I spent a decade of my life in the valley and I do believe it's relevant to remember that what used to be a homebrew mixing of nerds, hippies, academics, researchers, teachers, makers, marketers, tinkerers and capitalists is now in large part skewed to marketers and capitalists. This is not necessarily good, bad, or romanticized it just is. So here are some tips:
Don't hustle.
Don't crush anything.
Try not to have to give a stage presentation with a mic at the corner of your mouth.
Your creation is not completely superlative or world changing yet, speak of it realistically.
The internet is not a substitute or replacement for you having to deal with humanity.
Be nice.
Follow your curiosities and interests. Have curiosities and interests.
Don't claim false passions. You're not passionate about "revolutionizing HR" or "remaking the way people buy nail polish".
Learn how tech relates to the world and how you relate to it, don't make tech its own world.
+100. I spent almost two decades in SV before moving to PHX and agree completely with your tips.
I've found that since moving to PHX, the hustling and "revolutionizing/world-changing/disruptive" rhetoric is kept to a minimum. Tech isn't its "own world" as much here and most of my friends and co-workers in the tech community end up talking about things we all enjoy doing as hobbies, or our families, more than anything. It's nice to find professional peers who enjoy hiking in Sedona, not worrying about how many PRs their open-source project has, or how many retweets their presentation at RubyConf got.
Its totally subjective, but its my kind of environment.
People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t.
Ask the average person what brands and products they like and use the most (or just look at the data on where and how they spend their time and money) and you’ll see that Silicon Valley is doing just fine in the eyes of the populace. In fact, Silicon Valley has never been more influential.
Ask people to go to a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, Uber/Lyft and they’ll call you crazy. But the media knows that, so it goes after the losers: It’s easy to point and laugh at the 100 things that look stupid, without realizing that “lol this social network for college kids thinks it’s worth $150m” seems just as crazy. Silicon Valley is the place that will be wrong funding Juicero in order to be right funding Facebook. You can’t have one without the other. (As an aside, I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money.)
But the media that sees itself losing its power, losing influence, and losing money. Of course they hate tech.
As someone outside of SV (Nevadan living in Boston and practicing medicine), I think this article largely misses the mark.
I think it is true that there is a diversity problem in SV, just like there is a diversity problem in medicine. It’s a problem, because there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields. But that’s probably the only point that resonates.
The criticism of Juicero and Theranos being emblematic of focusing on the wrong problems is not sensible. Companies fail, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes due to dishonest behavior, etc. If Theranos had the tech they claimed to have, it would have been richly rewarded (outshined only by the consumer surplus it would have created).
The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV, and then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem as it proceeds to its logical extreme.
> The criticism of Juicero and Theranos being emblematic of focusing on the wrong problems is not sensible. Companies fail, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes due to dishonest behavior, etc. If Theranos had the tech they claimed to have, it would have been richly rewarded (outshined only by the consumer surplus it would have created).
The problem with Juciero and Theranos isn't that they failed. The problem with them is that Juciero was an immensely dumb idea that was never checked or questioned and thereby wasted tons of money, and Theranos was so unabashedly, obviously mustache-twirlingly evil that if it were used to script an evil corporation for TV, I'd have called it unrealistic (and thereby, it wasted tons of money). They're the worst parts of SV (dumb companies offering things nobody wants at outrageous prices, and obvious evil pretending things are OK because they're 'changing the world' or some other nonsense) exaggerated to near-comical extremes.
Silicon Valley's problem is deeper than failing businesses or not enough diversity. It's that the entire enterprise is a bold-faced moneygrab for VCs; ethics, diversity, etc. were never really part of the point, and it's only now that the rest of the world is starting to figure that out. SV's problems are at the core of the reasons for its current existence.
> The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV
The rise in income inequality is tied pretty directly to pervasive automation. Economic efficiency is not always social progress, especially when coupled with retrograde politics and social policy. We're not having "more leisure" or whatever because of it, we're having people ground to dust in worthless jobs because the computers are doing more and more.
To that end, tech (and not just the Valley, but the Valley is a particularly visible and awfully smarmy representation of tech) probably should get more shade thrown at it than it does.
> then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem
Tech is doing no such thing. Tech is reifying capital, it is not trying to solve the problem on behalf of labor.
> The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV, and then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem as it proceeds to its logical extreme.
