9 ms·

Im so tired of random writers, even if it's O'Reilly himself, trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. That's like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall S

Im so tired of random writers, even if it's O'Reilly himself, trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. That's like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is doomed. I've been around long enough to know that nothing will unseat Silicon Valley as the tech capital of the world. Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world. There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. Despite having much higher educational standards even in 3rd world countries, the best the world could do is China which just stole US ideas and then built a firewall to keep others out. Do I like what Silicon Valley has turned into? Hell no. I like the 90s version so much better, where nerds were tinkering with cool stuff and writing software because they loved software, not because they want to increase engagement by 1%. But it is what it is, and Silicon Valley will change with the times, I'm sure. I would love to see another dot-com-bust and clear out some of the chaff, but it doesn't seem like it's going to happen this time around. If there's anything that will kill Silicon Valley it's that people since 2010 have made *too* much money. Practically anyone at a FAANG is now a multi-millionaire no matter what you've worked on. One of the factors I listed above, greed, is now missing for the most part. People have too much money, and with that they stop getting hungry. The hunger for making money, which propelled a lot of the advancement in previous decades, is absent in many people here. Even I've become a multi-millionaire over the last 5 years by doing nothing differently except buying a house and working at a tech company. This causes a financial convection current, which you're somewhat seeing, of the bored rich Googlers moving on and doing other stuff. The incentive is gone for many. But as long as more immigrants from other countries come to Silicon Valley because they've heard about how rich people come, that will continue to fuel things for decades to come. These days, if you get funded by a VC, you're getting $5 million for 20%, which is a lot of money. Deals like that can't be matched elsewhere and another reason why you won't see people trying to raise money elsewhere, they will just come to Silicon Valley with their greatest ideas and keep propelling it. Silicon Valley will never die.

