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The cult of conformity in Silicon Valley [video]
- strawpeople 4y agoThink deferent.
- syedkarim 4y agoI was hoping that they would answer the question, rather than just ask, “So where do non-conformists go now?”
- dasil003 4y agoThey answered it softly by saying "we hope YC can be that place". Softly is the key, because of course you can't actually tell non-conformists where to go, especially once you are an establishment power yourself.
- toomim 4y agoAs soon as you create a place for non-conformists to go, you've created a place for people to conform to. Non-conformists create new places. Yes, it's a tough life.
- whythre 4y agoSure, but I think the question still stands- if the outsiders are going somewhere other than Silicon Valley, where are they going, or what new space is being created?
- mportela 4y agobootstrapping their own companies and projects
- LurkerAtTheGate 4y agoBingo. I, and others I've known, don't fit in California, so we bootstrapped somewhere with a low cost-of-living and fiber-to-the-home with a proper privacy agreement. Many don't have the goal of growth, but subsistence for the nerds - freed from the tyranny of MBAs, spend company and personal time on side projects unrelated to the Business. Some have drawn the attention of the SV crowd - they sold, to YC grads or bigger corpos, and immediately bootstrapped again. The money is a Means only; We just want to solve puzzles and learn things.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoThat's like when Macy's started selling pre-ripped punk jeans, in the 1980s, and Doc Martens started going mainstream.
- capableweb 4y agoSeems odd of the people to not introduce themselves before jumping into it. Michael Seibel - managing director at Y Combinator and co-founder of two startups – Justin.tv (eventually Twitch) and Socialcam. Dalton Caldwell - partner at Y Combinator and founder and chief executive officer of Mixed Media Labs (picplz & App.net) and founder of imeem.
- super256 4y ago> Seems odd of the people to not introduce themselves before jumping into it. I don't think you need to introduce yourself on your own channel in every video. It would quickly become annoying for returning viewers.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dehrmann 4y agoI watch some Starcraft II casts, and one commentator always starts most of his videos with "Hello everyone, my name is Lowko." It's a bit of a meme at this point.
- runnerup 4y ago"Welcome friends, family, and other creatures of the sea to another high-level game of Starcraft II!"
- woodruffw 4y agoAsking honestly, and only a little provocatively: what makes Y Combinator a credible source for what is or isn’t conformity in Silicon Valley? This outsider can’t tell the difference between the conforming and non-conforming pablum.
- mikeg8 4y agoTheir known status as one of the most desired/premier incubators in SV (if not globally) during the post dot-com era, coupled with the number of applicants, founders, and investors they touch, would give them a fairly accurate reading of SV trends and characteristics. I don’t think anyone else could claim to have a larger dataset than them when it comes to seed funding in SV.
- groby_b 4y agoIt gives YC an accurate reading on conformists, yes. A large number of startups exist for one point - making a nice exit. There's no nonconformism, just an angle. Going to an incubator, getting seed funding, getting several VC series - it's about as conformist as you can get. You want to see nonconformism, you need to look outside that space. Bootstrapped, co-ops, democratic governance models - those are the models that attract the outliers, because startup land now is what Wall Street was in the late 80s.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoYou've hit the nail on the head. Startup land is basically the intersection of hobby coders and sharks. Often those overlap in the same person, but sometimes they're somewhat separated. And the motivations of both are surprisingly similar. Hobby coders want to tinker and work on cool stuff because it's fun and also because it can provide status and reassurance. And sharks want status and $$$. And sometimes also reassurance. The common factor is a strange kind of individualised selfishness which is either blind or aggressively hostile to social contexts and consequences. AirBnB is a classic example. They made a lot of money - go them - but they've also made a huge contribution to making rents and housing unaffordable for local populations in cities all over the world. Non-conformity would require a "Wait a minute - this is going to cause some significant harm" moment. Startup culture - YC included - just doesn't have what it takes to do that.
- sfpotter 4y agoThese guys are full of shit. Tech isn't cool. People pretend that tech is cool because they want money. That's all there is to it. People who understand this aren't going to let on that they understand it, and people who don't understand it are going to get taken advantage of unless they're useful to people who are in charge.
- sfpotter 4y agoIf you’re downvoting my post instead of upvoting it you’re definitely a conformist.
