I generally agree with the author. I don't have hard evidence but basically feel that the culture, ethos, magic, whatever you want to call it is gone. Does this mean innovation is dead? Of course not! As the author pointed, it will just likely be more spread out.
Also, I think it's important to appreciate that the formation and growth of Silicon Valley was a remarkably special thing but was bound to eventually hit the diminishing returns phase of faster compute, faster internet, smarter software, etc. Silicon Valley started with a transformative and enabling technology (the transistor) and from there we built a remarkable hardware and software ecosystem over the span of a few decades around that technology. Those seem to be the two elements in order to 'replicate' SV: a transformative technology that spurs an ecosystem of technologies, all of which interconnect and benefit from each others innovation.
I generally agree with the author, but his timeline is completely wrong. Silicon Valley as an ethos and as a concentration of free-wheeling globally-uniquely-great-at-their-jobs engineers in aggressive, innovative companies has been dead since at least the late 90s.
Naming Musk as a key example of innovation just shows how far we have fallen. Contrast with SGI, Sun, 3dFX, Nvidia, Cisco, maybe Google, etc. Yes, many of these are unglamourous or dead now, but their lives are totally different than the Teslas (heavily reliant on government subsidies), the Ubers (mostly just matchmaking playing chicken with regulations), and so on.
> a transformative technology that spurs an ecosystem of technologies, all of which interconnect and benefit from each others innovation.
Biotech, especially gene editing, comes to mind as a fast developing field. However, because it's health related, extensive testing and regulations means it will never evolve at the same pace as hardware and software did.
> Yes Amazon (which is not based in Silicon Valley) made online shopping better. However, it is fundamentally just another middleman, and will not stand the test of time.
Personally, I think Amazon's legacy will be AWS rather than online shopping. More than anyone else they've turned computing power into a utility. Like electricity this has made whole new types of businesses possible.
Edit: Still reading the article and want to note I don't mean this as a crticism. I'm really enjoying this story.
Not all innovations need to be what we consider modern tech. I've always viewed Amazon as the modern equivalent of what Sears was, what Sears did with railroad and mail order Amazon did similar with the internet. It will likely last at least 50 years.
Though you are right, I think the part that will survive the longest and have the largest impact will be AWS more than the Amazon marketplace itself.
Reminds me of this quote from Michael S. Malone in The Valley of Heart's Delight (2002)
> When will it end? I knowingly predicted Silicon Valley's imminent demise in 1980, 1985, 1989, and 1994. Eventually, I learned my lesson. The rest of the media world obviously has not--regularly indulging in yet another paroxysm of features about how the Valley is losing its crown to Austin, Orange County, Bangalore, even Boise.
> Perhaps. All I know is just months after the last time I predicted the Valley's end, I found myself regularly having lunch in a Chinese restuartant in Campbell with two young entrepreneurs... The company they were building was called Ebay.
Housing in Silicon Valley is much more expensive than it was then. It’s hard to live let alone innovate. It’s a FAANG goldmine where engineers are the miners.
> For example, Facebook is not an innovation. Facebook did not make socializing better. It made it worse. Was it at one point a new web site? Yes. Does it make money? Yes. But it is not innovative.
This is surprisingly hollow. Facebook took Instagram and WhatsApp and basically put it on steroids. Those apps couldn't have possibly been the behemoths they are now without Facebook's ample innovative, world-class sales, marketing, engineering weight behind it [0][1].
> Next consider Amazon. Yes Amazon (which is not based in Silicon Valley) made online shopping better. However, it is fundamentally just another middleman, and will not stand the test of time. True innovation, like the silicon chip itself, stands the test of time.
No no no. Amazon is probably one of the most innovative companies right now. You don't go from selling books to building a wildly profitable IT Enterprise business to winning the Emmys by resting on your laurels or being complacent.
His take on Amazon is incredibly ignorant. People act as if Prime 2 day shipping was a simple business decision because that's all they see. They can't see the supply chain optimization behind the scenes that allow this to be economical.
> Facebook took Instagram and WhatsApp and basically put it on steroids.
Ok, I’m tracking.
>Those apps couldn't have possibly been the behemoths they are now without Facebook's ample innovative, world-class sales, marketing, engineering weight behind it [0][1].
Wait what? How on earth did you land there? From your own video, Facebook left WhatsApp alone, and the value they got from Facebook was increased velocity. Absolutely nothing in that video indicates they would have failed or not continued the trajectory they were already on, it would’ve just taken a bit longer and probably had a different back-end.
