22 ms·
Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
- have_faith 9y agoSilicon Valley isn't a brand. People don't fall out of love with London or New York when some stupid products fail there.
- aylmao 9y agoFunny how one of your examples is New York, probably one of the world's strongest city brands, especially after the whole "Big Apple", and "I heart NY" campaigns targeted at promoting tourism.
- Apocryphon 9y agoPretty sure there is a lot of antipathy right now towards London as the centre of European finance. For NY, just replace it with Wall Street.
- josephv 9y agoGrabs popcorn
- bluetwo 9y agoHa.
- blahman2 9y agoAre most journalists nowadays a bunch of edgy teenagers? I get it they need clicks but man isn't the bar low...
- notfromhere 9y agowho else would work for the low wages?
- Caveman_Coder 9y agoAfter living in SV for most of my life, I decided to move to the Southwest to work in an industry that, in my opinion, is actually a public good (utility industry). It's a bit slower paced, but the engineering problems are the same and the community is much better.
- bluetwo 9y agoI'm curious about 'community is much better'... any more info? I don't live in SV.
- Caveman_Coder 9y agoWarning: totally subjective opinions to follow... The PHX community is "much better" in my opinion because the people I meet at various Dev groups aren't doing it because they want to be "software-developer famous"...if you know what I mean. When I was in SV I went to tons of meetups where it seemed like the devs were just trying to create something to get themselves "likes/favs/PRs/followers/etc" on HN/GitHub/Twitter. It was a weird kind of in-group celebrity that I detest. Here in PHX, I don't really see any of that. I went to a Linux Users Meetup and it was pretty chill, nobody was pushing their GitHub repo/blog/Twitter on the audience, it was just a laid back discussion on the latest happenings, but not the software-developer-gossip nonsense. When I go to a .NET developer group meetup, we discuss .NET Core and Azure...just the facts. We don't discuss the latest thing Scott Hanselman said on Twitter, or what so-and-so said about the latest <insert topic>. The discussion tend to be about the tech, how to use it, and what the new features allow us to do, that's it. Some of us don't want to be famous for our GitHub, we want to work with nice teammates on cool engineering problems that matter. I found my current employment (working on electrical grid software for a major SW utility company) to fit perfectly with my interests and background.
- bluetwo 9y agoThanks for the insight.
- 9y ago
- wpietri 9y agoThe description of the symptoms here has a lot of resonance for me. I was just talking with the CEO I worked for in 2001; she's busy putting together her next startup. We had a good conversation about what I was calling "unicorn fever", the way the desire for instant massive valuation has distorted so much of what we thought good about the startup ecosystem. The article calling this factory farming seems spot on to me.
- 8draco8 9y agoIt's not the problem of Silicon Valley it's the problem of investors throwing money at anything that is located in SV. You can still make some good money in SV you just have to invest in a startup with real future not just a good pitch. I don't think there will be big D-day when all unicorns will fail. We will see more and more stupid startups to fail (Juicero, Soccer Genomics etc.) and lower willingnes to invest into dumb startups but those that have the future like Dropbox, Github, WeWork etc.
- hienyimba 9y agoTechcrunch forgets its a "Part" of Silicon Valley. Most Valley stories cannot be told without Techcrunch in it e.g the T.v show - Silicon Valley.
- FussyZeus 9y agoI don't understand the point of this observation; are you saying they aren't allowed to criticize? Or that they are guilty of the same things? Or that they're somehow complicit? What are you getting at?
- snerbles 9y agoWe become desensitized to certain forms of stimuli over time. Someone with horrendous body odor may not even notice it at first, but once he can actually smell it the stench is making his neighbors gag. In other words, it's bad enough that TechCrunch has noticed.
- snerbles 9y agoThe author danced around but missed the detached, holier-than-thou elitism that radiates from the entire Bay Area.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoThat's like saying an atom bomb produces a warm glow.
- CalChris 9y agoThere's a huge difference between being elite (we are and I sure am) and elitism. In fact the author stabs at the heart of Silicon Valley elitism: Your ideas are only as good as the people in the room. And your door is shut to most people.
- Clubber 9y agoI don't think I've ever heard someone call themselves elite outside of a gaming session. You should probably use the numbers 1337 though. Wouldn't calling yourself elite, seemingly unaware of what that projects to people count as elitism?
- carbocation 9y agoAs someone outside of SV (Nevadan living in Boston and practicing medicine), I think this article largely misses the mark. I think it is true that there is a diversity problem in SV, just like there is a diversity problem in medicine. It’s a problem, because there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields. But that’s probably the only point that resonates. The criticism of Juicero and Theranos being emblematic of focusing on the wrong problems is not sensible. Companies fail, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes due to dishonest behavior, etc. If Theranos had the tech they claimed to have, it would have been richly rewarded (outshined only by the consumer surplus it would have created). The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV, and then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem as it proceeds to its logical extreme.
- gotthemwmds 9y ago" there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields." Sure there is: racist and sexist white males making decisions and developing a workplace culture that prevents them from attaining those positions. And the sooner people accept this, the better for everyone.