The issue here is that many people feel SV's ideas of basic income will absolutely never work in the long-term. Heck, it will never work in this country period. We can't even socialize healthcare in this country, and those who collect unemployment are looked down upon.
What makes you think basic income will ever become a reality? What makes you think a major political party wouldn't call those people freeloaders and work ceaselessly to remove those benefits if they are put in place? And what makes you think those millions of people being given subsidized, substandard, meaningless lives won't rise up against a system that has basically sucked as much productivity out of them that they could before abandoning them?
There is no a priori reason that society feels comfortable acknowledging, but for anybody without those hangups, the reasons are actually quite obvious.
> The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV, and then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem as it proceeds to its logical extreme.
People don't like new people getting money. A story as old as time.
As a non-american and as a person who has never been to SV but love the idea that is described in the article that anyone can start up a company I would like to adress the points in the article.
1. Your ideas are only as good as the people in the room. And your door is shut to most people.
Well, if anyone can start a company the door isn't shut. I don't buy that white men only invests in white men. I think people invest in companies (for the most part) where investors think they will gain the most money from.
2. Your rainforest of innovation has turned into a factory farm.
Totally agree, this is why startups should bootstrap and perhaps not start up in Sillicon Valley. Perhaps it is better to start up somewhere cheaper.
I think countries of the world should make it easier and less expensive to start a company. That is the best recipee for success in my view. If it is less of a risk to create a company, more people will do it.
I have been wanting to start a company for years but haven't just yet because of the economic game. I am still planning to do it, hopefully pretty soon but I want to save up enough so I can run my company for at least 1-2 years without any other income.
In my country Sweden, unfortunately, smaller companies get taxated pretty hard which makes any earning disappear. You will need a pretty good stream of incoming cash to be able to survive. Since I do want to create a product and not simply be a consultant this is much harder to achieve.
The article is shallow and it would be easy to rip apart most of its arguments (eg. [1][2]). But the worrying trend is that such articles are now appearing very regularly, and at some point perception becomes reality. At this pace, SV will be the Wall Street in no time, if it is not already.
[1] > You’re churning out companies that are raising hundreds of millions of dollars, and going bankrupt in literal satires of themselves
Yes, and that is an aspect of capitalism. You take risk on crazy ideas. Some of them will be a fancy juicer, but some of them will also be an electric car.
[2] > Your companies are now solving “my-world problems” (food delivery, cold-pressed, on-demand juice) versus the “real-world problems” you used to solve
Google wants to deploy Loon in Puerto Rico to offer connectivity. Tesla offered to rebuild Puerto Rico electrical grid based on Solar energy. If these are not real world problems affecting everything, I don't know what the author has in mind.
Google is not "deploying Loon" and Tesla is not "rebuilding the grid" out of the kindness of their heart, the problem is everyone already sees phase two coming and doesn't like it. It's not a media problem, it's pattern recognition.
Just to add on to your point, notice the writer is on the Board of a VC firm that does business inside and outside SV. I see huge potential for him trying to deface SV for the sake of his other projects.
Yeah I think little has changed in SV in the last year compared to the near 180 in public opinion. My theory is that journalists and readers who used to hate trump as a hobby are bored with the lack of scandal and have turned to SV, the only other interesting new thing in the us.
1. The startup scene's smarmy feel-good rhetoric and forced friendliness. The cutesy aesthetics, the wacky company names, and most gratingly the lofty mission statements that cover up at best business as usual and at worst actual corporate malfeasance. How did we get to here? When did "making the world a better place" become the mantra of Silicon Valley, and why did this laughable cliche get created? Was SV truly idealistic at one point, or has it been trying to cover up its true mission all along by pretending to be better than Wall Street or Hollywood, those other synonyms for wealth generation and inequality?
2. Silicon Valley can't even make the Bay Area a better place, never mind America, or the world. The extreme inequality in San Francisco and its environs is largely due to local government and broken politics, it is true. But SV companies should spend more of their lobbying efforts not in D.C. clamoring for special statuses, but in local legislatures securing better housing and infrastructure. Both their employees and the local populations will benefit, and like them more for it. Instead, what's the most high profile example of an SV executive interacting with local leaders? Steve Jobs presenting the new Apple headquarters plan to the Cupertino City Council in 2011. How's the traffic on Stevens Creek these days?