I'm leery to put advances in sales and marketing in the same category as engineering. An engineering advance adds total value, value that was not there before.
Advances in sales and marketing categorically don't do that. By definition they move value around that was pre-existing.
I agree that it's ignorant to call everything outside of programming and product ideation non-innovative. Though also, much of those giant companies' successes come from simply having a critical mass of dollars. At some point, it's sheer brute force.
I admit I'm not the most poetic of people, and often have trouble reading between the lines or finding deeper implications, but this:
> I would put the precise date as November 7, 2012, the day Dustin Curtis published his infamous blog post “The Best”. [...] When I first read it I thought it was brilliant satire. Then when I realized he was serious, I decided to leave myself. Dustin and his ilk had completely perverted the message of Steve Jobs.
completely baffled me. I don't get this, at all! I read that mentioned post, and it looked to me like an appreciation of working for quality that went beyond simply producing goods to be sold. I feel weirdly stupid because I cannot figure out what TFA is trying to imply there.
I recall that post being pretty polarizing on HN. I think PG himself showed up and ranted about how the people calling it consumerist schlock had it all wrong, and this was a sign of HN's decline or something. Anyway personally I found the post fairly repulsive. It reminded me of my thought patterns during some of my grossest excursions into materialist obsession - spending hours researching what "the best" thing to buy is, when I would have been much, much happier just getting something at random than agonizing about it - or just not buying anything at all.
I thought that this article was going talk about how 2020 broke apart SV and caused everyone to scatter. But to say it was 2012? No way. That totally misses out on Uber, Stripe, Coinbase, Lyft, Plaid, and many more.
I loved it and his writing style, I agree that it's rough premise and although there are counter arguments e.g. Stripe/Uber/Coinbase I think the overall argument is correct, the culture has changed.
But it's interesting to see so many argue that this is written in a self-aggrandizing, self-important style. Generally I agree with those people when it comes to LinkedIn style articles etc. e.g. [0] is a prime example.
But this one really resonated with me and comes across as extremely genuine hence my surprise at the reaction.
> [Amazon] is fundamentally just another middleman, and will not stand the test of time. True innovation, like the silicon chip itself, stands the test of time.
> Most importantly, Tesla continues to innovate.
I'm not sure what his definition of innovation is, here. Both Amazon and Tesla took existing technologies and ideas, put then together in a novel way, and iterated on them. Is it because Amazon (excluding AWS) doesn't build something physical? And if we include AWS, how can you argue that changing the way software infrastructure is managed not innovative?
As the author of The Best, I am quite surprised and confused by Rhinehart's suggestion that the piece marks the "death" of Silicon Valley. He does not seem to understand me or what I was saying at all.
Also, "my ilk" are the very people he praises, including Paul Graham and YC founders pre-2012. I'm tempted to write a rebuttal, because while I agree that there was a marked change in the startup community around that time, I think it happened for reasons very different from the ones Rhinehart outlines in his piece.
Your blog post sounds like your philosophy was to search for and find goods that you would enjoy using and give you peace of mind. His philosophy sounds more like "get what works, if it breaks replace it and try again." The longevity and quality of his items don't seem to matter so much as their ability to fulfill each stated purpose adequately. Your philosophy sounds consumeristic in the face of his more utilitarian sounding examples.
Taking the example of your flatware - why not just get some cheap stuff from Walmart? It will work well enough. The mouth sensation and feel in hand is secondary to the purpose of feeding yourself. I'd buy it because it looks nice but the cost of that vs a 20 piece set from Walmart? You can donate the excess to a soup kitchen.
My unasked for $0.02. I'd read your rebuttal. Please write it.
I think Rhinehart’s perspective may be that a generation of people are focused on solving the wrong problems (ones that don’t have real impact on human lives) and we (collective) are fetishsizing that singular focus on making the best of something that is largely inconsequential in the real of real problems. For example, should anyone be making the best flatware and why do we care about buying the best flatware when there’s plenty of good enough.
There’s so many points in his article that it’s hard to start in one place but I got the sense that his overarching thesis is this:
There’s a bunch of real human problems today (hunger, climate change, disease etc) and people can either be working on 1) solving these problems or 2) distracting people from thinking about their own mortality and these crises. In the bucket of the distraction-economy is probably anything entertainment related, social networking, consumerism, etc which is not innovative. There are people who are trying to change the system because it’s broken not just simply extract more value from it.
