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The Fall of Silicon Valley
- sweetlucipher 6y agoI would put the date earlier, around 2007, leading up to the great recession. I'm basing that on the vibe of the city (San Francisco), and how it took a nose dive afterwards, and never recovered.
- imgabe 6y ago> Yes Amazon (which is not based in Silicon Valley) made online shopping better. However, it is fundamentally just another middleman, and will not stand the test of time. Personally, I think Amazon's legacy will be AWS rather than online shopping. More than anyone else they've turned computing power into a utility. Like electricity this has made whole new types of businesses possible. Edit: Still reading the article and want to note I don't mean this as a crticism. I'm really enjoying this story.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jes5199 6y agoan innovative way to become a middleman, renting people free software, re-centralizing computing power, and un-democratizing hardware
- hailwren 6y agoThe problem with most of this crypto-anarchist rhetoric is that it establishes a value system that does not reflect the realities of the real world. decentralization, democracy = good and the opposite = bad runs up against fundamental value propositions of economies of scale and specialization
- jes5199 6y agocrypto? I thought I was being overt. Amazon’s economy of scale does capture a lot of value. The question becomes: how well does economic value align with our human values? One of my best friends mentors software development interns at Amazon. We talk a lot, they’re using it as mechanism to empower people who had otherwise been trapped in low-wage jobs, and generally I think that’s a good thing. Recently they tell me that one of their new interns was, until recently, a practicing medical doctor, in another country. Having this person optimizing user experience on a shopping system cannot possibly be as socially valuable as treating disease. But here we are. There’s another article on HN today questioning whether the current crop of tech companies embody the old Silicon Valley values that created our field. I think the answer is: they cannot possibly embody them all because some of the core values of hacker culture are contradictory, and a strong tradition of anti-capitalism, radical democratization, and anti-authoritanism go back to at least the 1960s computer programmer culture, maybe even further back
- imgabe 6y ago> Having this person optimizing user experience on a shopping system cannot possibly be as socially valuable as treating disease. It's possible that that person finds more fulfillment from programming than from treating disease and that's all that should matter. People are free and should not be forced to work in some field they don't want to because somebody else decides that's more socially valuable.
- Proven 6y agoIt's not Amazon's problem that some government assholes perpetuate a system in which a medical doctor can't earn more than $2,000 in 20 days, or a patient can't pay $3 to see the doctor.
- hailwren 6y agoI was reacting the specific 'decentralization' mantra that is a linguistic artifact of cryptocurrencies. > how well does economic value align with our human values? I couldn't begin to define what 'our human values' even means. > one of their new interns was, until recently, a practicing medical doctor Is your argument that there is no person practicing medicine who would produce more utility for society by writing software at Amazon? Because that seems like a pretty extreme position.
- michaelbrave 6y agoNot all innovations need to be what we consider modern tech. I've always viewed Amazon as the modern equivalent of what Sears was, what Sears did with railroad and mail order Amazon did similar with the internet. It will likely last at least 50 years. Though you are right, I think the part that will survive the longest and have the largest impact will be AWS more than the Amazon marketplace itself.
- redis_mlc 6y agotldr; The (long) article is simply wrong. It's true that the startup hardware scene in SV died around 2012, since VCs don't like the risk or long timeframes, but that just means more software startups. As an illustration, if you live outside SV, try telling your friends and family, "I'm quitting my day job to start (or work) at a startup" and watch their reactions. Especially in Europe or Asia.
- benatkin 6y agoFlagged because the author said Biden's son killed himself in his previous post. I don't think that's ad hom. It would be if he'd said it a long time ago, but it was 5 days ago.
- ignoramous 6y agoWhatever did I just read? > For example, Facebook is not an innovation. Facebook did not make socializing better. It made it worse. Was it at one point a new web site? Yes. Does it make money? Yes. But it is not innovative. This is surprisingly hollow. Facebook took Instagram and WhatsApp and basically put it on steroids. Those apps couldn't have possibly been the behemoths they are now without Facebook's ample innovative, world-class sales, marketing, engineering weight behind it [0][1]. > Next consider Amazon. Yes Amazon (which is not based in Silicon Valley) made online shopping better. However, it is fundamentally just another middleman, and will not stand the test of time. True innovation, like the silicon chip itself, stands the test of time. No no no. Amazon is probably one of the most innovative companies right now. You don't go from selling books to building a wildly profitable IT Enterprise business to winning the Emmys by resting on your laurels or being complacent. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJl27KvUDn0&t=34m47s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJl27KvUDn0&t=34m47s [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18065897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18065897
- austincheney 6y agoWhatsApp had half a billion active users before Facebook. They were doing just fine. That’s why Facebook paid over $20 billion for it.