gxs 6y ago
I agree, but never say never. The Chinese will for sure have their own version of Silicon Valley and their giants will rival ours, no doubt. I think there will be other critical centers of tech innovation, similar to how Hollywood is Hollywood but NYC has an industry as well.
- raspasov 6y ago
  The fear of China "overtaking" the US is like the fear of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Real, but with no substance. A system built on top of paranoia is very unlikely to succeed.
  - gxs 6y ago
    No one said they would over take - merely they that are a formidable foe and will have a presence no doubt. The kind of hubris in this thread tells me despite how asinine these articles are they hit HNs nerve.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      I wouldn't say "no one"; my personal opinion is that if the West doesn't wake up, they'll quite easily overtake in a few decades, if not sooner. We continue to enable their rise, while ignoring their bad behavior, all because we need access to their manufacturing capability... capability we've willingly ceded to them over the past decades.
  - seniorivn 6y ago
    you oversimplify their model, for most people in Schenchzen(Chinese silicon valley) the motivation is the same as it was in US
  - mempko 6y ago
    I'm sorry, but China is much stronger economically than the USSR ever was
  - kelnos 6y ago
    Downplaying China and their potential is exactly how China got to the level of prominence they have today. I don't see the Soviet Union as a good comparison. I think China could still fail, of course, but they're much more likely than the Soviets (from whom they no doubt learned some of what not to do) to succeed in the longer term. The biggest problem is that the West is allowing them to win, by being addicted to cheap goods and losing the ability to manufacture many things (cost-effectively or at all) ourselves, while China doesn't open up their markets to outsiders, at least nowhere near the same degree as we give them access.
onethought 6y ago
> the best the world could do is China which just stole US ideas and then built a firewall to keep others out. So where was WeChat and ubiquitous QR codes for everything stolen from? Silicon Valley still haven't figured out how to do Ubiquitous contactless payment... it's like going back in time every time I travel there, and I have to swipe a credit card and sign with a pen. Or Taiwan's COVID/PPE Supply tracking system's? Sorry... Silicon Valley is dying.
- ubertoop 6y ago
  You've listed literally 4 things. You can't really believe that compares to the innovations to come out of Silicon Valley, right?
  - onethought 6y ago
    Sorry, your right: - largest electric vehicle manufacturer and adoption - 5G (still no SV grown solution there) - Most advanced solar manufacture - biggest investor in renewable energy and nuclear - biggest investor in space based technology and delivery If you’d like more I can keep going. I was responding to: “they steal everything”... I pointed out the most widely used social network that was homegrown and unique.
    - astrange 6y ago
      > - 5G (still no SV grown solution there) Is this a real thing that anyone cares about? There was a lot of marketing from Samsung and Supermicro for a few months about how everyone needed "5G AI cloud infrastructure", but it seemed like an especially bad strain of bullshit. I certainly haven't figured out what it was supposed to mean yet. Selling infrastructure to ISPs is not an amazingly high margin business.
      - onethought 6y ago
        Yeah, 5G is a real thing. It’s really fast and awesome! It involves both improvements in hardware and software. Huawei are the leaders in it. (Devastating to the narrative that China just copies everyone)
wojciii 6y ago
> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. A few examples: Nokia (the sleeping giant will awaken again :)) Nordic Semiconductor The Qt Company Unity Technologies I might be influenced by living in Scandinavia. :)
- hu3 6y ago
  TSMC ASML
- busterarm 6y ago
  > Nokia (the sleeping giant will awaken again :)) There is a nice little scene of companies in Espoo filled with some incredibily talented technologists who all got their start at Nokia. Even if Nokia itself doesn't return, I expect at least one or two major technology developments out of there. I have my eye on ICEYE and have even thought of maybe working there.
- alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  Wasn’t Opera, Nokia, and QT all within the same building too in Oslo? Maybe something’s in the water
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    Not Nokia, but yes I used to work for opera and trolltech was just a floor above us. We did a lot of work for Nokia device so maybe that’s what you were thinking of. Nokia itself was a giant corporation with multiple buildings around Finland.
- 0DHm2CxO7Lb3 6y ago
  Also Nintendo, Sony, Ericsson, and Samsung
JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
> Silicon Valley will never die. Over what time period? It’s absurd to say this and mean forever, if you have ever opened a history book. Even America itself will pass out of dominance, as all superpowers have. Rome, Britain, etc. Change is the rule, not the exception. It is the natural way. https://marketcap.com.au/history-world-reserve-currencies/ https://marketcap.com.au/history-world-reserve-currencies/
- dang 6y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnyCJDYONSU#t=57 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnyCJDYONSU#t=57
- m0llusk 6y ago
  The research at Los Alamos that Geoffrey West has summarized most recently in his book Scale demonstrates different dynamics are at work. Creatures and companies grow and age and die. Cities are a completely different construct. Rome and Londinium are both still large and influential. Two particularly stark demonstrations of this effect are Hiroshima and Nagasaki both of which were wiped off the map with nukes yet in roughly 30 years were back to being thriving urban conurbations. Times change, but influence remains more consistent than most expect. The startup scenes in Detroit and Cleveland are other examples of boom towns that were written off yet remain significant contributors.
  - rory 6y ago
    Sure, there is still innovation coming out of Detroit and Cleveland, but I still think if SF/SV became like one of those cities that would qualify as "dying" to a lot of people who currently live there.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Apocryphon 6y ago
Did you even read the article? Because you seem to be addressing a generic “Silicon Valley the place is dead” clickbait article rather than an in-depth thoughtful essay about the state of the tech industry and how it might transform as more sciences beyond computing come to prominence. As detailed as your comment is, it doesn’t seem germane to the OP at all and appears to be responding to merely the title and the identity of the author.
