Silicon Valley startup

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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

Though the worst—2008’s “carmageddon”—was still ahead, America’s increasingly ambivalent attitude toward its once-mighty automakers fueled the hope that Silicon Valley’s startup ethos might make for a more innovative, environmentally friendly, and ultimately successful car company. The Roadster did prove that a high-tech startup could identify new opportunities that the established automakers were largely ignoring, develop new intellectual property, and design a cutting-edge car. To most of the public, who relate to cars entirely as consumer goods, that was enough to make Silicon Valley’s first automotive startup look like a potential world-beater. But behind the scenes, Tesla was proving that high-tech startup culture was an extremely poor match for the kinds of work that actually determine success and failure in the car business.

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It was a vibrant and unpretentious environment, whose layout and youthful staff spoke to the flat structure and creative collaboration of a software startup. Compared to the aging, hermetically sealed executive suite at the top of Ford’s “glass house” headquarters, or GM’s imposing C-Suite offices high above downtown Detroit, Tesla’s headquarters were as different as a Model S was from an F-150. But as alluring as the idea of a Silicon Valley startup automaker was, I had learned the hard way that the freshest and most intellectually appealing approaches to the car business are often the most troubled when it came to fundamentals. Earlier in my career, I had become fascinated by an Israeli startup called Project Better Place, which had the most daring and unique strategy I had ever heard.

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To live up to its ambition of selling affordable, mass-market electric cars, Tesla would have to find a way to balance its well-known strengths with these very different and often-overlooked challenges. These challenges have persisted even in the present day. First, at its heart, Tesla is driven by innovation and design, like so many Silicon Valley startups. But the automotive business is, at its core, a low-margin, manufacturing-based industry. From the start, Tesla rejected the values that are needed to succeed in this sort of enterprise, and it shows no signs of changing, even now. A disciplined, process-driven culture, not more creativity and innovation, is the key to overcoming this challenge.

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

The findings from our 2007 report “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” showed a rapid rise in the number of immigrant entrepreneurs even over the previous decade.21 In our survey, more than half (52.4%) of Silicon Valley startups had one or more immigrants as a key founder, compared with the California average of 38.8%. A comparison with Saxenian’s 1999 findings showed that the percentage of firms with Indian or Chinese founders had increased from 24% to 28%—despite the overall pie getting bigger, with there being far more tech startups. Indian immigrants outpaced their Chinese counterparts as founders of engineering and technology companies in Silicon Valley. Saxenian reported that 17% of Silicon Valley startups from 1980 to 1998 had a Chinese founder and 7% had an Indian founder.

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Saxenian reported that 17% of Silicon Valley startups from 1980 to 1998 had a Chinese founder and 7% had an Indian founder. 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.

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Silicon Valley is what everyone has tried to re-create, but this did not spring forth from tax breaks or targeted incentives to industry. Rather, Silicon Valley evolved because a critical mass of maverick thinkers and tinkerers came together from all over the world. It is this diversity and people-to-people Silicon Valley magic that Start-up Chile has tried to create. Thus far, Start-Up Chile has surpassed expectations. Our biggest concern was that few entrepreneurs, other than those from similar or even poorer Latin American countries, would agree to relocate their companies so distant from the existing nexuses of innovation to a remote place like Chile.

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

Most large companies are missing this fundamental piece of the corporate innovation puzzle. Neglect his advice at your peril.” —Thales S. Teixeira, Harvard Business School “People tend to associate the term ‘startup’ with a uniqueness that assumes a culture of creativity, innovation, and continuous learning. But as Eric Ries shows, you don’t have to fit the mold of a typical Silicon Valley startup to prioritize learning over perfection and create a culture where making mistakes is not just accepted, but encouraged. The Startup Way presents a new vision for what a modern company can, and should, look like.” —Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code “In The Startup Way, Eric Ries applies the secrets of Silicon Valley to established companies in every industry.

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If it hurts, you’re not doing it wrong, you’re doing it right.”3 In this part of the book, we’ll talk about what it means to become a modern company, and the entrepreneurial structure required to survive and embody a long-term vision for the future. Implementing that vision takes patience and dedication—transformation is never a quick fix—but organizations that operate this way have the greatest chance at continued expansion. We’ll walk through the elements of startup culture and work that have made Silicon Valley and other startup hubs such dynamic places, as well as the lessons and theories from the past that form the foundation on which to build a new way of thinking about management. Finally, we’ll synthesize these ideas into the Startup Way. CHAPTER 1 RESPECT THE PAST, INVENT THE FUTURE: CREATING THE MODERN COMPANY When I first began working with GE years ago, I sat down for a conversation with CEO Jeff Immelt.

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Not only that, but the entrepreneurs who lead these startups require a distinct career path with its own performance development standards of best practices and metrics for success, including mentorship in the high-impact techniques that accelerate growth. Figuring this out has been part of the secret sauce of Silicon Valley.1 Integrate Startups into the Parent Organization The second responsibility of the entrepreneurial function is to manage the problem of success. Although I acknowledge the fact that most startups fail, the hardest part for most organizations is knowing what to do when they succeed. A startup within an established organization that is limping along is only moderately threatening to the established order.

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

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.

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Green, “Don’t Link Carbon Markets,” Nature 543, no. 7646, (March 21, 2017), http://www.nature.com/news/don-t-link-carbon-markets-1.21663. Chapter 2    Coming of Age In the fall of 2007, I was torn between two offers I couldn’t pass up. One was to attend Stanford University, my dream school as far back as I could remember. The other offer was to stay on as a process engineer at a Silicon Valley start-up called Nanosolar that was going to change the world. The chief executive officer, a visionary entrepreneur from Germany named Martin Roscheisen, put his arm around me and told me in his booming voice, “Varun, it’ll be just like Xerox PARC.” He was referring to the legendary Palo Alto research park where the modern computer was invented.

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Then, as Japan and Germany took the lead from the United States in supporting their domestic solar industries, solar PV started to gain traction in the early years of the twenty-first century. China’s solar industry had modest beginnings, but when it finally got going, its competitors stood no chance. Even though the solar industry is finally in the ascendant, it lost a vital element when Silicon Valley’s start-ups failed. The surviving firms harbor no illusion that solar technology might change fundamentally. Rather, in each segment of the industry, all the way from upstream manufacturing to downstream deployment, firms are laser-focused on cutting costs rather than disrupting the current order. This approach looks set to fuel continued growth in the coming years, but it is not at all conducive to the innovation the industry needs to pursue to brighten solar’s long-term prospects.

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

I doubt that’s much comfort to Elvia Lopez, a kindly thirty-one-year-old Mexican immigrant who picks strawberries in Santa Maria, California (who was profiled in the Los Angeles Times).22 Agrobot isn’t alone in tackling this opportunity. A Japanese competitor claims that its technology can reduce strawberry picking time by 40 percent.23 Blue River Technologies, a Silicon Valley venture-funded startup headed by a Stanford graduate, is developing robots that can weed. To quote from their marketing materials: “We are creating systems that can distinguish crops from weeds in order to kill the weeds without harming the crops or the environment. Our systems use cameras, computer vision, and machine learning algorithms.”24 Note that the coming army of mechanical farmworkers doesn’t have to be faster than the workers they replace because, like autonomous vehicles, they can work in the dark and so aren’t limited to operating in daylight.

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Beyond the picking and packing of orders, as I’ve described above, there’s the loading and unloading of packages. This is done by human workers now because it takes human judgment to decide how to grasp and stack randomly shaped boxes in delivery vehicles and shipping containers. But another Silicon Valley startup, Industrial Perception, Inc., is changing all that. Its robots can peer into a truck, select an item, then pick it up. As it quipped on its website (before the site went dark after the company was acquired by Google in 2013), Industrial Perception is “providing robots with the skills they’ll need to succeed in the economy of tomorrow.”25 Sex workers.

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Rather than wait for someone to get a job before starting a Social Security account, the government could offer to add high-PBI stocks and bonds to the portfolio of people who volunteer for public-service work such as caring for the elderly, cleaning up parks, counseling troubled teens, distributing health education pamphlets, and the like. This could apply to retirees as well as those idled through unemployment or those who simply have some free time to spare. To encourage commitment and continuity, the government could take a page out of the Silicon Valley startup playbook: restricted stock vesting. You sign up for some public-service activity and are granted a pool of shares that you don’t actually own yet. As you work, these shares become yours (vest) over time. This way, you are always cognizant of the consequences of quitting prematurely, and you have a goal and scorecard with which to monitor your progress.

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

to focus while coding: Rhett Jones, “Lawsuit: VR Company Had a ‘Kink Room,’ Pressured Female Employees to ‘Microdose,’ ” Gizmodo, May 15, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, https://gizmodo.com/lawsuit-vr-company-had-a-kink-room-pressured-female-e-1795243868. The lawsuit was later settled out of court: Marisa Kendall, “Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Startup Settles ‘Kink Room’ Lawsuit,” The Mercury News, September 7, 2017, accessed October 7, 2018, https://gizmodo.com/lawsuit-vr-company-had-a-kink-room-pressured-female-e-1795243868. The lawsuit was later settled out of court: Marisa Kendall, “Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Startup Settles ‘Kink Room’ Lawsuit,” The Mercury News, September 7, 2017, accessed October 7, 2018, https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/09/07/san-francisco-virtual-reality-startup-settles-kink-room-lawsuit/.

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The odds are high the “problem” they’ll decide needs most urgently to be solved is the re-creation of the conveniences of dorm and home-life—where everyone prepared their meals, cleaned up after them, and ferried them around in vehicles. As my friend Clara Jeffery, the editor in chief of Mother Jones noted in a tweet, “So many Silicon Valley startups are about dudes wanting to replicate mom.” It’s also a symptom of how coding has evolved. To be sure, some of these services are popular outside the coterie of coddled recent grads. Many people—the ones wealthy enough to pay for it, certainly—are happy to pay to have the pain-in-the-ass parts of life abstracted away.

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But even Torvalds decided, at long last, that his behavior was a problem for the Linux community: In September 2018, he temporarily stepped down as benevolent dictator to “get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately,” as he wrote. One could reply, as some coders do, that the low proportion of women and minorities in projects like this—or at Silicon Valley startups like the early stage PayPal—is also just a function of meritocracy. Maybe women are just inherently less good at the discipline. The short answer to that is no. The longer answer is something I take up in the next chapter, “The ENIAC Girls Vanish.” Coders and techies, certainly in the US, have a reputation for leaning libertarian—which we could define here very loosely as believing that each person is responsible for their own fate, that government regulations generally stifle liberty, and that society is best served by letting the best rise by their own efforts.

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

Properly programming thermostats can save up to 20% in heating and cooling costs, yet over 85% of us never do so. This is often because we are intimidated by their complicated interfaces, some of which seem to need a PhD to crack. The electric thermostat was invented by Warren Johnson of Wisconsin in 1883, but its design has not changed much since. Until, that is, 2011 when Nest Labs, a Silicon Valley start-up, launched its “learning thermostat”. This Wi-Fi-enabled device learns and monitors the user’s habits, schedules and temperature preferences. With this information and real-time data from its integrated sensors, which track humidity, activity and light, the Nest device adjusts itself, for instance by reducing heating when the sun is out or turning off the cooling when no one is at home.

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The cost-effectiveness of the approach was comparable to traditional energy conservation programmes, with annual savings of $300 million. DIY health care In coming decades, health-care costs in the West are poised to rocket because of ageing populations and the explosion of lifestyle-related and chronic diseases. To defuse this ticking time bomb, forward-thinking health providers – ranging from Silicon Valley start-ups to health maintenance organisations (HMOs) and health insurance companies – are collaborating with governments and employers to usher in the “consumerisation” of health care. This new trend aims to give individuals a more active role in managing their own health care, from seeking out providers to choosing treatments.

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This only happens if the new model might significantly improve the bottom line. Changing a business model also requires investment, which must come with an attractive return. This analogy can help frugal producers convince customers to change their personal business model by showing them the relevant return on investment. For example, gThrive, a Silicon Valley start-up, offers precision agriculture services to farmers in drought-prone California. It sells gStakes, maintenance-free wireless sensors designed like a lightweight plastic ruler, which, when inserted in various parts of a field, frequently measure and track soil and environmental conditions (moisture, air temperature, sunlight).

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

But creating a car company was hard to pull off, to put it mildly. Eberhard was receiving similar pushback as he and his partners looked for money. Laurie Yoler, a friend and colleague at Packet Design who was well connected in the investor world, was setting them up with meetings around Silicon Valley. A startup typically began with some seed money—maybe from the founder’s own pocket or scraped together from friends and family, to show that the company had strong early support—before raising increasingly large rounds of funding. At each round, the founder gave up some ownership stake of the company as others bought in, and current investors either had to up their investment or else face dilution.

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Personal electronics companies, such as Apple Inc., were recalling devices with lithium-ion batteries out of concern they could overheat and catch fire. In 2004 and 2005, Apple recalled more than 150,000 laptops—with batteries made by LG Chem. When LG Chem realized it had sold a large number of its batteries to a Silicon Valley startup that planned to use all of them for a single device—a car, as it happened—its legal department sent a letter demanding the cells be returned. The battery maker didn’t want to be associated with a potentially fiery experiment. Eberhard ignored the request. He had little choice. His bet that Tesla would be able to find a ready battery supplier was proving harder to cover than expected.

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Eberhard cautioned Musk against being too definitive; issues with finding a battery supplier and uncertainty around the transmission had caused their former estimates of $80,000 to feel understated. He suggested being vague, for instance suggesting a price tag between $85,000 and $120,000. “I am nervous about $85k,” Eberhard told Musk, emphasizing the point. * * * — For the past three years, Tesla had been in “stealth mode,” a rite of passage for Silicon Valley startups as founders try to get their feet on the ground—raising initial money and hoping to avoid the harsh spotlight that magnifies the mistakes inevitably made during the early days of being a company. Coming out of stealth mode tends to have a familiar playbook, aimed at maximizing exposure, whether the end goal is raising more money or gaining customers.

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

It was a tantalizing prospect to join the Benchmark portfolio, an elite club of Silicon Valley tech startups. A hundred million dollars meant that Benchmark saw big things in WeWork. Neumann was getting the recognition—and the first taste of riches—that he had always craved. He took the deal. CHAPTER 7 Activate the Space Benchmark’s imprimatur—and the $15 million that accompanied it—imbued WeWork with a new swagger. The stamp of approval from the vaunted Silicon Valley moneymen infused the company with a sense of invincibility and the aura of a booming Silicon Valley–style startup. Employees at WeWork believed the concept of the workplace was about to be revolutionized, and WeWork was leading the way.

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The same venture capital and mutual fund machine that had agreed to label WeWork a $10 billion tech enterprise rather than a modest-sized real estate firm was showering money across a legion of young Silicon Valley companies. These startups pledged to disrupt everything from mattresses to coffee, inflating valuations as red ink piled up. That monsoon of money trickled through everyday life in San Francisco, the new capital of Silicon Valley startups. The city quickly became a terrarium of money-losing startups that turned former jewelry and rug storage spots into buzzy offices with Ping-Pong tables and macchiato stations.

