10 ms·

Silicon Valley: A Reality Check

249 points by gbear605 9y ago

prawn 9y ago
For every Silicon Valley hit, there's a fluff piece (or five). And for every genuinely innovative or helpful product, there's a gimmick product or distracting app. Useful piece though even if just for it highlighting these valuable startups.
davidjnelson 9y ago
> some sort of enterprise data solution software application package analytics targeting management something something something “the cloud” that's just flat out hilarious
amirmansour 9y ago
The part about the rockets is off. SpaceX is based in Hawthorne, CA, which is in the Los Angeles area. LA has a high density of aerospace engineers, which is one of the reasons Musk based SpaceX there. Source: Worked there.
- doctorcroc 9y ago
  The spirit of the article was to praise the fruits of SV culture, in which Elon Musk is a revered leader. But yeah, if you want to be pedantic, yes space x is in Southern california.
  - amirmansour 9y ago
    Sure, though mentioning the rockets wasn't even a good example of his point, since every launch gets plenty of media coverage.
  - yardie 9y ago
    If you include companies who aren't in SV in an article about SV. What's the point? I guess any startup that is SV funded is assumed to be a SV startup?
    - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
      Maybe it's a stretch but anything Elon could be seen as an off shoot of the successes of SV. He started and sold Zip2 and PayPal there. He used the money from those ventures to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla. Also iirc much of the capital for these ventures comes from SV players.
    - deleted 9y ago
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- sidlls 9y ago
  It's also misleading because there are a lot of government resources in this "private" innovation effort. That's generally true of the fawning over SpaceX, but in this context it's especially silly.
deleted 9y ago
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hvs 9y ago
This is a good article for pointing out the some of the great work going on in SV and why it's an engine for innovation. That said, the Juicero was ultimately panned because it was a bag squeezing machine (and not a very good one), but it is also the sort of cynical ploy that requires a wifi-connection to "check the expiration date" when we all know it was to enforce their DRMed juice packets. The investors weren't upset that it was a ridiculous product, they were upset that it was suddenly not a Keurig-style landfill-stuffing nightmare that they could charge ridiculous sums to people for DRMed juice. To paint SV with the Juicero brush is unfair, but let's not pretend there aren't tons of people (and VCs) in SV that would kill to get funding (or fund) just that sort of product.
- x2398dh1 9y ago
  That's precisely what SV has become - an engine for innovation, rather than a set geographic area. About 6-7 years ago people started referring to San Fransisco as, "Silicon Valley," which, geographically is not true, but it has become accepted because people know that both areas follow a particular brand of innovation. The culture and ways of creating certain types of business models which may have originated largely in Silicon Valley have spread to other areas, much as the London-based capitalist thinking of the 1600s-1700s has now spread across the globe, or the Dongguan-based capitalist legal structure has spread across China since the 1980s. The term, "Silicon Valley," doesn't even make sense anymore as there are no longer any silicon fabs left in Silicon Valley. When you have all sorts of cities and places around the US saying, "We'll we're the silicon valley of X," or "We're Silicon Prairie." What they are literally saying is, "we're going to start up a bunch of silicon fabs in this region," but what they are actually saying is, "we aspire to be super innovative and follow this particular brand of ethos and culture." Technological capability tends to be spread out over the world, and teams tend to work remotely. The author of this article is not even based in Silicon Valley, he claims to be based in the midwest. I am not based in Silicon Valley but I work with people from there all the time. I also work with people in Denver, Idaho, Montana, Minnesota, Chicago, etc., who are interested in this innovative industry. Wrapping ones identity up in a particular city-based geographic region to an excessive degree is almost as bad as being an outright nationalist. This city-nationalist way thinking prevents the free flow of ideas. When people attack Silicon Valley in the news or blogs, they are creating a thesis against the idea of software and internet-based business models as a whole, rather than a geographic region.
anovikov 9y ago
That's fine, this is how innovation works: for every big hit which changes the world, there are 9 scams and 90 plain failures. This is the way it should be. It was same in the age when the car was invented, or a plane - a ton of people got funded with scam projects, and even more tried to bootstrap obvious nonsense. We just didn't have the Internet back then so it received a lot less coverage.
- rtpg 9y ago
  I don't get this logic. Imagine if doctors had 99 failures for every successful operation. "Well that's just the way it has to be for that success". Sure, maybe Juicero could make money, but maybe $120 million could have been invested into some slightly more useful things? Who gets to decide? Obviously the investors and VCs, and it's their money. VCs simultaenously say that their 1:100 hit rate is part of their big strategies and that everything is luck. You can either be gambling your money or you can be using skill, but you can't do both! (modulo probabilities a bit higher than lottery ticket odds)
