12 ms·

What Silicon Valley Insiders Think of Peter Thiel’s Speech at RNC

31 points by abhi3 10y ago

neom 10y ago
This article fails to address the growing divide between east coast and west coast technologist and entrepreneurs. Many of us in New York are ashamed and embarrassed by the valley, and are looking to change it via negation.
- alex_c 10y ago
  I'm not a member of either community - can you expand on the difference you see between the two?
  - neom 10y ago
    Some people are building toys for children, some people are building tools for humans. Both are fine, in moderation. I think we see more and more the NYC tech culture feels like they are trying to build real things, the valley is stuck in consumerism and has lost the ability to push the needle, much of this is due to poorly considered greed and linear thinking. :(
    - sievebrain 10y ago
      What is "linear thinking"?
      - w1ntermute 10y ago
        It's one of those buzzwordy terms currently in vogue in the tech industry. It's a hipper way of saying "not creative/disruptive". The b-school equivalent would be "thinking inside the box". For example, here's sama (president of YC)[0]: > Very rare and extremely powerful combination: the ability to think both clearly and very non-linearly. Most people lucky to have one. An example of nonlinear thinking by sama[1]: > the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract. As you might expect, Peter Thiel prefers to be a contrarian and use his own term for it: Zero to One[2]. 0. https://www.twitter.com/sama/status/699330028404772864 https://www.twitter.com/sama/status/699330028404772864 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944 2. https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296 https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/080...
        markonthewall 10y ago
        Afaik the folks at F8 started the trend, I heard them use that idiom back in 2009 (F8 didn't exist yet)
    - 650REDHAIR 10y ago
      Tools for humans.... Sure. http://www.businessinsider.com/business-insider-2015-silicon-alley-100-hottest-startups-2015-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/business-insider-2015-silicon...
    - pohungc 10y ago
      What are some of the most impactful things being built in the NYC tech scene?
      - abhi3 10y ago
        theskimm, buzzfeed
      - neom 10y ago
        pinterest, etsy, fab, digitalocean, buzzfeed, any media platform, guilt, foursquare, seamless web, app nexsus, etc. I could literally list 100.
        650REDHAIR 10y ago
        So pinterest, fab, buzzfeed, guilt, and foursquare are "tools for humans" and startups like, oh I don't know, Tesla in SV/SF, are toys?
        neom 10y ago
        You named Tesla, bravo...?
      - shanacarp 10y ago
        So there are actually other things being built in NYC that are very not scenish at all. Like Vroom - no one talks about the used car market, but they are huge. Knewton and Schoology, two other big company no one treats as huge unless you are into ed-tech Kinnek just raised a huge round, they are trying to be an amazon of suppliers All of these things are impactful, but, well, weird. There are a LOT of those types of things in NYC
    - econner 10y ago
      What a sweeping generalization. Can you provide any justification that the valley has "lost the ability to push the needle?"
      - neom 10y ago
        Just look at the general investment philosophy of any VC below T1.
- stephancoral 10y ago
  Absolutely. I'm in NYC for HOPE this weekend. Coming from Silicon Valley where 1% of the workers are black, I was so happy to see such a huge diverse crowd at the conference, all there for the shared love of exploring technology and hacker culture. SV has some incredibly smart people but, in my experience, all they care about is making money. Feels like the hacker spirit has absolutely vanished
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    As a NY (and India) guy who occasionally visits the west coast, seriously? NY loves tech but the valley only wants to make money? Consider the blockchain. Out west they try and rebuild the world with it - consider the (thiel funded) urbit. Back east we just replace banking clearinghouses with bank built blockchain. What makes you feel differently? Also curious what the ancestry of the people doing tech has to do with anything.
    - igk 10y ago
      To be honest? I'll take 5% more efficient banks. The boring stuff is usually worth a lot more to Society. Just doesn't catch us tweens less easily Also, if you've followed the urbit guys from the start, then you know how cultlike they are. No thanks Source:am tween
      - Tycho 10y ago
        would the customer notice any difference if bank were 5% more efficient?
    - Canada 10y ago
      I don't think Urbit uses a blockchain at all.
    - stephancoral 10y ago