“Making the world a better place” is simply the cheapest marketing gag you can get. And in a way, they did make the world a better place—it's just for a select group of founders and investors only.
The overlords of Silicon Valley need to do a bit more to turn America's best minds towards solving serious social problems.
Personal anecdote: Right now, I am building software that automates the process of filing super-simple Chapter 7 bankruptcies. We give the product away for free.[1] Technologically, this is a really straightforward problem and solution: You just collect some documents and fill out a long questionnaire, fill out a PDF, show up to a couple of meetings, then you've discharged a bunch of unsecured debt and have a fresh start in life and the economy.
There should literally be millions of these Chapter 7 bankruptcies filed every year[2]... but nobody has built the software before! Despite its enormous potential impact and amazingly low cost (we have two full-time employees, though we could use more), nobody has really tackled the problem because there's no way to simultaneously get rich while building the most successful product.[3]
There is a crazy amount of low-hanging fruit out there like this. Much of it could be plucked by small, bright teams of the sort Silicon Valley has in abundance. The most powerful people just need to dedicate a little more money and 5-20% of their time to it - not just money, but serious, ongoing advice. [4]
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[1] https://Upsolve.org. The product is free and we're a non-profit because you trigger an avalanche of regulatory activity if you try to make money doing this. We've also been able to garner an incredible amount of institutional (judicial) buy-in because we are a non-profit.
[3] Our #1 success metric is simply "number of Chapter 7 bankruptcy discharges received".
[4] Real advice - not sending it down the black hole of billionaire philanthropy. Without even getting into the subject of how those institutions grind their founders' personal axes, there is a huge qualitative difference between their advice and Silicon Valley-level "Let's build a huge thing on a lean budget" advice.
Here's another view of the problem: the "average Joe" American is starting to hate all the centralized and monolithic institutions in the country, because he sees them as being corrupt, privileged, and primarily concerned with cementing their own power. It used to be that SV was a rebel and outsider going against Washington and Wall Street, but increasingly SV is just another pillar of the power structure.
To you, in the words of one Silicon Valley investor, this seems like “the only logical conclusion.”
To the average person, this seems like the height of arrogance. People are uncomfortable with
universal basic income because you’re essentially saying their labor isn’t worth anything — but you don’t see it!
I think this point is really missing from most UBI conversations that happen on HN. UBI is the answer when you believe that all economic productivity must come from the US coasts.
I think a lot of start ups have thrived trying to solve the problem of high density cities. Airbnb and Uber are start ups that get created when your biggest problems are high rent and poor public transit. I would be interested in seeing startups trying to solve suburban problems and producing suburban jobs. I think the fact that are very few companies like this is indicative of our increasing cultural divide.
> UBI is the answer when you believe that all economic productivity must come from the US coasts.
No, it's not.
UBI is the answer when you recognize that capitalism directs the gains from productivity (whether made in the US coasts or anywhere else) to a narrow class of megacapitalists, that it's gotten more efficient at that over time, and that the welfare state of the modern mixed economy is an overly complicated, inefficient corrective measure for that that leaves lots of gaps for people to fall through and responds slowly to changes in the details of the mechanisms of capitalist wealth capture. UBI is the simple, low-overhead, responsive implementation of a mixed economy, which gets out of the way—compared to classic welfare state programs—of realizing the value of labor, especially including labor marked as worthless and prohibited from sale by minimum wage laws.
> "I would be interested in seeing startups trying to solve suburban problems and producing suburban jobs."
In my opinion these aren't technical problems to be solved by a team of engineers in their SF Bay offices. They are political problems that need legislative solutions. To think that we can outsource political problems to the realm of tech is misguided and won't solve our long-standing public policy issues.
I don't see UBI as saying that someone's labour isn't worth anything, it just allows them the freedom to keep experimenting in order to find out what it is worth when applied to different jobs.
UBI is the answer when you believe that all economic productivity must come from the US coasts.
This is a failure of a common way presenting the UBI as "you should be able to have a comfortable life without working", which is both economically infeasible and not actually desirable. A UBI, at least in the form that I support, isn't something that you should be happy to live off of indefinitely, it's just better protection against homelessness and hunger than our current convoluted welfare systems. The expectation should still be that you'll find something productive to do, and a UBI incentivizes that because it avoids the welfare trap of losing a dollar in benefits for every dollar you earn.
