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The biggest problem with these candidacies is that they did not follow the valley way. Ebay and HP didn't spring up overnight driven by a huge ad budget. They s

by fleitz 16y ago

The biggest problem with these candidacies is that they did not follow the valley way. Ebay and HP didn't spring up overnight driven by a huge ad budget. They solved problems real people had starting small and growing as they delivered. Neither of them had the experience of winning a spot on the city council. The tech industry unlike Hollywood doesn't lend themselves to being a household name. It's easy for an actor to launch a political career because they are already well known to the public. Those candidacies are the quintessential VC fueled hype company. Whitman probably wouldn't give a fresh startup $140 million in the seed round and expect them to use it wisely, so why would anyone expect a different outcome? It has nothing to do with the Valley and everything to do with how the campaign was grown.

anigbrowl 16y ago
Oddly, maybe Whitman would have done better if she had started later. She was running commercials every single break for months before Brown even started advertising- I think people literally got tired of her being on TV all the time. Repeating the text of her then-current advert verbatim during the debate didn't help either; she came across as very scripted. I wonder if it was her campaign or her own preference to keep the media at arm's length? I've heard her speak before and she struck me as pretty personable, and I didn't expect her to be so stiff and formal during the election campaign. Her last ad had the line 'I'll treat you [the voters] like grown-ups,' which is how you speak to a ten year old. I'd rather like if Brown would hire her as his business adviser or something, because she had a few good economic ideas, like reducing the cost of business registration and suchlike. But that's probably not happening, they don't seem to like each other much.
- deleted 16y ago
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by fleitz 16y ago

anigbrowl 16y ago

Oddly, maybe Whitman would have done better if she had started later. She was running commercials every single break for months before Brown even started advertising- I think people literally got tired of her being on TV all the time. Repeating the text of her then-current advert verbatim during the debate didn't help either; she came across as very scripted. I wonder if it was her campaign or her own preference to keep the media at arm's length? I've heard her speak before and she struck me as pretty personable, and I didn't expect her to be so stiff and formal during the election campaign. Her last ad had the line 'I'll treat you [the voters] like grown-ups,' which is how you speak to a ten year old. I'd rather like if Brown would hire her as his business adviser or something, because she had a few good economic ideas, like reducing the cost of business registration and suchlike. But that's probably not happening, they don't seem to like each other much.

deleted 16y ago
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