- daveguy 9y agoEven better when we all recognize that it doesn't take a conscious racist or sexist decision. There are all kinds of ways to rationalize "better culture fit".
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jabot 9y agoTechnically that would not be an a priori reason. IMHO you are right though about discrimination existing.
- 201709User 9y agoWhat about plumbers and garbage collectors gender diversity? Is it "evil patriarchy" or "ugh it's icky"?
- grabcocque 9y agoThat's not the real reason public opinion has shifted sharply against denizens of the Valley. That would be Uber. A company so sociopathic, so awful, so entitled, so full of loathsome self-aggrandising bullies they became an unwitting figurehead for hatred of the Valley. And Uber make it so easy to hate them.
- onewaystreet 9y agoThe fact that Uber hasn't suffered any noticeable loss of business suggests that this is false. Or at least that it doesn't matter if people love you or not.
- grabcocque 9y agoYou don't have to be loved to be profitable. That said Uber is currently neither, nor is it likely to be any time soon. But my point is that Uber's reputation plumbing the abyssal depths, and to a lesser extent AirBnB's, is dragging down the reputation of the rest of the valley.
- emidln 9y agoComcast is the poster child for hated but profitable.
- wavefunction 9y agoI think those early SV days were probably not that way. Hard to see Hewlett and Packard or the folks at Fairchild or some of the other firms out there acting the way SV folks act in 2017. Can you imagine Bill Hewlett kicking some kids off a field because he had reserved it for his kick-ball team?
- atonse 9y agoThis article feels mostly spot on. Except I do see at least investors like YC making an effort to broaden the kinds of investments they make, more into actual "public good" type companies like in the education, health, and non-profit sectors.
- vasilipupkin 9y agothis article is so nonsensical, it's almost comical, I don't even know where to start. Ok, how about calling it a problem that 19 out of 20 investments will fail. Willing to invest like that is a great thing about SV, not a bad thing!
- mixedbit 9y ago19 of 20 investments fail because VCs equate success with > 1B$ valuation. Among the failed companies there are plenty that produce great and useful products but need to shut down because the VC deals forced them to grow to unsustainable size.
- vasilipupkin 9y agook, but those 19 investments didn't have to take VC money. if they produced great and useful products, then why couldn't they grow organically, borrow from a bank, etc.? I mean it's just complete nonsense to complain about the fact that you failed using someone else's money.
- mixedbit 9y agoThey could grow organically and there are plenty of companies that do, but this is not the Silicon Valley way, and this is what the article is complaining about.
- vasilipupkin 9y agowell, to be honest, I don't get that criticism. Why does it need to be the silicon valley way? you want to build a 10 million dollar business? you can do that in Boise, Idaho without VC funding. I mean the article is just clickbait.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoSV will adapt or die. It's how stuff like this always goes. What's left of domestic manufacturing adapted. Coal is basically dead. If SV picks latter option I just hope the corpse doesn't stink up the rest of society. (obviously this is a long ways off because inertia but it's something to think about if you think you'll retire by selling your SV property to the next sucker)
- autokad 9y agosv has a diversity problem, but I think its more geographic than related to skin color.
- ryanb23 9y agowhat does that mean?
- autokad 9y agopeople from the midwest and south are largely not represented in sv companies. sv has done a great job at basically hiring the same type of person over and over. I believe this is mostly because of their preference for a narrow set of universities, among other things.
- imaginenore 9y agoIt's more of a gap between the educated in the useful fields vs everyone else. And it's not going anywhere. The people who don't have the capacity to learn complex and useful things are left behind in our quickly accelerating world.
- austenallred 9y agoPeople generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t. Ask the average person what brands and products they like and use the most (or just look at the data on where and how they spend their time and money) and you’ll see that Silicon Valley is doing just fine in the eyes of the populace. In fact, Silicon Valley has never been more influential. Ask people to go to a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, Uber/Lyft and they’ll call you crazy. But the media knows that, so it goes after the losers: It’s easy to point and laugh at the 100 things that look stupid, without realizing that “lol this social network for college kids thinks it’s worth $150m” seems just as crazy. Silicon Valley is the place that will be wrong funding Juicero in order to be right funding Facebook. You can’t have one without the other. (As an aside, I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money.) But the media that sees itself losing its power, losing influence, and losing money. Of course they hate tech.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jrs95 9y agoI think some of the people that do have a problem with SV or tech in general also just have a problem with people they perceive as having lower social status succeeding. It's not anti-intellectualism exactly, but it sort of parallels it in my opinion.
- gt_ 9y agoI agree. It is not the classic anti-intellectualism, but I think a refined version of it.
- austenallred 9y agoIt’s old money vs. new money. New money doesn’t respect the culture, rituals, and hierarchy created by the old guard. And because tech is printing money it doesn’t have to.