>I would be interested in seeing startups trying to solve suburban problems and producing suburban jobs. I think the fact that are very few companies like this is indicative of our increasing cultural divide
You'll have an uphill battle because "environment". Nobody wants to invest in making commuting more bearable or making areas with non-city population densities more environmentally friendly. Everyone wants to hitch their wagon into whatever the latest scheme to cram people into carbon neutral shipping containers.
> "As evidenced by the major backlash over the recent launch of a company called Bodega — where the founders and investors genuinely didn’t understand why the name was problematic — you don’t always have the best handle on how your ideas will be received outside of the Silicon Valley bubble.""
I find it ironic that the article claims that people in the "SV bubble" don't understand why "Bodega" is a bad name... if you took a survey, I imagine an extremely small percentage of people would find anything wrong with that name (personally, I had to Google around a good bit to find why people had a problem with it). I think you'd have to be in an ultra-pedantic PC media bubble to extract outrage out of a name like "Bodega".
"Thoughtfully, Fast Company asked McDonald about that. He replied, “We did surveys in the Latin American community to understand if they felt the name was a misappropriation of that term or had negative connotations, and 97% said ‘no’.”" (https://www.eater.com/2017/9/13/16302386/bodega-startup-corn...)
The problem with Bodega is not the name. It's that it doesn't carry much of an inventory. It's just another box accessed with an app for in-plant vending. Byte Foods does that.[1] TechShop SF has one of those, as do many hospitals. The vending industry term is "micro-market".
Vending machine micro-markets are a standard item from Canteen Vending.[2] They have 4500 US locations. They're also found in Swiss train stations.
The really creepy player in this industry is Three Square. In their system, employees have implanted RFID tags which identify them to the vending machines. They're in River Falls, WI, not Silicon Valley.
The description of the symptoms here has a lot of resonance for me.
I was just talking with the CEO I worked for in 2001; she's busy putting together her next startup. We had a good conversation about what I was calling "unicorn fever", the way the desire for instant massive valuation has distorted so much of what we thought good about the startup ecosystem. The article calling this factory farming seems spot on to me.
What this piece misses the obvious financial privilege that many startups have. Uber is slaying yellow/black cabs around the world, but only by massively subsidizing its rides through investment capital. Amazon is the world's largest store, by working on margins that don't let people who actually expect a return on the investment compete.
It's gotten to the point that if a company actually does things the old fashioned way: taking a small seed, creating a product that people want, selling it and expanding based on that revenue... we ooh and ahh, calling it "organic growth". Everywhere else, it's just called "building a business".
Pair that with the "thought leaders" who dismiss businesses that allow people to build a life for themselves and their families. Because Silicon Valley isn't really about making things anymore, it's about making financial bets. And that's a shame - watching billionaires blow money on reinventing the vending machine isn't much fun.
The small midwestern town from which I hail is rotting. The residents could never afford the luxuries flowing here in the valley. They are angry. They are huge Trump supporters. They don't want handouts. They want jobs. They want to contribute. They don't want to leave their homes. They are stuck.
>They don't want handouts. They want jobs. They want to contribute. They don't want to leave their homes.
Well, they can't have everything. A big part of why America has historically had social and economic mobility is because it also had literal mobility; people willing to go where the work is.
What I hear when I read this is, "they want someone to come along and hand them a stable well-paying job." And who doesn't? But we live in the real world.
I think this is the main reason the Democrats got swept, and will probably continue to get swept. They aren't offering what most people want, honest pay for honest work. They are offering welfare, which most people are to proud to take, let alone want.
This isn't just a problem in the Midwest, this is a problem for almost anywhere that isn't a large city on the coast (with some exceptions). This problem affects probably 90% of our land mass and the problem has been consistently growing for the past 45 years or so.
Neither political party knows how to solve this, or if they do, don't have the political will to solve it.
Valuable comment - because both sides of the spectrum miss something in there. It cost the democrats the election not to understand that these people wanted jobs, not welfare, and the reason they won't get jobs is that they won't go where the jobs are.
Well they should pull themselves up by the bootstraps like good little republicans.