- ShredKazoo 4y agoI'm happy for you that you're better attuned to what is & isn't cool than the rest of us.
- sfpotter 4y agoMe too!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- molsongolden 4y agoTech is cool. Meaning that tech is now an attractive alternative for status-seeking conformists looking to make a bunch of money. Parents at a college graduation party will now say "oh wow, that's great" when a graduate says they are joining a tech company instead of thinking it's a wild choice.
- sfpotter 4y agoCoolness: the thing defined by what parents say at graduation parties.
- molsongolden 4y ago
- a_c 4y ago"You are all different." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbzSif78qQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbzSif78qQ
- molsongolden 4y agoHoping there will be a little more discussion on this one. All the talking points in the video are pretty accurate and it's not just an overall industry shift, the same shift happens within startups as they grow. Small startup = high risk and mostly true believers who are interested in the problems. Large startup = heavily de-risked and people are now joining for the brand more than for the problems. The push for instant hypergrowth seems to have exacerbated this transformation over the past few years as startups raised larger and larger rounds earlier and earlier. This premature funding then drove premature headcount growth which diluted the core sooner. As someone mentioned in the video comments, maybe the non-conformists are now the ones refusing VC money but it's a tough game when your competitors can spend more on marketing in a month than you spend in a year.
- christkv 4y agoThey were in school during the Dotcom boom. It was a similar wave of conformists and anyone who had any inkling of doing a bit of HTML joining the fray until the collapse came. This feels like a mini Dotcom crash. The big companies will survive but will shed workers. Underfunded companies will go under, and other companies will scape by with minimal staffing, waiting for the industry to turn around to look for funding. The recovery will be slower with lower valuations and longer time in-between rounds. General and stock comp will probably take big hit.
- dehrmann 4y ago> This feels like a mini Dotcom crash The differences this time are the companies are much bigger, but they actually have revenue. What I wonder is how many will go under this time because their only customers were other tech companies.
- kurthr 4y agoPart of what happened was a secular decline in interest rates. Long term (10yr) rates have consistently dropped for 40 years from 1980-2020 down to zero. That makes longer term speculative investments (the discount rate) much more investable than otherwise. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS10 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS10 Basically, it's the same reason your entire family thinks housing is an investment. Unless, we figure out a way to back to zero and (figure out a way like digital currencies to go) negative this doesn't really continue. More likely, if there is some form of deglobalization, rates go up for the medium term (5-10yrs).
- invalidator 4y agoI think the concept they're after is there are two large groups of people into tech: the people who enjoy it and are here because they're doing what they love; and the people who are here for the money. I don't know if Conformity is the right word, unless you're viewing the world through a lens where everyone is working a job they hate just to survive. I've absolutely noticed the culture shift over the years though. In the 90s it was a bunch of us creating things because we saw a way to do it, and we were making enough money that we didn't have to worry too much about how to pursue our visions. But money corrupts everything eventually. Geek fashion was definitely nonconformist for a while, but then became trendy - because it was associated with affluence. I love being part of the Just For Fun crowd. It makes me versatile - I can pick up new technologies quickly because I love reading about them. Throw a problem at me and it's a puzzle I want to solve, not a chore. That doesn't translate well to a resume or job listing, and over time it has certainly gotten harder to link up with other people who think this way and want to create things in this uninhibited, creative kind of way. It's one of the reasons I've jumped into HN. There are a lot of them here, and I want to make that be more of my world again.
- mancerayder 4y ago>I love being part of the Just For Fun crowd. It makes me For many Just For Fun would be Phase 2 after Phase 1: accumulate enough affluence that Phase 2 can be done in a typical high cost of living city and doesn't involve moving to a cabin or in with roommates.
- invalidator 4y agoLike you say, it can be a mix. They can also happen at the same time. I am blessed that I can make a good living doing what I love.
- mathgladiator 4y agoI'm in this phase 2, and it's both great and awkward. I moved from Seattle to Kansas City to be closer to friends and family, and I'm building a strange thing: https://www.adama-platform.com/ https://www.adama-platform.com/ I'm working on how to explain it, but I love doing it just for fun. I love optimizing and just making things. Even if Adama fails as a business, the key is that I am building the platform I want to use.