      Urbit, to me, is an elitist joke filled with needlessly obscurantist terminology. If it takes off I will eat my foot but I doubt it. To me it's just another example of the Valley bubble where they want "to change the world" but have no connection to the world they so desperately (for mostly egotistical reasons) seek to alter. The NYC scene I've witnessed at HOPE is not nearly as pretentious as SV people. Whenever I hear "changing" or "rebuilding" the world my bullshit meter explodes. To me the NYC scene doesn't want to change the world in grand capitalistic gestures, they want to help out people and have information be free. I'm a big fan of 2600 and that whole ethos. Not to say SV is devoid of that, it's just so much more focused on the glitz and bullshit. The ancestry / ethnicity of people in tech has to do with everything. Algorithms can be racist - whether it's insensitive snapchat filter (the Bob Marley one comes to mind) or facial detection algos that can't detect black people because the devs only tested it on lighter-skinned people. Diversity is a beautiful thing, especially in these polarizing times, and so its meaningful to me for there to be a large amount of different folk involved in our profession and interests. Only 1% of people working in Sv are black. That's just wrong.
- wavefunction 10y ago
  Of course there are more than just the coasts.
  - vpribish 10y ago
    please cite some examples
    - nickthemagicman 10y ago
      lol. check mate.
    - SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
      Boulder, Colorado, "America's Start-up Capital". [1] Denver and Austin. [2] [1] http://www.inc.com/magazine/201312/boulder-colorado-fast-growing-business.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/201312/boulder-colorado-fast-gro... [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/tompost/2014/03/13/the-best-places-to-launch-a-startup-in-2014/#421f146c359c http://www.forbes.com/sites/tompost/2014/03/13/the-best-plac...
    - Turing_Machine 10y ago
      University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Georgia Tech (okay, that's technically in the east, but it's not what's usually thought of as "East Coast"). UT Austin. University of Wisconsin—Madison. University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. The list could go on. If you want to expand outward a bit, the University of Waterloo in Canada is also quite good.
Nate75Sanders 10y ago
A related article that does a good job of explaining why Thiel supports Trump: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/peter-thiel-republican-convention-speech https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/peter-thi... EDIT: (to explain why) No other analysis I've seen anywhere of Thiel at the RNC takes into account this very, very important attempt at explaining Thiel's reasons: """ Now, in 2016, Thiel has finally found a politician capable of seizing that opportunity: a disruptor-in-chief who will destroy a dying system and build a better one in its place. Trump isn’t just a flamethrower for torching a rotten establishment, however – he’s the fulfillment of Thiel’s desire to build a successful political movement for less democracy. """ Thiel doesn't want less government, but he does want less democracy, because he can achieve his aims more easily if this is the case (or so he believes). Lest anyone read the above and somehow believe I'm a Trump or Thiel supporter/advocate/etc, I'm solidly NOT.
- sievebrain 10y ago
  I found it a relatively poor article actually. It's longer than the speech itself yet says less: http://time.com/4417679/republican-convention-peter-thiel-transcript/ http://time.com/4417679/republican-convention-peter-thiel-tr... From the man's own words, it seems to be a combination of: • A shared feeling that America was once great, and it can be again, but currently is in decline. No other politician except Trump says this. • Dislike of foreign wars, a feeling that only Trump says "end foreign wars" and really believes it. And that's it. I'm not sure it really needs more analysis than that: Thiel feels America doesn't work as well as it used to, and like many libertarian types, is against foreign military intervention. If these two things are much more important to you than other things, it makes logical sense to support Trump.
  - Nate75Sanders 10y ago
    I didn't walk away with anywhere near the analysis you did, so I added an edit to my original post. You can't simply hear Thiel's speech and directly get what he wants, because saying it would cause too much backlash. He wants to use the government's massive resources to carry out projects that he's aligned with -- perhaps even that he has control over.
neom 10y ago
Yes, you are totally correct. I love my SF friends are starting to come over to NY, leave the old white men in the valley and burn it down, vive la revolution. ;)
- yodsanklai 10y ago
  > leave the old white men in the valley Should I apologize for being old and white?
  - calibraxis 10y ago
    Depends, have you spent some of that long life fighting for those who don't have your privileges? (Assuming you haven't been unable due to intersecting factors like mental illness or poverty?) Noam Chomsky's an old white man. Doesn't thrill him to spend half his time helping the human race end its wars and self-destruction, but he takes the responsibility. (Even if you did apologize, what difference would it make?)
    - dang 10y ago
      For a long time, you've been using HN primarily for political purposes. That's not a legitimate use of this site, and we've already asked you to stop doing it. In addition, many of your comments (like this one) straddle if not cross the line into personal disrespect. That's also an abuse of this site, so please stop doing that too.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - neom 10y ago