On my team of 8 people 1 grew up anywhere near the Seattle area. Half the team moved to the US from other countries. Maybe these people should move. It sucks, but life isn't fair and sometimes you have to sacrifice what you want for what you actually need.
The big problem is that they do want handouts; just of a different kind. Jobs retraining programs have been around for quite a while; they were central to Clinton's plan for what to do with people who used to work in coal mines. But they don't want to stop mining coal, no matter how shitty it is for everyone involved (the miners themselves, the environment, those who live near coal plants, etc). They want to keep the coal mining jobs. They want... a handout.
After living in SV for most of my life, I decided to move to the Southwest to work in an industry that, in my opinion, is actually a public good (utility industry). It's a bit slower paced, but the engineering problems are the same and the community is much better.
That's actually fair and I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point in the whole Juicero debacle, someone uttered the phrase "Keurig for Juice" or something along those lines. The thing with Keurigs and the like is that there's actually a market for making single cups of hot coffee. I don't personally own or want one but it's a compromise that a lot of people are willing to make both at home and the workplace in exchange for convenience. (Really Keurig is effectively positioned as a better instant coffee.)
But there were very real differences between Keurig and Juicero that make one costly/wasteful/but fills a niche and the other just stupid.
Ha, that's one of the reasons that my answer is always the same whenever someone asks what I think of their idea: "Whatever I think of the merits of your idea are almost completely irrelevant. I've seen horrible ideas succeed, and I've seen great ideas fail for irrelevant reasons. What I can offer, however, is a list of challenges I think you'll have."
I stopped reading when the author suggests that people are falling out of love with silicon valley because most companies hire mostly white males. What a terrible racist/sexist thing to say.
The fundamental problem with this article is it presupposes that America used to love Silicon Valley. I think Silicon Valley loves Silicon Valley, and investors kinda-sorta love Silicon Valley, and the rest of us like Apple and begrudgingly use Facebook, because, well, what else is there?
It'd be nice if Silicon Valley did something other than make software to keep our noses in our phones.
You haven’t produced a new firm that has cracked the world’s top 200 since Facebook’s founding in 2003.
That's a significant point.
Of the 15 companies that entered the Fortune 500 this year, only one, Lam Research, is in Silicon Valley. And they're in Fremont. (PayPal made the list, but as a spinoff of eBay.)[1]
[+] [-] brm|8 years ago|reply
Don't hustle.
Don't crush anything.
Try not to have to give a stage presentation with a mic at the corner of your mouth.
Your creation is not completely superlative or world changing yet, speak of it realistically.
The internet is not a substitute or replacement for you having to deal with humanity.
Be nice.
Follow your curiosities and interests. Have curiosities and interests.
Don't claim false passions. You're not passionate about "revolutionizing HR" or "remaking the way people buy nail polish".
Learn how tech relates to the world and how you relate to it, don't make tech its own world.
Maybe get a hobby.
Be kind.
[+] [-] Caveman_Coder|8 years ago|reply
I've found that since moving to PHX, the hustling and "revolutionizing/world-changing/disruptive" rhetoric is kept to a minimum. Tech isn't its "own world" as much here and most of my friends and co-workers in the tech community end up talking about things we all enjoy doing as hobbies, or our families, more than anything. It's nice to find professional peers who enjoy hiking in Sedona, not worrying about how many PRs their open-source project has, or how many retweets their presentation at RubyConf got.
Its totally subjective, but its my kind of environment.
[+] [-] austenallred|8 years ago|reply
Ask the average person what brands and products they like and use the most (or just look at the data on where and how they spend their time and money) and you’ll see that Silicon Valley is doing just fine in the eyes of the populace. In fact, Silicon Valley has never been more influential.
Ask people to go to a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, Uber/Lyft and they’ll call you crazy. But the media knows that, so it goes after the losers: It’s easy to point and laugh at the 100 things that look stupid, without realizing that “lol this social network for college kids thinks it’s worth $150m” seems just as crazy. Silicon Valley is the place that will be wrong funding Juicero in order to be right funding Facebook. You can’t have one without the other. (As an aside, I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money.)
But the media that sees itself losing its power, losing influence, and losing money. Of course they hate tech.
[+] [-] carbocation|8 years ago|reply
I think it is true that there is a diversity problem in SV, just like there is a diversity problem in medicine. It’s a problem, because there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields. But that’s probably the only point that resonates.