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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.

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

For example, Joi Ito, a friend and head of the MIT Media Lab, was born in Japan but raised in Michigan. In his mid-twenties he moved back to Japan and set up one of the first commercial Internet service providers there. He also kept developing connections in the United States, investing in Silicon Valley start-ups like Flickr and Twitter, establishing the Japanese subsidiary for the early American blogging company Six Apart, and more recently helping to establish LinkedIn Japan. Is Joi the only person with start-up experience who does angel investing in the Valley? No. Is he the only person with roots in both the United States and Japan?

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If you’d like to be promoted from analyst to associate, it may mean a first step of building a relationship with a key partner, or taking a night course to pick up advanced financial management skills before taking that step of marching into the boss’s office and asking for that promotion. Sometimes the first step toward a goal is rather simple. A question people sometimes ask us is, “What’s the best way to get into Silicon Valley start-ups?” Well, there are various ways, but the first step is this: move here! If you’re unsure what your first, or even your second, step should be, pick a first step with high option value, meaning that it could lead to a broad range of options. Management consulting is a classic example of a career move that maximizes “optionality” because the skills and experiences of consulting can be helpful in and applied toward many other next steps, even if you’re not sure what those steps are yet.

…

“We contemplated pulling the plug.”11 But the resilient team partnered with other Internet radio companies and marshaled a massive lobbying effort in Washington to extend the period during which they could negotiate with labels. Westergren’s users flooded Congress with emails and phone calls; he estimates about one million emails or phone calls fighting the increase in costs were sent to legislators in total. In 2009, long after Pandora had been relegated to the “dead pool” of Silicon Valley start-ups, the artists and record labels struck a significant revenue-sharing deal with online broadcasters like Pandora, resolving the royalty dispute. Shortly thereafter, Greylock’s David Sze led a new investment in the company and joined the board. By the end of 2010, Pandora offered more than 700,000 songs in its library and had earned $100 million in revenue.

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

—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.

…

On-demand platforms like Uber and Lyft have dispensed with the idea of human supervision altogether, putting decisions like pay, dispatching, and dispute resolution in the hands of algorithms. Algorithmic management has become a lucrative industry. In addition to Cogito, there are also retail-oriented AI companies like Percolata, a Silicon Valley start-up that counts Uniqlo and 7-Eleven among its clients, which uses in-store sensors to calculate a “true productivity” score for each worker. Another AI start-up, Beqom, automates the process of calculating worker pay and year-end bonuses. And Nexus AI, a “workforce management” system, allows managers to sort workers into teams based on calculated attributes like “high performers” and “good chemistry.”

…

Amazon uses complex algorithms to track the productivity Colin Lecher, “How Amazon Automatically Tracks and Fires Warehouse Workers for ‘Productivity,’ ” The Verge, April 25, 2019. IBM has used Watson, its AI platform Tristan Greene, “IBM Is Using Its AI to Predict How Employees Will Perform,” TheNextWeb, July 10, 2018. Percolata, a Silicon Valley start-up Hazel Sheffield, “The Great Data Leap: How AI Will Transform Recruitment and HR,” Financial Times, November 4, 2019. The company, whose clients include Sweetgreen and OfferUp Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Firm Led by Google Veterans Uses AI to ‘Nudge’ Workers Toward Happiness,” New York Times, December 31, 2018.

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.

…

After what Chesky would later refer to as an “intervention,” Blecharczyk finally agreed to relocate to San Francisco for three months and moved back into the Rausch Street apartment. The band was back together. They had been given another chance. “What Are You Still Doing Here?” Founded in 2005 by Paul Graham and three copartners, Y Combinator very quickly became one of the most prestigious launchpads in Silicon Valley, a “quasi startup factory, university, and venture capital fund rolled into one,” as Fortune called it. It wasn’t easy to get in, but start-ups it deemed worthy got seed funding of $5,000 plus another $5,000 per founder and a priceless wealth of knowledge, connections, operational assistance, and more offered by Graham and his copartners.

…

Chesky loves peppering his discourses with quotes from history’s great thinkers, often paraphrasing one from George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the environment. The unreasonable man adapts the environment to him. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” It’s a much-cited reference in Silicon Valley, where legions of start-up founders pride themselves on being unreasonable enough to get gobs of funding and then get the laws changed in their favor. For this reason, Chesky is not surprised that Airbnb has generated so much pushback. “When we started this business, I knew that if it would become successful, it would be somewhat controversial,” he tells me in a moment of reflection in the President’s Room at Airbnb’s headquarters, a wood-paneled replica of a 1917 executive quarters in the company’s offices in 2015.

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

There was an immediate backlash against the specter of the tech giant having access to NHS patient data despite the fact that Google claimed strict privacy policies were in place and the data was carefully anonymized.51 All this illustrates, once again, how factors beyond the capability of the technology itself—in this case, perceived privacy concerns—can act to significantly slow the deployment of artificial intelligence in the healthcare arena. Some of the most surprising successes with artificial intelligence in healthcare are occurring in the mental health arena. Woebot Labs, a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2017, has developed a chatbot powered by natural language processing technology similar to what is used in Alexa and Siri, combined with carefully scripted conversational elements developed by psychologists. Woebot’s approach is essentially to automate cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, a proven technique for helping people with depression or anxiety.

…

In the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, there may also be far more emphasis placed on properly cleaning and sanitizing vehicles on a frequent basis. This, again, is something that is currently the responsibility of drivers. I think it will be fascinating to watch the evolution of self-driving cars over the coming years in terms of both the technology and the business models that ultimately emerge. There are a large number of Silicon Valley startups focused on developing and licensing self-driving technology, as well as varying degrees of investment by virtually every major automotive manufacturer. A disruptive breakthrough could emerge from any of these initiatives, but I think one of the most interesting narratives will center on the widening gap between the strategies pursued by Waymo and Tesla, and how competition between these two companies plays out over time.

…

By one account, as of April 2020, there were at least 230 startup companies focused on using AI to find new pharmaceuticals.75 Daphne Koller, a professor at Stanford and the co-founder of the online education company Coursera, is one of the world’s top experts on applying machine learning to biology and biochemistry. Koller is also the founder and CEO of insitro, a Silicon Valley startup, founded in 2018, that has raised over $100 million to pursue new medicines using machine learning. The broad-based slowdown in technological innovation that plagues the American economy as a whole is especially evident in the pharmaceutical industry. Koller told me that: The problem is that it is becoming consistently more challenging to develop new drugs: clinical trial success rates are around the mid-single-digit range; the pre-tax R&D cost to develop a new drug (once failures are incorporated) is estimated to be greater than $2.5 [billion].

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

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. When Pavan asked for a business plan, Clark simply revealed the Magic Diamond with Healthscape at the center. Pavan was at first very excited; then he was very nervous.

…

Pavan and Kittu had finished in the top one-hundredth of one percent on the test taken by bright young Indians who probably were already in the top one-hundredth of one percent on the national brainpower scale. Yet about twice a week Pavan found a way to remind Kittu that he had finished 250 places behind him. To Kittu the suggestion that he was too smart to take risks was "total bullshit." In the first place, how much risk was there in working for a Silicon Valley start-up? The worst thing that happened is that the startup failed, and you went back to your old job and your $80,000 a year. Page 121 Silicon Graphics or any other big company would have hired them back the instant they applied. In the second place, his life had been nothing but risk: the risk of growing up in a Third World hellhole, the risk that he wouldn't get into a decent school that might catapult him out of the hellhole, the risk that he wouldn't find work in the United States, the risk that ITV, the highest-profile engineering project in Silicon Valley, would flop.

…

The VCs had been to business school, they spoke the jargon, they wore the suits, or at least owned them. The VCs kept their neckties on hooks on the back of their office doors, so they could go either way. They were pleasantly free of the odor of a man on a suicide mission. One VC in particular had a gift for persuading mainstream CEOs that the only place to be was a Silicon Valley start-up: John Page 156 Doerr. Doerr was the only VC whom Clark favored with something akin to respect. He asked Doerr to join Healtheon's board and to help him recruit a CEO. Doerr, who had told a lot of people that Healtheon might one day be the biggest company Kleiner Perkins ever backed, then set out to find the Serious American Executive who could make the Magic Diamond plausible to the wider world.

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). Knight, Sam. 2016.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

In 2014, Low had an associate open a bank account in Singapore in the name of “Aabar,” not coincidentally part of the name of Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Aabar Investments, for the purpose of stealing over $100 million.12 Chris and some college friends tried a sort of familiarity gambit when they attempted to start a technology business in the mid-1980s. In the era before Silicon Valley startups founded by teenagers routinely went on to billion-dollar valuations, a company run by a bunch of nineteen-year-olds lacked credibility. So they chose a name that created the illusion of being a well-established firm: “Consolidated Electronics.” After all, a company that was “consolidated” must have been formed from several preexisting companies, like the energy company Consolidated Edison.

…

The following two podcasts devoted to the Theranos story and the criminal trial of Elizabeth Holmes include extensive quotations from depositions and trial testimony on the aspects of the case that we discuss in this book: The Dropout (ABC News, 2021–2022) [https://abcaudio.com/podcasts/the-dropout/] and Bad Blood: The Final Chapter (John Carreyrou, 2021–2022) [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bad-blood-the-final-chapter/id1575738174]. The story is narrated in J. Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (New York: Knopf, 2018). At the end of her fifteen-week trial in early 2022, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty on four charges related to defrauding investors [https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/theranos-founder-elizabeth-holmes-found-guilty-investor-fraud], and she was sentenced to 135 months in prison [https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/elizabeth-holmes-sentenced-more-11-years-defrauding-theranos-investors-hundreds].

…

Among the many reporting failures identified by the panel, the final report concluded that CBS had “failed to obtain clear authentication of any of the Killian documents,” had not adequately scrutinized the background of its source, Bill Burkett, and had failed to corroborate the claims. See S. Kiehl and D. Zurawik, “CBS Fires 4 Executives, Producers over Bush–National Guard Report,” Baltimore Sun, January 11, 2005 [https://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/tv/bal-te.to.cbs11jan11-story.html]. 5. J. Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (New York: Knopf, 2018). Carreyrou reports that he wanted to publish the story as soon as possible after he filed it, but his editor “cautioned patience,” explaining that the “story was a bombshell and we needed to make sure it was bulletproof when we went to press with it” (see pp. 265–273 for these quotations and the timeline between his filing the story and its ultimate publication). 6.

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

We were the first campaign in the UK to put almost all our money into digital communication then have it partly controlled by people whose normal work was subjects like quantum information . . . If you want to make big improvements in communication, my advice is – hire physicists, not communications people from normal companies. * * * • • • Just like Brad, Cummings set up Vote Leave like a Silicon Valley start-up, with physicists, data, innovation and constant testing of ads or messages. One especially smart move involved inviting people to guess the results of all 51 matches in the Euro 2016 football tournament with the chance of winning £50 million, in exchange for their phone number, email, home address and a score of 1–5 in respect of how likely they were to vote for staying in the EU.14 This, of course, fed into the models.

…

Science fiction is fast becoming science fact, as rapidly improving artificial intelligence starts to impact our economy. However, rather than speculation about a ‘jobless future’, we should be worrying about growing inequality and whether the coming tech revolution will wipe out the middle class. LIKE MANY SILICON VALLEY start-ups, Starsky Robotics was founded by two twenty-somethings who regard sleep as optional. Any successful new tech firm needs someone who understands technology and someone who understands business, and these two distinct skills are rarely found in one individual. At Starsky, Kartik Tiwari is the ‘tech guy’ who specialises in artificial intelligence, and Stefan Seltz-Axmacher is the ‘serial entrepreneur’ guy, who mostly specialises in starting-up start-ups.

…

No one wants to live in a world comprising a handful of trillionaires and hordes of unemployed or extremely poorly paid people – not even the trillionaires. A growing number of people are proposing a bold new idea to deal with this. In 2017 I interviewed Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, the most important fund in Silicon Valley for tech start-ups. Thousands of businesses apply every year to access Y Combinator’s funding and guidance, in exchange for a small slice of their company. Sam is a Princeton dropout and frequently wears a hoodie, yet when I met him, he was only 31 years old and already a multi-millionaire. He is often described as ‘the man who invents the future’.

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

Two huge streams of culture and argument that continue to underlie many of today’s conversations were incubated by robot anxiety: the “left” and science fiction. We find a hatching of the left in the early writings of Karl Marx, who as early as the 1840s was obsessed with the Luddite dilemma. Marx was one of the first technology writers. This realization came to me in a flash many years ago when I was driving in Silicon Valley and some Internet startup was on the radio trumpeting the latest scheme to take over the world. There was a lot of the usual filler about innovation breaking through traditional market boundaries, the globalization of technical talent, and so on. I was just about to turn the radio off, muttering something about how I couldn’t take even one more pitch from one of these companies, when the announcer intoned, “This has been an anniversary reading of Das Kapital.”

…

One journalist found that 40 percent of the tasks on offer are to create spam.4 CHAPTER 15 Story Found The First Act Is Autocatalytic A newly launched Siren Server is like a tiny baby creature in a hostile ecosystem that must grow fast enough to survive in a world of predators. The most common means to survival is to route enough data fast enough so that by the time predators notice you at all, they won’t find it worthwhile to go after your niche. There are a variety of Siren Servers, ranging from consumer-facing Silicon Valley startups tempting people with “free” bait, to financial servers that skim the cream off the economy in relative obscurity, to providers of infrastructure who realize that they can also play the big data game, to governments and other entities yet to be discussed. In all cases, there has to be some way for a particular Siren Server to gain enough initial momentum to become the beneficiary of network effects.

…

Even the slightest expense or risk might slow the initial growth spurt, so every possible effort is made to pretend there are no costs, risks, or even delayed gratifications. This can never really be true. Yet it feels true as you sign up for a social network or an app store for the first time. Since You Asked Here’s typical advice I’d give to someone who wants to try the Silicon Valley startup game: Obviously you have to get someone else to do something on your server. This can start out as a petty activity. eBay started out as a trading site for people who collected Pez candy dispensers. The key is that it’s your server. If you’re getting a lot of traffic through someone else’s server, then you’re not really playing the game.

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

Foundational tours provide continuity by helping companies retain employees who focus on the long term. Your senior management team should consist of Foundational employees. The optimal blend of Rotational, Transformation, and Foundational tours depends on the specific market conditions of your company. Silicon Valley companies, including start-ups, rely primarily (roughly 80 percent) on Transformational tours, with a small number of Foundational and Rotational employees. This allows them to field a high-performance, highly adaptable workforce. In contrast, a manufacturing company with a stable market and a quasi-monopoly would probably rely far more on Rotational tours (for routine, lower-value work) and Foundational tours (for tapping legacy knowledge).

