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For These Young Entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley Is, Like, Lame
- staplers 9y agoCondescending title aims to portray youth opinion as shallow
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoFor this hacker news commenter, news article headline is, like, lame.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- iovrthoughtthis 9y agoBack in my day we tortured ourselves for years attempting to forfifll out dreams of sustaining ourselves on our own creation, these whippersnappers don't understand the sacrifice. - entrepreneurs from the 2000's in 30 years.
- stcredzero 9y agoYouth opinion is shallow? Nah. When I was 5, I thought I knew it all. How could my parents be such dolts? However, when I was 10, I realized how stupid I was before, but I had a pretty good handle on everything. How could my parents be so clueless? On the other hand, when I was 15, I finally realized how much of a dummy I'd always been, but by then I had it all figured out. Also, what's up with my parents!? But that was just nonsense, of course! When I turned 20, I realized how much of a dumb teen I had been, but then I had all of the essential truths of how the world works pretty much figured out... Kids are genius. However, youth opinion is uninformed by experience.
- nostrademons 9y agoIf you live a fulfilling life, the process continues up through 25, 30, 35, and presumably onwards though I haven't gotten there yet. Unfortunately a large number of people get to 25 or 30, figure "I'm an adult now", and then their mental model of the world gets stuck at however it was when they were that age even as the world changes around them.
- jrs95 9y agoAnd if you’re lucky you might have actual realizations instead of just adopting the ones society tells you to. Do kids think their parents are stupid because of genuine observation, or is it because we tell kids to think their parents are stupid?
- stcredzero 9y agoMostly the latter.
- nostrademons 9y agoI'm not entirely sure of that. Kids have excellent bullshit detectors, because a.) they haven't been socialized to keep their mouth shut when they see bullshit and b.) they don't have incentives to keep their mouth shut when they see bullshit. (cf. Emperor's New Clothes) On one level kids think their parents are stupid because they don't have experience with the constraints their parents live under (eg. getting a job, keeping a job, putting a roof over your heads), but on another level the parents are stupid because they've let themselves internalize those constraints beyond what's rational (eg. working so hard that you're unhappy all the time and don't have time for the kids, not looking for another job when you hate your current one). I've seen a number of instances - mostly surrounding racism, classism, overwork, violence, corruption, or misaligned incentives - where kids will say something both profound and naive and I'll think to myself "Yes, you're absolutely right, and unfortunately humanity is filled with idiots."
- stcredzero 9y ago
- intrasight 9y agoWhen you reach a certain level of experience, you gain the wisdom that your parents where actually very smart and hard-working and had set a great example for you. That might happen when you hit 20 or 50 or it may never happen. For me it happened when I had teenage kids.
- teh_klev 9y agoWell, having once been a youth, I can safely say that youth opinion is in fact shallow.
- abhinavkulkarni 9y agoNon-paywalled/archive link?
- bilkoo 9y agohttps://outline.com/dtqTfg https://outline.com/dtqTfg
- tengbretson 9y agoI can't access the full article, but is anyone else seeing the teaser for "China’s Great Leap to Wallet-Free Living"? It seems awfully distasteful for an organization like the WSJ to make a dismissive play on the Great Leap Forward.
- merpnderp 9y agoI agree, pretty callous to make a word play on something that killed ~50 million innocent people.
- aj_g 9y agoUnder the title on the HN post, click "web", then click the link from Google.
- seangrogg 9y agoDoesn't work anymore.
- jrs95 9y agoI don’t know if it was necessarily intended to be that. The phrase “great leap” is used in a lot of contexts.
- mattnewton 9y agoBut in the context of Chinese National policy, there is really only one “great leap” that comes to mind.
- jrowley 9y agoI guess the WSJ editors are going to juicier titles, and we are talking about it, so it is at least somewhat effective.
- jdtang13 9y agoYeah, it would be like having an article titled "The Trail of Tears in Silicon Valley Investment Failures" or something.