- dang 6y ago
  "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    Very well, next time I will simply state “the article doesn’t mention any of that, you have clearly not read it, and you are using this comment thread as a personal soapbox to broadcast your own opinions about a subject that is orthogonal to the actual link, sucking up valuable discussion that could be actually relevant and addresses the article at hand.”
    - dang 6y ago
      Ok, I see what you mean and realize that I didn't really read your comment beyond the trigger phrase at the beginning. Yes, generic top subthreads that don't really address the article, but rather get sucked straight into $predictable-thing-people-always-argue-about, are indeed one of the biggest problems on HN and I'm constantly trying to convince people not to go there. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=black%20hole%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Still, please don't "Did you even read the article"—it doesn't help. However, if you (or anyone) notice one of these generic subthreads sitting at the top of a thread, gathering mass and choking out more interesting discussion, there actually is something super helpful you can do: email hn@ycombinator.com to let us know. We downweight those, and doing that is perhaps the single best moderation thing we can do in large threads. It makes a huge difference. Just please remember that the problem is a co-creation, and the bulk of it is caused not by the root generic comment but by the upvotes they routinely attract. It's more a tragedy-of-the-commons thing and not worth taking out on any individual user. The solution is moderation, i.e. a module whose job it is to watch over the main system and jiggle it out of its failure modes. I plan to add software so that users can help identify and downweight these generic subthreads. Pending that, though, emails hn@ycombinator.com alerting us to these are greatly, fabulously appreciated.
barry-cotter 6y ago
> Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world. Tel Aviv has it. Beijing has it. SV’s big advantage over them is the internal market and Beijing will acquire that soon enough. > There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. True enough in software but see SAP. DeepMind was British, no? Give it time. Germany was the epicenter of the chemical industry before and to a large extent after WW1. It's still a big deal but Detroit is still a big deal in the automotive industry too. > Despite having much higher educational standards even in 3rd world countries, the best the world could do is China which just stole US ideas and then built a firewall to keep others out. There is no credible interpretation of this. In CS the US’ dominance in research is so great I’m not even sure what the best non-US university even is, perhaps ETH Zürich?
- rapsey 6y ago
  > Beijing will acquire that soon enough. I very much doubt it. Israel and china have something in common like all rising powers do, strong nationalism. Foreigners getting funded before locals is I am sure completely unthinkable.
rapsey 6y ago
SV will exist for as long as the US is in the position it is in the world. Money will flow while USD is the worlds reserve currency. The US is however rotting from within. The political disfunction will eventually destroy everything.
- astrange 6y ago
  The US has a lot of democratic risk but I have more hope for the country than Europe or Africa, because our economic policy is so much better. Europeans love their post-WW2 welfare states, but in practice their current governments react to everything with more austerity, and they're really anti-immigration.
  - rapsey 6y ago
    US economic policy is a result of the dollar being a world reserve currency. This is a unique privilege (usd being overvalued and liquid) and also a curse (inequality). Europe has quite a lot of internal migration and the US largely benefits from highly educated european and asian immigrants to SV. What makes europeans move is access to capital. It all comes down to the dollar.
    - astrange 6y ago
      Well, that's a theory, but it's not proven and we'd have to lose the status to do the experiment. There are countries with higher median wealth than the US and there are countries with a higher debt to GDP ratio - Japan and Canada have both. Really it just seems like printing money is much safer than people think, and everyone is just afraid of inflation because it happened once in the 70s due to an energy crisis.
      - rapsey 6y ago
        > There are countries with higher median wealth than the US and there are countries with a higher debt to GDP ratio - Japan and Canada have both. All irrelevant. > Really it just seems like printing money is much safer than people think It is safer when your currency is the one most other countries are indebted in and buy their goods in. USD increasing in value causes economic crises around the world, USD decreasing in value causes economic booms around the world. All because countries are paying their debts in dollars. > and everyone is just afraid of inflation because it happened once in the 70s due to an energy crisis. A whole lot of things happened in the 70s. Like the USD going off the gold standard completely, other countries starting to get rid of it for this reason and the establishment of the petro dollar to get it under control again. The 70s showed how things start unraveling when USD status is threatened.
KorematsuFred 6y ago
While the title of Tim's essay (which is not all matching with the title) is wrong so is your conclusion. > Silicon Valley will never die. Silicon valley is already dead in many sense. It has long stopped being the place where bunch of nerds could meet and make interesting stuff purely for the soul in the game. In last 20 years it is replaced by "i want to get rich" crowd who are building crappy products, VCs in suites who just get lucky every now and then, Big Tech which is a bog in itself, greedy and corrupt politicians squeezing people. The joy of building stuff is replaced with pressure of white board coding, and folks are large cos are not really solving interesting problems but haggling over promos and TC on teamblind.com. SV of today is just another wall street where people spend their 20s and 30s doing back breaking work so they could get out of this place in their 40s. It is a soul less place. I think SV will die eventually (so will NY, London or any other city) over sufficiently long period.
justinzollars 6y ago