  - mwfunk 9y ago
    I think the SV VC scene is as nutty as anybody, but skill and gambling are most definitely not mutually exclusive. It's not analogous to a lottery, it's more like professional gamblers playing blackjack in Vegas. People can and do make a living at it, even though statistically they're still not going to win the majority of the games they participate in.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - anovikov 9y ago
    This is an absolutely wrong comparison. Building startups is R&D, it is not the production, so acceptability of failure is much higher. Better compare it this way: what if 99% of all potential new drugs fail clinical trials and never make it to the pharmacy shelves, of which 9% would be deliberate scams devised by con artists to extract funding? That will be just fine, and in fact, that's what it is in the drug world! We are still, as humanity, making great progress in treating diseases.
deepnotderp 9y ago
I can't recommend this article enough.
- johan_larson 9y ago
  "Enterprise data solution software application package analytics targeting management something something something 'the cloud'" is my phrase of the week.
bradgessler 9y ago
When Silicon Valley screws up, people who want a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer get a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer. Which by all accounts makes pretty good juice. No. When SV screws up we get a 1.5 billion person social network that shows indifference towards "fake news"
- nafey 9y ago
  A Devil's advocate might say you need to balance the good of social networks with its evils
- MS-DDOS 9y ago
  Or the deep social implications of creating self-reinforcing bias loops in the news those 1.5B read, fake or otherwise.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  Is that really different than the fellow who only watches FOX News or the fellow who only watches MSNBC?
  - x2398dh1 9y ago
    I don't know if your question is genuine or whether you were more asking out of anger...it's different from the standpoint of editorial involvement. Fox News and MSNBC have editors who filter the majority of their content, while the users (readers) contribute, "feedback" in terms of what stories are, "hot/trending" as well as comments. In Twitter/Facebook these roles are reversed, with the users filtering the majority of the content, barring outright obscene content. Fox News and MSNBC do have the option of pushing stories which change the conversation, thereby controlling how things are delivered on a story-by-story basis, like an art form whereas Facebook has dials and levers to tweak particular aspects of how sharing is done. I would say news content on Facebook is 90% sharing, 10% curation while news content on MSNBC and Fox are 80% curation and 20% sharing.
- Symmetry 9y ago
  All the research on the matter I've seen showed that people who use Facebook weren't any more susceptible to fake news than people who didn't.
ajobaccount2017 9y ago
I think that Juicero articles have nearly nothing to do with Juicero and a lot to do with the growing sentiment against SV. While there are many good examples in OP's blogpost, most people are familiar only with the past and present unicorns and how they operate. So there is the story of Uber that is going on: an immoral company with abusive management, avoiding taxes, exploiting employees and killing local business. It may be the biggest factor in this. Another factor may be that people are becoming more and more aware and wary of the main modus operandi of the SV internet companies: data hoarding. My point is that Juicero story happened, because people are looking for reasons to dismiss SV, not because Juicero did something exceptional. Unless the reasons for the sentiment are addressed, it probably won't go away.
- watwut 9y ago
  Another factor is backslash against "change the world" bs where every company framed itself as a bunch of saviors saving us all. You was anti-tech outcast if you disagreed, so it stayed bottled up and once someone breaks it, everyone wants to add his piece.
- louithethrid 9y ago
  We ride into town, sack the jobs and torch the communitys- expecting what? Gratitude? Praise for the progress? Gratefullness for the chance to sacrifice onces existance and family on a altar of capitalism with a high priest having aspergers? Actually its a miracle people did take out theire anger onall the other scapegoats offered and not on th valley.
soVeryTired 9y ago
I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion of the article: "When Wall Street screws up, the country is plunged into recession and poor families lose their homes. When Silicon Valley screws up, people who want a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer get a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer." Silicon valley tech is funded by VC money. A substantial portion of that VC money comes from institutional investors (i.e. pension funds). The investors need to see a return at some point. If they don't, the taxpayer will eventually pick up the bill via pension fund bailouts. The chain of causality isn't as clear as with the financial crisis, but all that money has to come from somewhere. If it's squandered, there will be a reckoning eventually.
- dullgiulio 9y ago