- ignoramous 6y ago> They were doing just fine. The YouTube video I linked to is Neeraj Arora, early WhatsApp employee, on what Facebook's acquisition meant for WhatsApp.
- mr_woozy 6y agoDoes it discuss the part where Brian Acton (co-founder of WA) donated 50million to Signal because of how badly Facebook will distort Whatsapp's user base and tech?
- mr_woozy 6y agoexactly this. arguably they've probably trojaned or backdoored the e2e encryption by now, after buying it too.
- jkw 6y agoI thought that this article was going talk about how 2020 broke apart SV and caused everyone to scatter. But to say it was 2012? No way. That totally misses out on Uber, Stripe, Coinbase, Lyft, Plaid, and many more.
- ehnto 6y agoI think SV will continue to produce big tech companies, but you can probably put a date on the begin of a decline earlier than them. I think SVs decline will be more like jumping the shark in ideology than monetary failures.
- jes5199 6y agoI think the point is that Uber, etc, are capitalizing on the _myth_ of SV without sharing the ethos that created it
- jennyyang 6y agoThe genius of Travis Kalanick is twofold: 1) Going global as quickly as possible. He aggressively moved into a lot of countries as quickly as possible with the same formula, and for the most part it worked. 2) He created an entire industry by having the balls to lower prices to the point where it fundamentally changed transportation. Everyone ubered everywhere (before the pandemic) and I know many people who sold their cars because ubering was cheaper. The downside was that both are extremely capital intensive, which showed in how much money they raised. But I would say both techniques are extremely innovative and what most startups these days are trying to strive for.
- cambalache 6y ago> The downside was that both are extremely capital intensive There is another small downside: They still need to be profitable.
- zepto 6y agoIs there anything to this genius other than recognizing that he could get VCs to fund predatory pricing almost indefinitely?
- square_usual 6y agoI admit I'm not the most poetic of people, and often have trouble reading between the lines or finding deeper implications, but this: > I would put the precise date as November 7, 2012, the day Dustin Curtis published his infamous blog post “The Best”. [...] When I first read it I thought it was brilliant satire. Then when I realized he was serious, I decided to leave myself. Dustin and his ilk had completely perverted the message of Steve Jobs. completely baffled me. I don't get this, at all! I read that mentioned post, and it looked to me like an appreciation of working for quality that went beyond simply producing goods to be sold. I feel weirdly stupid because I cannot figure out what TFA is trying to imply there.
- ahelwer 6y agoI recall that post being pretty polarizing on HN. I think PG himself showed up and ranted about how the people calling it consumerist schlock had it all wrong, and this was a sign of HN's decline or something. Anyway personally I found the post fairly repulsive. It reminded me of my thought patterns during some of my grossest excursions into materialist obsession - spending hours researching what "the best" thing to buy is, when I would have been much, much happier just getting something at random than agonizing about it - or just not buying anything at all.
- aquajet 6y agoThe Best discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755470
- baby 6y agohttps://dcurt.is/the-best https://dcurt.is/the-best
- bengotow 6y agoGreat read, but remember this is the guy that also recently authored "Why I'm voting for Kanye West".
- baby 6y agohttps://www.robrhinehart.com/why-i-am-voting-for-kanye-west/ https://www.robrhinehart.com/why-i-am-voting-for-kanye-west/
- fossuser 6y agoThis essay is so bad it really makes me want to discount and ignore anything this person has to say about anything else. I know that’s probably unfair and I genuinely try to treat unrelated arguments independently from the person arguing them - but it’s rare to see something this wrong while the author revels in their own ignorance. This isn’t coming from a place of politics, though there’s no way for me to prove it to anyone - it’s just coming from the place of being a reasonably educated person.
- moab 6y agoChoice quotes like "Kanye is the only candidate to my knowledge that has talked about agriculture." abound. Funny read.
- Threeve303 6y ago> Who is this man (Biden)? I had never heard of him until very recently. Wait, what? Just a paragraph before he is talking about having voted for Obama. So either you voted for someone for the first and only time and didn’t bother looking into the VP on the ticket. Or it’s just a lie.
