) allows future tech to moguls design their own video games and animations, while the Exploratorium’s MacArthur Genius Grant– winning interactive displays (Click here ) help kids figure out the physics of skateboarding for themselves, and kiddie gearheads are riveted by vintage steamships at the Hyde St Pier Historic Ships Collection ( Click here ).
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The Mission, SoMa & Potrero Hill (Click here) The best way to enjoy the Mission is with a book in one hand and a burrito in the other, amid murals, sunshine and the usual crowd of documentary filmmakers and novelists. The Mission is difficult to define and never entirely exclusive: largely Latin American 24th St also attracts Southeast Asians, lesbians and dandies. Silicon Valley refugees take to Potrero Hill, while barflies and artists lurk in the valley below. Some are drawn to South of Market (SoMa) for high technology, others for high art, but everyone gets down and dirty on the dance floor. The Castro & Noe Valley (Click here) Rainbow flags wave their welcome to party boys, career activists and leather daddies in the Castro, while over the hill in Noe Valley, megastrollers brake for bakeries and boutiques, as moms load up on sleek shoes and strong coffee.
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Today, skateboarders do tricks of a different sort in the park, under the watchful eye of Beniamino Bufano’s 1929 pink granite and steel statue of Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. Chinese Telephone Exchange Historical Building Offline map Google map (743 Washington St; Stockton St; California St) California’s earliest adopters of advanced technology weren’t in Silicon Valley, but right here in Chinatown. This triple-decker tiled pagoda caused a sensation in 1894 not for its looks, but its smarts. To connect callers to the right person, switchboard operators had to speak fluent English and five Chinese dialects as well as memorize at least 1500 Chinatown residents by name, residence and occupation.
Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams
Asperger Syndrome, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Debian, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maui Hawaii, Multics, Murray Gell-Mann, PalmPilot, profit motive, Project Xanadu, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, slashdot, software patent, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, urban renewal, VA Linux, Y2K
By the end of the first LinuxWorld show, most reporters know better than to use the term "Linux" in his presence, and wired.com is running a story comparing Stallman to a pre-Stalinist revolutionary erased from the history books by hackers and entrepreneurs eager to downplay the GNU Project's overly political objectives.2 Other articles follow, and while few reporters call the operating system GNU/Linux in print, most are quick to credit Stallman for launching the drive to build a free software operating system 15 years before. I won't meet Stallman again for another 17 months. During the interim, Stallman will revisit Silicon Valley once more for the August, 1999 LinuxWorld show. Although not invited to speak, Stallman does managed to deliver the event's best line. Accepting the show's Linus Torvalds Award for Community Service-an award named after Linux creator Linus Torvalds-on behalf of the Free Software Foundation, Stallman wisecracks, "Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance."
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With the 55 stock market approaching the Y2K rollover like a hyperbola approaching its vertical asymptote, all talk of free software or open source as a political phenomenon falls by the wayside. Maybe that's why, when LinuxWorld follows up its first two shows with a third LinuxWorld show in August, 2000, Stallman is conspicuously absent. My second encounter with Stallman and his trademark gaze comes shortly after that third LinuxWorld show. Hearing that Stallman is going to be in Silicon Valley, I set up a lunch interview in Palo Alto, California. The meeting place seems ironic, not only because of the recent no-show but also because of the overall backdrop. Outside of Redmond, Washington, few cities offer a more direct testament to the economic value of proprietary software. Curious to see how Stallman, a man who has spent the better part of his life railing against our culture's predilection toward greed and selfishness, is coping in a city where even garage-sized bungalows run in the half-million-dollar price range, I make the drive down from Oakland.
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I follow the directions Stallman has given me, until I reach the headquarters of Art.net, a nonprofit "virtual artists collective." Located in a hedge-shrouded house in the northern corner of the city, the Art.net headquarters are refreshingly run-down. Suddenly, the idea of Stallman lurking in the heart of Silicon Valley doesn't seem so strange after all. I find Stallman sitting in a darkened room, tapping away on his gray laptop computer. He looks up as soon as I enter the room, giving me a full blast of his 200-watt gaze. When he offers a soothing "Hello," I offer a return greeting. Before the words come out, however, his eyes have already shifted back to the laptop screen.
Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary
3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay
— AVROM GILBERT, COO of Seeking Alpha ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sangeet Paul Choudary is a widely published researcher and advisor to C-level executives globally, best known for his work on platform business models and multi-sided network effects. He is the co-chair of the MIT Platform Strategy Summit, held annually at the MIT Media Labs in Boston. Sangeet also acts as an industry advisor to the Global Platform Data Project at Stanford University and is an advisor at 500Startups in Silicon Valley. He is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at INSEAD Business School and a Global Fellow at the Centre for Global Enterprise in New York. Sangeet is an advisor to C-level executives globally and has advised CXOs and board members in multiple industries across Europe, North & South America, Asia and Australia, on the design and implementation of platform business models and network effects.
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TARGET A MICRO-MARKET WHERE SMALL IS GOOD Facebook gave the students at Harvard the exclusivity they valued, at least initially. High-end commerce marketplaces often build traction relatively fast by catering to an audience that values exclusivity. In its early days, the small size of Quora helped. The high quality of discussions and the absence of ‘trolling’, initially prompted the who’s who of Silicon Valley to come on board and help build an incredible resource. Subsequently, invite-only networks like Quibb and Medium also built a culture of quality by staying small, initially. LEVERAGE EXISTING INTERACTIONS IN THE MICRO-MARKET Facebook leveraged a community with strong offline ties. This helped build critical mass rapidly.
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While user focus is critical, over-catering to the needs of one micro-market can come in the way of effectively spilling over to other adjacent micro-markets. Also, the micro-market itself should be representative of the larger whole and should not offer advantages that will not stay relevant with a larger audience. Many platforms that launch and find traction in Silicon Valley often face a moment of truth where they need to prove their ability to spread to an audience beyond the early adopters of technology. A MICRO-MARKET MAY BE A THIN-SLICED USE CASE What is as big as Facebook but relatively unknown? Most people outside China have never heard of Tencent. Yet, at nearly 800M users, Tencent QQ is probably the second largest social network in the world.
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game
Benn quickly landed a job as a developer at a San Francisco tech start-up with $25 million in venture funding and its pick of employees. When Benn quit his job as a financial consultant, only half a year earlier, he was making $40,000 a year. His new job as a computer developer paid $100,000—an amount that can continue to grow, essentially without limit in the Silicon Valley market, along with his skill level. When I last spoke with Benn, he was thriving in his new position. A newfound devotee of deep work, he rented an apartment across the street from his office, allowing him to show up early in the morning before anyone else arrived and work without distraction.
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Hansson doesn’t talk publicly about the magnitude of his profit share from Basecamp or his other revenue sources, but we can assume they’re lucrative given that Hansson splits his time between Chicago, Malibu, and Marbella, Spain, where he dabbles in high-performance race-car driving. Our third and final example of a clear winner in our economy is John Doerr, a general partner in the famed Silicon Valley venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Doerr helped fund many of the key companies fueling the current technological revolution, including Twitter, Google, Amazon, Netscape, and Sun Microsystems. The return on these investments has been astronomical: Doerr’s net worth, as of this writing, is more than $3 billion.
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Chapter Two Deep Work Is Rare In 2012, Facebook unveiled the plans for a new headquarters designed by Frank Gehry. At the center of this new building is what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “the largest open floor plan in the world”: More than three thousand employees will work on movable furniture spread over a ten-acre expanse. Facebook, of course, is not the only Silicon Valley heavyweight to embrace the open office concept. When Jack Dorsey, whom we met at the end of the last chapter, bought the old San Francisco Chronicle building to house Square, he configured the space so that his developers work in common spaces on long shared desks. “We encourage people to stay out in the open because we believe in serendipity—and people walking by each other teaching new things,” Dorsey explained.
The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life by Bernard Roth
Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, classic study, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, deskilling, do what you love, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, school choice, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, zero-sum game
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, as long as you are honest with yourself about your goals. Otherwise you are bound to spend your life frustrated and unhappy, like my friend. There is an ethos regarding change in Silicon Valley. Within many companies there is always a fierce struggle to develop something new in an effort to stay ahead of competitors. Silicon Valley people believe their companies will stagnate and die without continual innovation: it’s the ultimate what-have-you-done-lately? culture. To maintain status in such a culture, people always need a new and evolving story. If they don’t deliver, they feel they lose face.
