Silicon Valley’s Secret: Proximity, Stolen Parts, and the Kindness of Strangers
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
To preface, I love Canada. I love Toronto. I was born and raised here. (Yes, Drake's pretty cool, too). But my biggest criticism of the industry in Toronto is that it seems to be missing this spark. A meeting in Silicon Valley isn't just a meeting. Due to proximity and kindness of strangers, it's the start of propagating wave of influence. As you create more of these waves, constructive interference forms peaks that manifest in specific individuals who are not only willing to help you, they're willing to champion for you.
Toronto doesn't lack kindness of strangers. At all. But it lacks a large-scale cohesive human medium via proximity that Silicon Valley so readily provides. As a Toronto-born Canadian, I'm deeply interested in how Canada's ecosystem can better facilitate and grow this kind of critical mass of talent and connections. There are good places to start, my friend Ahmad Nassri runs TechMasters (https://techmasters.chat/) and is bringing thousands of developers together.
I think a great approach might be heading towards deepening SV ties and becoming part of a larger social medium instead of trying to bootstrap its own. I think this is a huge part of the NYC tech community that is blossoming and I've been able to witness first hand as well. I guess we'll see how far SV influence can reach. :)
LOL!
He's one of my favorites. If you ever get a chance to hear him speak at a conference, take it!
Disclaimer: I am not Nolan Bushnell. :)
That sort of under-cuts the meritocracy message by a lot.
I think success is a product of more things than talent, it could be about projected talent as much as what's underneath the hood - confidence as a product of ignorance and narcism is indistinguishable from the real thing, unless tested.
And guess what, some of those people who talk big actually become those people by a mixture of opportunity and hard work - I feel like one of those imposters :)
But asking a lottery winner on picking the best numbers is nearly as useful as picking a loser on how not to pick them - it's what they do after they win a dice roll that matters (invest, avoid going bankrupt etc).
This is not without lessons though - that the failures were made in a consequence-less environment (sic at Nutting & their bankruptcy) and those lessons were carried into aa future success instead of being the opening chapters of a student loan driven panic.
The universe has no even playing fields, and it's hard to win friends by contradicting that.
Does hard work matter? Of course. Does it determine success? Not as much as it would under a meritocracy.
> That sort of under-cuts the meritocracy message by a lot.
What meritocracy message? If there is one thing Silicon Valley ISN'T it's meritocratic. Success here is a function of luck, access to capital, personal connections and shameless self-promotion. Nothing meritocratic about that. We HAVE all worked with idiots who have gone off and been successful. It's an encouraging message--if you're an idiot.
That is, this "idiot who has gone off and been successful" may not be able to code his ass out of a paperbag if his life depended on it, but he has enough shamelessness to convince customers and investors alike that his $100/piece connected smart paperbags will solve world hunger and their marriage problems.
Maybe talent isn't what you think it is.
Not well known: BSD Unix was supposed to die when DARPA cut off funding. DARPA had decided to support Mach, which was more of a research project and potentially could have better security. But instead, BSD Unix was taken up by Sun as a startup.
I was at an aerospace company that made satellites and ground stations back then, and we had a few Sun workstations in the early 1980s. One had a TV-resolution color display in addition to the black and white display. Someone ported an orbital elements program plotting program for satellite orbits and positions, and the positions of the ground stations, providing a real-time display. An Air Force general was visiting, and demanded that the entire machine be immediately moved over to the USAF Satellite Control Facility (the old "blue cube" in Sunnyvale), which was still running on the 1960s technology used by NASA for Apollo. This was done, and the in-house machine was replaced at USAF expense.
I'm sure you know what kick-started the self-driving boom that's currently overtaking Silicon Valley - the DARPA Grand Challenge.
The Valley owes a lot to the DoD.
And you don't believe that the military will give some lucrative contracts as soon as the technology works well enough? ;-)
This just can't happen today, anymore. Everybody/-thing and their dog is bound at least by NDAs, if not worse by non-compete agreements.
The only exception I know of is Google's 20% program, but IIRC even this has been scaled down.
Is that an exception? Letting people work on whatever, for the company, is different than letting them work on whatever then walk off with it.
It wasn't a hard thing to do, and I get the impression that unless you're planning on directly competing with something they care about, they're pretty liberal with such releases.
If it becomes successful enough to launch into its own company, there is a huge disadvantage to not having the IP situation clarified up front. For one thing, investors get very concerned about even the remote possibility of someone else trying to claim copyright to your code. And once you are successful, it's not safe (or ethical, really) to just assume your [former] employer will never hear about it and connect the dots.