- julianozen 9y agoTo you, in the words of one Silicon Valley investor, this seems like “the only logical conclusion.” To the average person, this seems like the height of arrogance. People are uncomfortable with universal basic income because you’re essentially saying their labor isn’t worth anything — but you don’t see it! I think this point is really missing from most UBI conversations that happen on HN. UBI is the answer when you believe that all economic productivity must come from the US coasts. I think a lot of start ups have thrived trying to solve the problem of high density cities. Airbnb and Uber are start ups that get created when your biggest problems are high rent and poor public transit. I would be interested in seeing startups trying to solve suburban problems and producing suburban jobs. I think the fact that are very few companies like this is indicative of our increasing cultural divide.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago>I would be interested in seeing startups trying to solve suburban problems and producing suburban jobs. I think the fact that are very few companies like this is indicative of our increasing cultural divide You'll have an uphill battle because "environment". Nobody wants to invest in making commuting more bearable or making areas with non-city population densities more environmentally friendly. Everyone wants to hitch their wagon into whatever the latest scheme to cram people into carbon neutral shipping containers.
- rjsw 9y agoI don't see UBI as saying that someone's labour isn't worth anything, it just allows them the freedom to keep experimenting in order to find out what it is worth when applied to different jobs.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> UBI is the answer when you believe that all economic productivity must come from the US coasts. No, it's not. UBI is the answer when you recognize that capitalism directs the gains from productivity (whether made in the US coasts or anywhere else) to a narrow class of megacapitalists, that it's gotten more efficient at that over time, and that the welfare state of the modern mixed economy is an overly complicated, inefficient corrective measure for that that leaves lots of gaps for people to fall through and responds slowly to changes in the details of the mechanisms of capitalist wealth capture. UBI is the simple, low-overhead, responsive implementation of a mixed economy, which gets out of the way—compared to classic welfare state programs—of realizing the value of labor, especially including labor marked as worthless and prohibited from sale by minimum wage laws.
- RestlessMind 9y agoThe article is shallow and it would be easy to rip apart most of its arguments (eg. [1][2]). But the worrying trend is that such articles are now appearing very regularly, and at some point perception becomes reality. At this pace, SV will be the Wall Street in no time, if it is not already. [1] > You’re churning out companies that are raising hundreds of millions of dollars, and going bankrupt in literal satires of themselves Yes, and that is an aspect of capitalism. You take risk on crazy ideas. Some of them will be a fancy juicer, but some of them will also be an electric car. [2] > Your companies are now solving “my-world problems” (food delivery, cold-pressed, on-demand juice) versus the “real-world problems” you used to solve Google wants to deploy Loon in Puerto Rico to offer connectivity. Tesla offered to rebuild Puerto Rico electrical grid based on Solar energy. If these are not real world problems affecting everything, I don't know what the author has in mind.
- gggdvnkhmbgjvbn 9y agoYeah I think little has changed in SV in the last year compared to the near 180 in public opinion. My theory is that journalists and readers who used to hate trump as a hobby are bored with the lack of scandal and have turned to SV, the only other interesting new thing in the us.
- Applejinx 9y agoIf there was another interesting new thing, how would you know?
- fancyfacebook 9y agoGoogle is not "deploying Loon" and Tesla is not "rebuilding the grid" out of the kindness of their heart, the problem is everyone already sees phase two coming and doesn't like it. It's not a media problem, it's pattern recognition.
- chillingeffect 9y agoJust to add on to your point, notice the writer is on the Board of a VC firm that does business inside and outside SV. I see huge potential for him trying to deface SV for the sake of his other projects.
- jabot 9y agoThis article bashes Juicero - rightfully, in my (humble) opinion; it is a stupid and wasteful idea, and ridiculously overpriced. However, it has that in common with Keurig - which is a huge success. My point is that just because something is stupid and wasteful it doesn't have to fail...
- ghaff 9y agoThat's actually fair and I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point in the whole Juicero debacle, someone uttered the phrase "Keurig for Juice" or something along those lines. The thing with Keurigs and the like is that there's actually a market for making single cups of hot coffee. I don't personally own or want one but it's a compromise that a lot of people are willing to make both at home and the workplace in exchange for convenience. (Really Keurig is effectively positioned as a better instant coffee.) But there were very real differences between Keurig and Juicero that make one costly/wasteful/but fills a niche and the other just stupid.
- JangoSteve 9y agoHa, that's one of the reasons that my answer is always the same whenever someone asks what I think of their idea: "Whatever I think of the merits of your idea are almost completely irrelevant. I've seen horrible ideas succeed, and I've seen great ideas fail for irrelevant reasons. What I can offer, however, is a list of challenges I think you'll have."
- jedrek 9y agoWhat this piece misses the obvious financial privilege that many startups have. Uber is slaying yellow/black cabs around the world, but only by massively subsidizing its rides through investment capital. Amazon is the world's largest store, by working on margins that don't let people who actually expect a return on the investment compete. It's gotten to the point that if a company actually does things the old fashioned way: taking a small seed, creating a product that people want, selling it and expanding based on that revenue... we ooh and ahh, calling it "organic growth". Everywhere else, it's just called "building a business". Pair that with the "thought leaders" who dismiss businesses that allow people to build a life for themselves and their families. Because Silicon Valley isn't really about making things anymore, it's about making financial bets. And that's a shame - watching billionaires blow money on reinventing the vending machine isn't much fun.