> or Wall Street is doomed IDK Wall Street seems pretty irrelevant to me. The only thing that matters these days is the Fed.
dataking 6y ago
> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. Spotify, ATI, ARM, BlackBerry?
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  Canonical and the part of AWS built in SA?
keenreed 6y ago
》But as long as more immigrants from other countries come to Silicon Valley because they've heard about how rich people come Why should I come to SV? Living standard, taxes, workforce cost, housing... I may get $5m funding, but that would only buy an office and couple of employees for a few years. And if I ever make it, VC and California taxes would eat 90% of my profit. And do not even let me start on family and children cost and friendliness. Buying $3m house, so homeless guy can expose himself in front of my daughter... :( Raising funds is not that big deal, there is so much free capital now. New trend is residency in tax heaven (UAE, Singapore, Cyprus) and globally distributed team.
- astrange 6y ago
  California doesn't have a high tax burden. If you manage to get a house you're actually set, it's a feudal system where you essentially never have to pay taxes again, since your property tax will be below inflation forever.
  - gedy 6y ago
    Prop 13 allows for 2% increase every year[0]. That's more than the (supposed) inflation rate in many years[1], though agreed that feels inaccurate. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_... [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi
  - keenreed 6y ago
    Compared to what? California is not exactly known as tax heaven.
    - astrange 6y ago
      That’s because the only people who complain about “taxes” in general terms are propagandists like Grover Norquist who don’t care about reality. People actually trying to skip on their tax bills like Musk tend to do it quietly and make up excuses. Anyone who lives here knows perfectly well that their neighbor who bought a house in the 80s has a property tax bill 10x lower than theirs - actually I live next to several car dealerships who’d pay less than I would if I could afford a house here. That’s the power of Prop 13. Besides that, CA residents are probably getting a tax refund this year because the state has a budget surplus.
jandrewrogers 6y ago
Many places have plenty of talent, capital is increasingly global, and greed is a human constant. None of these are meaningfully unique to Silicon Valley these days. What traditionally has been unique is the culture, the importance of which should never be underestimated. Unfortunately for Silicon Valley, that culture now exists in many pockets outside of Silicon Valley, often brought there by former denizens of The Valley. And those people are bring a lot more wealth with them due to making loads of money. To your point, I do think the amount of money being thrown at employees in Silicon Valley (and Seattle, and...) has been detrimental to the ability to build hardcore technology startups. The cost of building a critical mass of highly qualified employees has made doing so effectively unachievable in many domains that require such employees to have any chance of executing successfully. This has created an arguably pathological selection bias for the kinds of startups that can be funded or the kinds of founders that can plausibly start a given company. Silicon Valley isn’t dead but as a place to build a tech company it is looking less differentiated with each passing year. Some critical future software deep tech is now developed almost entirely outside of Silicon Valley (cloud, AI, etc) even at companies headquartered in the Valley.
nmfisher 6y ago
> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. Probably the most ignorant comment I've ever seen on HN.
- stepbeek 6y ago
  This sentiment crops up semi-frequently here and I find it really odd. The USA has a lot going for it, but they don’t have a monopoly on impactful tech.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- temporalparts 6y ago
  Instead of calling OP ignorant, can you help us with world-leading tech companies that are not in the US? I can think of Tencent from China in terms of company valuation, but my impression is that Tencent's dominance is confined to China instead of the world.
  - m_mueller 6y ago
    I’ll bite: Leadership in chip manufacturing is firmly in TSMC’s hands. Chip design is dominated by ARM and Qualcomm. Display tech by Samsung and LG. Today, if you have an idea for a new gadget and you need fast prototyping, you’re far better off setting up shop in Shenzen than San Jose. I’ll give you one thing: When it comes to software, by far SV has still the most influence. But when you include the whole tech space I think one should differentiate.
    - presentation 6y ago
      Not saying you're wrong, but isn't Qualcomm an American company?
serial_dev 6y ago
> That's like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is doomed. > Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world. Nothing lasts forever. Some time ago, Detroit would have been on your list, too: "so tired of random writers trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. It's like saying Detroit is doomed. Detroit has the critical mass of talent and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world."
sampo 6y ago
> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. Young people might not remember but 10+ years ago, Nokia used to be the market leader in mobile phones. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-mobile-phone-market-share-the-Big-Five-2005-2011_fig5_256053886 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-mobile-phone-mark...
astrange 6y ago
> If there's anything that will kill Silicon Valley it's that people since 2010 have made too much money. Practically anyone at a FAANG is now a multi-millionaire no matter what you've worked on. No they're not. A multi-thousandaire maybe. You can get to millionaire status if you buy a house and pay off the loan, but for that you need more than 10 years of working in SV or an inheritance.
fancyfish 6y ago
I love this take. It’s true, after the rise of modern tech post-2008, the top talent got rich off RSUs and lost their greediness. Greed made this industry what it is, in every innovation cycle (hardware, software, dotcom, mobile). We need a return to greed and a rise in hunger and competitiveness, which creates innovation. Too many talented individuals resting on their laurels cashing RSUs instead of starting a company.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  I think it’s a massive success that tech has been able to share as much of its profits with its workers, and I think that’s because of stock comp creating a race to the top with wage growth. We need more of that, not less.