I think one more reason is leaders who are leading nowadays compare to older times of around 2010... Leaders today want quick results, Fail-fast. These management graduates leading companies today, don't understand empathy, research investment, innovation. They don't encourage grass-root employees to spend time on their own choices and innovation.. everything had to be justified by business and ROI.. innovation is just a bucket and used to showcase to senior leadership..
I hadn't thought about Rob Rhinehart a while. He inspired many of us back in 2013 when he founded a company to solve the food problem with the engineering mindset, and all the innocence that entails. Today his blog looks like rallying cry for all the nails that got hammered down. It's very inspiring and some of this stuff takes a nontrivial amount of courage to say. He can be my movement leader any day.
I just can’t tell what time period he is talking about
When was he there to watch it fall?
2019-2020 finally had companies moving offices into parts of the bay that many more people actually wanted to be in
Leave the bay area and good luck finding people to talk about some obscure package that is going to soon become treated like a unique skillset requiring years of experience
I just can't understand why someone would put so much effort into writing this. I almost stopped myself from reading it but I decided to read it anyway. I regret it. I think this same essay has been written millions of times (of course for things other than and probably more important than Silicon Valley). It's definitely been written about Silicon Valley at least once before.
As an Indian citizen in Silicon Valley who has also lived in many other countries, I would say that SV will go through lots of ups and downs (it should) but a long term bet on SV will generally pay off.
I would put the date earlier, around 2007, leading up to the great recession. I'm basing that on the vibe of the city (San Francisco), and how it took a nose dive afterwards, and never recovered.
[+] [-] t_serpico|5 years ago|reply
Also, I think it's important to appreciate that the formation and growth of Silicon Valley was a remarkably special thing but was bound to eventually hit the diminishing returns phase of faster compute, faster internet, smarter software, etc. Silicon Valley started with a transformative and enabling technology (the transistor) and from there we built a remarkable hardware and software ecosystem over the span of a few decades around that technology. Those seem to be the two elements in order to 'replicate' SV: a transformative technology that spurs an ecosystem of technologies, all of which interconnect and benefit from each others innovation.
[+] [-] foobiekr|5 years ago|reply
Naming Musk as a key example of innovation just shows how far we have fallen. Contrast with SGI, Sun, 3dFX, Nvidia, Cisco, maybe Google, etc. Yes, many of these are unglamourous or dead now, but their lives are totally different than the Teslas (heavily reliant on government subsidies), the Ubers (mostly just matchmaking playing chicken with regulations), and so on.
[+] [-] joaomacp|5 years ago|reply
Biotech, especially gene editing, comes to mind as a fast developing field. However, because it's health related, extensive testing and regulations means it will never evolve at the same pace as hardware and software did.
[+] [-] thinking2smll0|5 years ago|reply
Covid-19 was a biological/social Big Bang?
Strange loops indeed.
[+] [-] imgabe|5 years ago|reply
Personally, I think Amazon's legacy will be AWS rather than online shopping. More than anyone else they've turned computing power into a utility. Like electricity this has made whole new types of businesses possible.
Edit: Still reading the article and want to note I don't mean this as a crticism. I'm really enjoying this story.
[+] [-] jes5199|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelbrave|5 years ago|reply
Though you are right, I think the part that will survive the longest and have the largest impact will be AWS more than the Amazon marketplace itself.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] YoyoyoPCP|5 years ago|reply
> When will it end? I knowingly predicted Silicon Valley's imminent demise in 1980, 1985, 1989, and 1994. Eventually, I learned my lesson. The rest of the media world obviously has not--regularly indulging in yet another paroxysm of features about how the Valley is losing its crown to Austin, Orange County, Bangalore, even Boise.
> Perhaps. All I know is just months after the last time I predicted the Valley's end, I found myself regularly having lunch in a Chinese restuartant in Campbell with two young entrepreneurs... The company they were building was called Ebay.
[+] [-] almost_usual|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ignoramous|5 years ago|reply
> For example, Facebook is not an innovation. Facebook did not make socializing better. It made it worse. Was it at one point a new web site? Yes. Does it make money? Yes. But it is not innovative.
This is surprisingly hollow. Facebook took Instagram and WhatsApp and basically put it on steroids. Those apps couldn't have possibly been the behemoths they are now without Facebook's ample innovative, world-class sales, marketing, engineering weight behind it [0][1].
> Next consider Amazon. Yes Amazon (which is not based in Silicon Valley) made online shopping better. However, it is fundamentally just another middleman, and will not stand the test of time. True innovation, like the silicon chip itself, stands the test of time.