- fossuser 6y agoI don’t know if that’s supposed to be an exaggeration or something? The entire thing reads like something by someone who’s done too many hallucinogens and is a little fried.
- friedman23 6y agoI just can't understand why someone would put so much effort into writing this. I almost stopped myself from reading it but I decided to read it anyway. I regret it. I think this same essay has been written millions of times (of course for things other than and probably more important than Silicon Valley). It's definitely been written about Silicon Valley at least once before.
- mr_woozy 6y agoI liked it, and I despise Facebook and Amazon.
- YoyoyoPCP 6y agoReminds me of this quote from Michael S. Malone in The Valley of Heart's Delight (2002) > When will it end? I knowingly predicted Silicon Valley's imminent demise in 1980, 1985, 1989, and 1994. Eventually, I learned my lesson. The rest of the media world obviously has not--regularly indulging in yet another paroxysm of features about how the Valley is losing its crown to Austin, Orange County, Bangalore, even Boise. > Perhaps. All I know is just months after the last time I predicted the Valley's end, I found myself regularly having lunch in a Chinese restuartant in Campbell with two young entrepreneurs... The company they were building was called Ebay.
- almost_usual 6y agoHousing in Silicon Valley is much more expensive than it was then. It’s hard to live let alone innovate. It’s a FAANG goldmine where engineers are the miners.
- 5cott0 6y agoI read the blog hoping to find out what the fall of Silicon Valley was but that was rendered incoherent by the excessive Name dropping.
- chheplo 6y agoThere are few of this type of articles written by 'nobody' every month.
- joshmanders 6y agoWhile I agree with the absurdity of this article; Rob, the creator of Soylent, is far from a "nobody".
- vmception 6y ago> and got acquired by an advertising company lololol I just can’t tell what time period he is talking about When was he there to watch it fall? 2019-2020 finally had companies moving offices into parts of the bay that many more people actually wanted to be in Leave the bay area and good luck finding people to talk about some obscure package that is going to soon become treated like a unique skillset requiring years of experience
- pazimzadeh 6y ago> I also learned that the biggest LPs were pension funds. The money was going to the government! Many of the Venture “Capitalists” were actually agents of the socialist pension funds Snort.
- gwilikers 6y agoI hope the fall of Silicon Valley takes with it these overlong, self-important essays about Silicon Valley.
- zerop 6y agoI think one more reason is leaders who are leading nowadays compare to older times of around 2010... Leaders today want quick results, Fail-fast. These management graduates leading companies today, don't understand empathy, research investment, innovation. They don't encourage grass-root employees to spend time on their own choices and innovation.. everything had to be justified by business and ROI.. innovation is just a bucket and used to showcase to senior leadership..
- deepnotderp 6y agoI can't help but find that this article resonates with me, even if in some ways it goes too far.
- t_serpico 6y agoI generally agree with the author. I don't have hard evidence but basically feel that the culture, ethos, magic, whatever you want to call it is gone. Does this mean innovation is dead? Of course not! As the author pointed, it will just likely be more spread out. Also, I think it's important to appreciate that the formation and growth of Silicon Valley was a remarkably special thing but was bound to eventually hit the diminishing returns phase of faster compute, faster internet, smarter software, etc. Silicon Valley started with a transformative and enabling technology (the transistor) and from there we built a remarkable hardware and software ecosystem over the span of a few decades around that technology. Those seem to be the two elements in order to 'replicate' SV: a transformative technology that spurs an ecosystem of technologies, all of which interconnect and benefit from each others innovation.
- joaomacp 6y ago> a transformative technology that spurs an ecosystem of technologies, all of which interconnect and benefit from each others innovation. Biotech, especially gene editing, comes to mind as a fast developing field. However, because it's health related, extensive testing and regulations means it will never evolve at the same pace as hardware and software did.
- Balgair 6y agoMaaaybe? The one silver lining of this catastrophe of covid is that the FDA process has been turned up to 11. There is some hope that it'll stay that way after/if a vaccine is made. The ModeRNA vaccine is looking to be some amazing stuff and it would have taken at least a decade to get through before covid. CRISPR-CAS9 technology and a faster FDA should result in some very good outcomes for all humans. The biotech centers of San Diego, Boston, NC Research Triangle, and Denver should see growth from that kind of a boom.
- thinking2smll0 6y agoCome together in SV, Big Crunch. Covid-19 was a biological/social Big Bang? Strange loops indeed.