gxs 6y ago

I agree, but never say never. The Chinese will for sure have their own version of Silicon Valley and their giants will rival ours, no doubt. I think there will be other critical centers of tech innovation, similar to how Hollywood is Hollywood but NYC has an industry as well.

raspasov 6y ago
The fear of China "overtaking" the US is like the fear of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Real, but with no substance. A system built on top of paranoia is very unlikely to succeed.
- gxs 6y ago
  No one said they would over take - merely they that are a formidable foe and will have a presence no doubt. The kind of hubris in this thread tells me despite how asinine these articles are they hit HNs nerve.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    I wouldn't say "no one"; my personal opinion is that if the West doesn't wake up, they'll quite easily overtake in a few decades, if not sooner. We continue to enable their rise, while ignoring their bad behavior, all because we need access to their manufacturing capability... capability we've willingly ceded to them over the past decades.
- seniorivn 6y ago
  you oversimplify their model, for most people in Schenchzen(Chinese silicon valley) the motivation is the same as it was in US
- mempko 6y ago
  I'm sorry, but China is much stronger economically than the USSR ever was
- kelnos 6y ago
  Downplaying China and their potential is exactly how China got to the level of prominence they have today. I don't see the Soviet Union as a good comparison. I think China could still fail, of course, but they're much more likely than the Soviets (from whom they no doubt learned some of what not to do) to succeed in the longer term. The biggest problem is that the West is allowing them to win, by being addicted to cheap goods and losing the ability to manufacture many things (cost-effectively or at all) ourselves, while China doesn't open up their markets to outsiders, at least nowhere near the same degree as we give them access.

onethought 6y ago

> the best the world could do is China which just stole US ideas and then built a firewall to keep others out. So where was WeChat and ubiquitous QR codes for everything stolen from? Silicon Valley still haven't figured out how to do Ubiquitous contactless payment... it's like going back in time every time I travel there, and I have to swipe a credit card and sign with a pen. Or Taiwan's COVID/PPE Supply tracking system's? Sorry... Silicon Valley is dying.

ubertoop 6y ago
You've listed literally 4 things. You can't really believe that compares to the innovations to come out of Silicon Valley, right?
- onethought 6y ago
  Sorry, your right: - largest electric vehicle manufacturer and adoption - 5G (still no SV grown solution there) - Most advanced solar manufacture - biggest investor in renewable energy and nuclear - biggest investor in space based technology and delivery If you’d like more I can keep going. I was responding to: “they steal everything”... I pointed out the most widely used social network that was homegrown and unique.
  - astrange 6y ago
    > - 5G (still no SV grown solution there) Is this a real thing that anyone cares about? There was a lot of marketing from Samsung and Supermicro for a few months about how everyone needed "5G AI cloud infrastructure", but it seemed like an especially bad strain of bullshit. I certainly haven't figured out what it was supposed to mean yet. Selling infrastructure to ISPs is not an amazingly high margin business.
    - onethought 6y ago
      Yeah, 5G is a real thing. It’s really fast and awesome! It involves both improvements in hardware and software. Huawei are the leaders in it. (Devastating to the narrative that China just copies everyone)

wojciii 6y ago

> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. A few examples: Nokia (the sleeping giant will awaken again :)) Nordic Semiconductor The Qt Company Unity Technologies I might be influenced by living in Scandinavia. :)

