Secret History of Silicon Valley (2009)

Culture has changed dramatically and I hate to blame things on politics but i feel like that's exactly what it is. It's divided us all, made the identification of truth seem like a nonsensical fairytale, and those sentiments have sank into the background of cognition. We can dissociate all we like from culture and relegate ourselves to our comfort zones of computing, technology, things that bring us stability and a way of making sense of the world - but if we can't own up to our own mistakes then all of that goes away.

You can say you aren't affected by it, but it's divided people through argument, it's made progress in education and research seem pointless because no one knows what's real anymore, who to listen to, what to believe.

Failure is something to be scared of in a culture that's been indoctrinated into seeing chaos everywhere to the point that the only thing that matters is survival. Survival instinct is something people can hack. The point is to not allow it to blind you from coming to solutions as a group with people you are supposed to trust - whether through contractual obligation or through your own self defined choice.

Don't let this culture break our culture. Don't let the culture of shifting of blame become part of you.

Failure is critically important to success. Anyone who ignores this fact is blind to the process of learning. You have to be able to identify your own errors. Being right all the time is it's own version of insanity, because one literally can not identify the difference between correctness and error.

We need to be able to fail and we need to be able to fail in front of others. Otherwise everything will keep going in circles with no sense of progress.

I've lived my whole life this way, change, change, change. Blame, blame, blame. Accept, accept, accept. Correct, correct, correct.

This is not a good mindset to have when you have to build things with other people unless you can point out your own errors to others, allow others to point out errors to you.

You have to know what failure is in order to identify success. In education, this is obvious. A or F. In groups of building things, people define these metrics. Everyone either must agree 'this is the metric' or everyone must agree 'this is the new standard'. That's how to measure yourself in systems where rules are continuously changing and you can't identify why.

That's an interesting slide and I think that a lot of universities unknowingly put up a lot of barriers to entrepreneurship because they don't get the value of it, or they don't get how that value is created. Berkeley vs Stanford is a decent example of this contrast

eh? can you give a concrete example or two? there is a seeming innumerable number of new startups, solving very small niche problems. it is a given that very very many will fail. the funding continues.

my very small company uses maybe 15 saas vendors. maybe 10 of them are small guys that will be out of business in 3-5 years.

there’s tons of failure to go around!

When I started in computing in the 80s a lot of people did programming out of intellectual curiosity and fun. People did things like easter eggs and other stupid stuff. Now it's just a career and everything is about money, money and more money. I guess that's a natural progression once something goes mainstream.

Accepting failure is the prerequisite of learning. This works great when people can do things mostly by themselves - they try something, they fail and learn. When the basic unit to do something becomes a company coordination becomes more important than personal achievements. For coordination you need more stability, less agility. This is quite intuitive - when the leader changes the direction too often - then people tend to stop following him. But I have a feeling that this can also be formalized in terms of the system theory - it is a basic fact that in a system with feedback loops it is often that you need to react slower and less intensively or you can destabilize the system completely (think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game or even just one basic Business Inventory https://books.google.pl/books?id=JSgOSP1qklUC&lpg=PA51&vq=bu...).

Personally I feel unfit for the position of a leader because I tend to be frank about my failures, react to changes quickly. I have been thinking much about making a starup - I have lots of ideas etc. - but I am afraid I would not be a good CEO. Fortunately I discovered that it works quite well when speculating (I now trade crypto - but that is just coincidental).

At the dawn of the era experimenting on a small scale was essential - now we need bigger experiments and this means more coordination, and that means politics unfortunately.

You should read The Master Switch.

Hmmm. A certain amount is accepted/supported today. Just consider the number of startups that get funded with the expectaion that the majority will not survive. On the flip side how would a supporter distinguish repeated failures toward success vs futility? It's very difficult so cap it in some manner. The best we can do is to document the attempts for others to study, learn, and continue.

I'm tired of hearing 'X is the Silicon Y'.

The truth is that few places in the world have the tolerance to failure that SV has. In many so called 'Silicon Y' a failed startup would mean the end of your career. And that is why it has been so hard to reproduce that success in some places in Europe.

404

That's true of a lot of things in history, and doesn't seem very interesting to me.

Some things were instrumental in the past that are no longer necessary.