- 6y ago
- dcurtis 6y agoAs the author of The Best, I am quite surprised and confused by Rhinehart's suggestion that the piece marks the "death" of Silicon Valley. He does not seem to understand me or what I was saying at all. Also, "my ilk" are the very people he praises, including Paul Graham and YC founders pre-2012. I'm tempted to write a rebuttal, because while I agree that there was a marked change in the startup community around that time, I think it happened for reasons very different from the ones Rhinehart outlines in his piece. (For reference: https://dcurt.is/the-best https://dcurt.is/the-best )
- drenvuk 6y agoYour blog post sounds like your philosophy was to search for and find goods that you would enjoy using and give you peace of mind. His philosophy sounds more like "get what works, if it breaks replace it and try again." The longevity and quality of his items don't seem to matter so much as their ability to fulfill each stated purpose adequately. Your philosophy sounds consumeristic in the face of his more utilitarian sounding examples. Taking the example of your flatware - why not just get some cheap stuff from Walmart? It will work well enough. The mouth sensation and feel in hand is secondary to the purpose of feeding yourself. I'd buy it because it looks nice but the cost of that vs a 20 piece set from Walmart? You can donate the excess to a soup kitchen. My unasked for $0.02. I'd read your rebuttal. Please write it.
- parsley27 6y agoI missed your post when it came out the first time, but I don't think you need to add a rebuttal about "The Best"; I think the message is clear and hasn't changed. Now your view on if Silicon Valley has fallen would be something I'd like to read. But as far as your original post, I couldn't find anything polarizing and controversial about why seeking and trusting the best would bring peace of mind, or how that is somehow a call for overconsumption. It's strange how differently the same words can be understood by different people.
- floatingatoll 6y agoI’d be interested in reading that post. I hope you do end up writing it.
- dehrmann 6y ago> [Amazon] is fundamentally just another middleman, and will not stand the test of time. True innovation, like the silicon chip itself, stands the test of time. > Most importantly, Tesla continues to innovate. I'm not sure what his definition of innovation is, here. Both Amazon and Tesla took existing technologies and ideas, put then together in a novel way, and iterated on them. Is it because Amazon (excluding AWS) doesn't build something physical? And if we include AWS, how can you argue that changing the way software infrastructure is managed not innovative?
- FullyFunctional 6y agoWhy are there no down-vote buttons for bad submissions?
- dehrmann 6y agoThe more interesting point for me is how the people and the politics have changed. I don't see as many hardcore geeks who breathe the stuff as a I used to, and the politics have got from more libertarian to progressive. Maybe it's just the scene growing up?
- drdrey 6y agoWhat is this guy's problem with Nancy Pelosi?
- cvhashim 6y agoIn another piece, he says he’s voting for Kanye.
- jart 6y agoI hadn't thought about Rob Rhinehart a while. He inspired many of us back in 2013 when he founded a company to solve the food problem with the engineering mindset, and all the innocence that entails. Today his blog looks like rallying cry for all the nails that got hammered down. It's very inspiring and some of this stuff takes a nontrivial amount of courage to say. He can be my movement leader any day.
- throwawaymanbot 6y agoThe Mythical "Ethos". Most countries on Planet earth would kill to have something like silicon valley. Yes the surrounding prices are insane for housing etc, but thats a market issue, and a lack of innovation in the economics of the place issue, not an innovation in silicon valley issue.
- iorrus 6y agoInteresting how polarizing this article is. I loved it and his writing style, I agree that it's rough premise and although there are counter arguments e.g. Stripe/Uber/Coinbase I think the overall argument is correct, the culture has changed. But it's interesting to see so many argue that this is written in a self-aggrandizing, self-important style. Generally I agree with those people when it comes to LinkedIn style articles etc. e.g. [0] is a prime example. But this one really resonated with me and comes across as extremely genuine hence my surprise at the reaction. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24901940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24901940
- KorematsuFred 6y agoAs an Indian citizen in Silicon Valley who has also lived in many other countries, I would say that SV will go through lots of ups and downs (it should) but a long term bet on SV will generally pay off.
- SergeAx 6y ago> there is nothing special about the resources or geography of Silicon Valley that makes it particularly amenable to innovation Colleges and universities?
- deepnotderp 6y agoBoston/Route 128 had MIT and Harvard and in the 1980s Stanford was nowhere near in prowess.