hu3 6y ago
TSMC ASML
busterarm 6y ago
> Nokia (the sleeping giant will awaken again :)) There is a nice little scene of companies in Espoo filled with some incredibily talented technologists who all got their start at Nokia. Even if Nokia itself doesn't return, I expect at least one or two major technology developments out of there. I have my eye on ICEYE and have even thought of maybe working there.
alfiedotwtf 6y ago
Wasn’t Opera, Nokia, and QT all within the same building too in Oslo? Maybe something’s in the water
- kmonsen 6y ago
  Not Nokia, but yes I used to work for opera and trolltech was just a floor above us. We did a lot of work for Nokia device so maybe that’s what you were thinking of. Nokia itself was a giant corporation with multiple buildings around Finland.
0DHm2CxO7Lb3 6y ago
Also Nintendo, Sony, Ericsson, and Samsung

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago

> Silicon Valley will never die. Over what time period? It’s absurd to say this and mean forever, if you have ever opened a history book. Even America itself will pass out of dominance, as all superpowers have. Rome, Britain, etc. Change is the rule, not the exception. It is the natural way. https://marketcap.com.au/history-world-reserve-currencies/ https://marketcap.com.au/history-world-reserve-currencies/

dang 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnyCJDYONSU#t=57 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnyCJDYONSU#t=57
m0llusk 6y ago
The research at Los Alamos that Geoffrey West has summarized most recently in his book Scale demonstrates different dynamics are at work. Creatures and companies grow and age and die. Cities are a completely different construct. Rome and Londinium are both still large and influential. Two particularly stark demonstrations of this effect are Hiroshima and Nagasaki both of which were wiped off the map with nukes yet in roughly 30 years were back to being thriving urban conurbations. Times change, but influence remains more consistent than most expect. The startup scenes in Detroit and Cleveland are other examples of boom towns that were written off yet remain significant contributors.
- rory 6y ago
  Sure, there is still innovation coming out of Detroit and Cleveland, but I still think if SF/SV became like one of those cities that would qualify as "dying" to a lot of people who currently live there.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Apocryphon 6y ago

Did you even read the article? Because you seem to be addressing a generic “Silicon Valley the place is dead” clickbait article rather than an in-depth thoughtful essay about the state of the tech industry and how it might transform as more sciences beyond computing come to prominence. As detailed as your comment is, it doesn’t seem germane to the OP at all and appears to be responding to merely the title and the identity of the author.

dang 6y ago
"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Very well, next time I will simply state “the article doesn’t mention any of that, you have clearly not read it, and you are using this comment thread as a personal soapbox to broadcast your own opinions about a subject that is orthogonal to the actual link, sucking up valuable discussion that could be actually relevant and addresses the article at hand.”
  - dang 6y ago
    Ok, I see what you mean and realize that I didn't really read your comment beyond the trigger phrase at the beginning. Yes, generic top subthreads that don't really address the article, but rather get sucked straight into $predictable-thing-people-always-argue-about, are indeed one of the biggest problems on HN and I'm constantly trying to convince people not to go there. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=black%20hole%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Still, please don't "Did you even read the article"—it doesn't help. However, if you (or anyone) notice one of these generic subthreads sitting at the top of a thread, gathering mass and choking out more interesting discussion, there actually is something super helpful you can do: email hn@ycombinator.com to let us know. We downweight those, and doing that is perhaps the single best moderation thing we can do in large threads. It makes a huge difference. Just please remember that the problem is a co-creation, and the bulk of it is caused not by the root generic comment but by the upvotes they routinely attract. It's more a tragedy-of-the-commons thing and not worth taking out on any individual user. The solution is moderation, i.e. a module whose job it is to watch over the main system and jiggle it out of its failure modes. I plan to add software so that users can help identify and downweight these generic subthreads. Pending that, though, emails hn@ycombinator.com alerting us to these are greatly, fabulously appreciated.

barry-cotter 6y ago

> Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world. Tel Aviv has it. Beijing has it. SV’s big advantage over them is the internal market and Beijing will acquire that soon enough. > There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. True enough in software but see SAP. DeepMind was British, no? Give it time. Germany was the epicenter of the chemical industry before and to a large extent after WW1. It's still a big deal but Detroit is still a big deal in the automotive industry too. > Despite having much higher educational standards even in 3rd world countries, the best the world could do is China which just stole US ideas and then built a firewall to keep others out. There is no credible interpretation of this. In CS the US’ dominance in research is so great I’m not even sure what the best non-US university even is, perhaps ETH Zürich?