  Most probably, a fall of Silicon Valley would make Wall Street tumble. Then, the government would have to save the "evil banksters." Of course, all is fine when the money keeps rolling in, no questions asked. Greedy lending needs greedy borrowers.
- bko 9y ago
  $58.8 Billion in Venture Capital Invested Across U.S. in 2015 [0] For comparison, the largest us bank, JP Morgan had a market value of 300b and about double that in debt I doubt enough people would be hurt in a SV bubble to have enough political pressure for a bailout. Far from too big to fail http://nvca.org/pressreleases/58-8-billion-in-venture-capital-invested-across-u-s-in-2015-according-to-the-moneytree-report-2/ http://nvca.org/pressreleases/58-8-billion-in-venture-capita...
- potato_mOWX2EVX 9y ago
  > institutional investors (i.e. pension funds) I don't pensions funds would invest in Start-UPs since they have a low risk threshold.
  - smeyer 9y ago
    >I don't pensions funds would invest in Start-UPs since they have a low risk threshold. You seem to be mistaken. Here's a 2014 article titled "Behind the Venture Capital Boom: Public Pensions" from Bloomberg. Specifically, the article claims (sourcing a Dow Jones report) that "In 2014, they contributed 20 percent of the sector’s overall haul, down slightly from a 25 percent contribution in 2013." It's not that a massive fraction of each pension fund is in venture capital, but a sizable chunk of the money in venture capital is from pensions. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-23/are-public-pensions-inflating-a-venture-capital-bubble https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-23/are-publi...
philh 9y ago
There's another thing that I think is worth bringing up: sometimes the things that we think are useless are, in fact, useful to the people who buy them. See http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/160054980296/so-of-course-the-news-that-juicero-is-selling-a http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/160054980296/so-of-co... and http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/160099648056/unverified-claim-i-coincidentally-heard-today http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/160099648056/unverifi... > that genre of thinkpiece spawned another genre of thinkpiece, which drops the ‘marvelling at how poorly-conceived or scammy products get hundreds of millions in investor funding’ to just settle on ‘sneering at the fact things are sold which I, an enlightened consumer who sees past the horrors of late-stage capitalism, would never buy’. ... > yes, there exist people for whom getting a package regularly is way less stress and way more convenient than running out to the nearest convenience store. Not everyone lives in cities where the nearest toothbrush is ‘down stairs to the bodega’, not everyone has access to a means of transportation, not everyone can leave their house or pick things up at the store. The store’s hours might be hours you are working. You might be a single parent who can’t nip out for a shopping trip without packing up the kids. You might be disabled. Literally all of those things at once might be true, and are true for many people! ... > unless you’re a big established company for who [$2300+ is] nothing and the cost of the lawyers is no big deal, it’s way safer not to admit that your product is for disabled people or to advertise in a way that suggests it is a solution to a specific condition. And so we get generically incompetent infomercial people I wonder if that's what the EZ-Crunch bowl does. I'm not sure what disability it might help with, but I'm hardly an expert on all the disabilities that exist in the world.
- beaconstudios 9y ago
  I don't understand why the quoted author took issue with Quip in the first place. Modern life is increasingly complicated, and full of small burdens on memory and willpower that add up to a huge background stress load. If I can pay a small amount of money to alleviate just one thing to remember (refreshing my toothbrush every couple of months) and could do that for every other annoying little inconvenience of modern life (car maintenance/insurance/tax, renewing and comparing financial services, buying in food and finding new recipes, tracking my dietary composition and fitness, backing up my computer, expensing mileage, and so many hundreds of little things) then life would be a lot more enjoyable. I have nothing but praise for the companies who focus on the little things and do them well. We could all do with not having to think about and remember so many things.
betageek 9y ago
"When Silicon Valley screws up, people who want a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer get a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer. Which by all accounts makes pretty good juice." Nope. Silicon Valley screwing up has real world consequences. All the "wifi juicer" startups are taking up resources - money, people, time, materials - that would be better spent elsewhere. One of the biggest problems the valley has is that it wants to keep it's 'hey, we're just insanely great guys having some inconsequential fun' image while ignoring it's real world impact.
- cousin_it 9y ago
  Yeah, it was weird reading that argument from Scott, who long ago proposed using dead children as a unit of currency: https://web.archive.org/web/20160318104428/http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160318104428/http://www.raikot...
  - RodericDay 9y ago
    Scott Alexander is the kind of writer that found his niche reassuring wealthy liberal people that, yes, they actually are living in the best of all possible worlds. He's now in the same bucket as Steven Pinker, David Brooks, Doctor Pangloss, etc.