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Since Transformational tours represent the greatest departure from most companies’ management practices, this book focuses on defining and implementing this type of tour. Thus, whenever we refer to a tour of duty or tour, you can assume that we’re referring to a Transformational tour. A Broadly Applicable Framework No company could be more the antithesis of a Silicon Valley start-up than fast food giant McDonald’s. The company is big, it’s old, and it makes most of its money by serving the same hamburgers, fries, and shakes it served over half a century ago. Yet despite these differences, McDonald’s actually illustrates the spirit behind tours of duty. Len Jillard, chief people officer for McDonald’s Canada, said, “Whether you’re with us for one year or if you’re here for more, we will help you meet your future.

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When he thought about how he wanted to build his career coming out of college, Hahn took inspiration from Theodore Roosevelt’s famous dictum, “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”5 To Hahn, that meant finding a way to have a positive impact on the world, and to do so at the largest scale possible. He started his career in Washington DC, thinking that he would achieve this aspiration through politics and policy, but realized the pace of change wasn’t fast enough to satisfy him. He decided Silicon Valley’s start-up ecosystem offered a better alternative. He set two initial aspirations: to learn from great leaders who had already built successful companies at scale, and to work for a company with a mission grander than just achieving its financial goals. Hahn executed a plan that would let him make progress toward both of his goals.

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

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. Things moved so quickly and money was so plentiful that most entrepreneurs had no chance, or any need, to turn a profit, or even run to their companies for long. The pace was grueling, and everyone was expected to bring his or her top game each day for months of sixteen-hour days, until it was clear whether a fledgling business would fly or crash.

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What came next—ruthless optimization and relentless growth—were not his strong suits. Netflix badly needed a large cash infusion and some hard decisions made about its direction, and Hastings could handle both tasks better. Although the venture capital community poured a then record $5.4 billion into Silicon Valley start-ups in 1998, and interest in dot-coms was still climbing, investors were becoming wary of companies with no clear path to solvency and profit. Nevertheless, when Hastings started making the rounds of the venture capital community he found checkbooks opening for him based on his success with Pure Atria.

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Hasting liked to be photographed with a fan of DVDs or behind a conveyor belt in the nearby distribution center. He stuck to company-related settings as a safeguard against the embarrassment he had felt after posing on the hood of his Porsche for a photo accompanying a 1995 USA Today article about Silicon Valley start-ups entitled “Boom! You’re a Millionaire.” Hastings proved an adept and interested student of mass media, and held up well most of the time as Netflix’s public persona. Occasionally Hastings’s engineer brain would trump his CEO manners. At a 2010 event at the Churchill Club, hosted by former Walt Disney chairman and chief executive Michael Eisner, Hastings ended his ninety-minute appearance, rose, and walked off the stage before the moderator had finished a rather meandering concluding speech—eliciting an audible gasp from the audience.

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

Quizlet, which was created by a high school student in his bedroom, had millions of users creating and sharing flash cards and learning games—all for free. Textbooks, study rooms, coaching, fund-raising, learning aids, and much more—what I saw was the steady unbundling of the hybrid university into pieces that can be reassembled into the University of Everywhere. It was a virtual hive of Silicon Valley start-ups, each working to specialize in providing a specific kind of service that students have traditionally been forced to buy all at once from colleges, whether they needed or wanted them or not. Each start-up was taking advantage of the enormous economies of scale now available to software businesses by serving huge numbers of students at prices that were radically different from what undergraduates were indenturing themselves to pay.

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Gap Year students spend three months living together in San Francisco, taking seminars and workshops; three months living in a foreign country where they don’t speak the native language; three months in an internship; and three months working on an independent project. The first class of students enrolled in fall 2013 and hundreds of students applied for spots in the subsequent winter and spring. — IN DEV BOOTCAMP and UnCollege Gap Year, I saw two more examples of Silicon Valley start-up companies picking the hybrid university to pieces by serving discrete parts of the higher-education market. In Minerva, I saw a university with the financial, technological, and intellectual resources to exploit the weakness of the hybrid model and the various inefficiencies and absurdities that universities have allowed to fester within their cocoon of wealth and privilege.

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A few months after Udacity was loosed upon the world, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the original investors in Google, announced that he would be joining the board of a new company, backed by KPCB and led by Ng and a colleague from the Stanford computer science department named Daphne Koller. The company was called Coursera. And while Udacity was busy building a bunch of new courses from scratch, Coursera had a different plan. It was going to try and build the digital higher-education platform to rule them all. — LIKE ANY SUBCULTURE, the Silicon Valley start-up world operates within a tightly defined set of aesthetic guidelines. People speak to one another in code—20X!—wear the same clothes, buy the same smartphones and computers, and work in offices that look remarkably alike. So I was a little surprised upon arriving with Michael Staton at Coursera’s offices to see that it was not located inside a converted industrial space and did not involve taking a freight elevator to a reception area/fixie bicycle storage space.

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

Fatima’s story is over the top: her company ignored her input, made sexist assumptions, and launched a product that failed. But this mind-set—where someone assumes they have all the answers about a product, and leaves out anyone with a different perspective—isn’t rare. Scratch the surface at all kinds of companies—from Silicon Valley’s “unicorns” (startups with valuations of more than a billion dollars) to tech firms in cities around the world—and you’ll find a culture that routinely excludes anyone who’s not young, white, and male. One designer working on digital products in the Midwest told me she sat down with her company’s owners to talk about maternity leave and found out they didn’t even know whether they had a maternity policy.

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“Scrappy unknowns with a suitcase and a dream are the exceptions, not the rule.” 3 As Sharon Vosmek, CEO of the venture accelerator Astia, put it, “They call it pattern recognition, but in other industries they call it profiling or stereotyping.” 4 Meanwhile, women hardly get funded at all: only 10 percent of the 187 Silicon Valley startups that received Series A funding in 2016 were woman-led, up a meager 2 percent from the year before.5 Yet much of the tech industry still clings to meritocracy like a tattered baby blanket. Sequoia Capital partner Greg McAdoo insisted, “This business is a meritocracy by and large.” 6 David Sacks, an early executive at PayPal, claimed that “if meritocracy exists anywhere on earth, it is in Silicon Valley.” 7 Until 2014, code-hosting platform GitHub even put a rug emblazoned with “United Meritocracy of GitHub” in the center of its Oval Office–replica waiting room.8 In the fall of 2016, the Atlantic sent out its annual “pulse of the technology industry” survey to influential executives, founders, and thinkers—and found that “men were three times as likely as women to say Silicon Valley is a meritocracy.” 9 It’s not just tech that wants desperately to believe in a meritocracy, of course.

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Hall’s now-deleted article in Forbes, “There Is No Diversity Crisis in Tech,” which he reposted at Medium.com on October 7, 2015: https://medium.com/@brianshall/the-article-on-diversity-in-tech-that-forbes-took-down-15cfd28d5639#.sp3ogqmuw. 2. 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.

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

Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Carreyrou, John, author. Title: Bad blood : secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley startup / John Carreyrou. Description: First Edition. | New York : Knopf, 2018. Identifiers: LCCN 2018000263 | ISBN 9781524731656 (hardback) | ISBN 9781524731663 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Theranos (Firm)—History. | Hematologic equipment industry—United States. | Fraud—United States. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Entrepreneurship. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Finance. | TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Biomedical.

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That made him a friend of the Journal’s famously conservative editorial page, to which he occasionally contributed op-eds. During a visit to the paper’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters to discuss climate change with its editorial board in 2012, Shultz had dropped mention of a secretive and reclusive Silicon Valley startup founder who he felt certain was going to revolutionize medicine with her technology. Intrigued, the Journal’s long-serving editorial page editor, Paul Gigot, had offered to send one of his writers to interview the mysterious wunderkind when she felt ready to break her silence and introduce her invention to the world.

…

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? If Holmes wasn’t forthright with her board about her relationship with Balwani, then what else might she be keeping from it?

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

As the very first guest of this new service, Surve had been included in the presentation. His stay hadn’t even begun yet and here he was, grafted into chapter 1 of what his hosts were clearly hoping would be a very long story. “It was very strange,” Surve says years later. Surve was happy just to have a comfortable place to sleep, but he ended up getting an education in the Silicon Valley startup scene as well. He spent lots of time that week on the couch with Gebbia and Chesky, talking about design and examining Apple’s new device, the very first iPhone. Surve hadn’t even heard of Steve Jobs, let alone the iPhone, and he was totally unfamiliar with the litany of motivational Jobs sayings that Gebbia and Chesky frequently quoted, such as “We’re here to put a dent in the universe.”

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News and World Report13 and the Chicago Sun-Times.14 About two hundred new hosts signed up every week in August, and Airbnb collected a commission of around twelve dollars for each hundred-dollar-per-night booking. But then, after the conventions, things quieted down, the number of new reservations booked each week dwindled below ten, and once again Chesky was waking up early, staring at the ceiling, and marinating in dread over his unfulfilled potential. Silicon Valley’s startup scientists have a name for this phase in a company’s gestation; they call it the Trough of Sorrow, when the novelty of a new business idea wears off and the founders are left trying to jump-start an actual business. Gebbia and Chesky experienced a deep trough that would have swamped most founders.

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Airbnb, she says, responded with a rotating series of explanations of why that was too complex or how it exposed the company to legal liability. (The site was still not adequately warning New York customers a year later, according to a review by Gawker.)16 Krueger, a lifelong New York Democrat with a dry wit and a dim view of Silicon Valley startups seeking to play by their own rules, figured there was a simpler explanation: Airbnb didn’t want to curtail its fast-growing business in the city. And she laughed at the ridiculousness of the neighborhood hotline and the idea that the California company might be able to respond meaningfully when complaints came in during the middle of the night or weekends.

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

After dropping out of college, he or she gathers a small team who are happy to work for equity, sets up shop in a humble garage, plays foosball, raises money from sage venture capitalists, and proceeds to change the world—after which, of course, the founders and early employees live happily ever after, using the wealth they’ve amassed to fund both a new generation of entrepreneurs and a set of eponymous buildings for Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. It’s an exciting and inspiring story. We get the appeal. There’s only one problem. It’s incomplete and deceptive in several important ways. First, while “Silicon Valley” and “start-ups” are used almost synonymously these days, only a tiny fraction of the world’s start-ups actually originate in Silicon Valley, and this fraction has been getting smaller as start-up knowledge spreads around the globe. Thanks to the Internet, entrepreneurs everywhere have access to the same information.

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This is where an emphasis on speed also plays an important role. Because Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs focus on designing business models that can get big fast, they are more likely to incorporate network effects. And because the fierce local competition forces start-ups to grow so aggressively (i.e., blitzscale), Silicon Valley start-ups are more likely to reach the tipping point of network effects before start-ups from less aggressive geographies. One of the motivations for this book is to help entrepreneurs from around the world emulate these successes by teaching them how to systematically design their businesses for blitzscaling.

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At this phase, you should try to make your opponents defend every bit of their territories, because, if you succeed, they will be stretched too thin to ward off the attacks you actually consider important. Just remember to save a few ships to fend off attacks from those pesky pirates! From Captain to Admiral At the time of the writing of this book, the ridesharing company Uber was Silicon Valley’s most valuable start-up (and second globally to its frenemy, China’s Didi Chuxing), despite having spent most of 2017 in the news for a number of serious problems and scandals. Some of these issues were due to clearly unethical behavior, including internal problems, such as the sexual harassment reported by the former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, and various external attempts to subvert free competition, regulation, and the press, such as creating fake accounts to poach drivers from its rival Lyft (as reported by The Verge), developing software (Greyball) to prevent law enforcement and regulators from accessing the service, and then-COO Emil Michael suggesting that the company spend money to hire opposition researchers to intimidate journalists.

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

An explosion of these services pushed Chinese companies to roll up their sleeves and do the grunt work of running an operations-heavy business in the real world. In my view, that willingness to get one’s hands dirty in the real world separates Chinese technology companies from their Silicon Valley peers. American startups like to stick to what they know: building clean digital platforms that facilitate information exchanges. Those platforms can be used by vendors who do the legwork, but the tech companies tend to stay distant and aloof from these logistical details. They aspire to the mythology satirized in the HBO series Silicon Valley, that of a skeleton crew of hackers building a billion-dollar business without ever leaving their San Francisco loft.

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When looking to disrupt a new industry, American internet companies tend to take a “light” approach. They generally believe the internet’s fundamental power is sharing information, closing knowledge gaps, and connecting people digitally. As internet-driven companies, they try to stick to this core strength. Silicon Valley startups will build the information platform but then let brick-and-mortar businesses handle the on-the-ground logistics. They want to win by outsmarting opponents, by coming up with novel and elegant code-based solutions to information problems. In China, companies tend to go “heavy.” They don’t want to just build the platform—they want to recruit each seller, handle the goods, run the delivery team, supply the scooters, repair those scooters, and control the payment.

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These chips are central to everything from facial recognition to self-driving cars, and that has set off a race to build the next-generation AI chip. Google and Microsoft—companies that had long avoided building their own chips—have jumped into the fray, alongside Intel, Qualcomm, and a batch of well-funded Silicon Valley chip startups. Facebook has partnered with Intel to test-drive its first foray into AI-specific chips. But for the first time, much of the action in this space is taking place in China. The Chinese government has for many years—decades, even—tried to build up indigenous chip capabilities. But constructing a high-performance chip is an extremely complex and expertise-intensive process, one that has so far remained impervious to several government-sponsored projects.

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

“But wouldn’t it be incredibly annoying if we can’t be the leader in creating this?” Life inside the Prime building, and in the gradually increasing number of offices around South Lake Union inhabited by the Alexa team, became even busier. Many of the new features would be rushed out the door, so that Amazon could start gathering customer feedback. Silicon Valley startups call this style of product development “minimum viable product,” or MVP. At Amazon, Jeff Wilke had popularized the idea of calling it “minimum lovable product,” or MLP, asking, “What would we be proud to take to the market?” It didn’t seem to matter that many Alexa features, such as the voice calling, were initially half-baked and rarely used.

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When engineers inside corporations and governments wanted to run their computing experiments via AWS, they often quietly routed around their organizations’ stringent procurement processes. Like many other technology revolutions, cloud computing was first the provenance of geeks, and then spread outward. The first companies to embrace AWS became its beta testers and evangelists. Silicon Valley startups like Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, and the photo-sharing site SmugMug ran their operations on AWS and could quickly order up more servers as their businesses grew at unprecedented rates. It was one of the greatest enablers of the post-recession technology boom—arguably more important than even the iPhone, though outsiders understood very little about it.

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Is @WaPo a registered lobbyist? * * * Predictably, Bezos took the most interest in the Post’s products and technology. He forged a partnership with CIO Shailesh Prakash, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, and boasted that the newspaper had better engineers than many Silicon Valley startups. He obsessed over shaving milliseconds from the time it took web pages and complex graphics to load. He also asked for customized metrics that could measure the reader’s true interest in stories, and whether an article was truly “riveting.” When Bezos acquired the paper, Prakash had been developing a content system for the Post, called Arc Publishing, to manage functions like online publishing, blogging, podcasting, and advertising.