rapsey 6y ago
> Beijing will acquire that soon enough. I very much doubt it. Israel and china have something in common like all rising powers do, strong nationalism. Foreigners getting funded before locals is I am sure completely unthinkable.

rapsey 6y ago

SV will exist for as long as the US is in the position it is in the world. Money will flow while USD is the worlds reserve currency. The US is however rotting from within. The political disfunction will eventually destroy everything.

astrange 6y ago
The US has a lot of democratic risk but I have more hope for the country than Europe or Africa, because our economic policy is so much better. Europeans love their post-WW2 welfare states, but in practice their current governments react to everything with more austerity, and they're really anti-immigration.
- rapsey 6y ago
  US economic policy is a result of the dollar being a world reserve currency. This is a unique privilege (usd being overvalued and liquid) and also a curse (inequality). Europe has quite a lot of internal migration and the US largely benefits from highly educated european and asian immigrants to SV. What makes europeans move is access to capital. It all comes down to the dollar.
  - astrange 6y ago
    Well, that's a theory, but it's not proven and we'd have to lose the status to do the experiment. There are countries with higher median wealth than the US and there are countries with a higher debt to GDP ratio - Japan and Canada have both. Really it just seems like printing money is much safer than people think, and everyone is just afraid of inflation because it happened once in the 70s due to an energy crisis.
    - rapsey 6y ago
      > There are countries with higher median wealth than the US and there are countries with a higher debt to GDP ratio - Japan and Canada have both. All irrelevant. > Really it just seems like printing money is much safer than people think It is safer when your currency is the one most other countries are indebted in and buy their goods in. USD increasing in value causes economic crises around the world, USD decreasing in value causes economic booms around the world. All because countries are paying their debts in dollars. > and everyone is just afraid of inflation because it happened once in the 70s due to an energy crisis. A whole lot of things happened in the 70s. Like the USD going off the gold standard completely, other countries starting to get rid of it for this reason and the establishment of the petro dollar to get it under control again. The 70s showed how things start unraveling when USD status is threatened.

KorematsuFred 6y ago

While the title of Tim's essay (which is not all matching with the title) is wrong so is your conclusion. > Silicon Valley will never die. Silicon valley is already dead in many sense. It has long stopped being the place where bunch of nerds could meet and make interesting stuff purely for the soul in the game. In last 20 years it is replaced by "i want to get rich" crowd who are building crappy products, VCs in suites who just get lucky every now and then, Big Tech which is a bog in itself, greedy and corrupt politicians squeezing people. The joy of building stuff is replaced with pressure of white board coding, and folks are large cos are not really solving interesting problems but haggling over promos and TC on teamblind.com. SV of today is just another wall street where people spend their 20s and 30s doing back breaking work so they could get out of this place in their 40s. It is a soul less place. I think SV will die eventually (so will NY, London or any other city) over sufficiently long period.

justinzollars 6y ago

> or Wall Street is doomed IDK Wall Street seems pretty irrelevant to me. The only thing that matters these days is the Fed.

dataking 6y ago

> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. Spotify, ATI, ARM, BlackBerry?

selimthegrim 6y ago
Canonical and the part of AWS built in SA?

keenreed 6y ago

》But as long as more immigrants from other countries come to Silicon Valley because they've heard about how rich people come Why should I come to SV? Living standard, taxes, workforce cost, housing... I may get $5m funding, but that would only buy an office and couple of employees for a few years. And if I ever make it, VC and California taxes would eat 90% of my profit. And do not even let me start on family and children cost and friendliness. Buying $3m house, so homeless guy can expose himself in front of my daughter... :( Raising funds is not that big deal, there is so much free capital now. New trend is residency in tax heaven (UAE, Singapore, Cyprus) and globally distributed team.