    - bernardlunn 9y ago
      It is also called taking a glass half full view which is no bad thing. Entrepreneurs are naturally more Tigger than Eeyore.
    - adwn 9y ago
      > Scott Alexander is the kind of writer that found his niche reassuring wealthy liberal people that, yes, they actually are living in the best of all possible worlds. Huh?! You must have him confused with someone else. This assessment of his writing is so completely wrong that I don't even know where to start correcting it.
      - 9y ago
henrik_w 9y ago
Related (yesterday in The Guardian): "America has become so anti-innovation – it's economic suicide" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/11/tech-innovation-silicon-valley-juicero https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/11/tech-inno...
jondubois 9y ago
Most of the counter-examples given as being examples of interesting companies sound terrible to me: >> ... Neema, an app to help poor people without access to banks gain financial services... Neema sounds even more useless than Juicero. Poor people have no money so they don't need financial services. >> ... Kangpe, online health services for people in Africa without access to doctors. So they don't have access to doctors but they have an iPhone with internet. Totally realistic. >> Dost Education, helping to teach literacy skills in India via a $1/month course Does the $1 per month include the cost of the computer/iphone, electricity and internet? It's probably cheaper to just pay a private tutor for one hour a day. Teachers aren't that expensive in India. >> ... CBAS, which describes itself as “human bionics plug-and-play" Nice buzzwords but what is the actual point of this? Does it actually improve lives? Is this what people really want or is it what silicon valley wants them to want?
- Laforet 9y ago
  >Poor people have no money so they don't need financial services. We already have it in the form of check cashing and payday loan businesses. >So they don't have access to doctors but they have an iPhone with internet. Totally realistic Don't underestimate penetration of mobile internet in certaim parts of Africa.
- bonniemuffin 9y ago
  225M people in Africa have a smartphone today (I think that's like 20%?): https://qz.com/748354/smartphone-use-has-more-than-doubled-in-africa-in-two-years/ https://qz.com/748354/smartphone-use-has-more-than-doubled-i... Meanwhile in some places there's only 1 doctor per 100,000 people: http://mgafrica.com/article/2015-02-05-hullo-where-have-all-of-africas-doctors-gone http://mgafrica.com/article/2015-02-05-hullo-where-have-all-... So yeah, I do think there are probably a lot of people in Africa with a smartphone but not a doctor.
  - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
    You can get a smartphone in the US for 20USD I can only imagine that number is lower in Africa. In support of your point.
falsedan 9y ago
#NotAllStartups
RodericDay 9y ago
"The unwritten story of the Juicero debacle is that high income inequality causes capital to be misallocated towards luxury production." - Matt Bruenig, with a better take. That, if you look a little closer, also applies to Uber/etc's "sharing servant economy", and even Tesla's "trickle-down environmentalism".
- bbctol 9y ago
  Yeah. Even if Juicero had "succeeded," it would have been research and investment into a $400 juicer.
- ghaff 9y ago
  But is this really anything new. The scale of investment may be different (although I'm not sure by how much if you take into account high-end real estate). But walk down Fifth Avenue in Midtown or the typical Las Vegas mall (or even--especially--the high-end shopping streets in Beijing) and there's plenty of money allocated toward making and selling things for the 1% plus that have nothing to do with tech.
- haltingthoughts 9y ago
  Tech nearly always reached the rich first. "Computers are type writers for rich snobs who can't type."
gwbas1c 9y ago
"there’s not a lot of evidence for silly Juicero-style startups being much of the Silicon Valley business community at all." "Origin (“Keurig for smoothies”), MoveButter, which compares itself to three different companies I’ve never heard of in its first sentence but seems to be grocery-related in some way; Mere Coffee, a better-tasting coffee machine for small businesses" All of those businesses just sound like Juicero. A “Keurig for smoothies” is just Jucero with a small pivot.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  Given that there are thousands of startups that YC alone has funded, and probably hundreds of thousands in the Bay Area, naming three doesn't really contradict the author's point.
pascalxus 9y ago
The biggest problems now, aren't technical, they're more political. For the biggest problems (housing, healthcare and transportation), the biggest barriers to entry are legal/political in nature. I think we'll need venture funds that reflect that, otherwise consumer product innovation will become increasingly meaningless.
norea-armozel 9y ago
I don't know if the writer understands the fundamental problem in the discussion of Silicon Valley centers on the fact that it's the peak of capitalism gone awry. So for every little research project he listed there's ten or more silly "ventures" into DRM'd juicing machines or spying social media apps.
utkarshohm 9y ago
Interesting bit- Latest YC batch has 1/4th each of altruistic, cutting-edge, meat-and-potatoes-for-cloud and Uber-for-tacos companies