- throwaway13337 4y agoThe answer to the question of 'where the non-conformist tech nerds hang out' is almost too obvious. It's where the money isn't. There's a lot of cool stuff that isn't obviously a path to money. The blender community is full of it, for instance. YC isn't a part of that because YC is primarily concerned with making money. This isn't a very satisfying answer because it does not lead to investment and money but that's kinda the point.
- the-grump 4y agoPlus making money is the whole point of creating a company. There are many weirdos (I mean that as a positive thing) building things like popcorn time and its successors, creating models for vrChat, modding games, building rockets, automating their homes with ESP Home/Tasmota, using esoteric languages to solve solved problems, playing with ML models, etc. They don't need to come to YC. Like it or not, status follows money, and YC has proven itself to be an effective step to a successful exit. Seekers of money and status (what the discussion refers to as conformists) will find you if you're at YC. Weirdos are weirded out by you.
- throwaway13337 4y agoI agree. The tech nerds were a great investment recently and so people are trying to spot the real ones in a sea of fakes now. The investors think that spotting the real ones will lead to more of the same. Maybe that was a moment in time. Another way to to look at it is through value capture. The things you listed often create a lot of value for the community they're a part of or for humanity as a whole. But these things do not generate as much value to the creators. The creators are unable to capture the value they created but do it anyway. The last decade can be seen through the lens of tech companies (mostly big ones) capturing the overall value of the tech created at the expense of the communities it once subsidized. Value capture isn't bad in itself but the immense focus on it kills a lot of the utility of the thing created. More loose forms of value capture created the tech revolution that were then monetized often by a separate group. The cynically monetized tech will hopefully be outcompeted by the looser forms due to increased utility inherent in its looseness as happened previously.
- AlbertCory 4y agoTheir notion of "conformity" is too narrow. The startup I was in which made it and IPO'ed was "non-conformist" in a different way: it took a technology which the networking graybeards claimed would never work, and said, "yes, it will." YC and these two are in no way, shape, or form "non-conformist" to that degree. They are the Cool Kids Table in the high school cafeteria.
- neilv 4y agoWhen they say what they look for, surely they're aware that a bunch of people aspiring to be YC founders are studying their every word, to know what appearance to project. So are they making it harder to find what they're looking for, by coaching fakers? One way this could be interesting is if they figured out how to plant a trap in what they say -- some suggestion that less-genuine people would dutifully follow, but more-genuine would decline that part while still otherwise engaging. Or maybe they just say what they're looking for, but never say some less-obvious telltale signs of it that they look for. Something people with a certain quality would say/do without even thinking about it, but probably wouldn't occur to someone who was trying to fake that quality. (Or, if the person can understand people well enough to fake even that non-obvious sign, maybe you want stock in any company where they're CEO/salesperson anyway.)
- etothepii 4y agoThis is a really interesting question. My suspicion is that most of what gets said in these videos is sufficiently internally coherent that it would be really tough for this to be the case.
- chmod600 4y agoWhat do they lose if someone fools them? What do they gain by clearly saying whay they want?
- quickthrower2 4y ago500k I guess. That said the conformist might still have a good idea, and their connections could get something off the ground.
- ravagat 4y agoI think in some cases a lot of publications (of docs, videos, etc.) like this are indirectly serving as a filter. Filters for both acceptance and rejection. You've worded it better than I can in your last two sentences.
- bluedays 4y agoI get the impression that all the nonconformists are now entering the space of microcontrollers and such.
- afdssdddd 4y agoCult of Conformity... Yale and Stanford... start ups used to be formed by punk rock drummers, people who made blue boxes, hackers and all the crazy rejects of society who where smart enough to build, but were rejected by all the "conformist institutions" - we had no where else to go. Now... yeah...
- sammalloy 4y agoThe honest truth is that since about 2007, the non-conformists are found just about everywhere but tech. It’s just how these things work. The newest ideas aren’t going to come from computer science or IT, they are going to come from outside those fields and then be adapted and monetized. That’s how it has always worked. The example I always like to go on and on about is AR. In 2023, augmented reality should have already been a dominant technology adopted by the mainstream. Yet, we don’t see anyone using it. This is because the people who worked on adoption failed to realize that functional fashion, in other words wearable computing, was the future, not ridiculous looking glasses. I should be able to grab a baseball cap, put it on my head, and have as much functionality as a mini PC or high end smartphone. Yet it doesn’t exist. I should be able to wear clothing with screens embedded in the sleeves, or projecting displays available on my wrist. Still don’t have it. Functional fashion and clothing have enormous tech potential, and we still don’t see much. Everyone needs clothing. All you need to do is make it useful.