- platz 9y agoThose pesky Chinese and their great firewall. GAFAM would love to make inroads there but they can't even get a toehold. The China model destroys the Calinfornian model. What you do with the internet now in this age (walled gardens), are things the Chinese are doing at a national level. i digress. TLDR: “China is like a startup. The U.S. is like a big corporation... China runs very fast, tweaking along the way. The U.S. runs at a steady pace, doing a lot of research and development. It’s hard to tell who will win in the end.”
- icobaron 9y ago> What you do with the internet now in this age (walled gardens), are things the Chinese are doing at a national level. When the walled garden is that big its not really a garden anymore. Us Americans focus on really irrelevant things about other cultures, things people in those cultures don't find limiting at all.
- contingencies 9y agoTo the downvoters: this is actually pretty close to the truth.
- usaar333 9y agoThat quote might be true for large corporations, but I'm not seeing obvious examples (from the article or elsewhere) where this is clearly true for start-ups.
- jxramos 9y agoI wonder what the figures of the ratio of the number of startups to the number of large companies would look like between the two countries normalized by their urban populations.
- qiqing 9y agoIn contrast to GAFAM, consider the counterexamples -- Western companies who have done well in China. Including: LinkedIn, Coursera, Evernote, Starbucks, McDonalds, KFC, Coach, Airbnb, GM, Coca-cola, Flipboard, Pocket, ... list goes on. There's something really interesting about connecting with your customers and understanding how they use your products as opposed to assuming they are the same as your North American customers. The ones who succeed tend to do a good job on localization, not just translation but local product market fit research. (McDonalds, Starbucks, and Evernote are great examples.)
- hiram112 9y agoThis extension is, like, not lame: https://github.com/njuljsong/wsjUnblock https://github.com/njuljsong/wsjUnblock
- icobaron 9y ago> To many in the group, northern California’s low-rise buildings looked shabby ... They didn’t see the shared bikes ... can’t believe Americans still use credit cards and cash I too was shocked about how unappealing Silicon Valley was. I'm an American. It was like "wow they don't know they are imagining solving problems that aren't a problem for the rest of the country" Pull off to any random gas station on the peninsula? Sorry you need cash at the pump. Already in the line to the carwash? TOUGH LUCK! better get out your car, run to the attendant and get cash! Don't mind that the bank freezes your debit card at this location because its sketchy af, further inconveniencing everyone in the carwash line waiting for you. Where is the apple or google pay? Nonexistent. I digress, that has almost nothing to do with anything. It is just the reality of whats in Silicon Valley, distinct from more cosmopolitan areas. Silicon Valley's real inconveniences are partially California administrative problems. And as the article points out, the US is like a big corporation, lots of things in your way before change.
- stass 9y agoI have not seen a single gas station in California that does not accept credit or debit cards for 10 years, let alone in the Bay Area. If they do exist, it’s most certainly a tiny minority.
- sidlls 9y agoThe AM/PMs I've seen in the peninsula take debit cards and cash only. There's one debit card station to serve all the pumps.
- cardiffspaceman 9y agoRe: SV is so backward. My AM/PM here in San Diego, Calif, has debit card acceptance at each pump.
- DrScump 9y agoThe AM/PMs I suspect those gas stations are actually Arco.
- 9y ago
- balls187 9y agoThe optimist in me wants to say "Good, rising tides raise all ships." Having multiple loci of major innovation can help alleviate some of the problems of Silicon Valley's monoculture.
- adreamingsoul 9y agoAs a "young entrepreneur", I have no interest in Silicon Valley. In fact, I'm more inclined to be a farmer who moonlights as an engineer.
- balls187 9y agoTalent, investment, innovation culture, mentorship, and meetups are just a few of the reasons why Silicon Valley is a great place to be an entrepreneur. Yes, the downsides are well enumerated and discussed ad nauseum, and there are other interesting locations to run a startup, but dismissing it out right is rather silly.
- QAPereo 9y agoSquandered talent, exceptional investment, buzzword, buzzword, partial-buzzword, connections. It’s a great place to be young and wealthy, with minimal affect and empathy.