249 points by gbear605 9y ago

For every Silicon Valley hit, there's a fluff piece (or five). And for every genuinely innovative or helpful product, there's a gimmick product or distracting app. Useful piece though even if just for it highlighting these valuable startups.

davidjnelson 9y ago

> some sort of enterprise data solution software application package analytics targeting management something something something “the cloud” that's just flat out hilarious

amirmansour 9y ago

The part about the rockets is off. SpaceX is based in Hawthorne, CA, which is in the Los Angeles area. LA has a high density of aerospace engineers, which is one of the reasons Musk based SpaceX there. Source: Worked there.

doctorcroc 9y ago
The spirit of the article was to praise the fruits of SV culture, in which Elon Musk is a revered leader. But yeah, if you want to be pedantic, yes space x is in Southern california.
- amirmansour 9y ago
  Sure, though mentioning the rockets wasn't even a good example of his point, since every launch gets plenty of media coverage.
- yardie 9y ago
  If you include companies who aren't in SV in an article about SV. What's the point? I guess any startup that is SV funded is assumed to be a SV startup?
  - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
    Maybe it's a stretch but anything Elon could be seen as an off shoot of the successes of SV. He started and sold Zip2 and PayPal there. He used the money from those ventures to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla. Also iirc much of the capital for these ventures comes from SV players.
  - deleted 9y ago
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sidlls 9y ago
It's also misleading because there are a lot of government resources in this "private" innovation effort. That's generally true of the fawning over SpaceX, but in this context it's especially silly.

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hvs 9y ago

This is a good article for pointing out the some of the great work going on in SV and why it's an engine for innovation. That said, the Juicero was ultimately panned because it was a bag squeezing machine (and not a very good one), but it is also the sort of cynical ploy that requires a wifi-connection to "check the expiration date" when we all know it was to enforce their DRMed juice packets. The investors weren't upset that it was a ridiculous product, they were upset that it was suddenly not a Keurig-style landfill-stuffing nightmare that they could charge ridiculous sums to people for DRMed juice. To paint SV with the Juicero brush is unfair, but let's not pretend there aren't tons of people (and VCs) in SV that would kill to get funding (or fund) just that sort of product.

x2398dh1 9y ago
That's precisely what SV has become - an engine for innovation, rather than a set geographic area. About 6-7 years ago people started referring to San Fransisco as, "Silicon Valley," which, geographically is not true, but it has become accepted because people know that both areas follow a particular brand of innovation. The culture and ways of creating certain types of business models which may have originated largely in Silicon Valley have spread to other areas, much as the London-based capitalist thinking of the 1600s-1700s has now spread across the globe, or the Dongguan-based capitalist legal structure has spread across China since the 1980s. The term, "Silicon Valley," doesn't even make sense anymore as there are no longer any silicon fabs left in Silicon Valley. When you have all sorts of cities and places around the US saying, "We'll we're the silicon valley of X," or "We're Silicon Prairie." What they are literally saying is, "we're going to start up a bunch of silicon fabs in this region," but what they are actually saying is, "we aspire to be super innovative and follow this particular brand of ethos and culture." Technological capability tends to be spread out over the world, and teams tend to work remotely. The author of this article is not even based in Silicon Valley, he claims to be based in the midwest. I am not based in Silicon Valley but I work with people from there all the time. I also work with people in Denver, Idaho, Montana, Minnesota, Chicago, etc., who are interested in this innovative industry. Wrapping ones identity up in a particular city-based geographic region to an excessive degree is almost as bad as being an outright nationalist. This city-nationalist way thinking prevents the free flow of ideas. When people attack Silicon Valley in the news or blogs, they are creating a thesis against the idea of software and internet-based business models as a whole, rather than a geographic region.

anovikov 9y ago

That's fine, this is how innovation works: for every big hit which changes the world, there are 9 scams and 90 plain failures. This is the way it should be. It was same in the age when the car was invented, or a plane - a ton of people got funded with scam projects, and even more tried to bootstrap obvious nonsense. We just didn't have the Internet back then so it received a lot less coverage.