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

But before we do that work, since there are so many misconceptions around core values, let me clear up the muck. Your Values Point to New Visions for the World Most entrepreneurs get core values wrong. In Mindvalley’s early days, I certainly did. In 2008 when I assembled my team to do a values exercise, I was imitating Silicon Valley start-ups. We went through a democratic voting process to choose the company values. Every member of my team has an equal vote, and our forty-person team identified some three hundred different attributes of Mindvalley. We clustered them and came up with a ten-point list of our supposed “values.”

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Malaysia was seen as a career dead end. Friends asked: “Why the hell are you back? There are no good jobs here.” At least in Malaysia we had the comfort and support of my immediate family. My mom and dad still lived in Kuala Lumpur. The question was: Could I achieve my dreams of building a Silicon Valley–style start-up catering to the US market in a country on the other side of the planet with a severe shortage of talent? I had four suitcases and the love of my wife and parents. And I was now moving back into my parents’ home at the age of twenty-eight. They also believed in me and gave me the space to be foolishly stubborn.

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Now, here is a big secret: The bigger your vision, the easier it gets. When you live this way, you may find that the vision is not coming from you. Instead the Universe is choosing to go through you to realize what the world needs. IN 2003, AT THE age of twenty-seven, I quit my job as vice president of a promising Silicon Valley start-up so I could dedicate my life to a career that gave me great meaning. I had decided to teach and promote meditation. My very first site made me a decent living teaching meditation classes around the world. But I quickly realized that teaching meditation was nowhere as lucrative as my previous job.

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

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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Marty Hellman, the inventor of public key cryptography, joined the company’s advisory board, and Bill Melton, the founder of VeriFone, provided his backing, as well. Of course a startup with no revenue, much less a working product, needs more than talent. Attracting investments is critical, and selling private equity through a round of venture financing is how most Silicon Valley startups receive cash infusions. At a hyped press conference in July, 1999, a year after Peter and Max first met, representatives from Nokia Ventures and Deutsche Bank used a Palm Pilot to “beam” $3 million in venture funding to Peter in front of a gaggle of media onlookers. It was a public relations hit.

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Andersen rigidly adhered to hierarchy to the point where title meant more than skills or experience. A total lack of ownership and frequent bouts of inactivity frustrated the entrepreneurial members of the young staff, and that frustration manifested itself in the form of constant cynicism. It was little wonder then that many of them over the past year had headed south to work for Silicon Valley startups. The thought had certainly crossed my mind more than once, especially on days such as this when I idly sat by waiting for something to do. This early-November lull proved fateful. Cranky and dejected, I decided to waste some of the long day by catching up on personal correspondence. It was when I opened the inbox of my personal e-mail account that I came across an unusual message.

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, British Empire, creative destruction, data acquisition, data science, Dava Sobel, different worldview, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, Eyjafjallajökull, Flash crash, friendly fire, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Ian Bogost, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, lone genius, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, place-making, polynesian navigation, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, skunkworks, smart grid, systems thinking, the map is not the territory, vertical integration

French, “Historical Overview of Automobile Navigation Technology,” Proceedings of the Thirty-Sixth IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1986), 350–8. 121 Nolan Bushnell: Alexis C. Madrigal, “Chuck E. Cheese’s, Silicon Valley Startup: The Origins of the Best Pizza Chain Ever,” Atlantic, July 17, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/chuck-e-cheeses-silicon-valley-startup-the-origins-of-the-best-pizza-chain-ever/277869/; Ian Bogost, “Persuasion and Gamespace,” in Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level, edited by Friedrich von Boories, Steffen P.

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The plan to make civilian GPS worse was led by Mel Birnbaum, the Air Force software engineer who had worked so hard to make GPS perfect, and dropped the faux bombs in the 1977 test that demonstrated it was. Implementing the idea would require a new generation of satellites, still a few years away. Launched in 1938 to market audio oscillators, Hewlett-Packard was a kind of Platonic ideal of a Silicon Valley startup, right down to its origins in a Palo Alto garage. Within the tech industry, HP became known as much for its innovative products as for its adherence to an oddball (now familiar) corporate culture it dubbed the “HP way”: egalitarian ideals, empowerment of employees, a reverence for individual ingenuity.

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

Graham has consistently argued that few people are well suited for starting a startup but that the only effective way of determining who does excel is by having lots of people try: “As long as you’re at a point in your life when you can bear the risk of failure, the best way to find out if you’re suited to running a startup is to try it.”11 • In Graham’s view, there is only one best place to start a startup: among countries, it is America, and within America, it is Silicon Valley. It is a view that comes naturally to someone who works and lives at the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s startup ecosystem. But this view of the world does not take into account the way that software has outgrown its original boundaries, as a subindustry within the computer industry. It has become a pervasive presence in virtually all industries: Software is eating the world. No economic force of such size can be commandeered by coders in a single place.

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If any member of YC’s summer 2011 batch were to enjoy Reddit-scale success on a similar timeline, it would not be evident until the year 2019. By then, the original founders may have left long before—this was the case with Reddit—and set off on new startup adventures. The attraction of starting afresh is powerful, even to those who are already working on startups. No narrative that centers on Silicon Valley startups can end with a proper ending. Where a conclusion is expected are always new beginnings. Randall Stross April 29, 2013 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To begin, I thank Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston. Their willingness to let me observe unimpeded the workings of Y Combinator is what made this book possible.

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Dan Primack, “Exclusive: SV Angel’s Investment Portfolio,” Fortune, November 22, 2011, http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/11/22/exclusive-sv-angels-investment-portfolio/. For a portrait of Conway during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, see Gary Rivlin, The Godfather of Silicon Valley: Ron Conway and the Fall of the Dot-coms (New York: AtRandom, 2001); for a contemporary portrait, see Miguel Helft, “Ron Conway Is a Silicon Valley Startup’s Best Friend,” Fortune, February 10, 2012, http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/02/10/ron-conway-sv-angel/. 4. Dave McClure interview, “9th Founder Showcase—Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch Interviews Dave McClure of 500 Startups,” http://vimeo.com/35399949; Anthony Ha, “Dave McClure Isn’t Worried About the ‘Series A Crunch,’” TC, January 21, 2012, http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/21/dave-mcclure-series-a-crunch/.

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

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.

…

.; Jay Lathrup, interviewed by telephone on October 24, 2001. page 96 The biggest obstacle fell in 1962 . ..; the account of Frank Wan- lass' innovations is retold in We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age by Bob Johnstone, published by Basic Books in 1999. page 97 ... the Silicon Valley start-up General Micro-electronics ...; information on the products and the business positions of both General Micro-electronics and General Instrument come from the article "The Expanding Market" by Jerome Eimbinder, Electronics, October 4, 1965. page 97 Another big advantage . ..; this discussion regarding the technical advantages of MOS microchips comes from the article "MOS Integrated Circuits Save Space and Money" by Donald E.

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

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.

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Amazon licensed the patent to Apple in 2000 for an undisclosed sum and tried to use it, ineffectively, to gain some leverage over a rising and worrisome rival that first showed up on Amazon’s radar in mid-1998: eBay. Jeff Blackburn, the former Dartmouth football player who later would become Amazon’s chief of business development, saw eBay coming before almost anyone else at Amazon. The Silicon Valley startup, founded in 1995 as a site called AuctionWeb, made $5.7 million in 1997, $47.4 million in 1998, and $224.7 million in 1999. Blackburn realized that it was growing rapidly, and, even more unsettling—and unlike Amazon—it was profitable. The company had the perfect business model: it took a commission on each sale but had none of the costs of storing inventory and mailing packages.

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Almost all figured that Amazon’s best days were behind it. The company reached incredible levels of attrition in 2002 and 2003. “The number of employees at that point other than Jeff who thought he could turn it into an eighty-billion-dollar company—that’s a short list,” says Doug Boake, who departed for the Silicon Valley startup OpenTable. “He just never stopped believing. He never blinked once.” They all had their reasons. David Risher left to teach at the University of Washington’s business school. Joel Spiegel wanted to spend more time with his three teenage kids before they left home. Mark Britto wanted to get back to the Bay Area.

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 Turing Test Cuts Both Ways Whatever the motivation, Turing authored the first trope to support the idea that bits can be alive on their own, independent of human observers. This idea has since appeared in a thousand guises, from artificial intelligence to the hive mind, not to mention many overhyped Silicon Valley start-ups. It seems to me, however, that the Turing test has been poorly interpreted by generations of technologists. It is usually presented to support the idea that machines can attain whatever quality it is that gives people consciousness. After all, if a machine fooled you into believing it was conscious, it would be bigoted for you to still claim it was not.

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The real customer is the advertiser of the future, but this creature has yet to appear in any significant way as this is being written. The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers—we might call them messianic advertisers—who could someday show up. The hope of a thousand Silicon Valley start-ups is that firms like Face-book are capturing extremely valuable information called the “social graph.” Using this information, an advertiser might hypothetically be able to target all the members of a peer group just as they are forming their opinions about brands, habits, and so on. Peer pressure is the great power behind adolescent behavior, goes the reasoning, and adolescent choices become life choices.

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

“Steve was on board when we negotiated with Disney to make a feature film. He was a big help in making it happen. But he still gets frustrated at having to keep funding the rest of Pixar.” “How much has he invested in the company?” I asked. “Close to fifty million,” Ed said. Fifty million! That was a huge number by Silicon Valley start-up standards. No wonder Steve griped when he had to put in more. I enjoyed talking to Ed. He wasn’t pulling any punches with me on our first meeting, even though what he was saying wasn’t making me feel great about this opportunity. Pixar felt like a company that had meandered from here to there but never found its way.

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I thought to myself. So began a collaboration that would take Efi and me all over the world making deals with the titans of the office automation industry, companies like Canon, Xerox, Ricoh, and Kodak. Developing fair arrangements with these enormous companies was no small task for tiny Silicon Valley start-ups. In fact, my entire law practice was built around doing this. The habit of corporate giants like these was to try to tie up the start-ups every which way they could, often blocking their freedom to become independent, thriving companies. The large corporations often had impenetrable walls of bureaucracy that were stifling to the far nimbler start-ups.

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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.

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

That morning, fortified by several cups of coffee, I left my house in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood and hopped on the Google bus to Mountain View. At around 6:00, I walked into the storied Googleplex, the sprawling campus of low-slung glass-and-brick buildings that make up the company’s main headquarters. Google was the quintessential Silicon Valley start-up. Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin had incorporated the company in 1998, after working out of the garage of Susan Wojcicki (now YouTube’s CEO). By the time I joined, nearly two decades later, Google had grown into one of the most iconic companies on the planet. There were more than 60,000 Googlers working around the world, on everything from perfecting search engines to testing self-driving cars.1 Those products and services brought in an astonishing $90 billion in annual revenue.2 Within a year Google would briefly dethrone Apple as the most valuable brand in the world.3 Google had become the kind of company every scrappy start-up sought to unseat.

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This was the rationale behind more than a dozen manufacturing hubs the Obama administration established, in cities from Detroit, Michigan35 to Knoxville, Tennessee.36 Future efforts should continue to focus on building hubs in the industrial Midwest—for instance in my father’s native Ohio—which has been hardest hit by deindustrialization but retains deep manufacturing expertise. A number of notable efforts—including Mark Kvamme and Chris Olsen’s Drive Capital, former AOL CEO Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest fund, and J. D. Vance’s Narya, a venture capital firm, Naryafund—have begun to incubate a Silicon Valley start-up culture in struggling midwestern communities, defying the narrative that says only Silicon Valley can reap the gains of the tech revolution. While the vast majority of tech growth remains concentrated in a handful of big cities,37 tech investment in middle America has tripled to more than $20 billion over the past decade,38 leading to talk of a “Silicon Prairie.”

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sh=7c5a86af9857. 9 Harrison Weber, “Airbnb officially closes its $475 million megaround,” VentureBeat, August 1, 2014, https://venturebeat.com/2014/08/01/airbnb-officially-closes-its-475-million-mega-round/. 10 Josh Ong, “Uber announces UberPool, a carpooling experiment with 40% lower prices than UberX,” The Next Web News, August 6, 2014, https://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/08/06/uber-announces-uberpool-carpooling-experiment-40-lower-prices-uberx/. 11 Ananya Bhattacharya, “Fitbit is now worth $4.1 billion after IPO,” CNN Money, June 25, 2015, https://money.cnn.com/2015/06/17/investing/fitbit-ipo/index.html. 12 Quentin Hardy, “Palantir, a Silicon Valley Start-Up, Raises Another $880 Million,” New York Times Business, Innovation, Technology, Society, December 23, 2015, https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/palantir-a-silicon-valley-start-up-raises-another-880-million/. 13 Katie Benner, “The ‘Unicorn’ Club, Now Admitting New Members,” New York Times, August 23, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/technology/the-unicorn-club-now-admitting-new-members.html. 14 Maeve Duggan, “Mobile Messaging and Social Media 2015,” Pew Research Center, August 19, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/08/19/mobile-messaging-and-social-media-2015/. 15 Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (New York: Random House, 2014). 16 Veronica Toney, “Complete guest list for the state dinner in honor of Chinese President Xi Jinping,” Washington Post, September 25, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2015/09/25/complete-guest-list-for-the-state-dinner-in-honor-of-chinese-president-xi-jinping/. 17 Robinson Meyer, “The Secret Startup That Saved the Worst Website in America,” The Atlantic, July 9, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/. 18 David Dayen, “The Android Administration,” The Intercept, April 22, 2016, https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationship-with-the-obama-white-house-in-two-charts/; Brody Mullins, “Google Makes Most of Close Ties to White House,” Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-makes-most-of-close-ties-to-white-house-1427242076. 19 Andrew Orlowski, “Revealed: The revolving door between Google and the US govt—in pictures,” The Register, April 29, 2016, https://www.theregister.com/2016/04/29/google_transparency_project/; “Our Offices,” Google, https://about.google/intl/en_us/locations/?

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

Outside investment increases a company’s flexibility, and it also conveys further information—about the prowess of the company as well as the trust that an investor has in it. Sometimes, the informational dimension of an outside investment may be more valuable than the capital inflow itself. When a highly respected venture capital (VC) firm such as Sequoia Capital invests in a Silicon Valley start-up, it’s akin to conferring a peerage in nineteenth-century England: the recipient gets immediate name recognition and often gains additional market value as a result. As markets embrace diverse information streams, these two functions of capital—information and value—are no longer necessarily intertwined.

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In general, more money is becoming available for capital investments as investors are trying to identify opportunities that offer higher returns than the rock-bottom interest rates available through conventional and conservative investment mechanisms. Attracting capital, especially for start-ups in the right location, is far easier today than it was in earlier decades. One CEO of a Silicon Valley start-up commented that the company, absent an urgent need, raised money simply because it could. At the same time, fewer investment options exist on conventional stock markets. In the United States, the number of listed companies is down from more than 9,000 in the late 1990s to fewer than 6,000 in 2016.