    Depends, have you actively spent your time trying to dismantle the patriarchy? If yes, no, if no, absolutely.
- dang 10y ago
  This whole divisive rhetoric thing is exactly what we don't want on HN, so please don't post such stuff here, and especially not with bonus race trolling. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12149564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12149564 and marked it off-topic.
thormathison 10y ago
As an attorney and someone in tech, I used to strongly admire Thiel. He left biglaw and took a gamble, and it paid off. But between his support for Trump and the Gawker nonsense, I no longer have any respect for the man. Anyone on record supporting trump is on the wrong side of history.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
  > on the wrong side of history Nikita Sergeyevich, is that you?
  - elgabogringo 10y ago
    Point awarded. Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_will_bury_you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_will_bury_you "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!"
    - _delirium 10y ago
      "History on our side" is a pretty common phrase, used by people of varying political stripes. A quick Google Books search turns up British MPs using it in the 1940s and George H.W. Bush using it in the 1990s, among others.
      - elgabogringo 10y ago
        Backward looking as a proofpoint, yes. Forward looking as a justification, no, it's not that common until recently and - at least to me - has a marxist sound to it.
      - B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
        It's a bit of ideological poison, extracted from the root of the dialectical materialism tree (aka 'scientific socialism', as defined in the poems of Marx and Engels). The allegedly scientific basis is that there is an unstoppable march of historical progress, and you should cheer it on and actively lay waste to the obstacles that are going to be swept aside anyway. (Yes, it's a strange creed.)
mter 10y ago
> 14 said they would not personally do business with him as a result. One of the most interesting things about current politics. I've always found it odd that republicans haven't picked up on this and tried to seize on the opportunity to create an incubator for republican leaning/apolitical companies. Seems like there would be a tremendous amount of opportunity there given the success of fox news, particularly for an apolitical twitter given recent censorship issues.
- pythia__ 10y ago
  The idea just might be in the air, but there are several ways an attempt at implementing it can go, some of which are less likely than others to succeed through differentiation. Those details should not be neglected. For one, "libertarian" (but explicitly not left-libertarian) would probably be a better first-order approximation of how to position such an incubator (or conference, or...). A Republican incubator could plausibly reject Curtis Yarvin on ideological grounds, which doesn't seem like the goal.
- specialist 10y ago
  "incubator for republican leaning/apolitical companies" That's precisely what they did. Their focus has been media, think tanks, politics instead of tech. They've been fantastically successful.
elgabogringo 10y ago
Silicon valley is increasingly adopting way too much of the PC groupthink as of late. There's absolutely nothing and nobody that is truly disrupting anything. Even the word "disrupting" has become a cliche adlibs fill in the blank for pitching "new ideas". Gone are the middle-class rebels (jobs/clark) that don't care what anybody thinks, in are the ivy-league-ish conformers that want wall street funding and friendly government regulation (basically everybody. And hey, if wall street and friendly government regulators is what you want and if you have a few hundred grand (maybe a few million) to throw at her foundation or her friends, then Hillary is your gal.
- lisper 10y ago
  > There's absolutely nothing and nobody that is truly disrupting anything It's not for want of trying. http://urbit.org http://urbit.org And my own humble efforts in this regard: https://sc4.us https://sc4.us
  - elgabogringo 10y ago
    Thank you for your efforts. I will read more of this when I get a chance. You are right that the new tech barons are waaaaay too cozy with the government. They travel by private jet with armed bodyguards and share our info with the government and tell us to "relax" and "get along" while we are getting felt up by TSA and having our emails read.
  - jackfoxy 10y ago
    > SC4 is Strong Cryptography (or Secure Communications) for non-technical people. Even technical people can't be technical about everything. We need useable and ubiquitous.
  - elgabogringo 10y ago
    Oh, and I shouldn't have said "absolutely nothing and nobody". That's not fair or accurate. I could have expressed that sentiment better. Incidentally, it's a POV Thiel shares, I believe.
elgabogringo 10y ago
Honestly, this type of thinking is part of the problem. Silicon Valley should be about ideas and innovation, not alignment with some PC racial quota dogma.
- dang 10y ago
  Personal attacks are not welcome on HN. Please (re)-read the site guidelines and edit such stuff out of your comments here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12149564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12149564 and marked it off-topic.