rtpg 9y ago
I don't get this logic. Imagine if doctors had 99 failures for every successful operation. "Well that's just the way it has to be for that success". Sure, maybe Juicero could make money, but maybe $120 million could have been invested into some slightly more useful things? Who gets to decide? Obviously the investors and VCs, and it's their money. VCs simultaenously say that their 1:100 hit rate is part of their big strategies and that everything is luck. You can either be gambling your money or you can be using skill, but you can't do both! (modulo probabilities a bit higher than lottery ticket odds)
- mwfunk 9y ago
  I think the SV VC scene is as nutty as anybody, but skill and gambling are most definitely not mutually exclusive. It's not analogous to a lottery, it's more like professional gamblers playing blackjack in Vegas. People can and do make a living at it, even though statistically they're still not going to win the majority of the games they participate in.
- deleted 9y ago
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- anovikov 9y ago
  This is an absolutely wrong comparison. Building startups is R&D, it is not the production, so acceptability of failure is much higher. Better compare it this way: what if 99% of all potential new drugs fail clinical trials and never make it to the pharmacy shelves, of which 9% would be deliberate scams devised by con artists to extract funding? That will be just fine, and in fact, that's what it is in the drug world! We are still, as humanity, making great progress in treating diseases.

deepnotderp 9y ago

I can't recommend this article enough.

johan_larson 9y ago
"Enterprise data solution software application package analytics targeting management something something something 'the cloud'" is my phrase of the week.

bradgessler 9y ago

When Silicon Valley screws up, people who want a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer get a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer. Which by all accounts makes pretty good juice. No. When SV screws up we get a 1.5 billion person social network that shows indifference towards "fake news"

nafey 9y ago
A Devil's advocate might say you need to balance the good of social networks with its evils
MS-DDOS 9y ago
Or the deep social implications of creating self-reinforcing bias loops in the news those 1.5B read, fake or otherwise.
hkmurakami 9y ago
Is that really different than the fellow who only watches FOX News or the fellow who only watches MSNBC?
- x2398dh1 9y ago
  I don't know if your question is genuine or whether you were more asking out of anger...it's different from the standpoint of editorial involvement. Fox News and MSNBC have editors who filter the majority of their content, while the users (readers) contribute, "feedback" in terms of what stories are, "hot/trending" as well as comments. In Twitter/Facebook these roles are reversed, with the users filtering the majority of the content, barring outright obscene content. Fox News and MSNBC do have the option of pushing stories which change the conversation, thereby controlling how things are delivered on a story-by-story basis, like an art form whereas Facebook has dials and levers to tweak particular aspects of how sharing is done. I would say news content on Facebook is 90% sharing, 10% curation while news content on MSNBC and Fox are 80% curation and 20% sharing.
Symmetry 9y ago
All the research on the matter I've seen showed that people who use Facebook weren't any more susceptible to fake news than people who didn't.

ajobaccount2017 9y ago

I think that Juicero articles have nearly nothing to do with Juicero and a lot to do with the growing sentiment against SV. While there are many good examples in OP's blogpost, most people are familiar only with the past and present unicorns and how they operate. So there is the story of Uber that is going on: an immoral company with abusive management, avoiding taxes, exploiting employees and killing local business. It may be the biggest factor in this. Another factor may be that people are becoming more and more aware and wary of the main modus operandi of the SV internet companies: data hoarding. My point is that Juicero story happened, because people are looking for reasons to dismiss SV, not because Juicero did something exceptional. Unless the reasons for the sentiment are addressed, it probably won't go away.

watwut 9y ago
Another factor is backslash against "change the world" bs where every company framed itself as a bunch of saviors saving us all. You was anti-tech outcast if you disagreed, so it stayed bottled up and once someone breaks it, everyone wants to add his piece.
louithethrid 9y ago
We ride into town, sack the jobs and torch the communitys- expecting what? Gratitude? Praise for the progress? Gratefullness for the chance to sacrifice onces existance and family on a altar of capitalism with a high priest having aspergers? Actually its a miracle people did take out theire anger onall the other scapegoats offered and not on th valley.

soVeryTired 9y ago

I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion of the article: "When Wall Street screws up, the country is plunged into recession and poor families lose their homes. When Silicon Valley screws up, people who want a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer get a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer." Silicon valley tech is funded by VC money. A substantial portion of that VC money comes from institutional investors (i.e. pension funds). The investors need to see a return at some point. If they don't, the taxpayer will eventually pick up the bill via pension fund bailouts. The chain of causality isn't as clear as with the financial crisis, but all that money has to come from somewhere. If it's squandered, there will be a reckoning eventually.