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

And we failed because I was arrogant. We spent lots of time meeting potential investors and working up intricate website schematics, and no time learning about teachers’ problems. We weren’t yet focused on what counted. Down to a few hundred dollars, our company cheated death by getting into Imagine K12, the Silicon Valley start-up accelerator for the education market. Our mission statement went something like: “Remind101: A safe way for teachers to message students and parents. We’re building the most powerful communication platform in education and using SMS as the ‘hook.’ Think Twitter, for education.” There were millions of children with learning issues like mine, and countless teachers struggling to help them.

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OKRs furnished the pathway for Coursera’s mission. They enabled teams to articulate their goals and to align with the company’s objectives—and with its broader values, as well. Years later, the company’s friendly, inclusive culture remains a welcome contrast to the blustery, combative personality of many Silicon Valley start-ups. Coursera team with former president and COO Lila Ibrahim (left), cofounder Daphne Kohler (to the left of John Doerr), and cofounder Andrew Ng (far right), 2012. As Rick Levin, Coursera’s former CEO, said, “I can’t imagine where we would be without OKRs. The discipline forces us to look back every quarter and hold ourselves accountable, and to look ahead every quarter to imagine how we can better live our values

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

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.

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I studied the very origins of modern typography in the ruins of the ancient Roman Empire. I’ve even discussed the hidden meaning of something as simple as a brick or a piece of wood, while working at an architecture firm. Finally, I’ve implemented the fruits of all this practice and analysis in the fast-paced environment of Silicon Valley startups. Design and visual communication is so deeply embedded in my brain that I’m hardly aware of its presence. My handwriting still sucks, though. Design as Literacy One evening, I was “moworking” in a cafe with my friend Ziad, coding some design tweaks to the WordPress template for my blog.

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker

23andMe, AI winter, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, behavioural economics, business process, call centre, clean water, commoditize, computer age, Demis Hassabis, Frank Gehry, information retrieval, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, job automation, machine translation, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, thinkpad, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

New machines, after all, are in the business of replacing people—not something that often generates a warm welcome. The third issue involved competition. Assuming that natural-language, data-snarfing, hypothesis-spouting machines made it into offices and laboratories, who was to say that they’d be the kin of a Jeopardy contraption? Other companies, from Google to Silicon Valley startups, were sure to be competing in the same market. The potential for these digital oracles was nearly limitless. But in each industry they faced obstacles, some of them considerable. Medicine was one of the most promising areas but also among the toughest to crack. The natural job for Watson would be as a diagnostic aid, taking down the symptoms in cases like Ferrucci’s and producing lists of possible conditions, along with recommended treatments.

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Such analyses could save lives, Jasinski said. ”We kill a hundred thousand people a year from preventable medical errors.” In fact, the potential for next-generation computers in medicine stretches much further. Within a decade, it should cost less than $100 to have an individual’s entire genome sequenced. Some people will volunteer to have this done. (Already, companies like 23andMe, a Silicon Valley startup, charge people $429 for a basic decoding.) Others, perhaps, will find themselves pressed, or even compelled, by governments or insurers, to submit their saliva samples. In either case, computers will be studying, correlating, and answering questions about growing collections of this biological information.

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

Both men had experience working on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) during the Ronald Reagan years. Dubbed “Star Wars,” SDI proposed to fill space with a variety of futuristic weapons designed to take down enemy missiles before they could reach the United States. Like Worden, Griffin had a fondness for doing weird stuff in space and an appreciation of the Silicon Valley start-up ethos. Griffin began to think that perhaps Worden could shake up Ames and bring some New Space, tech-friendly vibes to the place, so he tapped him as Ames director in May 2006. “Mike said, ‘I want you to come and work for me, but you can’t keep making those statements about NASA out loud,’” Worden said.

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Schingler had a gift for dealing with the more practical business matters, such as setting and executing a strategy and hiring, and would focus on nurturing relationships between Planet and its customers. A handful of people from Ames also agreed to risk the stability of their NASA jobs and go on the start-up adventure, including Vincent Beukelaers, Matthew Ferraro, Ben Howard, James Mason, and Mike Safyan. Like any good Silicon Valley start-up, Planet Labs sprang to life in a garage. The team would discuss their concepts in the comfort of the Rainbow Mansion and then head to their garage to try and turn their ideas into working hardware. The basic concept was to build the smallest, cheapest satellite capable of taking decent pictures of Earth.

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New Zealand, he said, was a country with no predators; as a result, some of the birds did not even fly because historically they had had nothing to flee. And although the Māori had a word for space, they didn’t have one for a rocket. Beck had now changed the country’s relationship with the skies and the heavens. Aotearoa had put something into space for the first time. Chapter Thirteen The Military Is Not So Bad In Silicon Valley, technology start-ups often try to raise more money after they’ve hit certain milestones. You scrape by for a while on your initial funding, build a product that proves that you know what you’re doing, then encourage rich people to marvel at that product, dream about what could come next, and cut you a fresh batch of much larger checks.

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

It also acquired Perot’s contracts, including one in Japan with the NSA, where Perot employee Ed Snowden was connecting the agency’s information systems with the ones at the CIA. x In 2015, Business Insider published a Mother’s Day list of Silicon Valley start-ups organized by which childish complaints (e.g., “Mom, what’s for dinner?” and “Mom, I don’t want to clean my room!”) they served to answer. As I write seven years later, such firms absorb a shockingly large portion of American investment. Biz Carson, “Silicon Valley Start-ups Are Obsessed with Developing Tech to Replace Their Moms,” Business Insider, May 10, 2015. xi Though Google’s buses were the most prominent, to the point of synecdoche, other South Bay firms followed their example.

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When the irascible comp sci boss, Les Earnest, found out his employees were sneakily redirecting Stanford resources into their private start-up, going so far as to sell boards that were made on campus, he forced their resignations. For a while, the conventional wisdom about the creation of cisco Systems—all lowercase to start, as in the last part of San Francisco—was that Lerner and Bosack were inventor-entrepreneurs, icons of a new wave of Silicon Valley start-ups and founders of the fastest-growing company in American history. The couple in charge was portrayed as naive even, getting pushed out of their own company by conniving venture capitalists, a cautionary tale for the inventors who followed. But after Bosack’s and Lougheed’s former boss on the router project, Tom Rindfleisch, published his revisionist account in 1999, Yeager and the broader Stanford network got more credit.2 The cisco team, on the other hand, gets credit for pursuing an ask-forgiveness-later strategy to wild success.

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“You are empowering people, whether they live in the barrios or a mansion, and allowing them to take control of their health care,” the future president told the media, symbolically lending Holmes and her fraud the White House seal.7 But as Carreyrou documented in his reporting for the Wall Street Journal and in his book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Theranos moved fast and broke things (and people) to no useful end. When it rushed its blood tests into drugstores, they yielded false results. And when rumors threatened to topple the pyramid scheme, Theranos brought on feared litigator David Boies in exchange for stock. With Boies personally signing documents, whistleblower lawyers were hesitant to go after the company.

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff by Clara Shih

Benchmark Capital, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, glass ceiling, jimmy wales, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, pets.com, pre–internet, rolodex, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social web, software as a service, tacit knowledge, Tony Hsieh, web application

Part II: Transforming the Way We Do Business • Chapter 4,“Social Sales,” speaks to the power of the online social graph for a sales cycle, from prospecting and the first call through to customer references, navigating customer organizations, and enabling sales teams to more easily collaborate. It features a case study on how Silicon Valley start-up Aster Data Systems has used employees’ collective MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn networks to source leads and build personal relationships with customers. • Chapter 5,“Social Network Marketing,” talks about the breakthrough new marketing techniques made possible by online social networks, including hypertargeting, enhanced ability to capture passive interest and conduct rapid testing and iteration on campaigns, social community engagement, and automated word-of-mouth marketing.

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Figure 7.5 A request for referral sent to me from a LinkedIn connection. LinkedIn allows recruiters to tap extended networks not only for interested applicants but also for referrals of interested applicants, which has a multiplying effect on how many people within the trusted network they are able to reach. Silicon Valley start-up company Appirio has taken this concept to Facebook with Jobs4MyFriends, an application it developed that allows businesses to easily tap employees’ Facebook networks to source job candidates. Given the high costs of recruiting and From the Library of Kerri Ross 132 Pa r t I I Edited by Foxit Reader Copyright(C) by Foxit Software Company,2005-2008 Tra n s fo r m i n g t h e Way We D o B u s i n e s s For Evaluation Only.

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

And Kapor Capital is a seed-stage investor in both for-profit and nonprofit tech start-ups; between 2015 and 2017, it has already invested $40 million in education that focuses on improving access for minorities. Forty-four of these seventy-nine investments (59 percent) have a founder who is a woman or a person of color; 42 percent of their first-time investments have a female founder; and 28 percent have a founder who is a member of a racial minority. In contrast with all too many Silicon Valley start-ups that have no clear benefit to the broader community, all of Kapor Capital’s investments have a social purpose. There’s Pigeonly, for example, founded by the formerly incarcerated Frederick Hutson, which helps inmates make calls from prison. There’s Phat Startup, a company focused on helping young inner-city people who identify with urban culture succeed in developing technology careers.

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Indeed, a July 2017 report about the gig economy by the British MP Frank Field alleges that some self-employed UK drivers are earning only £2.50 an hour working for sharing economy companies like Parcelforce and webuyanycar.com.30 “In reality, there is no utopia at companies like Uber, Lyft, Instacart and Handy, whose workers are often manipulated into working long hours for low wages while continually chasing the next ride or task,” that 2017 New York Times editorial argues.31 Or, as the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino bluntly put it, commenting on the cult of work celebrated by on-demand companies such as the freelance marketplace Fiverr, “The gig economy celebrates working yourself to death.”32 My own experience as a heavy Uber user chimes with these conclusions. On my travels around the world to research this book, I’ve discussed the value of Uber with many of my drivers. Very few had anything good to say about the Silicon Valley start-up, and most admitted that they were looking for alternative ways to make extra money. There was, for example, the Singaporean retiree, a former marketing executive at Singapore Airlines, who had been pushed into driving an Uber vehicle because his son wanted him out of the house. He worked sixty hours a week and made 500 Singapore dollars (around $350)—“less than a cleaner,” he told me disgustedly about his less-than-six-dollars-an-hour rate.

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

Eventually, they’ll have those expectations of every company, no matter what the industry. What that means is that every organization that hopes not just to survive but to succeed needs to understand how to innovate by building software, and how to hire and manage the people who build it. I’ve spent the last decade helping all kinds of companies, from Silicon Valley startups to Fortune 50 industrial behemoths, increase their chances of building game-changing innovations by adopting the principles outlined in my book The Lean Startup. As a result, I’ve often found myself trying to explain the semiconductor revolution to leaders who don’t understand software. Many still believe that this tsunami of disruption will somehow bypass their business.

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In twenty minutes, an entrepreneur can form a Delaware C-Corp, open a bank account, get set up to receive credit card payments online, and even get startup credits for popular startup services like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. 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.

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

Individual companies had begun to attract outside interest—Intel would have a successful IPO in 1971, for example—but three years would pass before any major national publication wrote about the Peninsula as a distinct, technology-based regional economy.2 Years would pass before the name “Silicon Valley” gained widespread use.III In the early 1970s, Silicon Valley startup companies were largely deemed irrelevant to the real business of the United States, which was concentrated in East Coast financial centers and cities such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Chicago that had manufacturing at their core. The nation’s new minicomputer companies, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) most prominent among them, were clustered near MIT and Harvard, along Boston’s Route 128.

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Bristow concurs: “The thinking moved from ‘We don’t know what we can do, so let’s give it a try’ to ‘You need to prove why you need to do this new product.’ ” Decades later, Alcorn still cannot understand why, at a time when Atari’s revenues were so high that it would have made no discernible difference to the bottom line if the Cosmos hologram system failed, Kassar was unwilling to risk its release. Kassar and the rest of the Warner executive team, in Alcorn’s estimation, were paralyzed by “the fear of failure”: “They weren’t Silicon Valley, they weren’t start-up guys, they were not risk takers—so nothing came out!”55 Even more important than Kassar’s East Coast roots, however, was his lack of technical background. He was a marketing expert who believed, correctly, that much of the success of the VCS had come from the marketing push behind it.

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An experienced salesman, he had met Kurtzig when he had come to California to see if she wanted to sell ASK to the giant computer-leasing conglomerate Itel Corporation, his then employer. After spending the day with Lavey, Kurtzig declared, “I don’t want to be bought by Itel, but I want to buy you. How much do you cost?” Kurtzig was on the cusp of recognizing that ASK, a small business started at her kitchen table, might be a high-tech Silicon Valley startup. Certainly Paul Ely, a computing executive at Hewlett-Packard, saw ASK that way. When Kurtzig asked him to suggest potential board members—she, her father, and Arie were the ASK board at that point—he recommended men enmeshed in Silicon Valley’s financial and entrepreneurial networks.VI One of those men was Burt McMurtry, now sitting across the restaurant table from Kurtzig.

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

At the time, it appeared that, in the automotive world, only Kumar and Sinkula were aware of Argonne’s NMC formulation. They alone seemed to conclude that, if you were thinking of profit-making applications, NMC 2.0 was the most promising battery material available. Kumar had identified its properties at the Silicon Valley start-up company where he and Sinkula previously worked. The start-up, NanoeXa, sought to develop batteries for power tools, and Kumar, its chief engineer, had stumbled on the NMC after a months-long hunt for an edge over incumbent companies. He had examined hundreds of patents and academic papers on lithium-ion.

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Both he and Kumar said they favored cashing out—whenever it was in their interest. But to turn one of the interested car giants into an actual buyer, they needed to advance their technology a bit more. They could also take a greater risk and go to the equity market. They could offer shares in an initial public offering—an IPO, the traditional aim of Silicon Valley start-ups seeking to monetize their years of toil. They had a firm idea of what an IPO should raise. A billion dollars, Kumar said. That was Kumar’s and Kapadia’s personal goal—a $1 billion payout. Late one night, Chamberlain called Kumar’s founding partner, Sinkula. “Look, I am about to put my reputation on the line by pulling the string on this,” he said, meaning to stir up American interest in Envia.

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

It has become a leader in online entertainment of all kinds, rivaling Netflix as the next-generation movie and television studio. And with the Amazon Echo, it has become a force in bringing intelligent agents and AI into the consumer realm. But arguably the most important thing that Amazon did was to turn its e-commerce application into a cloud computing platform on which the bulk of Silicon Valley startups operate; as the cloud model has matured, large, established enterprises have migrated to it as well. The lessons of this business transformation alone could fill a book (and will be the subject of a later chapter in this one). Apple led the generational shift from the personal computer to the smartphone, and from the web to mobile apps.