  - elgabogringo 10y ago
    Fixed. Sorry.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
youngButEager 10y ago
The Left has not helped Silicon Valley much. 1) ageism -- once you hit 40-45yo, you're done. Take a survey of the ages of the people at your company for evidence. Most engineers in their 20s; some in their 30s; almost none in their 40s and beyond 2) sexism -- females are about 50% of the population. But in Silicon Valley? Hiring favors males. Again, look at the companies you have worked at in Silicon Valley over your career. Mostly all male. 3) racial stereotyping -- take a look again at the companies you have worked for over your career. How many blacks there? How many Hispanics? VERY FEW. So the idea that the Left is playing an effective role in the Valley is BOGUS in several dimensions: - AGEISM - SEXISM - BLACK AND LATINO HIRING
- pjscott 10y ago
  The candidates applying to those jobs are overwhelmingly male, with few blacks and hispanics. Imagine an unbiased hiring process: how would its results look different from what you see now?
  - brighteyes 10y ago
    That's a reasonable argument, but some of the facts don't fit it. 7% of tech roles in Apple are black [1], while at Google that figure is just 1%. A 7 times difference is very large. But let's be generous and say that the 1% is 1.5% that was rounded down. The percentage of black tech workers is still almost 5 times higher at Apple than at Google. These are massive companies, not small startups where a single hire skews the figures. So it's fair to say something is going on here - one of those companies might have a biased hiring process. And it looks like it is Google that is biased against black people, since 9% of CS graduates are black [3], far closer to Apple's 7% than Google's 1%. [1] http://www.apple.com/diversity/ http://www.apple.com/diversity/ [2] https://www.google.com/diversity/ https://www.google.com/diversity/ [3] http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/12/silicon-valley-diversity-tech-hiring-computer-science-graduates-african-american-hispanic/14684211/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/12/silicon-valley...
    - DominikR 10y ago
DominikR 10y ago
> Speaking privately, Thiel’s allies could only conjecture reasons for his unexpected partnership with Trump; many expressed frustration with how anyone could support a candidate so unpredictable. I could come up with a few pretty obvious reasons why a gay libertarian like Thiel would support trump. 1) Democrats support the resettling of millions of Muslims to the West that have been indoctrinated in an ideology that calls for killing gays. Currently in 11 Muslim countries acting out homosexuality is punishable by death. In most others they imprisons gays and extra judicial killings of gays by mobs are not persecuted. It is not unreasonable for a gay man to fear Muslims and Muslim culture. 2) Democrats engage in political correctness and in vilification of their political opponents (You don't agree with me? You are like Hitler!) to a degree that people who say the wrong things or support the wrong candidate must fear for their financial and in some cases even physical security. Even a billionaire like Thiel will face repercussions for this as was mentioned in the article: > In my anonymous poll of 42 randomly selected start-up founders from the database CrunchBase, only nine people supported Trump. Fifteen of them opposed Thiel’s speech for Trump, and 14 said they would not personally do business with him as a result. In many areas it is basically open season on anyone that openly supports Trump, people will attack you, people will key your car and strangers will insult you. It says a lot when people like Dilbert creator Scott Adams endorse Clinton because they fear for their personal safety: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145456082991/my-endorsement-for-president-of-the-united-states http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145456082991/my-endorsement-for... This vilification pushed by the Democrats is the exact opposite of freedom and democracy. I totally get why a libertarian would support Trump even if he doesn't like him to at least restore the most basic personal freedoms. 3) Trump is very much anti big government. He wants to reduce its size and remove regulations that inhibit the growth of the private sector. Few libertarians would have a problem with that. Also it isn't sustainable to permanently have a large portion of society completely dependant on government as we can obviously witness by the insane growth of government debt everywhere in the West. This system almost guarantees that poor people will always stay poor and that their children will be poor too as all they know is dependance and submission to the social system. Social systems do not help the poor, they never did. Over the last decades it has gotten bigger and bigger and yet poverty never went down, instead the opposite happened. The same is true for public education which was basically run by liberals since the 80ties. It has gotten so bad that today it can't even guarantee that a child going through this system will not end up as a functional illiterates.