dullgiulio 9y ago
Most probably, a fall of Silicon Valley would make Wall Street tumble. Then, the government would have to save the "evil banksters." Of course, all is fine when the money keeps rolling in, no questions asked. Greedy lending needs greedy borrowers.
bko 9y ago
$58.8 Billion in Venture Capital Invested Across U.S. in 2015 [0] For comparison, the largest us bank, JP Morgan had a market value of 300b and about double that in debt I doubt enough people would be hurt in a SV bubble to have enough political pressure for a bailout. Far from too big to fail http://nvca.org/pressreleases/58-8-billion-in-venture-capital-invested-across-u-s-in-2015-according-to-the-moneytree-report-2/ http://nvca.org/pressreleases/58-8-billion-in-venture-capita...
potato_mOWX2EVX 9y ago
> institutional investors (i.e. pension funds) I don't pensions funds would invest in Start-UPs since they have a low risk threshold.
- smeyer 9y ago
  >I don't pensions funds would invest in Start-UPs since they have a low risk threshold. You seem to be mistaken. Here's a 2014 article titled "Behind the Venture Capital Boom: Public Pensions" from Bloomberg. Specifically, the article claims (sourcing a Dow Jones report) that "In 2014, they contributed 20 percent of the sector’s overall haul, down slightly from a 25 percent contribution in 2013." It's not that a massive fraction of each pension fund is in venture capital, but a sizable chunk of the money in venture capital is from pensions. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-23/are-public-pensions-inflating-a-venture-capital-bubble https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-23/are-publi...

philh 9y ago

There's another thing that I think is worth bringing up: sometimes the things that we think are useless are, in fact, useful to the people who buy them. See http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/160054980296/so-of-course-the-news-that-juicero-is-selling-a http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/160054980296/so-of-co... and http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/160099648056/unverified-claim-i-coincidentally-heard-today http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/160099648056/unverifi... > that genre of thinkpiece spawned another genre of thinkpiece, which drops the ‘marvelling at how poorly-conceived or scammy products get hundreds of millions in investor funding’ to just settle on ‘sneering at the fact things are sold which I, an enlightened consumer who sees past the horrors of late-stage capitalism, would never buy’. ... > yes, there exist people for whom getting a package regularly is way less stress and way more convenient than running out to the nearest convenience store. Not everyone lives in cities where the nearest toothbrush is ‘down stairs to the bodega’, not everyone has access to a means of transportation, not everyone can leave their house or pick things up at the store. The store’s hours might be hours you are working. You might be a single parent who can’t nip out for a shopping trip without packing up the kids. You might be disabled. Literally all of those things at once might be true, and are true for many people! ... > unless you’re a big established company for who [$2300+ is] nothing and the cost of the lawyers is no big deal, it’s way safer not to admit that your product is for disabled people or to advertise in a way that suggests it is a solution to a specific condition. And so we get generically incompetent infomercial people I wonder if that's what the EZ-Crunch bowl does. I'm not sure what disability it might help with, but I'm hardly an expert on all the disabilities that exist in the world.

beaconstudios 9y ago
I don't understand why the quoted author took issue with Quip in the first place. Modern life is increasingly complicated, and full of small burdens on memory and willpower that add up to a huge background stress load. If I can pay a small amount of money to alleviate just one thing to remember (refreshing my toothbrush every couple of months) and could do that for every other annoying little inconvenience of modern life (car maintenance/insurance/tax, renewing and comparing financial services, buying in food and finding new recipes, tracking my dietary composition and fitness, backing up my computer, expensing mileage, and so many hundreds of little things) then life would be a lot more enjoyable. I have nothing but praise for the companies who focus on the little things and do them well. We could all do with not having to think about and remember so many things.

betageek 9y ago

"When Silicon Valley screws up, people who want a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer get a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer. Which by all accounts makes pretty good juice." Nope. Silicon Valley screwing up has real world consequences. All the "wifi juicer" startups are taking up resources - money, people, time, materials - that would be better spent elsewhere. One of the biggest problems the valley has is that it wants to keep it's 'hey, we're just insanely great guys having some inconsequential fun' image while ignoring it's real world impact.

cousin_it 9y ago
Yeah, it was weird reading that argument from Scott, who long ago proposed using dead children as a unit of currency: https://web.archive.org/web/20160318104428/http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160318104428/http://www.raikot...
- RodericDay 9y ago
  Scott Alexander is the kind of writer that found his niche reassuring wealthy liberal people that, yes, they actually are living in the best of all possible worlds. He's now in the same bucket as Steven Pinker, David Brooks, Doctor Pangloss, etc.
  - bernardlunn 9y ago
    It is also called taking a glass half full view which is no bad thing. Entrepreneurs are naturally more Tigger than Eeyore.
  - adwn 9y ago
    > Scott Alexander is the kind of writer that found his niche reassuring wealthy liberal people that, yes, they actually are living in the best of all possible worlds. Huh?! You must have him confused with someone else. This assessment of his writing is so completely wrong that I don't even know where to start correcting it.
    - 9y ago

henrik_w 9y ago

Related (yesterday in The Guardian): "America has become so anti-innovation – it's economic suicide" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/11/tech-innovation-silicon-valley-juicero https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/11/tech-inno...