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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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Meanwhile, the advantages accruing to firms from new technology are deeply wrapped up in their ability to train their workforce and change their workflows to accommodate it. This retraining was central, for example, to former IBM CIO Jeff Smith’s attempt to transform IBM’s internal software development culture to one that mirrors the agile, user-centered, data-driven, and cross-functional approach that characterizes today’s Silicon Valley startups. Except that instead of doing it at a startup, he was doing it for a software development team of 20,000 people, in support of a company with more than 400,000 employees. Laura Baldwin, president and COO at O’Reilly Media, tells our customers, “You have to go to war with the army you have.”

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

And Facebook had thought it wise to acquire even newer potential rivals, for prices like $1 billion for Instagram, when it had thirteen employees, and $19 billion for WhatsApp, when it had fifty-five employees, when both were years away from being profitable or even from producing significant revenues. 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.

…

NETWORK MAN you might well wind up in Silicon Valley: General background and history about Silicon Valley comes from author’s interviews with Arthur Rock, Hal Varian, Laszlo Bock, AnnaLee Saxenian, Bob Metcalfe, Ben Rosen, Reid Hoffman, Thomas Perkins, John Doerr, John Lilly, David Sze, David Hahn, Michael Mandel, Joe Kraus, Josh Kopelman, Nancy Lublin, Joi Ito, Peter Thiel, Simon Rothman, George Arison, David Sanford, Mark Pincus, Jeff Weiner, Premal Shah, James Manyika, Evan Williams, Allen Blue, Ann Miurako, John Etchemendy, Mike Maples, Roy Bahat, Terry Winograd, Ian McCarthy, Jen Pahlka, Tim O’Reilly, Linda Rottenberg, Ben Casnocha, and Dan Portillo. Arthur Rock, by now retired: Author’s interviews with Arthur Rock. One study of Silicon Valley start-ups: Susan E. Woodward and Robert E. Hall, “Benchmarking the Returns to Venture,” NBER Working Paper Number w10202 (January 2004). Reid Hoffman’s association with Silicon Valley: Reid Hoffman’s story comes from author’s interviews with Hoffman. “At PayPal, we broke the rules”: Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling, Currency, 2018, 180.

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commissions, fixed Committee to Restore Dealer Rights Commodity Futures Modernization Act; process behind Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) communism; failure of; rejection of community organizing; see also interest groups Community Reinvestment Act Comptroller of the Currency computers; in investment banking; see also Silicon Valley Concept of the Corporation (Drucker) conformity conglomerates; see also leveraged buyouts; mergers and acquisitions Congregationalist church Congress: auto dealers and; bailout authorized by; banking regulated by; campaign contributions to; confirmation hearings by; corporate oversight by; deregulation by; housing regulated by; lobbying of consumers; corporations held accountable by; deregulation for; manipulation of Coordination, Control, and the Management of Organizations (class) Corporation in Modern Society, The (Mason) corporations; advertising used by; as autocratic; big government as counter to; as black box; boards of; conservative critiques of; converted to pure market entities; debt of; executives of, see executives; finance vs.; founders of; jobs lost at; liberal acceptance of; liberal critiques of; lifetime employees of; regulation of; research labs of; shareholders of, see shareholders; in Silicon Valley; as social institutions; start-ups vs.; trustbusting as counter to; as unforeseen by founders of U.S.; in web of related institutions; see also General Motors; institutions; Organization Man corruption Council of Economic Advisers countervailing power Countrywide Cowles, Alfred Cowles Commission for Research in Economics crime; white collar Croly, Herbert Cruz, Zoe Cuba Daley, Bill D’Andrea, Amy D’Andrea, Nick Darvish, Tamara Davis Polk Debreu, Gerard Debs, Eugene debt: in auto industry; corporate; derivatives and; foreign; hedge funds and; interest rates and; of investment banks; junk bonds and; in leveraged buyouts; risk magnified by; see also mortgages democracy; threats to Democratic Party: in Chicago; databases of; deregulation by; Silicon Valley and; Wall Street donors to Department of Labor deposits, insurance of deregulation; by Democrats; globalization and; interest rates and; of mortgages; in 1970s; skeptics of derivatives; fight to keep unregulated; regulated by EU; risks of; skepticism about; volume of; see also specific financial instruments D.

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 some cases, the TTO is tightly integrated into the fabric of the university; in others it is a separate organization with a clear mission to generate as much revenue as possible through the capture and licensing of IP. I encourage all universities to look west toward the leadership of Stanford as an example, and the corresponding impact on the Silicon Valley startup community. I’m often asked how universities can better engage with the startup community. As a feeder, the university can be a great convener of entrepreneurial activities. Universities have great spaces to work, large conference and auditorium facilities, and lots of students and faculty interested in entrepreneurship.

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It is cargo-cult startup-community creation, not unlike the post–World War II stories of island cultures in the Pacific that created fake runways in hopes those air force aviators would return with money and trade. This blind mimicry of Silicon Valley confuses the resources of that particular community with the causes of startup community creation, growth, and renewal. Much of what makes Silicon Valley or any startup community work has to do with things that happen below the surface. It has to do with the permeability of organizational boundaries, dictating whether people can move freely and bring their talents with them. It is driven by the continuous collision of young entrepreneurs in a dense urban environment who are coming, going, or simply milling about.

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

The look of the space—wide open, chaotic, customizable—is familiar to me from my visits to high-tech firms across North America. Everything from the cords dangling from the exposed ceiling to the translucent conference areas oozes innovation. Only, this isn’t the already too-cramped offices of a Silicon Valley start-up. This is the temporary home of Cornell Tech, university of the future. Cornell Tech is, in many ways, the brainchild of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg held a competition for proposals for a new educational facility on Manhattan’s Roosevelt Island. The contest was part of an initiative called Applied Sciences NYC launched by Mayor Bloomberg in 2011.

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The global financial data firm Bloomberg “logs every keystroke of every employee, along with their comings and goings in the office.”32 Over in Vegas, Harrah’s casino “tracks the smiles of the card dealers and waitstaff on the floor (its analytics team has quantified the impact of smiling on customer satisfaction).”33 More and more companies are not just storing but also analyzing e-mail, looking for “insights about our productivity, our treatment of co-workers, our willingness to collaborate or lend a hand, our patterns of written language, and what those patterns reveal about our intelligence, social skills, and behavior.”34 The trend with much of this “indoor logistics” is to generate data to predict the future. For instance, there’s Knack, a clever Silicon Valley start-up that makes games for mobile devices. The games include Dungeon Scrawl, in which players have to move through quest-themed mazes and puzzles, and Wasabi Waiter, which, as you might imagine, is a game in which players have to match up sushi to an ever-growing number of customers. But here’s the rub.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

.* The sluggishness, however, results almost entirely from the staggering complexity of the computation required to perform this seemingly simple task. If there is one thing the history of information technology teaches, it is that this robot is going to very soon get a major speed upgrade. Indeed, engineers at Industrial Perception, Inc., the Silicon Valley start-up company that designed and built the robot, believe the machine will ultimately be able to move a box every second. That compares with a human worker’s maximum rate of a box roughly every six seconds.1 Needless to say, the robot can work continuously; it will never get tired or suffer a back injury—and it will certainly never file a worker’s compensation claim.

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At the Rethink Robotics booth, Baxter had received Halloween training and was grasping small boxes of candy and then dropping them into pumpkin-shaped trick-or-treat buckets. There were also companies marketing components like motors, sensors, vision systems, electronic controllers, and the specialized software used to construct robots. Silicon Valley start-up Grabit Inc. demonstrated an innovative electroadhesion-powered gripper that allows robots to pick up, carry, and place nearly anything simply by employing a controlled electrostatic charge. To round things out, a global law firm with a specialized robotics practice was on hand to help employers navigate the complexities of labor, employment, and safety regulations when robots are brought in to replace, or work in close proximity to, people.

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

“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. “But getting companies to think differently about what they do and radically undercut their current way of business in some area and do something radically different to make much more money, that isn’t really in the culture of a lot of companies,” he adds.

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The answer is probably no. And I’ll give you the simplest reason, which is what every regulator has told me: they are uncomfortable with a bank that grows more than 20 percent year over year. The number one historical indicator of a bank that is about to go belly-up is one that has a lot of growth. But a good Silicon Valley start-up grows 20 percent month over month.” Regardless, Zac made an effort. The room for improvement was too enticing for him to give up. Faced with regulatory hurdles to make a go of it as a bank in the United States, Zac’s company applied to become an independent bank in the United Kingdom, describing itself as a “technology-first wholesale bank.”

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

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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At the end of May 2000, about a month after Metallica delivered its boxes, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners invested $13 million in return for 20 percent of Napster and installed one of its partners, Hank Barry, as interim chief executive, a position he ended up keeping for a year and a half. An intellectual property lawyer who had done work for A&M Records as well as numerous Silicon Valley start-ups, Barry understood both businesses and had an easy time talking with label executives, many of whom shared his professional background. Within a week of starting at Napster, he met with the Universal Music digital executives Albhy Galuten and Lawrence Kenswil at the Palo Alto office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the law firm where he worked before going to Hummer.

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

“There is not really a market for consumer privacy software,” Marlinspike told me. He and other privacy-oriented cell phone developers—such as the Guardian Project—are funded largely through grants. Marlinspike said he has been trying to attract talented programmers who might otherwise go to work at Silicon Valley start-ups. He used his latest grant to fly a team of developers to Hawaii for a week of programming at the beach. But Marlinspike is working on a small scale. His apps—RedPhone and TextSecure—work only on Android and most of my friends are on iPhone, so I can’t encrypt our communications with his apps.

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On a section of its website called “How we’re different,” PeopleSmart listed its “free and easy opt-out” as the top difference between itself and other people-search websites where it claimed, “Some don’t fully remove personal information, even when requested.” A bit of Web sleuthing led me to the surprising conclusion that this company was actually a hot Silicon Valley start-up called Inflection. Its website describes the company as a “Big Data start-up” and advertises employee perks like sailing trips, meditation, yoga, and hiking retreats. I fired off an angry e-mail demanding an explanation. To his credit, the company’s CEO, Matthew Monahan, replied almost immediately, promising to look into it.

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

“At some point, the alcohol culture led to grabby hands at parties, that sort of thing,” Rubenstein recalls. “If someone says no and it keeps happening, that’s a problem.” A woman who worked at the company told me that Slide felt like a frat house, with an undercurrent of sexism and rumored hookups. Given that many Silicon Valley start-ups are founded and staffed by young men straight out of college, drinking at the office is common. There’s beer on tap at most big tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and you’ll often find beer in the refrigerator at small start-ups, to juice those late nights of coding with your buddies.

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As Holmes recounted this story, there were a few gasps from the women in the living room and then silence. This wasn’t some sick joke, Holmes went on; this man was angry. Fear overtook her. “I immediately burst into tears,” Holmes remembered. A bystander intervened, and the man’s grip was broken. Holmes never told anyone else at the company about it. As is common among Silicon Valley start-ups, Holmes said Cooliris did not have a human resources department. Instead, she buried that moment and went back to work the next day. It was the most dramatic, but far from the only offensive, incident to occur during her internship. Sexist behavior often comes from the top, and in Holmes’s telling that was the case at Cooliris, where the young CEO, Soujanya Bhumkar, gave the entire staff copies of the Kama Sutra, an illustrated guide to sexual positions.

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

For every 1 million people, there are only eleven ophthalmologists, and in rural areas, the ratio is even smaller. Most people never receive the screening they need. But in 2015, a Google engineer named Varun Gulshan hoped to change that. Born in India and educated at Oxford before joining a Silicon Valley start-up that was acquired by Google, he officially worked on a virtual-reality gadget called Google Cardboard. But in his “20 percent time,” he started exploring diabetic retinopathy. His idea was to build a deep learning system that could automatically screen people for the condition, without help from a doctor, and so identify far more people that needed care than doctors ever could on their own.

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AT MICROSOFT CHRIS BROCKETT, the former professor of linguistics who became a Microsoft AI researcher. LI DENG, the researcher who brought Geoff Hinton’s ideas to Microsoft. PETER LEE, head of research. SATYA NADELLA, CEO. AT OPENAI SAM ALTMAN, the president of Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y Combinator who became OpenAI’s CEO. GREG BROCKMAN, the former chief technology officer of fintech start-up Stripe who helped build OpenAI. ELON MUSK, the CEO of electric car maker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX who helped create OpenAI. ILYA SUTSKEVER, the Geoff Hinton protégé who left Google Brain to join OpenAI, the San Francisco AI lab created in response to DeepMind.

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

The past month has been a torrent of emotions, a series of lows, each lower than the last as I retreated into a shell, neglected my health and came to terms with our only chance at a strategic acquihire [i.e., an acquirer that only wants to hire the venture’s team] ending with a shitty Skype chat where we were told we just weren’t good enough to work with the successful Silicon Valley startup in our space.” But despite all the factors that encourage an early-stage founder to delay a shutdown, there are also countervailing forces at work. In particular, investors may push for an early shutdown if they’ve concluded that a turnaround is unlikely. They’d rather dissolve the venture before it has consumed all of its capital, so they can get some of their money back.

…

Ozbek, “The Right People in the Wrong Places: The Paradox of Entrepreneurial Entry and Successful Opportunity Realization,” Academy of Management Review 41, no. 1 (2016): 109–129, argues that overconfident and narcissistic individuals are more likely to be drawn to bold, novel opportunities because they will overestimate success odds (due to overconfidence) and will crave the attention that comes with doing something big and new (due to narcissism). Navis and Ozbek also argue that overconfidence and narcissism inhibit learning in ways that reduce success odds with novel ventures. Elizabeth Holmes is an example: John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (New York: Knopf, 2018), p. 43. To confront this problem: Blumberg, Startup CEO, Ch. 37. For additional guidance on best practices for managing a board, see the references for the section “Board Priorities” in Ch. 6. Federal Express did: Frock, Changing How the World Does Business.

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

Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. INCENTIVES Depending on whom you ask, it was either the apex, the inflection point, or the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley’s startup scene—what cynics called a bubble, optimists called the future, and my future coworkers, high on the fumes of world-historical potential, breathlessly called the ecosystem. A social network everyone said they hated but no one could stop logging in to went public at a valuation of one-hundred-odd billion dollars, its grinning founder ringing the opening bell over video chat, a death knell for affordable rent in San Francisco.

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Thank you to Dan Wiener and Ellen Freudenheim, for their enthusiasm and guidance. I am grateful to Ian Sherman for his love, for his steady support of my writing, and for always asking the right questions. A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Anna Wiener is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, where she writes about Silicon Valley, startup culture, and technology. She lives in San Francisco. Uncanny Valley is her first book. You can sign up for email updates here. Thank you for buying this Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook. To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters.