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He was taking a class of mine, “The Designer in Society,” which encourages students to examine and take control of their lives. I’ve been a professor of engineering at Stanford for fifty-two years, and along the way I’ve met too many engineers who once dreamed of starting a company of their own—and instead ended up working for large Silicon Valley companies and never taking that big step toward making their dreams a reality. Only a small percentage ever followed through on what they really wanted to do with their lives, and I hoped to do something to change that. Having talent and good ideas is only part of the equation. The next step—the harder step—is the doing, taking the responsibility for designing success in your own life.
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Conversation Some people are very secretive about their problems, and consequently they are often on their own. It is not a healthy psychological state to be in, and often not very productive. There are countless stories about how, in the famous “idea factories” of Bell Labs, Building 20 at MIT, and various Silicon Valley companies, casual conversation led to a big breakthrough. Talking to people is a great way to stimulate ideas. Forced Transformations This is the process of purposefully modifying your ideas to make the conventional into the unconventional. Alex Osborn, the famous early creativity guru, created a checklist of possible modifications, with items such as magnify and minimize, which referred to changing the scale of an idea.
Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application
But they may have a high-tech future as well. A Silicon Valley start-up called ClearStreet wants to take the model online, with an app that allows people to join a digital savings circle in which members make the same sorts of commitments to save into a common pool. The challenge will be to replicate the power of real-world relationships in a virtual environment. The social cost of defaulting on people who live in the same village is clearly greater than the cost of defaulting on strangers. Kim Polese, who was the original product manager for Java and counts as bona fide Silicon Valley royalty, is the chairwoman of ClearStreet.
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Limited partners in VC funds have done badly overall: since 1997 less cash has been returned to investors than has been put in.3 Moreover, the VC model, based as it is on personal relationships, is inherently limiting. Even though there is a lot of institutional money flowing to venture capital, an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley is going to have a better chance of finding funding than an entrepreneur in North Dakota. Things are even worse across the Atlantic: the industry rule of thumb is that young American firms raise twice as much money in each round of financing as European ones—and twice as fast. There are other drawbacks, too.
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He was one of the first batch of Thiel fellows, twenty people under twenty who were each given one hundred thousand dollars to skip college for two years and pursue their ambitions in a program funded by Peter Thiel, a guru of technology investing whose résumé includes founding PayPal and backing Facebook. So Gu headed to Silicon Valley, where he worked for six months developing a variety of random Web applications. As he turned business ideas over in his head, he was drawn to a very basic financial problem for young people. As we discussed in the opening chapter, people have two forms of capital: they have financial capital, which is the money they actually accumulate, and they have human capital, which is their potential to make money through their future earnings.
Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, climate change refugee, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, fake news, floating exchange rates, full employment, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, investor state dispute settlement, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, zero-sum game
Forty-four of the eighty-seven private start-ups that are now valued at over $1 billion were started by immigrants, and sixty-two of these companies have immigrants as key members of their management team.6 Between 2006 and 2012, immigrants started one-third of the US venture capital–backed companies that became publicly traded, a total of ninety-two companies.7 It is nearly impossible to imagine Silicon Valley without immigrants. Google, Instagram, Uber, and eBay were founded by immigrants, and the role of immigrants in the region extends far beyond these companies. As of 2014, 46 percent of Silicon Valley’s workforce was foreign-born. The share is even larger for workers between the ages of 25 and 44, and it rises to a whopping 74 percent of workers hired for their math and computer expertise in that age bracket.8 These workers also extend opportunities for American-born workers.
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Thirty percent tariffs would make almost every item at Gap or Walmart 30 percent more expensive. Steel tariffs harm workers in industries using steel as an input, such as construction. Retaliation from trading partners hurts workers making US exports. Restrictive immigration policies harm the technological leads of our companies, and fewer immigrants mean fewer entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and beyond. Withdrawing from trade agreements and negotiating “tougher” terms with our partners gives us fewer friends and weaker allies, making battles against terrorism and climate change more difficult.3 Reducing the mutual economic interests that link China and the United States makes it more likely that small disagreements transform into broader conflict.
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Higher costs of imported intermediate goods will make US manufacturing less productive, lowering the market share of US firms in the world economy. Consumers will find shopping trips more expensive, and real wages will fall due to the higher costs of imported consumption (and the higher prices of domestic products that compete with imports). If the United States reduces immigration flows, we will have fewer engineers in Silicon Valley, fewer entrepreneurs opening their first small businesses in New York City, fewer workers to pick fruit and to do eldercare, fewer inventors, and fewer Nobel Prize–winning scientists. We will also have fewer patriotic, hardworking new Americans grateful for their improved living standards. And the demographic pressures of our aging population will weigh more heavily as birthrates and population growth slow.
Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One by Jenny Blake
Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, cloud computing, content marketing, data is the new oil, diversified portfolio, do what you love, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, future of work, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, solopreneur, Startup school, stem cell, TED Talk, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game
In 2011, I made the difficult decision to leave Google after my sabbatical and launch a full-time business based on my blog and recently released book. People reacted as if I were breaking up with Brad Pitt. “You really think you can do better than Gooooogle?!” I wasn’t sure, but I knew I would forever regret not trying. So I rented out my condo, packed a suitcase, and moved from Silicon Valley to New York City. I have been running my own company in the years since as a career and business strategist, writer, and keynote speaker. I am the happiest and healthiest I have ever been. Even as my business goes through ups and downs, I feel calm and engaged with my work. As much as we began from similar places of dissatisfaction, our stories all have something in common with how we proceeded, too.
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As much as we began from similar places of dissatisfaction, our stories all have something in common with how we proceeded, too. We each shifted to new, related work by leveraging our existing base of strengths, interests, and experience. Though it might seem as if each of us made drastic changes, we were not starting from scratch. In Silicon Valley parlance, we pivoted. Eric Ries, author of the business bible The Lean Startup, defines a business pivot as “a change in strategy without a change in vision.” I define a career pivot as doubling down on what is working to make a purposeful shift in a new, related direction. Pivoting, as we will refer to it in this book, is an intentional, methodical process for nimbly navigating career changes.
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I recommend books for each Pivot stage in the Pivot 201 section at the back of the book, but the two I suggest for processing major life events are When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön, and Second Firsts by Christina Rasmussen. CONNECT THE DOTS LOOKING BACKWARD When I was twenty years old, I took a leave of absence from UCLA, where I was studying political science and communications, to join a political polling start-up in Silicon Valley as its first employee. This was my first pivot, and it kicked off my examination of what it takes to switch quickly and successfully from one trajectory to the next, even when it seems to go against the grain of what others are doing. In hindsight I see my entire career as a series of pivots, within companies and also on my own, where I have made several smaller pivots in my business since: After two years at Polimetrix, where my role included managing our Google AdWords accounts, I landed a job at Google in training and development, teaching customer service representatives how to support the AdWords product.
12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson
"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator
In 1800, life expectancy was 40 – and the early factory system, with its hellhole slums and 12-hour days, cut that by around 10 years. 200 years later, 80 years has become the new normal (though even in the Bible we get offered threescoreyearsandten, so it’s taken a while to pass home-base, whatever the enthusiasts for Capitalism have to say). Those of us who have a good diet, who exercise, who have access to healthcare, and not too much stress, can live healthily as well as long. The rich, who have access to the best of everything, are doing very well. Naturally, they want to do better, which is why Silicon Valley is investing in research that will stall, or reverse, physical and cognitive decline. Cognitive decline for humans is as real as muscle loss and organ failure. In the end, our biology beats us. AI systems, embodied or not, suffer no such losses and no such decline. AI systems can augment, version-up, get smarter.
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I loved that great story of the online-addict teenager whose mother confiscated all her devices and turned off the Wi-Fi. The kid realised she could send tweets from the home’s smart fridge. The whole thing may well have been a hoax, but Reddit offers full instructions on how to tweet from a Samsung fridge, if you have one. The point of this story is that the goal of our digital masters in Silicon Valley is that there will be no offline. No need to hack your fridge. * * * And yet … It may be that all of this – privacy, protections, dataflow, and data usage – is a temporary problem. At present we imagine human interests and human actors as dominant in all our scenarios. If, though, AI does become superintelligent – a player and not just a tool – then the future for humans may be irrelevant.
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Blood transfusions were just beginning to be understood – and there was a gruesome quasi-magical folklore belief in drinking the blood of animals or virgins for vitality and longevity. Note: in 2018 a Californian start-up, Ambrosia, started offering blood-plasma transplants to enhance longevity. Alkahest, a Silicon Valley biotech lab with over 40 million dollars of investment, says it has promising results using plasma to reverse degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It seems like the vampire was on to something. * * * There were plenty of eastern European undead legends – but nothing like the worldly and magnetic vampire figure of Polidori’s story (probably based on Byron).
Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay
Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management
Similar accidents of history-the site of Leland Stanford's university and the Xerox corporation's research facility-made Silicon Valley the center of the international software industry. 16 The competitive advantages of countries and regions-Switzerland, Hollywood, Wall Street, Silicon Valley-are based on the competitive advantages of companies and of individuals. In Switzerland, each firm has a competitive advantage in its own particular line of business, and the common competitive advantages of all these firms are based on the competitive advantages that well educated and trained Swiss workers themselves enjoy. The same is true in Silicon Valley. In both cases, the { 92} John Kay geographic proximity ofbusinesses to each other reinforces these competitive advantages through the formal and informal sharing of knowledge, experience, and people.
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At Sophia Antipolis I am meeting Marie-Louise, a consultant with Accenture, and Gerhard, a divisional manager in Nortel Networks. The town comprises six thousand acres of parkland broken by woods, sculpture, and office complexes. It is the product of a conscious attempt by the local government, the Conseil General des Alpes-Maritimes, to create a local version of Silicon Valley by attracting footloose but internationally connected industries. Au Coin Gourmand is set in a row of small shops selling designer clothes and furniture. The tempo is brisker than in Menton. At lunch, single plates of mixed meats, smoked salmon, foie gras, are served, with wine by the glass; the adjoining traiteur offers similar products, which busy workers take away for evening meals.
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The United States is well endowed with natural resources; it is some way ahead of Japan and most European countries, although behind Canada, Venezuela, and (probably) Russia. But every six months, the United States creates output more valuable than its entire stock of productive natural resources. It is a modern cliche that Silicon Valley is not built on reserves of silicon. That is why countries with limited natural resources, such as Japan, have not been greatly disadvantaged in international competition. Rich states have easy access today to natural resources, not because of geographical proximity, but because they have the financial resources to buy them.
Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn, Jennifer Levitz
"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, blockchain, call centre, Donald Trump, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, high net worth, impact investing, independent contractor, Jeffrey Epstein, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, performance metric, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Thorstein Veblen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, yield management, young professional, zero-sum game
In the late 2000s, two-thirds: December 17, 2019, emailed comments from Mark Sklarow, CEO of Independent Educational Consultants Association. Stuyvesant High School in New York City: Robert Kolker, “Cheating Upwards,” New York Magazine, September 14, 2012, http://nymag.com/news/features/cheating-2012-9/. A cluster of suicides shook: Hanna Rosin, “The Silicon Valley Suicides,” The Atlantic, December 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/, and “Epi-Aid 2016-2018: Undetermined risk factors for suicide among youth, ages 10-24—Santa Clara County, CA, 2016,” https://www.sccgov.org/sites/phd/hi/hd/epi-aid/Documents/epi-aid-report.pdf. a vivid, searing description: Carolyn Walworth, “Paly school board rep: ‘The sorrows of young Palo Altans,’” Palo Alto Online, March 25, 2015, https://paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/03/25/guest-opinion-the-sorrows-of-young-palo-altans.
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Handcuffs were cinched before the men and women were guided into the backs of government vehicles, to bob along the hills above Hollywood or cruise down tranquil palm-tree-lined boulevards past the predawn traffic of morning joggers and maids and nannies making their way to work. Hundreds of agents had fanned out across the country that morning, from Manhattan to Miami, from Houston to Silicon Valley, conducting similar sweeps at dozens more homes. Arrest warrants gave bare details for the raid: conspiracy to commit mail fraud for some; racketeering conspiracy for others. In Los Angeles, the FBI’s unmarked sedans pulled into an underground garage at the ruddy granite Edward R. Roybal Federal Building and U.S.
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Webb bought an ergometer, and wanted to see if his daughter’s times were at least in the ballpark of competitive. But the teen wasn’t interested, so they dropped it. Only later did Webb realize, “Holy shit.” * * * • • • SINGER KEPT EVEN BUSIER back in California, where he made his regular spins through Sacramento, Silicon Valley, Orange County, and Los Angeles. The next development: making more inroads with coaches and colleges that wanted those affluent families to help boost their bottom lines. Vince Cuseo was in his office on the northern edge of the Occidental College campus one day in 2012 when he got an email that made him cringe.
Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase
Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work,