jondubois 9y ago

Most of the counter-examples given as being examples of interesting companies sound terrible to me: >> ... Neema, an app to help poor people without access to banks gain financial services... Neema sounds even more useless than Juicero. Poor people have no money so they don't need financial services. >> ... Kangpe, online health services for people in Africa without access to doctors. So they don't have access to doctors but they have an iPhone with internet. Totally realistic. >> Dost Education, helping to teach literacy skills in India via a $1/month course Does the $1 per month include the cost of the computer/iphone, electricity and internet? It's probably cheaper to just pay a private tutor for one hour a day. Teachers aren't that expensive in India. >> ... CBAS, which describes itself as “human bionics plug-and-play" Nice buzzwords but what is the actual point of this? Does it actually improve lives? Is this what people really want or is it what silicon valley wants them to want?

Laforet 9y ago
>Poor people have no money so they don't need financial services. We already have it in the form of check cashing and payday loan businesses. >So they don't have access to doctors but they have an iPhone with internet. Totally realistic Don't underestimate penetration of mobile internet in certaim parts of Africa.
bonniemuffin 9y ago
225M people in Africa have a smartphone today (I think that's like 20%?): https://qz.com/748354/smartphone-use-has-more-than-doubled-in-africa-in-two-years/ https://qz.com/748354/smartphone-use-has-more-than-doubled-i... Meanwhile in some places there's only 1 doctor per 100,000 people: http://mgafrica.com/article/2015-02-05-hullo-where-have-all-of-africas-doctors-gone http://mgafrica.com/article/2015-02-05-hullo-where-have-all-... So yeah, I do think there are probably a lot of people in Africa with a smartphone but not a doctor.
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
  You can get a smartphone in the US for 20USD I can only imagine that number is lower in Africa. In support of your point.

falsedan 9y ago

#NotAllStartups

RodericDay 9y ago

"The unwritten story of the Juicero debacle is that high income inequality causes capital to be misallocated towards luxury production." - Matt Bruenig, with a better take. That, if you look a little closer, also applies to Uber/etc's "sharing servant economy", and even Tesla's "trickle-down environmentalism".

bbctol 9y ago
Yeah. Even if Juicero had "succeeded," it would have been research and investment into a $400 juicer.
ghaff 9y ago
But is this really anything new. The scale of investment may be different (although I'm not sure by how much if you take into account high-end real estate). But walk down Fifth Avenue in Midtown or the typical Las Vegas mall (or even--especially--the high-end shopping streets in Beijing) and there's plenty of money allocated toward making and selling things for the 1% plus that have nothing to do with tech.
haltingthoughts 9y ago
Tech nearly always reached the rich first. "Computers are type writers for rich snobs who can't type."

gwbas1c 9y ago

"there’s not a lot of evidence for silly Juicero-style startups being much of the Silicon Valley business community at all." "Origin (“Keurig for smoothies”), MoveButter, which compares itself to three different companies I’ve never heard of in its first sentence but seems to be grocery-related in some way; Mere Coffee, a better-tasting coffee machine for small businesses" All of those businesses just sound like Juicero. A “Keurig for smoothies” is just Jucero with a small pivot.

nostrademons 9y ago
Given that there are thousands of startups that YC alone has funded, and probably hundreds of thousands in the Bay Area, naming three doesn't really contradict the author's point.

pascalxus 9y ago

The biggest problems now, aren't technical, they're more political. For the biggest problems (housing, healthcare and transportation), the biggest barriers to entry are legal/political in nature. I think we'll need venture funds that reflect that, otherwise consumer product innovation will become increasingly meaningless.

norea-armozel 9y ago

I don't know if the writer understands the fundamental problem in the discussion of Silicon Valley centers on the fact that it's the peak of capitalism gone awry. So for every little research project he listed there's ten or more silly "ventures" into DRM'd juicing machines or spying social media apps.

utkarshohm 9y ago

Interesting bit- Latest YC batch has 1/4th each of altruistic, cutting-edge, meat-and-potatoes-for-cloud and Uber-for-tacos companies