31 points by abhi3 10y ago

neom 10y ago

This article fails to address the growing divide between east coast and west coast technologist and entrepreneurs. Many of us in New York are ashamed and embarrassed by the valley, and are looking to change it via negation.

alex_c 10y ago
I'm not a member of either community - can you expand on the difference you see between the two?
- neom 10y ago
  Some people are building toys for children, some people are building tools for humans. Both are fine, in moderation. I think we see more and more the NYC tech culture feels like they are trying to build real things, the valley is stuck in consumerism and has lost the ability to push the needle, much of this is due to poorly considered greed and linear thinking. :(
  - sievebrain 10y ago
    What is "linear thinking"?
    - w1ntermute 10y ago
      It's one of those buzzwordy terms currently in vogue in the tech industry. It's a hipper way of saying "not creative/disruptive". The b-school equivalent would be "thinking inside the box". For example, here's sama (president of YC)[0]: > Very rare and extremely powerful combination: the ability to think both clearly and very non-linearly. Most people lucky to have one. An example of nonlinear thinking by sama[1]: > the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract. As you might expect, Peter Thiel prefers to be a contrarian and use his own term for it: Zero to One[2]. 0. https://www.twitter.com/sama/status/699330028404772864 https://www.twitter.com/sama/status/699330028404772864 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944 2. https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296 https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/080...
      - markonthewall 10y ago
        Afaik the folks at F8 started the trend, I heard them use that idiom back in 2009 (F8 didn't exist yet)
  - 650REDHAIR 10y ago
    Tools for humans.... Sure. http://www.businessinsider.com/business-insider-2015-silicon-alley-100-hottest-startups-2015-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/business-insider-2015-silicon...
  - pohungc 10y ago
    What are some of the most impactful things being built in the NYC tech scene?
    - abhi3 10y ago
      theskimm, buzzfeed
    - neom 10y ago
      pinterest, etsy, fab, digitalocean, buzzfeed, any media platform, guilt, foursquare, seamless web, app nexsus, etc. I could literally list 100.
      - 650REDHAIR 10y ago
        So pinterest, fab, buzzfeed, guilt, and foursquare are "tools for humans" and startups like, oh I don't know, Tesla in SV/SF, are toys?
        neom 10y ago
        You named Tesla, bravo...?
    - shanacarp 10y ago
      So there are actually other things being built in NYC that are very not scenish at all. Like Vroom - no one talks about the used car market, but they are huge. Knewton and Schoology, two other big company no one treats as huge unless you are into ed-tech Kinnek just raised a huge round, they are trying to be an amazon of suppliers All of these things are impactful, but, well, weird. There are a LOT of those types of things in NYC
  - econner 10y ago
    What a sweeping generalization. Can you provide any justification that the valley has "lost the ability to push the needle?"
    - neom 10y ago
      Just look at the general investment philosophy of any VC below T1.
stephancoral 10y ago
Absolutely. I'm in NYC for HOPE this weekend. Coming from Silicon Valley where 1% of the workers are black, I was so happy to see such a huge diverse crowd at the conference, all there for the shared love of exploring technology and hacker culture. SV has some incredibly smart people but, in my experience, all they care about is making money. Feels like the hacker spirit has absolutely vanished
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  As a NY (and India) guy who occasionally visits the west coast, seriously? NY loves tech but the valley only wants to make money? Consider the blockchain. Out west they try and rebuild the world with it - consider the (thiel funded) urbit. Back east we just replace banking clearinghouses with bank built blockchain. What makes you feel differently? Also curious what the ancestry of the people doing tech has to do with anything.
  - igk 10y ago
    To be honest? I'll take 5% more efficient banks. The boring stuff is usually worth a lot more to Society. Just doesn't catch us tweens less easily Also, if you've followed the urbit guys from the start, then you know how cultlike they are. No thanks Source:am tween
    - Tycho 10y ago
      would the customer notice any difference if bank were 5% more efficient?
  - Canada 10y ago
    I don't think Urbit uses a blockchain at all.
  - stephancoral 10y ago
    Urbit, to me, is an elitist joke filled with needlessly obscurantist terminology. If it takes off I will eat my foot but I doubt it. To me it's just another example of the Valley bubble where they want "to change the world" but have no connection to the world they so desperately (for mostly egotistical reasons) seek to alter. The NYC scene I've witnessed at HOPE is not nearly as pretentious as SV people. Whenever I hear "changing" or "rebuilding" the world my bullshit meter explodes. To me the NYC scene doesn't want to change the world in grand capitalistic gestures, they want to help out people and have information be free. I'm a big fan of 2600 and that whole ethos. Not to say SV is devoid of that, it's just so much more focused on the glitz and bullshit. The ancestry / ethnicity of people in tech has to do with everything. Algorithms can be racist - whether it's insensitive snapchat filter (the Bob Marley one comes to mind) or facial detection algos that can't detect black people because the devs only tested it on lighter-skinned people. Diversity is a beautiful thing, especially in these polarizing times, and so its meaningful to me for there to be a large amount of different folk involved in our profession and interests. Only 1% of people working in Sv are black. That's just wrong.
wavefunction 10y ago
Of course there are more than just the coasts.
- vpribish 10y ago
  please cite some examples
  - nickthemagicman 10y ago
    lol. check mate.
  - SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
    Boulder, Colorado, "America's Start-up Capital". [1] Denver and Austin. [2] [1] http://www.inc.com/magazine/201312/boulder-colorado-fast-growing-business.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/201312/boulder-colorado-fast-gro... [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/tompost/2014/03/13/the-best-places-to-launch-a-startup-in-2014/#421f146c359c http://www.forbes.com/sites/tompost/2014/03/13/the-best-plac...
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Georgia Tech (okay, that's technically in the east, but it's not what's usually thought of as "East Coast"). UT Austin. University of Wisconsin—Madison. University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. The list could go on. If you want to expand outward a bit, the University of Waterloo in Canada is also quite good.