- jimbo9991 4y agoThe benefit of having something attached to your body vs taking a second longer to get from the phone in your pocket renders the value proposition of wearable tech pretty small in most cases. The easy sells have already mostly been made (apple watches) and are only slightly popular.
- RangerScience 4y agoOne of the unexpected main issues with functional fashion AKA tech inside of clothes is simple: washing. Still wish it was more of a thing.
- bigDinosaur 4y agoI can't think of a single reason I'd want tech integrated with my clothes. What's a problem it could solve?
- sammalloy 4y agoWell, you can look at how the health and fitness industry is currently using it for 3D body scans, and extrapolate from there. I’m interested in clothing that gives me feedback as to my vitals and health.
- srj 4y agoI remember watching office space when it came out and thinking "welp that's going to be my life." In high school I talked to someone who had a bachelors in CS and he cautioned me that it wasn't worth the paper it was printed on (this was around the dot com crash). Oh well, I was having a blast coding AOL punters and knew programming was the only thing I was good at. The gold rush has certainly brought in a different crowd. Many of them can excel past nerds like me just from sheer intelligence and quickness. It's still great having opportunities to work with fellow hackers colleagues though.
- dehrmann 4y ago> Many of them can excel past nerds like me just from sheer intelligence and quickness Really? Usually breadth and depth of knowledge makes people who really like the stuff stand out.
- moomoo11 4y agoI mean someone who wants to build a business vs have a hobby are going to be vastly different. The former is going to be ultra competitive since they have to survive against the competition and face extinction level events on the regular. The hobbyist can take forever and do whatever because it’s a hobby and even if their model airplane never flies that’s okay. It’s like playing ranked vs people who never play ranked and do whatever meme custom game.
- olliej 4y agoI think there are a few issues here: * sure a degree alone isn’t instantly valuable, you can skip it in CS, but it requires substantial time commitment regardless. The goal is to have the knowledge and skills to be valuable (in a purely utilitarian sense). A CS degree can do that, but so can for example working on large OSS projects - the difference is largely how focused the approach is on bringing up core knowledge. On the one hand I know a lot of “self taught”/non degree devs who have annoying gaps, on the other hand you get people who know O(N) but not how a computer works. You really need both. > many of them can excel … No, the super successful “young founder” startups are largely luck plus connections, not any magical ability others lack. There’s often after the fact assignment of brilliance, but that happens in many fields and is often kind of questionable. Strategic/tactical brilliance is also super susceptible to survivor bias. Just focus on doing the best you can, and worry less about what others are doing. There will always be someone who might be smarter, or richer, or luckier, etc and there’s nothing you can do to change that, so don’t bother.
- spamizbad 4y agoWas scratching my head at the claim that both tech and startups being uncool and non-conformist until he mentioned he went to Yale and it made sense. I can see tech being uncool for Ivy League/tier-1 university students who, particularly in the aughts, were tracking into consulting and finance. That was "cool"/"conformist". But these takes aren't relevant to you if you're not part of that elite milieu. In the aughts, after only attending community college for a while, I started my tech career; specifically in early stage startups. And, to be honest, I felt more like a square than a non-conformist. For me it was pretty simple: I liked programming computers. The easiest places to get hired to program computers were early stage startups. Early stage startups give you a bunch of personal latitude towards programming. When I was young, this freedom made up for the downsides (lower pay, inexperienced business operators, employment volatility, etc)
- quickthrower2 4y agoStartups and tech was seen as very uncool in the UK at that time. Nothing to do with elite. Changed once you get a job like you say, they chuck you in an open plan with other coders. The conformist/nonconformist thing never crossed my mind. To me a nonconformist would probably go travel for a few .. well for life, or volunteer to help people.