- pathseeker 9y ago>but only by massively subsidizing its rides through investment capital This is not true for many cities. Most of the subsidizing only happens in new markets to get people interested. Uber/Lyft are still better than cabs when unsubsidized.
- jedrek 9y agoThe subsidizing happens to find drivers and passengers. When Uber came to my city, it was months before I paid for a ride, and drivers told us all about how they were getting cash bonuses for working high traffic times. No matter how optimistic you are about the product, Uber isn't worth a fraction of its valuation without the constant expansion, and the constant expansion is impossible without very inexpensive money that is VC.
- ExactoKnight 9y agoThe cheaper price comes almost entirely from the driver making less. Love it or hate it, that's really the big difference now that most existing cab companies now have Uber-like dispatch technology.
- 9y ago
- staticelf 9y agoAs a non-american and as a person who has never been to SV but love the idea that is described in the article that anyone can start up a company I would like to adress the points in the article. 1. Your ideas are only as good as the people in the room. And your door is shut to most people. Well, if anyone can start a company the door isn't shut. I don't buy that white men only invests in white men. I think people invest in companies (for the most part) where investors think they will gain the most money from. 2. Your rainforest of innovation has turned into a factory farm. Totally agree, this is why startups should bootstrap and perhaps not start up in Sillicon Valley. Perhaps it is better to start up somewhere cheaper. I think countries of the world should make it easier and less expensive to start a company. That is the best recipee for success in my view. If it is less of a risk to create a company, more people will do it. I have been wanting to start a company for years but haven't just yet because of the economic game. I am still planning to do it, hopefully pretty soon but I want to save up enough so I can run my company for at least 1-2 years without any other income. In my country Sweden, unfortunately, smaller companies get taxated pretty hard which makes any earning disappear. You will need a pretty good stream of incoming cash to be able to survive. Since I do want to create a product and not simply be a consultant this is much harder to achieve.
- s73ver_ 9y ago"Well, if anyone can start a company the door isn't shut. I don't buy that white men only invests in white men. I think people invest in companies (for the most part) where investors think they will gain the most money from." Numbers don't lie. And there are countless examples of times where women-led startups couldn't even get meetings with VCs, but after adding a male founder, suddenly were asked to come in for meetings. "I think countries of the world should make it easier and less expensive to start a company. That is the best recipee for success in my view. If it is less of a risk to create a company, more people will do it." Most of the costs are not something that countries can help with. You're still going to need funds for equipment, salaries, and such.
- qbaqbaqba 9y ago>And there are countless examples Do you mind posting any?
- CalChris 9y agoYour rainforest of innovation has turned into a factory farm. If ever any sentence better described YC, its brethren incubators and demo days, I haven’t read it.
- redleggedfrog 9y agoThe fundamental problem with this article is it presupposes that America used to love Silicon Valley. I think Silicon Valley loves Silicon Valley, and investors kinda-sorta love Silicon Valley, and the rest of us like Apple and begrudgingly use Facebook, because, well, what else is there? It'd be nice if Silicon Valley did something other than make software to keep our noses in our phones.
- shoefly 9y agoThe small midwestern town from which I hail is rotting. The residents could never afford the luxuries flowing here in the valley. They are angry. They are huge Trump supporters. They don't want handouts. They want jobs. They want to contribute. They don't want to leave their homes. They are stuck.
- lostboys67 9y agoSo they do want handouts /subsidies then
- deadmetheny 9y agoThis is remarkably tone-deaf. I also originally hailed from a small Midwestern town. The lack of available work is not a pretty sight, and suggesting that people should just uproot themselves and move somewhere else is not a solution for a number of reasons (family/friends, lack of money to move in the first place, etc). It's no small wonder that people voted for Trump - even though his promises were pretty obviously full of hot air, the opposition was (and still does) not even attempt to mask their total contempt for 'flyover country'. You will reap what you sow.
- crush-n-spread 9y agoTone-deaf or not, you have to go where the work is. You might have to pick up a laptop and learn to code. Maybe that means uprooting your family and finding new friends. You have to make it work. To not find work is to not survive.
- Clubber 9y ago>You might have to pick up a laptop and learn to code. I'm sure you can't honestly believe this will work for the vast majority of people in the US. Either you don't value your trade, or you are simply unwilling to seriously discuss the issue.