Nate75Sanders 10y ago

A related article that does a good job of explaining why Thiel supports Trump: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/peter-thiel-republican-convention-speech https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/peter-thi... EDIT: (to explain why) No other analysis I've seen anywhere of Thiel at the RNC takes into account this very, very important attempt at explaining Thiel's reasons: """ Now, in 2016, Thiel has finally found a politician capable of seizing that opportunity: a disruptor-in-chief who will destroy a dying system and build a better one in its place. Trump isn’t just a flamethrower for torching a rotten establishment, however – he’s the fulfillment of Thiel’s desire to build a successful political movement for less democracy. """ Thiel doesn't want less government, but he does want less democracy, because he can achieve his aims more easily if this is the case (or so he believes). Lest anyone read the above and somehow believe I'm a Trump or Thiel supporter/advocate/etc, I'm solidly NOT.

sievebrain 10y ago
I found it a relatively poor article actually. It's longer than the speech itself yet says less: http://time.com/4417679/republican-convention-peter-thiel-transcript/ http://time.com/4417679/republican-convention-peter-thiel-tr... From the man's own words, it seems to be a combination of: • A shared feeling that America was once great, and it can be again, but currently is in decline. No other politician except Trump says this. • Dislike of foreign wars, a feeling that only Trump says "end foreign wars" and really believes it. And that's it. I'm not sure it really needs more analysis than that: Thiel feels America doesn't work as well as it used to, and like many libertarian types, is against foreign military intervention. If these two things are much more important to you than other things, it makes logical sense to support Trump.
- Nate75Sanders 10y ago
  I didn't walk away with anywhere near the analysis you did, so I added an edit to my original post. You can't simply hear Thiel's speech and directly get what he wants, because saying it would cause too much backlash. He wants to use the government's massive resources to carry out projects that he's aligned with -- perhaps even that he has control over.

neom 10y ago

Yes, you are totally correct. I love my SF friends are starting to come over to NY, leave the old white men in the valley and burn it down, vive la revolution. ;)

yodsanklai 10y ago
> leave the old white men in the valley Should I apologize for being old and white?
- calibraxis 10y ago
  Depends, have you spent some of that long life fighting for those who don't have your privileges? (Assuming you haven't been unable due to intersecting factors like mental illness or poverty?) Noam Chomsky's an old white man. Doesn't thrill him to spend half his time helping the human race end its wars and self-destruction, but he takes the responsibility. (Even if you did apologize, what difference would it make?)
  - dang 10y ago
    For a long time, you've been using HN primarily for political purposes. That's not a legitimate use of this site, and we've already asked you to stop doing it. In addition, many of your comments (like this one) straddle if not cross the line into personal disrespect. That's also an abuse of this site, so please stop doing that too.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- neom 10y ago
  Depends, have you actively spent your time trying to dismantle the patriarchy? If yes, no, if no, absolutely.
dang 10y ago
This whole divisive rhetoric thing is exactly what we don't want on HN, so please don't post such stuff here, and especially not with bonus race trolling. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12149564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12149564 and marked it off-topic.