- olliej 4y agoThe entire premise of this video is a fiction. At what point were Silicon Valley startup founders non-conformists? They have historically been started by rich white dudes, who went to Stanford etc. In the 60s and 70s there’s lots of talk about drug use at berkeley etc, but that wasn’t where startups were. In fact then being a startup was even more likely to require you to be from an already affluent family, definitely white (because banks could and did deny loans to people who weren’t white, red zoning meant PoC couldn’t buy property in many areas of the bay - hell it was so bad that Digital had to create its own credit union because it employed women and PoC who could not then get mortgages, etc) In the 90s people realized that they could use marketing to create an image of what a tech rockstar should look like, and then was “affluent white guy”, and that’s where the funding went. The ability to be anything beyond white guy in a suit is recent, and being “counter culture” has always been a negative. Hell Steve Jobs is the closest you get to “counter culture”, and all his marketing images have in a suit through out early Apple. It was until much later that any other image was acceptable, and that image was rich “grad student”.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stakhanov 4y agoI don't think that creation of startups has become a more conformist thing in any and all circumstances, but rather that YC and Silicon Valley, in general, see the most status-seeking cohort of founders. In Europe, if you're anywhere in the "self-employed" spectrum, people basically think of you as an insolvency waiting to happen. This is particularly true for banks. So, as a startup founder in Europe, you'll watch all your highschool friends build houses while you yourself can certainly kiss that particular piece of status-seeking goodbye until the day of your IPO (which probably will never come). And it doesn't really matter what words you use to describe yourself, whether you say you're self-employed or a startup founder or an entrepreneur or a small business owner or whatever. Because people, in their own minds and in conversations with others, will always project that image that they're basically like Steve Jobs even when they're self-employed as in UPS driver or a small business owner as in dogwalker. So people seek out some kind of badge that says: No, no, I'm not one of those people. I'm the sort of calibre of person who could have easily gotten an offer from Facebook or from Goldman Sachs, but I just chose to sit around in my garage and work on a crazy-sounding idea I have, that has yet to make a single dime. YC serves as a badge like that. ...or even just sitting in a garage in Silicon Valley rather than your parents' garage does that. So, I think that's at least a big part of what they're seeing there.
- watwut 4y ago> In Europe, if you're anywhere in the "self-employed" spectrum, people basically think of you as an insolvency waiting to happen. This is particularly true for banks. So, as a startup founder in Europe, you'll watch all your highschool friends build houses Living in Europe, I have seen my college peers starting startups or small companies and buy the same housing as employed programmers. It is a bit of distraction from your larger point, but getting mortgage for housing is not actually an issue for founder of a software startup.
- stakhanov 4y ago...seems we're both overstating our respective points then, when I claim it will definitely be a problem and you claim it's never a problem. Apparently you just had one piece of experience and I had another. When I moved from the U.K. to Austria to start my "startup", I had to wait several years before I could apply for a credit card from my Austrian bank because I couldn't show them a paycheck from a current employer. (I'm an Austrian national). When I later moved from Austria to Germany, one bank even rejected me for a basic bank account with no credit facility at all, when the only piece of information that the German consumer credit rating agency (Schufa) had about me was the date when I first appeared on their radar, implying I was a recent "immigrant", and the fact that I ticked the "self-employed" box on my application form. I managed to convince another bank to give me a bank account, though. In Munich, being an overheated housing market like most of Germany, prospective landlords wanted to see a recent paycheck, and I'd be in a world of pain trying to explain to them that I couldn't show them one but still wasn't really a financial risk for them. Luckily I came across a landlord who, himself, was a small business owner, who rented to me. Admittedly: Moving around a lot also played a role in my personal experience with consumer credit rating. I think it illustrates my main point rather well: To a status seeker it is extremely off-putting to think that, when they open a bank account or apply for a mobile phone plan, they might suddenly find themselves in a difficult conversation, even when they're not objectively in financial trouble. And, I think it even goes so far that people sometimes seek out pre-seed investments and incubator memberships and things like that, even when they don't need the money, because it serves a psychological need for status and validation.
- quickthrower2 4y agoBased on this I think I am maybe 60% conformist! I enjoyed tech for what it is, feeling super embarrassed to say this is what I wanted to do in my class at 10 years old (1990). But at the same time I expected employment to provide the opportunity to do cool stuff and thought startups was business and “other people” do business. I nodded along until they talked about confidence and that ability to take on any intellectual challenge. I am more like “no, I like a slight challenge not a scary one!”
- SunghoYahng 4y agoI'm confused. I keep hearing that for a startup to be successful, the founder has to be very unique. Isn't that a fundamental requirement?