- balls187 9y ago> It’s a great place to be young and wealthy, with minimal affect and empathy. Is it though? The article makes a point that SV doesn't have the glitz and glamor, so if you're truly young and wealthy wouldn't you be better off somewhere else? I don't know if there is any correlation to age and relative wealth with regards to success as an entrepreneur, but I do know that actually being an entrepreneur is a lot of hard work, regardless if you were raised with a silver spoon or not. There is a lot of hustle, and a lot of grind. Maybe if you're rich you can immediately just use your own money to pay others to do the hustling and grinding, but at that point aren't you really just an investor?
- yarrel 9y agoNeeds "(1993)" in the title going on that use of "like".
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- iamcasen 9y agoIf face recognition all along every city street, and face recognition as a requirement to enter all buildings is cool, then I don't ever want to be cool. Between the face recognition, and the "social credit score" shit going on in China, I really hope their vision for the future does not catch on.
- 0800 9y agoTheir vision of the future is fully inspired on, if not outright copied from, the US. China doesn't care about "keeping up appearances", but it is very much doing the same as the US, only more blatantly. And where in China it may be the government, in the US it is EvilCorp or some other entity not bound by the constitution.
- TomMarius 9y agoHow can there be an entity that isn't bound by the constitution?
- 0800 9y agoYou have no right to free speech or right to assemble on Facebook. My face is recognized, tagged, and stored in Facebook servers, shared with intelligence agencies, and cross-referenced with all other photo's. And I don't even have a Facebook account (leading some employers to distrust me -- "what do I have to hide?" -- and lower their "social credit score" of me). In contrast, I am relatively safe against China's spying apparatus.
- TomMarius 9y agoHaving "free speech" on Facebook would break Facebook's constitutional rights. Facebook doesn't owe you anything, it was not done for public money. It's private property. If you believe they use your personal information maliciously and/or without consent, you can (in the EU at least) sue.
- 9y ago
- leroy_masochist 9y agoI thought from the title that this would be about how up-and-coming founders think the stereotypically SV way of doing things is bad (equity-rich comp, expensive catering for lunch, homogeneity of political views, etc). Instead, it’s about how young Chinese entrepreneurs are underwhelmed by the lack of penetration of new technologies into daily life on the Peninsula. The whole thing reads like a submarine article artfully placed by the Shenzhen Economic Development Committee, especially given its ending quote: "China is like a startup. The U.S. is like a big corporation”. One point within the article strikes me as especially bad. The author notes that, “Especially for those in their 20s and 30s, last week’s visit largely failed to impress. To many in the group, northern California’s low-rise buildings looked shabbier than the glitzy skyscrapers in Beijing and Shenzhen.” The clear implication here is that California’s relative backwardness is evidenced by the shabbiness of local buildings. But that’s entirely the wrong conclusion to draw! The story here is that rich people don’t like new construction near where they live, and a lot of wealth has been created on the Peninsula in the last few decades. The NIMBY-zoning-driven damper on new office construction in the last few years has resulted in a lack of office space relative to demand, which means that it’s a seller’s market, which disincentivizes landlords from renovating buildings....and the onerous zoning makes it virtually impossible for property developers to build new ones.
- user5994461 9y agoCatering for lunch is much cheaper than paying salaries or overtime and it gets people to stay in the office for longer.
- SilasX 9y agoAlso, the employee is getting it at about a 40% discount against what they'd have to earn to buy it out of pocket (it's not treated as income and the business can expense it).
- closeparen 9y agoThat’s no longer true for 2018.