- 9y ago
- kevmo 9y agoThe overlords of Silicon Valley need to do a bit more to turn America's best minds towards solving serious social problems. Personal anecdote: Right now, I am building software that automates the process of filing super-simple Chapter 7 bankruptcies. We give the product away for free.[1] Technologically, this is a really straightforward problem and solution: You just collect some documents and fill out a long questionnaire, fill out a PDF, show up to a couple of meetings, then you've discharged a bunch of unsecured debt and have a fresh start in life and the economy. There should literally be millions of these Chapter 7 bankruptcies filed every year[2]... but nobody has built the software before! Despite its enormous potential impact and amazingly low cost (we have two full-time employees, though we could use more), nobody has really tackled the problem because there's no way to simultaneously get rich while building the most successful product.[3] There is a crazy amount of low-hanging fruit out there like this. Much of it could be plucked by small, bright teams of the sort Silicon Valley has in abundance. The most powerful people just need to dedicate a little more money and 5-20% of their time to it - not just money, but serious, ongoing advice. [4] ----- [1] https://Upsolve.org https://Upsolve.org. The product is free and we're a non-profit because you trigger an avalanche of regulatory activity if you try to make money doing this. We've also been able to garner an incredible amount of institutional (judicial) buy-in because we are a non-profit. [2] http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~miwhite/white-jleo-reprint.pdf http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~miwhite/white-jleo-reprint.pdf [3] Our #1 success metric is simply "number of Chapter 7 bankruptcy discharges received". [4] Real advice - not sending it down the black hole of billionaire philanthropy. Without even getting into the subject of how those institutions grind their founders' personal axes, there is a huge qualitative difference between their advice and Silicon Valley-level "Let's build a huge thing on a lean budget" advice.
- lostboys67 9y agoAnd how would SV (outwith funding a civil war) solve the problems cased by an devolved and outdated political system that is more appropriate for serving the needs of 18th century rich landowners?
- noonespecial 9y agoThat is a really cool idea. Make sure to do a Show HN on the Monday morning after you launch.
- whistlerbrk 9y agoDear media: You created a new scapegoat for systematic inequality distracting from the corrupt society we live in, and lo and behold people buy into it.
- doener 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15431938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15431938
- kpwagner 9y agoThis article misses the mark. Spot on.
- nsxwolf 9y agoMiddle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore. There will be torches and pitchforks coming for you.
- api 9y agoIt reminds me of the endless ghettoes of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, etc.) where people are basically warehoused and left to jack into "simstim" and rot. In reality the pitchforks will come out as you say and this endless ghetto will be paired with a total surveillance police state to contain the angry aimless masses. Perhaps not coincidentally this is exactly what Silicon Valley seems to be building. Pro tip: cyberpunk fiction was largely dystopian. I was briefly into the idea of basic income until I thought about it more deeply. It's basically consigning the bulk of humanity to the status of "surplus flesh." There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true. Humans are social beings. We are not going to become those things unless we are surrounded by other human beings who are those things and that only happens when we are surrounded by a lot of people who are doing things. That's not going to happen if there's nothing to do. Without a culture of opportunity and vision people turn inward to drugs (opiate epidemic), various forms of Skinner box masturbation (game and social media addiction), or lash out. The latter takes the form of disorganized lone nut mass shootings like Las Vegas or organized political fanaticism like ISIS or neo-fascism. People don't like to be worthless. The solution is not basic income. The solution is a massive increase in our ambition as a species. Here are some real first world problems we could be tackling: - Radically extending the human life span - Exterminating mental illness through a deep and diligent study of the human brain, and also possibly increasing human intelligence in general. - Colonizing the Moon and Mars - Replacing our entire fossil fuel based infrastructure with renewables, storage, and possibly some nuclear in areas where those are not sufficient. - Connecting all our major cities with high speed rail or maybe even more exotic things like underground hyperloop transit. - Rebuilding suburbia with modern knowledge about design including the social impact of the built environment. Options 3, 4, 5, and 6 would employ quite a few people. ... and so on. Basic income is the conservative risk-averse option. The things I listed above (and more) are for civilizations who are not afraid to spend a little money and put people to work. Part of the problem is the "developed world" narrative. Start with the premise that our children should properly regard us as un-developed, then commit a few trillion to becoming developed. If our children and our grandchildren do not look back at us as ignorant and backward we have failed. "When I was your age we only lived on one planet, drove around manual cars that burned dead stuff, and we only lived about 80 years and had a 100 median IQ." Edit: I didn't vote for Trump but when he won I did hold out a little hope that he might be some kind of crypto-liberal who would actually make good on that "trillion dollar infrastructure plan" talk. (A trillion is too low but it's a start.) Alas it appears that this isn't the case and he really is as bad as he looked.
- nadam 9y ago"So, what can you do about it?" As much as I love the Sillicon Valley, disproportional concentration of venture capital and brain drain to a geographical location is not the healthiest thing in the world. I am a big proponent of democratization of early-stage investment for years. Now it started to happen in the cryptocurrency world. It is wild west now, but who knows how it turns out?
- nitwit005 9y agoThis focuses on finance, and honestly doesn't seem that different than the gripes people had against banks 50 years ago. White men in charge? Not helping solve inequality?
- jeffdavis 9y agoSincere question: what is problematic about the word "bodega"?