astrange 6y ago
California doesn't have a high tax burden. If you manage to get a house you're actually set, it's a feudal system where you essentially never have to pay taxes again, since your property tax will be below inflation forever.
- gedy 6y ago
  Prop 13 allows for 2% increase every year[0]. That's more than the (supposed) inflation rate in many years[1], though agreed that feels inaccurate. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_... [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi
- keenreed 6y ago
  Compared to what? California is not exactly known as tax heaven.
  - astrange 6y ago
    That’s because the only people who complain about “taxes” in general terms are propagandists like Grover Norquist who don’t care about reality. People actually trying to skip on their tax bills like Musk tend to do it quietly and make up excuses. Anyone who lives here knows perfectly well that their neighbor who bought a house in the 80s has a property tax bill 10x lower than theirs - actually I live next to several car dealerships who’d pay less than I would if I could afford a house here. That’s the power of Prop 13. Besides that, CA residents are probably getting a tax refund this year because the state has a budget surplus.

jandrewrogers 6y ago

Many places have plenty of talent, capital is increasingly global, and greed is a human constant. None of these are meaningfully unique to Silicon Valley these days. What traditionally has been unique is the culture, the importance of which should never be underestimated. Unfortunately for Silicon Valley, that culture now exists in many pockets outside of Silicon Valley, often brought there by former denizens of The Valley. And those people are bring a lot more wealth with them due to making loads of money. To your point, I do think the amount of money being thrown at employees in Silicon Valley (and Seattle, and...) has been detrimental to the ability to build hardcore technology startups. The cost of building a critical mass of highly qualified employees has made doing so effectively unachievable in many domains that require such employees to have any chance of executing successfully. This has created an arguably pathological selection bias for the kinds of startups that can be funded or the kinds of founders that can plausibly start a given company. Silicon Valley isn’t dead but as a place to build a tech company it is looking less differentiated with each passing year. Some critical future software deep tech is now developed almost entirely outside of Silicon Valley (cloud, AI, etc) even at companies headquartered in the Valley.

nmfisher 6y ago

> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. Probably the most ignorant comment I've ever seen on HN.

stepbeek 6y ago
This sentiment crops up semi-frequently here and I find it really odd. The USA has a lot going for it, but they don’t have a monopoly on impactful tech.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
temporalparts 6y ago
Instead of calling OP ignorant, can you help us with world-leading tech companies that are not in the US? I can think of Tencent from China in terms of company valuation, but my impression is that Tencent's dominance is confined to China instead of the world.
- m_mueller 6y ago
  I’ll bite: Leadership in chip manufacturing is firmly in TSMC’s hands. Chip design is dominated by ARM and Qualcomm. Display tech by Samsung and LG. Today, if you have an idea for a new gadget and you need fast prototyping, you’re far better off setting up shop in Shenzen than San Jose. I’ll give you one thing: When it comes to software, by far SV has still the most influence. But when you include the whole tech space I think one should differentiate.
  - presentation 6y ago
    Not saying you're wrong, but isn't Qualcomm an American company?

serial_dev 6y ago

> That's like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is doomed. > Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world. Nothing lasts forever. Some time ago, Detroit would have been on your list, too: "so tired of random writers trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. It's like saying Detroit is doomed. Detroit has the critical mass of talent and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world."

sampo 6y ago

> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. Young people might not remember but 10+ years ago, Nokia used to be the market leader in mobile phones. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-mobile-phone-market-share-the-Big-Five-2005-2011_fig5_256053886 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-mobile-phone-mark...

astrange 6y ago

> If there's anything that will kill Silicon Valley it's that people since 2010 have made too much money. Practically anyone at a FAANG is now a multi-millionaire no matter what you've worked on. No they're not. A multi-thousandaire maybe. You can get to millionaire status if you buy a house and pay off the loan, but for that you need more than 10 years of working in SV or an inheritance.

fancyfish 6y ago

I love this take. It’s true, after the rise of modern tech post-2008, the top talent got rich off RSUs and lost their greediness. Greed made this industry what it is, in every innovation cycle (hardware, software, dotcom, mobile). We need a return to greed and a rise in hunger and competitiveness, which creates innovation. Too many talented individuals resting on their laurels cashing RSUs instead of starting a company.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
I think it’s a massive success that tech has been able to share as much of its profits with its workers, and I think that’s because of stock comp creating a race to the top with wage growth. We need more of that, not less.