- noetic_techy 9y agoMobile payments I think will take off in the US, its just going to take a generation to catch on. I'm 33 and most of the 20 somethings are all using Venmo and other payment apps. Give it time. We're a car culture. US cities and suburbs were designed for cars long ago. Hence the focus on the next iteration of cars: self driving. Plus, isnt the bike sharing thing turning into a disaster in China with stolen bikes? Really, facial recognition when you walk into work is sign of our lagging technology? Sounds more like over engineering a trivial thing. We've got rockets landing themselves, electric cars driving themselves, the re-emergence of VR with augmented reality on the way, blockchain technology (started in the US), and were still leading in AI by the way. The big stuff on the near-horizon are sea-steading communities experimenting with governance, quantum computers, lab grown meat, exoskeletons, and more useful household robotics. The long term R&D bets are whats paid off for us and there is no reason to assume they wont continue too. China can copy us 6 times over due to their population, but if their emphasis is always on "get it out the door now!" then they will just be waiting around looking for the next thing to copy from California. I'm getting kinda tired of this anti-US sentiment articles.
- Zarath 9y agoDo you have a source on the bike stealing in China? I was in Shanghai and there were practically more bikes on the sidewalks than people, I don't think people even bother stealing bikes.
- noetic_techy 9y agoAsk and ye shall receive: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/world/asia/china-beijing-dockless-bike-share.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/world/asia/china-beijing-... "But their popularity has been accompanied by a wave of misbehavior. Because the start-ups do not use fixed docking stations, riders abandon bicycles haphazardly along streets and public squares, snarling traffic and cluttering sidewalks. Thieves have taken them by the tens of thousands, for personal use or selling them for parts. Angry and mischievous vandals hang them in trees, bury them in construction sites and throw them into lakes and rivers." http://www.businessinsider.com/china-bike-sharing-frenzy-collapsing-2017-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/china-bike-sharing-frenzy-col... "Bike-sharing companies – with their capital-intensive, cash-burning, ride-subsidizing business model – were among the hottest startups in China. ... But this is how quickly a frenzy can deflate... On Thursday, Chinese media reported that Mingbike, with operations in major cities, had laid off 99% of its staff, after consumers had complained that they’d been unable to get their deposits..."
- usaar333 9y agoThere are areas where China's entrepreneurship is outperforming the US, but I find all the focus (that this article and others make) on e-commerce and mobile-payment transactions lacking. e-commerce is larger in China not so much because it is better, but because retail commerce is so underdeveloped. I'm not convinced it is per se better either. (cheaper, yes, but that's a COL issue) Mobile-payments solve a problem the US doesn't have; China never had the well-developed credit card system the US had. Having used both extensively, mobile contactless payments are only marginally better for a consumer than using a physical credit card - and mobile QR code based ones are worse. Cheap dockless bikes for rent are something I consider China to be solidly winning; that's blocked in the US by government regulation. US has plenty of meal-delivery options; lacking support at "any hour" is due to structural differences (lower density, higher COL)
- contingencies 9y agoYour take: China's retail is underdeveloped, China lacks a well-developed credit card system. Implication: credit cards are a foregone conclusion in a developed society. My take: China's retail is fine, and from some perspectives the most developed in the world. Credit cards in particular but arguably bank cards in general are a broken system that needs to die.
- usaar333 9y ago> Implication: credit cards are a foregone conclusion in a developed society. No, it's that in a society that already has an effective solution that is tied together by network effects (credit cards), there is little incentive for a marginally superior system (contactless payments via mobile phone) to take off. > Credit cards in particular but arguably bank cards in general are a broken system that needs to die What are you comparing them to? Mobile-phone contactless payments linked to my credit account? I don't see the newer tech as that superior -- and I think the market generally agrees by having such little adoption. > China's retail is fine, and from some perspectives the most developed in the world I probably expressed this a bit wrong. At the time of the e-commerce boom in China, China's retail was far less developed than the US. This means there was more relative value for a customer to use e-commerce. Another driver (that may be larger even) is a reduced car culture in China which means the cost of shopping at stores is higher. (Regardless, from my comparison of being in Shanghai vs. the SF Bay Area, I would put the SF Bay Area's physical retail as superior. e.g. I recall being unable to buy a very basic computer adapter at a physical store in China. And I don't see online availability/shipping speeds as strictly greater in China either).
- jdblair 9y agoClassic Silicon Valley, meaning Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and Mountain View, is lame. Its mile after mile of drab, functional single and 2 story buildings.
- DrScump 9y ago... with lots of yards and parks. Losers!