The criticism of Juicero and Theranos being emblematic of focusing on the wrong problems is not sensible. Companies fail, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes due to dishonest behavior, etc. If Theranos had the tech they claimed to have, it would have been richly rewarded (outshined only by the consumer surplus it would have created).
The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV, and then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem as it proceeds to its logical extreme.
[+] [-] ivraatiems|8 years ago|reply
The problem with Juciero and Theranos isn't that they failed. The problem with them is that Juciero was an immensely dumb idea that was never checked or questioned and thereby wasted tons of money, and Theranos was so unabashedly, obviously mustache-twirlingly evil that if it were used to script an evil corporation for TV, I'd have called it unrealistic (and thereby, it wasted tons of money). They're the worst parts of SV (dumb companies offering things nobody wants at outrageous prices, and obvious evil pretending things are OK because they're 'changing the world' or some other nonsense) exaggerated to near-comical extremes.
Silicon Valley's problem is deeper than failing businesses or not enough diversity. It's that the entire enterprise is a bold-faced moneygrab for VCs; ethics, diversity, etc. were never really part of the point, and it's only now that the rest of the world is starting to figure that out. SV's problems are at the core of the reasons for its current existence.
[+] [-] eropple|8 years ago|reply
The rise in income inequality is tied pretty directly to pervasive automation. Economic efficiency is not always social progress, especially when coupled with retrograde politics and social policy. We're not having "more leisure" or whatever because of it, we're having people ground to dust in worthless jobs because the computers are doing more and more.
To that end, tech (and not just the Valley, but the Valley is a particularly visible and awfully smarmy representation of tech) probably should get more shade thrown at it than it does.
> then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem
Tech is doing no such thing. Tech is reifying capital, it is not trying to solve the problem on behalf of labor.
[+] [-] TheAdamAndChe|8 years ago|reply
The issue here is that many people feel SV's ideas of basic income will absolutely never work in the long-term. Heck, it will never work in this country period. We can't even socialize healthcare in this country, and those who collect unemployment are looked down upon.
What makes you think basic income will ever become a reality? What makes you think a major political party wouldn't call those people freeloaders and work ceaselessly to remove those benefits if they are put in place? And what makes you think those millions of people being given subsidized, substandard, meaningless lives won't rise up against a system that has basically sucked as much productivity out of them that they could before abandoning them?
[+] [-] xversilov|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtflmaohnisdumb|8 years ago|reply
People don't like new people getting money. A story as old as time.
[+] [-] RodericDay|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gotthemwmds|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] staticelf|8 years ago|reply
1. Your ideas are only as good as the people in the room. And your door is shut to most people.
Well, if anyone can start a company the door isn't shut. I don't buy that white men only invests in white men. I think people invest in companies (for the most part) where investors think they will gain the most money from.
2. Your rainforest of innovation has turned into a factory farm.
Totally agree, this is why startups should bootstrap and perhaps not start up in Sillicon Valley. Perhaps it is better to start up somewhere cheaper.
I think countries of the world should make it easier and less expensive to start a company. That is the best recipee for success in my view. If it is less of a risk to create a company, more people will do it.
I have been wanting to start a company for years but haven't just yet because of the economic game. I am still planning to do it, hopefully pretty soon but I want to save up enough so I can run my company for at least 1-2 years without any other income.
In my country Sweden, unfortunately, smaller companies get taxated pretty hard which makes any earning disappear. You will need a pretty good stream of incoming cash to be able to survive. Since I do want to create a product and not simply be a consultant this is much harder to achieve.
[+] [-] RestlessMind|8 years ago|reply
[1] > You’re churning out companies that are raising hundreds of millions of dollars, and going bankrupt in literal satires of themselves
Yes, and that is an aspect of capitalism. You take risk on crazy ideas. Some of them will be a fancy juicer, but some of them will also be an electric car.
[2] > Your companies are now solving “my-world problems” (food delivery, cold-pressed, on-demand juice) versus the “real-world problems” you used to solve
Google wants to deploy Loon in Puerto Rico to offer connectivity. Tesla offered to rebuild Puerto Rico electrical grid based on Solar energy. If these are not real world problems affecting everything, I don't know what the author has in mind.