No no no. Amazon is probably one of the most innovative companies right now. You don't go from selling books to building a wildly profitable IT Enterprise business to winning the Emmys by resting on your laurels or being complacent.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJl27KvUDn0&t=34m47s
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18065897
[+] [-] Aunche|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austincheney|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tw04|5 years ago|reply
Ok, I’m tracking.
>Those apps couldn't have possibly been the behemoths they are now without Facebook's ample innovative, world-class sales, marketing, engineering weight behind it [0][1].
Wait what? How on earth did you land there? From your own video, Facebook left WhatsApp alone, and the value they got from Facebook was increased velocity. Absolutely nothing in that video indicates they would have failed or not continued the trajectory they were already on, it would’ve just taken a bit longer and probably had a different back-end.
[+] [-] pksebben|5 years ago|reply
Advances in sales and marketing categorically don't do that. By definition they move value around that was pre-existing.
[+] [-] brundolf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BlackCherry|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] judge2020|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] square_usual|5 years ago|reply
> I would put the precise date as November 7, 2012, the day Dustin Curtis published his infamous blog post “The Best”. [...] When I first read it I thought it was brilliant satire. Then when I realized he was serious, I decided to leave myself. Dustin and his ilk had completely perverted the message of Steve Jobs.
completely baffled me. I don't get this, at all! I read that mentioned post, and it looked to me like an appreciation of working for quality that went beyond simply producing goods to be sold. I feel weirdly stupid because I cannot figure out what TFA is trying to imply there.
[+] [-] ahelwer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jes5199|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehnto|5 years ago|reply
I think SVs decline will be more like jumping the shark in ideology than monetary failures.
[+] [-] ksrm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iorrus|5 years ago|reply
I loved it and his writing style, I agree that it's rough premise and although there are counter arguments e.g. Stripe/Uber/Coinbase I think the overall argument is correct, the culture has changed.
But it's interesting to see so many argue that this is written in a self-aggrandizing, self-important style. Generally I agree with those people when it comes to LinkedIn style articles etc. e.g. [0] is a prime example.
But this one really resonated with me and comes across as extremely genuine hence my surprise at the reaction.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24901940
[+] [-] dehrmann|5 years ago|reply
> Most importantly, Tesla continues to innovate.
I'm not sure what his definition of innovation is, here. Both Amazon and Tesla took existing technologies and ideas, put then together in a novel way, and iterated on them. Is it because Amazon (excluding AWS) doesn't build something physical? And if we include AWS, how can you argue that changing the way software infrastructure is managed not innovative?
[+] [-] dcurtis|5 years ago|reply
Also, "my ilk" are the very people he praises, including Paul Graham and YC founders pre-2012. I'm tempted to write a rebuttal, because while I agree that there was a marked change in the startup community around that time, I think it happened for reasons very different from the ones Rhinehart outlines in his piece.
(For reference: https://dcurt.is/the-best )
[+] [-] drenvuk|5 years ago|reply
Taking the example of your flatware - why not just get some cheap stuff from Walmart? It will work well enough. The mouth sensation and feel in hand is secondary to the purpose of feeding yourself. I'd buy it because it looks nice but the cost of that vs a 20 piece set from Walmart? You can donate the excess to a soup kitchen.
My unasked for $0.02. I'd read your rebuttal. Please write it.
[+] [-] calbear81|5 years ago|reply
There’s so many points in his article that it’s hard to start in one place but I got the sense that his overarching thesis is this:
There’s a bunch of real human problems today (hunger, climate change, disease etc) and people can either be working on 1) solving these problems or 2) distracting people from thinking about their own mortality and these crises. In the bucket of the distraction-economy is probably anything entertainment related, social networking, consumerism, etc which is not innovative. There are people who are trying to change the system because it’s broken not just simply extract more value from it.
At least that was my takeaway.
[+] [-] zerop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jart|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmception|5 years ago|reply
lololol
I just can’t tell what time period he is talking about
When was he there to watch it fall?
2019-2020 finally had companies moving offices into parts of the bay that many more people actually wanted to be in
Leave the bay area and good luck finding people to talk about some obscure package that is going to soon become treated like a unique skillset requiring years of experience
[+] [-] gwilikers|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 5cott0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepnotderp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] friedman23|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KorematsuFred|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sweetlucipher|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SergeAx|5 years ago|reply
Colleges and universities?
[+] [-] deepnotderp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chheplo|5 years ago|reply