- Klockan 9y agoCultural appropriation of Mexican small shops. Note that I don't really see the issue, the name describes their business well.
- jeffdavis 9y agoThat was my question... I have never heard the word "bodega" is a negative context. Nearly everything (especially having to do with food) is a cultural reference of some kind -- nothing bad about that. And a lot is not very authentic and may count as some kind of "appropriation". That's not really avoidable when cultures mix (as they do in the US).
- southphillyman 9y agoBodegas traditionally are run by Puerto Ricans and Dominicians in the NE (Not Mexicans). Taken into a NY-centric context it's easier to understand the backlash in a rapidly gentrifying and appropriating atmosphere.
- jeffdavis 9y agoI still don't get it. Cultural appropriation is everywhere, and the inevitable and obvious result of cultural mixing. What makes this different? Maybe it has more to do with economic competition than cultural sensitivities?
- Apocryphon 9y agoIt is a Xoogler-founded startup called Bodega offering a product that would compete with, and potentially replace, real-world working-class owned bodegas.
- 9y ago
- Mugwort 9y agoPeople like Apple. Google and Facebook are a different story.
- Mefis 9y agoWhat's wrong with naming a startup Bodega?
- nailer 9y agoThe startup was aiming to replace existing corner stores, which are called 'bodegas' in many parts of the US because they're typically run by Latino people. Using a Latino name for a company of (likely middle-class, likely Asian and European rather than Latino) engineers seeking to disintermediate working class bodega owners was the problem.
- mrexroad 9y agoWhat about the role that private / investment banks have been increasingly playing in fundraising over past 5-10 years? Things seemed a lot different 10 years ago. I mean, some of us even had to take pay cuts to join pre-series A startups...
- arjie 9y agoYeah, but Silicon Valley doesn't need their love. It needs their dollars. And they love giving Silicon Valley the dollars.
- d_burfoot 9y agoHere's another view of the problem: the "average Joe" American is starting to hate all the centralized and monolithic institutions in the country, because he sees them as being corrupt, privileged, and primarily concerned with cementing their own power. It used to be that SV was a rebel and outsider going against Washington and Wall Street, but increasingly SV is just another pillar of the power structure.
- debt 9y agoI think it'd be an interesting startup idea to decentralized all the monolithic services. Create an Uber for City X(ie Uber for London, Uber for Chicago, etc.). Allow the municipalities to run those services. And do the same for Airbnb, Yelp, Google, Facebook etc.
- Can_Not 9y agoI love this idea. I use to work for a "The WordPress of $INDUSTRY" startup and letting people rum their own thing and self brand was very fulfilling work. I think it's important to protect specific categories of small businesses (or simply markets that shouldn't need to be overly centralized) from the growth of underhanded heavy hitting centralized monopolies. I call it AmaZoning when a large player comes in and says "I'm the new middle man".
- camel_Snake 9y agoI've always thought cities should do this with regard to bottled water. It's one of those things you feel guilty spending money on but the convenience now and then is just worth it. But if it was local, I wouldn't feel as bad about environmental impact and the profits would hopefully go towards something useful like filling potholes or education. I'm ambivalent when it comes to bottle water but I certainly don't like giving Nestle my money.
- tempodox 9y ago> ... cementing their own power. Of course. That's basic systems theory. And one reason why checks and balances are not just romantic crap but really necessary. The deregulation hype is the real romantic crap.
- d0ee670a 9y agoI agree with this statement - as a cybersecurity professional, I feel this. "Your ideas are only as good as the people in the room. And your door is shut to most people."
- Mefis 9y ago>and eight men control half the world’s wealth. This is wrong. Eight men control as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the world's population. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jan/16/worlds-eight-richest-people-have-same-wealth-as-poorest-50 https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jan/16/w...
- binarymax 9y agoThe grammar is ambiguous. "half the world" == "the poorest 50% of the population". "half the world's wealth" == "the wealth of the poorest 50% of the population"
- kazinator 9y ago> Your companies are now solving “my-world problems” (food delivery, cold-pressed, on-demand juice versus the “real-world problems” you used to solve (getting affordable computers in the hands of everyone; inventing the Internet). You can understand where these hapless doofuses are coming from, though: whatever you come up with has to have paying customers, and be something someone won't steal two weeks after release. In other words, some plausible return on investment. Inventing the internet was fun hacking paid by cushy government grants. You're not easily gonna get that today, or not for just any old idea that pops into your head. Affordable computers in the hands of everyone means optimizing existing commodity stuff down to razor-thin margins (if not indeed taking a loss) plus all the logistics of actually reaching everyone.