[+] [-] fancyfacebook|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chillingeffect|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gggdvnkhmbgjvbn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|8 years ago|reply
1. The startup scene's smarmy feel-good rhetoric and forced friendliness. The cutesy aesthetics, the wacky company names, and most gratingly the lofty mission statements that cover up at best business as usual and at worst actual corporate malfeasance. How did we get to here? When did "making the world a better place" become the mantra of Silicon Valley, and why did this laughable cliche get created? Was SV truly idealistic at one point, or has it been trying to cover up its true mission all along by pretending to be better than Wall Street or Hollywood, those other synonyms for wealth generation and inequality?
2. Silicon Valley can't even make the Bay Area a better place, never mind America, or the world. The extreme inequality in San Francisco and its environs is largely due to local government and broken politics, it is true. But SV companies should spend more of their lobbying efforts not in D.C. clamoring for special statuses, but in local legislatures securing better housing and infrastructure. Both their employees and the local populations will benefit, and like them more for it. Instead, what's the most high profile example of an SV executive interacting with local leaders? Steve Jobs presenting the new Apple headquarters plan to the Cupertino City Council in 2011. How's the traffic on Stevens Creek these days?
[+] [-] tempodox|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevmo|8 years ago|reply
Personal anecdote: Right now, I am building software that automates the process of filing super-simple Chapter 7 bankruptcies. We give the product away for free.[1] Technologically, this is a really straightforward problem and solution: You just collect some documents and fill out a long questionnaire, fill out a PDF, show up to a couple of meetings, then you've discharged a bunch of unsecured debt and have a fresh start in life and the economy.
There should literally be millions of these Chapter 7 bankruptcies filed every year[2]... but nobody has built the software before! Despite its enormous potential impact and amazingly low cost (we have two full-time employees, though we could use more), nobody has really tackled the problem because there's no way to simultaneously get rich while building the most successful product.[3]
There is a crazy amount of low-hanging fruit out there like this. Much of it could be plucked by small, bright teams of the sort Silicon Valley has in abundance. The most powerful people just need to dedicate a little more money and 5-20% of their time to it - not just money, but serious, ongoing advice. [4]
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[1] https://Upsolve.org. The product is free and we're a non-profit because you trigger an avalanche of regulatory activity if you try to make money doing this. We've also been able to garner an incredible amount of institutional (judicial) buy-in because we are a non-profit.
[2] http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~miwhite/white-jleo-reprint.pdf
[3] Our #1 success metric is simply "number of Chapter 7 bankruptcy discharges received".
[4] Real advice - not sending it down the black hole of billionaire philanthropy. Without even getting into the subject of how those institutions grind their founders' personal axes, there is a huge qualitative difference between their advice and Silicon Valley-level "Let's build a huge thing on a lean budget" advice.
[+] [-] d_burfoot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julianozen|8 years ago|reply
I think a lot of start ups have thrived trying to solve the problem of high density cities. Airbnb and Uber are start ups that get created when your biggest problems are high rent and poor public transit. I would be interested in seeing startups trying to solve suburban problems and producing suburban jobs. I think the fact that are very few companies like this is indicative of our increasing cultural divide.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
No, it's not.
UBI is the answer when you recognize that capitalism directs the gains from productivity (whether made in the US coasts or anywhere else) to a narrow class of megacapitalists, that it's gotten more efficient at that over time, and that the welfare state of the modern mixed economy is an overly complicated, inefficient corrective measure for that that leaves lots of gaps for people to fall through and responds slowly to changes in the details of the mechanisms of capitalist wealth capture. UBI is the simple, low-overhead, responsive implementation of a mixed economy, which gets out of the way—compared to classic welfare state programs—of realizing the value of labor, especially including labor marked as worthless and prohibited from sale by minimum wage laws.
[+] [-] Caveman_Coder|8 years ago|reply
In my opinion these aren't technical problems to be solved by a team of engineers in their SF Bay offices. They are political problems that need legislative solutions. To think that we can outsource political problems to the realm of tech is misguided and won't solve our long-standing public policy issues.
[+] [-] rjsw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orangecat|8 years ago|reply
This is a failure of a common way presenting the UBI as "you should be able to have a comfortable life without working", which is both economically infeasible and not actually desirable. A UBI, at least in the form that I support, isn't something that you should be happy to live off of indefinitely, it's just better protection against homelessness and hunger than our current convoluted welfare systems. The expectation should still be that you'll find something productive to do, and a UBI incentivizes that because it avoids the welfare trap of losing a dollar in benefits for every dollar you earn.