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

Six long years later he sold that company to Akamai, the dominant software competitor in its field, for just enough money for Kalanick to join the club of San Francisco entrepreneurs who had achieved an “exit,” a financing event that put some cash in his pocket. During our first chat Kalanick also told me how Uber got started. It was an after-the-fact creation myth, which nearly every successful Silicon Valley start-up has, about how he and a friend named Garrett Camp had an epiphany when they couldn’t catch a cab during a blizzard in Paris in late 2008. If only there were a way to turn one’s phone into a taxi dispatcher. “The germ of the idea was Garrett’s,” Kalanick said. “Mine was the business architecture.”

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It was not the last time Kalanick would hang back from a fledgling start-up while he considered his options; he would do it again a decade later as Uber took flight. Scour was a perfect example of what would later be described as an ideal product-market fit, an almost totemic term among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Some start-ups make a nifty product that nobody wants. Others go after a massive market but have nothing to offer. Scour was a simple-to-use Web site that identified and listed music files available on a network, which greatly appealed to a market of college students who wanted to discover new music but could afford to buy only so many CDs.

Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World by Michael Edwards

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Bernie Madoff, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, different worldview, high net worth, invisible hand, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Shuttleworth, market bubble, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, subprime mortgage crisis, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

The essence of this movement is blended value, a process first described by Jed Emerson that creates hybrid institutions by combining elements from two different worlds — the social (meaning beyond the market or the individual), and the enterprise (meaning from business and the market).4 Venture philanthropists use business thinking to advance the social mission of foundations and other forms of giving. The hallmarks of venture philanthropy are “an entrepreneurial resultsoriented framework, leverage, personal engagement, and impatience.”5 As befits an approach that emerged from the world of venture capital and Silicon Valley start-ups, “engagement” means direct intervention in, and a high measure of control over, the activities of the organizations that each foundation supports; effectiveness is measured using business metrics to monitor performance; strategy is dominated by aggressive revenue-generation efforts to promote financial sustainability and rapid “scaling up”; and “leverage” comes from pulling in resources from government and others and investing in a wider range of vehicles to achieve social goals — such as pre-purchasing new vaccines in order to lower prices while maintaining the profit margins that are required to cover the costs of R&D.

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, call centre, citizen journalism, cloud computing, computer age, connected car, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, information security, John Markoff, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lock screen, Lyft, national security letter, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech worker, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, you are the product, Zimmermann PGP

In Orlando, Florida, non-evidentiary body-camera videos are kept for 90 days, while in Oakland, California, those same videos are kept for two years. Just like with other consumer technology, which is getting faster, cheaper, and smaller all the time, law enforcement surveillance technology is as well. Even now, a Silicon Valley startup, Visual Labs, is selling body-camera software that runs on existing Android phones—eliminating the need for another dedicated piece of hardware on an officer’s body. The small, central California town of Dos Palos (population 5,000) in Merced County is one of a handful of law enforcement agencies testing out this system, and is paying considerably less than it would with one of Visual Labs’ larger competitors, like VIEVU or Axon (the company formerly known as Taser)

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Available at: http://www.cnn.com/​2017/​06/​20/​us/​michael-brown-settlement-ferguson/​index.html. But like LPRs: Elizabeth Atkins, “#Blacklivesrecorded,” Unpublished Thesis, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, 2016. Available at: https://www.documentcloud.org/​documents/​3894162-SSRN-id2803588.html#document/​p12/​a362822. Even now, a Silicon Valley startup: Cyrus Farivar, “Meet Visual Labs, A Body Camera Startup That Doesn’t Sell Body Cameras,” Ars Technica, September 3, 2016. Available at: https://arstechnica.com/​tech-policy/​2016/​09/​meet-visual-labs-a-body-camera-startup-that-doesnt-sell-body-cameras/​. However, facial recognition doesn’t: Cyrus Farivar, “Boston Police Chief: Facial Recognition Tech Didn’t Help Find Bombing Suspects,” Ars Technica, April 21, 2013.

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

., Goldman Sachs’s CEO who had seemed so ready to commit to founding with Benchmark an entirely new online banking service for high-net-worth individuals, balked in the end. “What if there were to be another Meg Whitman?” he asked Dunlevie. What would happen, that is, if the head of this new Goldman Sachs entity, which would be structured like a Silicon Valley start-up, and its CEO, given an equity stake similar to that given to other Valley CEOs, was very successful, went public, and its CEO—like eBay’s Whitman—became extraordinarily wealthy? Wouldn’t the other Goldman Sachs partners become envious and demoralized? Dunlevie did not try to argue that that would not be the case.

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An avid skier and climber, he got along well with the Benchmark partners when he came down from Seattle to visit, and he declared that Nordstrom had chosen Benchmark not only for its e-commerce expertise but also for help in developing a corporate culture at Nordstrom “just as dynamic and hard-driven as a Silicon Valley start-up.” At the onset, Toys had said all the right things, too, but in Nordstrom’s case the details agreed upon between the two partners had remained intact, free of CFO and attorney meddling on the part of the larger partner. The new subsidiary would have its own management team and its own board of directors, and the sourcing arrangements with the parent were clean, without any surprise gotchas.

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

At what cost did venture capitalists provide capital to speculative new companies? Given the choice, would a meerkat stay a meerkat, or would it transform into a lion? THE IDEA THAT A NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD COLLEGE STUDENT COULD found a billion-dollar company may not sound strange to readers today. We are used to seeing Silicon Valley start-ups turn into billion-dollar unicorns. The start-up ethos favors the young and the geeky. To many of us, it seems completely natural that anyone with a great idea and a talent with computers can create something world-changing. But this is certainly a novelty in the sweep of corporate history.

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Joint stock companies in seventeenth-century England raised money from the unsuspecting public for palpably infeasible projects, knowing that the promoters would get rich before anyone got wise. Railroad companies in the nineteenth century took out massive amounts of debt that they knew would likely never be repaid. And today, technology companies launch products that create big risks without thinking through the consequences. No place better embodies this than the Silicon Valley start-up culture, which views failure as having no consequences (and indeed, often thinks of it as a badge of honor). Few arenas demonstrate the tremendous power of corporations to shape our lives more clearly than the internet. We search on Google, shop on Amazon, connect on Facebook, and do all of these things on our iPhones.

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

This was all so novel that in the first part of 1999 Chinese American entrepreneurs were struggling to translate “stock option” into Chinese and to understand how these things functioned.[33] On a trip to Silicon Valley shortly before Goldman’s investment, Jack Ma dined with John Wu, a Chinese-born, American-trained coder who was the lead engineer at Yahoo. Wu remembers Ma grilling him about how Silicon Valley startups recruited staff, prompting Wu to deliver a tutorial on the mechanics of stock-based compensation.[34] Once he took Goldman’s money and acquired the Cayman structure, Ma was in a position to put this tutorial into practice. His first coup was to hire Joe Tsai, his ex-Yale, ex–Sullivan & Cromwell investor, who waved goodbye to the $700,000 salary that went with his Hong Kong finance job.

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See Michael Moritz, “Investment Banks Are Losing Their Grip on IPOs,” Financial Times, Aug. 18, 2019, ft.com/content/7985bb78-bdbf-11e9-9381-78bab8a70848. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 84 CHAPTER FOURTEEN: UNICORN POKER John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (New York: Knopf, 2018), 208–9. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 For an example of the sea change in popular opinion toward venture-backed startups, see Erin Griffith, “The Ugly Unethical Underside of Silicon Valley,” Fortune, Dec. 28, 2016. In the view of some especially insistent critics, the tech giants had banished private contemplation and autonomous thought.

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In this mock-mobster photo, from left to right, top to bottom: Jawed Karim, cofounder of YouTube; Jeremy Stoppelman, cofounder of Yelp; Andrew McCormack, a member of the founding team at Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital; Premal Shah, cofounder of Kiva; Luke Nosek and Ken Howery, early partners at Thiel’s venture firm, Founders Fund; David Sacks, founder of Yammer; Thiel; Keith Rabois, a senior executive at LinkedIn and Square and later a venture capitalist; Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn; Max Levchin, cofounder of Affirm; Roelof Botha, a top investor at Sequoia; and Russel Simmons, Stoppelman’s cofounder at Yelp. Musk is conspicuous by his absence. For all the winning bets it made on Silicon Valley startups, Sequoia’s most successful play was to recruit Neil Shen, who established Sequoia China as the dominant venture firm in the country. For three straight years, Shen was the world’s top venture capitalist. Paul Graham (right) and Jessica Livingston (center) founded Y Combinator, revolutionizing the business of angel investing.

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

We can invent faster ways to travel from place to place over the surface of the planet; we can even learn how to escape it entirely and settle new frontiers. But we will never learn any of these secrets unless we demand to know them and force ourselves to look. The same is true of business. Great companies can be built on open but unsuspected secrets about how the world works. Consider the Silicon Valley startups that have harnessed the spare capacity that is all around us but often ignored. Before Airbnb, travelers had little choice but to pay high prices for a hotel room, and property owners couldn’t easily and reliably rent out their unoccupied space. Airbnb saw untapped supply and unaddressed demand where others saw nothing at all.

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

Julia arrived carrying a big canvas bag filled with Legos, and they’re now scattered out on the table. As we’re making small talk, she plays with the pieces, idly snapping and unsnapping them. Soon, between sips of my caffè Americano and bites of a remarkably good almond croissant, I start tinkering with the Legos, too. A few years earlier I briefly worked at a Silicon Valley–style start-up in Boston, a disastrous experience I chronicled in my last book, before getting a job as a writer on the HBO comedy Silicon Valley. Today, I have returned to the setting of that show—which, while a real place, is also a state of mind—not for fun, but for research. For the last two years, I have made it my mission to speak to as many people as I can to better understand the modern workplace and why work today seems to make so many people unhappy.

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VCs claim that they make decisions based entirely on the strength of the company’s ideas, and without any regard for race or gender. But can you guess where the members of the White Man Club tend to put their money? “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg” is how Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, a top Silicon Valley start-up incubator, once famously put it. Graham later claimed he was joking, but a glance through the roster of Y Combinator portfolio companies turns up an awful lot of nerdy young Zuckerberg clones. As for why there are so few women in venture capital, Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Ventures, once said that it’s not because of gender bias but that “What we’re not prepared to do is to lower our standards.”

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

That’s probably the biggest difference between then and now. VPL had to create its own production line. We started up a little factory in Redwood City to make headsets, gloves, and the rest. We did things that seem inconceivable today. We hired local people and trained them. Blue-collar local jobs! From a Silicon Valley startup! It happened! But it wasn’t perfect. There were ready consultants for every other aspect of being a startup, but manufacturing was still considered part of the parental, big-company world; part of the old economy Back East rather than the new Wild West. No one supported tiny-scale manufacturing in Silicon Valley.

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Once it’s solved, then that will be true. * * * Thirty-fourth VR Definition: Instrumentation that might just enable telecommunications with honest signals someday. * * * Back to Palo Alto in the 1980s. 16. The VPL Experience In-Spiral This is around the time when a normal memoir of a Silicon Valley startup would kick into gossip mode. Next would come juicy stories of intrigues on the board, struggles over stock, people yelling and quitting, backstabbings and betrayals. VPL had all of that, and such stuff might make a good story, and yet it’s not the story I’m telling. Here are a few reasons why.

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

We take them pretty much for granted out here now, but they are still endeavors that require very different skills from the ones needed in established companies. Like tourists on safari, senior executives from some of America's largest corporations come to the Valley to study the exotic ways of the natives. Arriving from Chicago or New York or Dallas, they think they need to be more like Silicon Valley startups, but they usually end up scratching their heads. I recently met with some senior managers from a world-class package goods company who had been up and down the Valley. "We thought we could take a crash course in the Valley way and apply the lessons to our business. But this place is extremely foreign to us.

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph by Ryan Holiday

British Empire, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, fear of failure, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, reality distortion field, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs

When people ask where we are, what we’re doing, how that “situation” is coming along, the answer should be clear: We’re working on it. We’re getting closer. When setbacks come, we respond by working twice as hard. ITERATE What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first steps to something better. —WENDELL PHILLIPS In Silicon Valley, start-ups don’t launch with polished, finished businesses. Instead, they release their “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP)—the most basic version of their core idea with only one or two essential features. The point is to immediately see how customers respond. And, if that response is poor, to be able to fail cheaply and quickly.

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

—Venture capitalist Arthur Rock FOR SEVERAL YEARS, FailCon was a popular annual event in San Francisco. Attendees were technologists who would get together to talk—you guessed it—about their stupendous failures. While Hollywood film directors run as fast as they can from their mistakes—Alan Smithee is the pseudonym directors use to erase their participation in the truly lousy—in Silicon Valley a failed start-up amounts to a badge of honor. Indeed, the frequency of company-crushing errors led to the discontinuation of FailCon in 2014. The confab was cancelled not because it was hurting the ability of technologists to attract venture funding but because, as FailCon founder Cassandra Phillipps observed, discussion of one’s mistakes in the tech sector is superfluous.

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As she stated in a 2014 interview: “It’s in the lexicon that you’re going to fail.”1 All of this raises a fairly basic question: Why do box-office disasters in the film industry place those attached to them in credit purgatory, while technologists proudly tout their errors to colleagues and potential investors? More specifically, why does the proverbial credit window shut so quickly for money-losing directors yet remain open for entrepreneurs who preside over imploding start-ups? 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.

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

And, in a nod to Musk’s obsession with safety, the rocket was said to be able to complete its missions even if three of the five engines failed, which was a level of added reliability that had not been seen in the market in decades. The only way to keep up with all of this work was to do what SpaceX had promised from the beginning: operate in the spirit of a Silicon Valley start-up. Musk was always looking for brainy engineers who had not just done well at school but had done something exceptional with their talents. When he found someone good, Musk was relentless in courting him or her to come to SpaceX. Bryan Gardner, for example, first met Musk at a space rave in the hangars at the Mojave airport and a short while later started talking about a job.

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The sum total of the company’s automotive expertise was that a couple of the guys at Tesla really liked cars and another one had created a series of science fair projects based on technology that the automotive industry considered ridiculous. What’s more, the founding team had no intention of turning to Detroit for advice on how to build a car company. No, Tesla would do what every other Silicon Valley start-up had done before it, which was hire a bunch of young, hungry engineers and figure things out as they went along. Never mind that the Bay Area had no real history of this model ever having worked for something like a car and that building a complex, physical object had little in common with writing a software application.

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

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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A Revolution in Search of Revolutionaries Of course, American diplomats had no idea how the Iranian protests would turn out; it would be unfair to blame them for the apparent inability of the Green Movement to unseat Ahmadinejad. When the future of Iranian democracy depended on the benevolence of a Silicon Valley start-up that seemed oblivious to the geopolitical problems besetting the world, what other choice did they have but to intervene? Given what was at stake, isn’t it preposterous to quibble about angry editorials in Moldovan newspapers that may have appeared even if the State Department stayed on the sidelines?

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

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.