- Applejinx 9y ago>cushy government grants Dare we say… 'handouts'? Gee, seems like that might not be such a bad thing after all. Want flyover America to grow economies and produce stuff to perk up SV's ears? Pay it to do so. People treat economics as if it's a merit-evaluating system capable of managing the ground its actors grow from, and it's absolutely not. Money is better considered as a vote, or like water in the environment. You can't have it function both in its fundamental property of facilitating commerce, and as a score indicator. I think something akin to 'likes' ought to replace money as the score indicator, and money ought to be entirely allocated to population-wide commerce. That means entirely abandoning the connotations of 'value' it has, reimagining it as 'abstracted power', and leaning much harder on the capacity of populations to innovate. It is stark madness to assume that the capacity to accumulate abstracted power (money) signifies ANYTHING other than itself, plus the ability of that power to convert back into actions (easily mistaken for merit or virtue!) Anyone who's seriously dug into the genetic algorithm ought to be able to see the merits of doling out 'power' (money, ability to act in an economic system) across a massive population of organisms who're on the whole still individually more intelligent than AI could hope to be. Starving populations of humans to death for the crime of not being as economically powerful as Silicon Valley is not only immoral, it's a grotesque and foolish waste of intelligence and innovation resources. Elon Musk is a clever and interesting fellow, but he's WAY less intelligent/innovative than a supported POPULATION of humans. You only think he's that much more clever, because his resources are almost unmeasurable compared to the fellow (times 10,000) in Boise Idaho with just a garage, who've got almost no resources at all. Genetic Algorithm says to focus solely on giving more resources to Elon is producing a local maximum and screwing yourself in the long run. We can't afford to make that mistake.
- fnord77 9y agotech wasn't always this ... douchey. I don't know what happened. I've been a programming since the early 1990s. It used to be fun. Now I don't tell people what I do.
- postramus 9y agoSilicon Valley will eventually be seen as yet another textbook case of a new industry getting away with externalization of costs initially unrecognized as such. Enjoy it while it lasts, I guess, but don’t expect to escape liability for the foreseeable consequences of the systems you build for all perpetuity.
- brm 9y agoI spent a decade of my life in the valley and I do believe it's relevant to remember that what used to be a homebrew mixing of nerds, hippies, academics, researchers, teachers, makers, marketers, tinkerers and capitalists is now in large part skewed to marketers and capitalists. This is not necessarily good, bad, or romanticized it just is. So here are some tips: Don't hustle. Don't crush anything. Try not to have to give a stage presentation with a mic at the corner of your mouth. Your creation is not completely superlative or world changing yet, speak of it realistically. The internet is not a substitute or replacement for you having to deal with humanity. Be nice. Follow your curiosities and interests. Have curiosities and interests. Don't claim false passions. You're not passionate about "revolutionizing HR" or "remaking the way people buy nail polish". Learn how tech relates to the world and how you relate to it, don't make tech its own world. Maybe get a hobby. Be kind.
- Caveman_Coder 9y ago+100. I spent almost two decades in SV before moving to PHX and agree completely with your tips. I've found that since moving to PHX, the hustling and "revolutionizing/world-changing/disruptive" rhetoric is kept to a minimum. Tech isn't its "own world" as much here and most of my friends and co-workers in the tech community end up talking about things we all enjoy doing as hobbies, or our families, more than anything. It's nice to find professional peers who enjoy hiking in Sedona, not worrying about how many PRs their open-source project has, or how many retweets their presentation at RubyConf got. Its totally subjective, but its my kind of environment.
- aj_g 9y agoHah. I live in Montana, and I find myself lusting sometimes for the inundation of tech in SV. I wish I could nerd out with more of my friends, instead of talking about hiking/skiing/whatever. I guess the grass is always greener :)
- cirgue 9y ago> I wish I could nerd out with more of my friends, instead of talking about hiking/skiing/whatever. I guess the grass is always greener :) I would be happy to trade!
- calebm 9y ago> "As evidenced by the major backlash over the recent launch of a company called Bodega — where the founders and investors genuinely didn’t understand why the name was problematic — you don’t always have the best handle on how your ideas will be received outside of the Silicon Valley bubble."" I find it ironic that the article claims that people in the "SV bubble" don't understand why "Bodega" is a bad name... if you took a survey, I imagine an extremely small percentage of people would find anything wrong with that name (personally, I had to Google around a good bit to find why people had a problem with it). I think you'd have to be in an ultra-pedantic PC media bubble to extract outrage out of a name like "Bodega".
- calebm 9y ago"Thoughtfully, Fast Company asked McDonald about that. He replied, “We did surveys in the Latin American community to understand if they felt the name was a misappropriation of that term or had negative connotations, and 97% said ‘no’.”" (https://www.eater.com/2017/9/13/16302386/bodega-startup-corner-store-silicon-valley https://www.eater.com/2017/9/13/16302386/bodega-startup-corn...)
- Animats 9y agoThe problem with Bodega is not the name. It's that it doesn't carry much of an inventory. It's just another box accessed with an app for in-plant vending. Byte Foods does that.[1] TechShop SF has one of those, as do many hospitals. The vending industry term is "micro-market". Vending machine micro-markets are a standard item from Canteen Vending.[2] They have 4500 US locations. They're also found in Swiss train stations. The really creepy player in this industry is Three Square. In their system, employees have implanted RFID tags which identify them to the vending machines. They're in River Falls, WI, not Silicon Valley. [1] https://bytefoods.co/ https://bytefoods.co/ [2] http://www.canteen.com/avenue-c/ http://www.canteen.com/avenue-c/ [3] https://32market.com/public/ https://32market.com/public/
- tomjen3 9y agoI too was confused - doubly so because here in Denmark a Bodega is a low end bar, and I thought it might be the same in English.