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|8 years ago|reply
You'll have an uphill battle because "environment". Nobody wants to invest in making commuting more bearable or making areas with non-city population densities more environmentally friendly. Everyone wants to hitch their wagon into whatever the latest scheme to cram people into carbon neutral shipping containers.
[+] [-] calebm|8 years ago|reply
I find it ironic that the article claims that people in the "SV bubble" don't understand why "Bodega" is a bad name... if you took a survey, I imagine an extremely small percentage of people would find anything wrong with that name (personally, I had to Google around a good bit to find why people had a problem with it). I think you'd have to be in an ultra-pedantic PC media bubble to extract outrage out of a name like "Bodega".
[+] [-] calebm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
Vending machine micro-markets are a standard item from Canteen Vending.[2] They have 4500 US locations. They're also found in Swiss train stations.
The really creepy player in this industry is Three Square. In their system, employees have implanted RFID tags which identify them to the vending machines. They're in River Falls, WI, not Silicon Valley.
[1] https://bytefoods.co/ [2] http://www.canteen.com/avenue-c/ [3] https://32market.com/public/
[+] [-] wpietri|8 years ago|reply
I was just talking with the CEO I worked for in 2001; she's busy putting together her next startup. We had a good conversation about what I was calling "unicorn fever", the way the desire for instant massive valuation has distorted so much of what we thought good about the startup ecosystem. The article calling this factory farming seems spot on to me.
[+] [-] jedrek|8 years ago|reply
It's gotten to the point that if a company actually does things the old fashioned way: taking a small seed, creating a product that people want, selling it and expanding based on that revenue... we ooh and ahh, calling it "organic growth". Everywhere else, it's just called "building a business".
Pair that with the "thought leaders" who dismiss businesses that allow people to build a life for themselves and their families. Because Silicon Valley isn't really about making things anymore, it's about making financial bets. And that's a shame - watching billionaires blow money on reinventing the vending machine isn't much fun.
[+] [-] shoefly|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leggomylibro|8 years ago|reply
Well, they can't have everything. A big part of why America has historically had social and economic mobility is because it also had literal mobility; people willing to go where the work is.
What I hear when I read this is, "they want someone to come along and hand them a stable well-paying job." And who doesn't? But we live in the real world.
[+] [-] Clubber|8 years ago|reply
This isn't just a problem in the Midwest, this is a problem for almost anywhere that isn't a large city on the coast (with some exceptions). This problem affects probably 90% of our land mass and the problem has been consistently growing for the past 45 years or so.
Neither political party knows how to solve this, or if they do, don't have the political will to solve it.
[+] [-] lostboys67|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acchow|8 years ago|reply
Government should subsidize relocation to a full time job.
[+] [-] yahna|8 years ago|reply
On my team of 8 people 1 grew up anywhere near the Seattle area. Half the team moved to the US from other countries. Maybe these people should move. It sucks, but life isn't fair and sometimes you have to sacrifice what you want for what you actually need.
[+] [-] s73ver_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mefis|8 years ago|reply
This is wrong. Eight men control as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the world's population.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jan/16/w...
[+] [-] Caveman_Coder|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluetwo|8 years ago|reply
I don't live in SV.
[+] [-] wtflmaohnisdumb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CalChris|8 years ago|reply
If ever any sentence better described YC, its brethren incubators and demo days, I haven’t read it.
[+] [-] jabot|8 years ago|reply
However, it has that in common with Keurig - which is a huge success.
My point is that just because something is stupid and wasteful it doesn't have to fail...
[+] [-] ghaff|8 years ago|reply
But there were very real differences between Keurig and Juicero that make one costly/wasteful/but fills a niche and the other just stupid.
[+] [-] JangoSteve|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] relics443|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redleggedfrog|8 years ago|reply
It'd be nice if Silicon Valley did something other than make software to keep our noses in our phones.
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
That's a significant point.
Of the 15 companies that entered the Fortune 500 this year, only one, Lam Research, is in Silicon Valley. And they're in Fremont. (PayPal made the list, but as a spinoff of eBay.)[1]
[1] http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2016...