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Travel & Leisure magazine is complementary to the travel business…in that it gives customers travel ideas which the company hopes will lead to ticket purchases and other travel arrangements through American Express Travel Services.” Such plain-vanilla examples helped make legislators comfortable with the idea of granting exemptions for commercial activities. But the truth is that banks didn’t want to be in the magazine publishing business—they wanted to be in hot Silicon Valley start-ups and, later, in the oil, gas, electricity, and minerals business. And indeed, between 2000 and 2012, all but one of the “complementary” activities that firms would seek to engage in via the loophole in the law had to do with commodities ownership and trading.51 Referring to Goldman’s purchase of metal warehouse space, Nick Madden, chief supply chain officer for the giant aluminum maker Novelis, says, “It had all the appearance of being part of an engineered market squeeze.

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

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.

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry by John Warrillow

Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, David Heinemeier Hansson, discounted cash flows, Hacker Conference 1984, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Network effects, passive income, rolodex, Salesforce, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, time value of money, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Then we’ll turn to financing the growth of your subscription business and explore whether you want to raise venture-capital funding, as WhatsApp and Dollar Shave Club did, or self-fund your growth, like FreshBooks and Mosquito Squad. Part Three ends with a discussion on scaling your subscription business. Let’s get started. PART ONE Subscribers Are Better than Customers Why are Amazon, Apple, and many of the most promising Silicon Valley start-ups leveraging a subscription business model? In Part One we’ll look at how automatic customers make your company more valuable . . . and a whole lot more enjoyable to run. CHAPTER 1 Who Wins in the Subscription Economy? Amazon has come a long way since its days of just hawking cheap books online.

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

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? Should professors be investing in their students’ companies?

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Miami (Michael Salzhauer) Samsung Sandberg, Sheryl Sanders, Bernie Saturday Night Live Sawyer, Diane Scan (QR code app) Schiffer, Eric Schmidt, Eric Sculley, John Secret (app) Sehn, Tim selfies Academy Awards (2014) selfie with Ellen DeGeneres first photographic self-portrait history of Sequoia Capital sexting Shark Tank (television program) Shonduras (Shaun McBride) Shontell, Alyson Sierra Ventures Silicon Valley (television sitcom) Slingshot (Facebook app) Smith, Daniel Smith, Kevin Snapchat Android app Arsenic Bitstrips purchased by brand advertising Brown lawsuit captions celebrities and Snapchat stars content management system (CMS) Council (employee gatherings) demographics of users Discover DJ Khaled and and Electric Daisy Carnival (Las Vegas) email leaks founding date of funding and investment geofilters Ghostface Chillah logo Good Luck America (election show) hacking and security Instant Articles IPO (initial public offering) Lenses Literally Can’t Even (original programming) Live Stories media coverage of Memories monetization original programming origins of Our Story Picaboo publishing and journalism Rio Summer Olympics (2016) coverage S-1 (SEC filing) Safety Center Scan purchased by Snap Channel Snap Lab Snapcash Snapcode “Snappy New Year” promotion Spectacles Stories Vergence Labs purchased by workforce and human resources Social Network, The (film) Sony Entertainment Sorrell, Martin SpaceX Spiegel, Evan Brown lawsuit and childhood education Forbes’s “30 Under 30” issue Future Freshman girlfriend at Stanford (Lily) interest in journalism internship at Red Bull and Kappa Sigma Market Street headquarters parents of proposal to Miranda Kerr at $SNAP IPO Snapchat’s origins at Stanford Stanford Women in Business conference keynote address worldview and corporate culture of Snapchat See also Snapchat Spielberg, Sasha Spotify Square Square Cash Stanford University commencement (2012) Donner (dorm) founding of Kappa Sigma Sigma Nu Silicon Valley and Startup Hau5 (Picaboo headquarters) stealth mode Stith, Mackenzie Stone, Josh Streep, Meryl Sun Microsystems Swift, Taylor Swisher, Kara Systrom, Kevin Taco Bell Tam, Donna Taneja, Hemant TechCrunch (tech blog) Disrupt conference Tencent Teo, Jon Tesla ThankYouX (Ryan Wilson) That White Bitch (blog) therealdrmiami.

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

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.

Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom Demarco

Brownian motion, delayed gratification, Frederick Winslow Taylor, interchangeable parts, knowledge worker, new economy, risk tolerance, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, The Soul of a New Machine, Yogi Berra

Box these gifted people in tightly enough, and none of their magic will be able to happen. 19 Vision MY FRIEND Sheila Brady was regaling us one night over dinner at her Woodside, California, home. The rain was coming down in sheets and wind was whipping through the eucalypts and the wine was flowing freely: a perfect time for let-your-hair-down storytelling. Many of the stories were of Sheila’s days at Apple, where she was a star project manager. But then the tales turned to Silicon Valley start-ups of more recent vintage, and she opened the floor to the subject of vision. Others around the table (they were employees of half a dozen Valley start-ups) leaped in. They began to talk about vision, mostly observed by its absence. The most common sign of absent vision was the sense of not knowing “who we are.”

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

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?).

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

Neither Kaphan nor Davis had much experience creating the kind of retailing or business software that Amazon.com needed, but Jeff’s philosophy was to hire people with the most talent rather than the most experience. After all, they were trying to do something new, and experience with legacy software could be more of a hindrance than a help. It’s a philosophy promoted by Silicon Valley start-ups that the best people are those who don’t know that something “can’t be done,” and therefore will figure out how to do it. Bezos is a strong believer in this philosophy. He and these two men developed the core software that launched Amazon.com, programs that ran the company for years. The third employee of the company was Jeff’s wife, MacKenzie.

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

In the Entrepreneurs video, he repeatedly urged his staff to conserve resources, to the point of complaining about the hotel room rates they were getting. Despite having seen him throw money around at Apple, Barnes was initially hopeful that Steve might change his ways. “I thought he’d be better when it was his own money,” she remembers. “Boy, was I wrong.” Most great Silicon Valley startups start out lean and simple. The advantage they have over established companies is the focus they can bring to a single product or idea. Unencumbered by bureaucracy or a heritage of products to protect, a small group of talented folks is free to attack a concept with speed and smarts. Eagerly working hundred-hour weeks, the employees want little more from the “company” than that it pay the bills and get out of their way.

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To find a shortcut to developing a more advanced version of the Macintosh OS, Amelio looked for companies that had built a working version of Unix that ran on familiar microprocessors. Sun and several other companies, including IBM, Apollo (by now part of Digital Equipment Corporation), NeXT, and an obscure Silicon Valley startup called Be Inc., all had developed their own implementations of BSD Unix—a version developed by Sun cofounder Bill Joy—and had managed to “port” them to machines employing chips from the very same family of microprocessors that Apple used in its Lisa and Macintosh. The pure software companies were most interesting because they were cheap enough to buy outright, and small enough to absorb.

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

Two decades in marketing had taught me many practical things, from how to build consensus across divisions to how to write a CYA memo when I wanted to color outside the lines. I viewed that experience as an important asset but was beginning to suspect that within the walls of the Googleplex,* it might be valued differently. I had wanted to live the Silicon Valley startup life, with its complete lack of longstanding rules. Now, poised on the precipice of realizing that dream, I asked myself, "My God. What have I done?" Chapter 2 In the Beginning HEY, WANT TO see something cool?" Jay asked me, standing in the micro-kitchen eating from a cup of yogurt, barefoot and sporting pajama pants, a well-loved sweatshirt, and a graying ponytail.

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Not once have they wavered in their commitment to our happiness or hesitated to sacrifice to bring it about. When they could ill afford it, they helped fund my dreams and then gave me the confidence to pursue them. I can never repay the debt I owe them for their guidance, their patience, and their understanding. My wife Kristen experienced all the pressures and insanity of a Silicon Valley startup without the compensating perks that I enjoyed. She didn't divorce me. For more than twenty-five years she has encouraged me, supported me, engaged me, and endured me. She is a ruthless editor and a stickler for facts. She has, on occasion, been the only reason I've remained sane. She is my best friend.

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

They’d taught him about open-sourcing a site’s code, and he’d taught them about maintaining quarterly goals. But in 2011, Newhouse decided it was time to try something new for Reddit. Bob Sauerberg, Condé’s president, was on board. He and Newhouse figured that if Reddit was allowed to raise venture capital funding and behave more like other Silicon Valley startups, the company would have a chance at competing with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Reddit would also have more flexibility to hire new employees, to pay them competitively, and to offer stock options. Plus, given investors’ enthusiasm for heavily trafficked money-losing websites, an independent Reddit would almost certainly be worth a lot more to the market than it was to Condé Nast.

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If Wong’s vision of growing and evolving Reddit as a “city-state” and trying to appease the community was rough going, his other objective, to move the company toward profitability, was tougher. By this point in 2014 it seemed too far-fetched to even put a timeline on. Instead, Wong decided to consider switching mind-sets—and possibly change the goal altogether. He could envision treating Reddit as a typical Silicon Valley startup. To that end, he had gone back to the place Reddit started, back to Y Combinator. Wong and Altman stepped away from their nearly matching cars and walked together into Y Combinator. Wong took in the space, all clean lines and stark design. This office, like Paul Graham’s original Cambridge one, had been built out by Graham’s architect friend Kate Courteau.

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

For example, when embarking on the self-driving car project, the team brought on Sebastian Thrun, who previously sent an autonomous car through a seven-mile obstacle course in the Mojave Desert. The external network. Google leverages external experts to support its projects. It has partnered with at least sixteen other companies so far, ranging from Silicon Valley start-ups to established chip manufacturers. All these criteria—separation, low investment, the right talent, and the external network—make for an open space in which teams can be innovative and almost instantly responsive to market feedback. All are necessary for creating a new, networked business within asset builder, service provider, and technology creator companies.

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

According to the Angel Capital Association, the median pre-money valuation (the valuation of your company before an investor puts in their money) of companies that are not yet generating revenue was $2.75 million in 2012. This was an increase over 2011, when it was $2.1 million, and an even larger increase over 2010, when it was $1.7 million.1 This means the valuation of a typical Silicon Valley startup – at the angel or seed stage – is $2.75 million. On average, these companies raise about $750,000.2 That means that, after that cash is added to their bank account, they are worth $3.5 million on average, and the investors own 21.42 per cent. So, while raising money this way costs you quite a bit of ownership of your company, there really isn’t another way to raise that amount to grow your company so quickly.

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Throughout this stage of the journey we’ll focus on how best to use your seed financing to achieve these goals and set the foundations for a solid app company – and put you in a great place to seduce some serious professional investors to allow you to expand your team and accelerate growth. How to Deliver Wow Paul Graham – one of the founders of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s top startup incubator – offers a great morsel of advice after decades of experience delivering software: ‘Don’t build something clever, build what people want.’ The nature of technology – and software companies in particular – has evolved quickly over the last decade. Open-source software – along with easily accessible services such as payment, mapping, messaging (and many others) in the form of APIs (application programming interfaces) – allows any developer to build powerful programs.

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Fresh off the back of a major funding round in 2013, Snapchat picked up a pretty seasoned COO, Emily White.3 Previously she was the executive who was leading Facebook’s Instagram advertising programme and before that she worked at Google.4 It would be a safe assumption to think she might have been brought on board to think about how to scale the business and get on the path of revenue generation. While it is very tough to land them, big hitters require a big salary and have high expectations. They can deliver game-changing opportunities to your company. That’s probably why it is common in Silicon Valley for top startups to steal great people from each other. Francoise Brougher, former vice president of SMB (small and medium-sized businesses) global sales and operations at Google, joined Square as its business lead to help drive the company’s growth. Bob Lee, chief technology officer at Square, also came from Google.

Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days by Chris Guillebeau

Airbnb, buy low sell high, content marketing, inventory management, Lyft, passive income, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, subscription business, TaskRabbit, the scientific method, Uber for X, uber lyft

There’s a school of thought that advises you to focus on making money only from one revenue source or only on offers that are fully aligned with your core business. This conventional “wisdom” is commonly taught in business school, business books, and executive coaching. But the side hustler’s mindset is different, or at least it should be. After all, it’s something you’re doing on the side. You aren’t trying to build a Silicon Valley startup and make money for a million investors; you’re doing this to make money for yourself. Consider the Million Dollar Homepage, started by a college student, that I mentioned on Day 21. The traditional business perspective would argue that such a thing is a gimmick, and a distraction from some “real” business that he could have been building.

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

They are trying to disrupt the status quo and have a strong sense that their work matters. They have a sense of impact greater than themselves, are growing quickly, and are part of a vibrant tribe. Those are the three core ingredients; there is, in fact, no real purpose void. When I was working for early-stage Silicon Valley start-ups, I had a deep sense of purpose. The first place I worked, HomeShark.com, was working to revolutionize the mortgage industry by taking the power out of institutional banking and putting it in the hands of consumers, so they could make better decisions about financing their homes. After a couple of months writing online tutorials on home buying, I was moved into a product management position.

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

APPENDIX Leadership Essentials NEVER DOUBT THAT A SMALL GROUP OF THOUGHTFUL, COMMITTED CITIZENS CAN CHANGE THE WORLD; INDEED, IT’S THE ONLY THING THAT EVER HAS. —Margaret Mead LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner sees “fewer things done better” as the most powerful mechanism for leadership. When he took the reins of the company he could easily have adopted the standard operating procedure of most Silicon Valley start-ups and tried to pursue everything. Instead, he said no to really good opportunities in order to pursue only the very best ones. He uses the acronym FCS (a.k.a. FOCUS) to teach his philosophy to his employees. The letters stand for “Fewer things done better,” “Communicating the right information to the right people at the right time,” and “Speed and quality of decision making.”

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

What came to be called the PayPal mafia went on to found a lot of successful companies: YouTube, LinkedIn, Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Yelp, Yammer, Slide … Thiel moved out of his one-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto to a condo in the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco. Within a week of leaving PayPal, he started a new fund called Clarium Capital Management. The end of his career as the CEO of a Silicon Valley start-up marked the start of his life as a technology mogul. 1999 WILD RIDE TO THE TURN OF THE CENTURY … ELOQUENT CLINTON ALLY CHOSEN TO GIVE CLOSING ARGUMENT … when you hear somebody say, “This is not about sex,” it’s about … Bill and Hillary Clinton are experimenting with a trial separation, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.… Party like it’s 1999.

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Holed up in the Trump Hotel with his lawyer and crew playing guts, a three-card game that rewarded self-possession. Vowed never to lose his shit again and later copped a plea, getting away with probation. He became a corporate rapper, an outlaw entrepreneur, wearing sneakers to the boardroom like in a Silicon Valley start-up, working in the legit world while living the hustler’s dream. He retired from rapping in 2003 at Madison Square Garden (but that didn’t last long) and became a music executive, president of Def Jam, the biggest label in hip-hop. He cut his old partner at Roc-A-Fella loose, taking the name with him—“It’s just business,” Jay-Z told Damon Dash, sounding like another screen mobster.

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