thormathison 10y ago

As an attorney and someone in tech, I used to strongly admire Thiel. He left biglaw and took a gamble, and it paid off. But between his support for Trump and the Gawker nonsense, I no longer have any respect for the man. Anyone on record supporting trump is on the wrong side of history.

B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
> on the wrong side of history Nikita Sergeyevich, is that you?
- elgabogringo 10y ago
  Point awarded. Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_will_bury_you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_will_bury_you "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!"
  - _delirium 10y ago
    "History on our side" is a pretty common phrase, used by people of varying political stripes. A quick Google Books search turns up British MPs using it in the 1940s and George H.W. Bush using it in the 1990s, among others.
    - elgabogringo 10y ago
      Backward looking as a proofpoint, yes. Forward looking as a justification, no, it's not that common until recently and - at least to me - has a marxist sound to it.
    - B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
      It's a bit of ideological poison, extracted from the root of the dialectical materialism tree (aka 'scientific socialism', as defined in the poems of Marx and Engels). The allegedly scientific basis is that there is an unstoppable march of historical progress, and you should cheer it on and actively lay waste to the obstacles that are going to be swept aside anyway. (Yes, it's a strange creed.)

mter 10y ago

> 14 said they would not personally do business with him as a result. One of the most interesting things about current politics. I've always found it odd that republicans haven't picked up on this and tried to seize on the opportunity to create an incubator for republican leaning/apolitical companies. Seems like there would be a tremendous amount of opportunity there given the success of fox news, particularly for an apolitical twitter given recent censorship issues.

pythia__ 10y ago
The idea just might be in the air, but there are several ways an attempt at implementing it can go, some of which are less likely than others to succeed through differentiation. Those details should not be neglected. For one, "libertarian" (but explicitly not left-libertarian) would probably be a better first-order approximation of how to position such an incubator (or conference, or...). A Republican incubator could plausibly reject Curtis Yarvin on ideological grounds, which doesn't seem like the goal.
specialist 10y ago
"incubator for republican leaning/apolitical companies" That's precisely what they did. Their focus has been media, think tanks, politics instead of tech. They've been fantastically successful.

elgabogringo 10y ago

Silicon valley is increasingly adopting way too much of the PC groupthink as of late. There's absolutely nothing and nobody that is truly disrupting anything. Even the word "disrupting" has become a cliche adlibs fill in the blank for pitching "new ideas". Gone are the middle-class rebels (jobs/clark) that don't care what anybody thinks, in are the ivy-league-ish conformers that want wall street funding and friendly government regulation (basically everybody. And hey, if wall street and friendly government regulators is what you want and if you have a few hundred grand (maybe a few million) to throw at her foundation or her friends, then Hillary is your gal.

lisper 10y ago
> There's absolutely nothing and nobody that is truly disrupting anything It's not for want of trying. http://urbit.org http://urbit.org And my own humble efforts in this regard: https://sc4.us https://sc4.us
- elgabogringo 10y ago
  Thank you for your efforts. I will read more of this when I get a chance. You are right that the new tech barons are waaaaay too cozy with the government. They travel by private jet with armed bodyguards and share our info with the government and tell us to "relax" and "get along" while we are getting felt up by TSA and having our emails read.
- jackfoxy 10y ago
  > SC4 is Strong Cryptography (or Secure Communications) for non-technical people. Even technical people can't be technical about everything. We need useable and ubiquitous.
- elgabogringo 10y ago
  Oh, and I shouldn't have said "absolutely nothing and nobody". That's not fair or accurate. I could have expressed that sentiment better. Incidentally, it's a POV Thiel shares, I believe.

elgabogringo 10y ago

Honestly, this type of thinking is part of the problem. Silicon Valley should be about ideas and innovation, not alignment with some PC racial quota dogma.