- relics443 9y agoI stopped reading when the author suggests that people are falling out of love with silicon valley because most companies hire mostly white males. What a terrible racist/sexist thing to say.
- jeffdavis 9y agoThe primary content in this article is a link to a FastCompany article, which actually tries to back up its claims.
- joshuaheard 9y agoGreat article, but I'm surprised it didn't mention the left-leaning politics. There is the alleged censorship by Twitter and Facebook of conservative views; the firing of the Google diversity memo guy; and even House of Cards raising the nefarious search engine manipulation meme. Silicon Valley is starting to get the "liberal Hollywood" treatment by the conservative media.
- thatonechad 9y agoI seen a commercial advertising googles "home" device and was a cringeworthy moment. The partner to the NSA, the SJW brigade is now trying to have me purchase something that sits in my home and reminds me of what a pathetic corporation it has become. No thanks.
- johnrichardson 9y agoThis article's dumb. 8 men control half the world's wealth? All of a sudden the word 'bodega' is racist? Too many white men contributing value is 'problematic'? Articles like this are the reason why Trump won.
- jswizzy 9y agoThis author is drinking some serious anti captalist kool-aid. First off both Bannon and Bernie are Leninists. True believers are interchangeable with one another if you believe Eric Hoffer.
- Animats 9y agoYou haven’t produced a new firm that has cracked the world’s top 200 since Facebook’s founding in 2003. That's a significant point. Of the 15 companies that entered the Fortune 500 this year, only one, Lam Research, is in Silicon Valley. And they're in Fremont. (PayPal made the list, but as a spinoff of eBay.)[1] [1] http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2016-only-12-remain-thanks-to-the-creative-destruction-that-fuels-economic-prosperity/ http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2016...
- Apocryphon 9y agoTwo things that the article missed: 1. The startup scene's smarmy feel-good rhetoric and forced friendliness. The cutesy aesthetics, the wacky company names, and most gratingly the lofty mission statements that cover up at best business as usual and at worst actual corporate malfeasance. How did we get to here? When did "making the world a better place" become the mantra of Silicon Valley, and why did this laughable cliche get created? Was SV truly idealistic at one point, or has it been trying to cover up its true mission all along by pretending to be better than Wall Street or Hollywood, those other synonyms for wealth generation and inequality? 2. Silicon Valley can't even make the Bay Area a better place, never mind America, or the world. The extreme inequality in San Francisco and its environs is largely due to local government and broken politics, it is true. But SV companies should spend more of their lobbying efforts not in D.C. clamoring for special statuses, but in local legislatures securing better housing and infrastructure. Both their employees and the local populations will benefit, and like them more for it. Instead, what's the most high profile example of an SV executive interacting with local leaders? Steve Jobs presenting the new Apple headquarters plan to the Cupertino City Council in 2011. How's the traffic on Stevens Creek these days?
- tempodox 9y ago“Making the world a better place” is simply the cheapest marketing gag you can get. And in a way, they did make the world a better place—it's just for a select group of founders and investors only.
- Apocryphon 9y agoThat's true, but why did Silicon Valley pick that shtick when other industries don't seem to except maybe when they're trying to greenwash.
- SamvitJ 9y agoYou haven’t produced a new firm that has cracked the world’s top 200 since Facebook’s founding in 2003. Facebook was founded in 2004.
- yahna 9y agoI find it kind of ridiculous that the reasons why people supposedly hate silicon valley ("it's all run by old white guys") are pretty much the opposite of the reasons why I hear hate of silicon valley (virtue signally/wrongthink/over concerned with diversity).
- emerged 9y agoI'm praying for a day when SV has been replaced by largely remote and decentralized teams. Spreading the wealth and opportunity beyond the privilege bubble and exposing the industry to a more representative distribution of political preferences. It may just be a dream, but I do feel hope as SV has been getting backlash for it's identity politics and new blockchain tech is looking to be a way to enable decentralized remote organizations.
- RickJWag 9y agoIt's the synthetic, fascist mono-culture. Free thought isn't allowed-- Silicon Valley enforces thought control like Weinstein did over Hollywood. Sooner or later (looks like sooner) everyone realizes Silicon Valley is 90% white and Asian male. All the politically-correct talk is lipservice alone. (That's probably why the self-virtue-signaling went into overdrive in the first place.)
- sprague 9y agoThese same criticisms were lobbed at Microsoft 15 years ago (and IBM before that), but then, as now, people forget that part of why some of us love technology is that nobody can rest on past success. Ten years from now, some new upstart is going to make everyone wonder what the big fuss was about.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]