dang 10y ago
Personal attacks are not welcome on HN. Please (re)-read the site guidelines and edit such stuff out of your comments here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12149564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12149564 and marked it off-topic.
- elgabogringo 10y ago
  Fixed. Sorry.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

youngButEager 10y ago

The Left has not helped Silicon Valley much. 1) ageism -- once you hit 40-45yo, you're done. Take a survey of the ages of the people at your company for evidence. Most engineers in their 20s; some in their 30s; almost none in their 40s and beyond 2) sexism -- females are about 50% of the population. But in Silicon Valley? Hiring favors males. Again, look at the companies you have worked at in Silicon Valley over your career. Mostly all male. 3) racial stereotyping -- take a look again at the companies you have worked for over your career. How many blacks there? How many Hispanics? VERY FEW. So the idea that the Left is playing an effective role in the Valley is BOGUS in several dimensions: - AGEISM - SEXISM - BLACK AND LATINO HIRING

pjscott 10y ago
The candidates applying to those jobs are overwhelmingly male, with few blacks and hispanics. Imagine an unbiased hiring process: how would its results look different from what you see now?
- brighteyes 10y ago
  That's a reasonable argument, but some of the facts don't fit it. 7% of tech roles in Apple are black [1], while at Google that figure is just 1%. A 7 times difference is very large. But let's be generous and say that the 1% is 1.5% that was rounded down. The percentage of black tech workers is still almost 5 times higher at Apple than at Google. These are massive companies, not small startups where a single hire skews the figures. So it's fair to say something is going on here - one of those companies might have a biased hiring process. And it looks like it is Google that is biased against black people, since 9% of CS graduates are black [3], far closer to Apple's 7% than Google's 1%. [1] http://www.apple.com/diversity/ http://www.apple.com/diversity/ [2] https://www.google.com/diversity/ https://www.google.com/diversity/ [3] http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/12/silicon-valley-diversity-tech-hiring-computer-science-graduates-african-american-hispanic/14684211/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/12/silicon-valley...
  - DominikR 10y ago

DominikR 10y ago

> Speaking privately, Thiel’s allies could only conjecture reasons for his unexpected partnership with Trump; many expressed frustration with how anyone could support a candidate so unpredictable. I could come up with a few pretty obvious reasons why a gay libertarian like Thiel would support trump. 1) Democrats support the resettling of millions of Muslims to the West that have been indoctrinated in an ideology that calls for killing gays. Currently in 11 Muslim countries acting out homosexuality is punishable by death. In most others they imprisons gays and extra judicial killings of gays by mobs are not persecuted. It is not unreasonable for a gay man to fear Muslims and Muslim culture. 2) Democrats engage in political correctness and in vilification of their political opponents (You don't agree with me? You are like Hitler!) to a degree that people who say the wrong things or support the wrong candidate must fear for their financial and in some cases even physical security. Even a billionaire like Thiel will face repercussions for this as was mentioned in the article: > In my anonymous poll of 42 randomly selected start-up founders from the database CrunchBase, only nine people supported Trump. Fifteen of them opposed Thiel’s speech for Trump, and 14 said they would not personally do business with him as a result. In many areas it is basically open season on anyone that openly supports Trump, people will attack you, people will key your car and strangers will insult you. It says a lot when people like Dilbert creator Scott Adams endorse Clinton because they fear for their personal safety: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145456082991/my-endorsement-for-president-of-the-united-states http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145456082991/my-endorsement-for... This vilification pushed by the Democrats is the exact opposite of freedom and democracy. I totally get why a libertarian would support Trump even if he doesn't like him to at least restore the most basic personal freedoms. 3) Trump is very much anti big government. He wants to reduce its size and remove regulations that inhibit the growth of the private sector. Few libertarians would have a problem with that. Also it isn't sustainable to permanently have a large portion of society completely dependant on government as we can obviously witness by the insane growth of government debt everywhere in the West. This system almost guarantees that poor people will always stay poor and that their children will be poor too as all they know is dependance and submission to the social system. Social systems do not help the poor, they never did. Over the last decades it has gotten bigger and bigger and yet poverty never went down, instead the opposite happened. The same is true for public education which was basically run by liberals since the 80ties. It has gotten so bad that today it can't even guarantee that a child going through this system will not end up as a functional illiterates.