The Fall of Silicon Valley
robrhinehart.com
robrhinehart.com
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.
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.
The one silver lining of this catastrophe of covid is that the FDA process has been turned up to 11. There is some hope that it'll stay that way after/if a vaccine is made. The ModeRNA vaccine is looking to be some amazing stuff and it would have taken at least a decade to get through before covid.
CRISPR-CAS9 technology and a faster FDA should result in some very good outcomes for all humans. The biotech centers of San Diego, Boston, NC Research Triangle, and Denver should see growth from that kind of a boom.
Covid-19 was a biological/social Big Bang?
Strange loops indeed.
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.
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.
decentralization, democracy = good and the opposite = bad runs up against fundamental value propositions of economies of scale and specialization
Amazon’s economy of scale does capture a lot of value. The question becomes: how well does economic value align with our human values?
One of my best friends mentors software development interns at Amazon. We talk a lot, they’re using it as mechanism to empower people who had otherwise been trapped in low-wage jobs, and generally I think that’s a good thing. Recently they tell me that one of their new interns was, until recently, a practicing medical doctor, in another country. Having this person optimizing user experience on a shopping system cannot possibly be as socially valuable as treating disease. But here we are.
There’s another article on HN today questioning whether the current crop of tech companies embody the old Silicon Valley values that created our field. I think the answer is: they cannot possibly embody them all because some of the core values of hacker culture are contradictory, and a strong tradition of anti-capitalism, radical democratization, and anti-authoritanism go back to at least the 1960s computer programmer culture, maybe even further back
It's possible that that person finds more fulfillment from programming than from treating disease and that's all that should matter. People are free and should not be forced to work in some field they don't want to because somebody else decides that's more socially valuable.
> how well does economic value align with our human values? I couldn't begin to define what 'our human values' even means.
> one of their new interns was, until recently, a practicing medical doctor
Is your argument that there is no person practicing medicine who would produce more utility for society by writing software at Amazon? Because that seems like a pretty extreme position.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
The YouTube video I linked to is Neeraj Arora, early WhatsApp employee, on what Facebook's acquisition meant for WhatsApp.
After WA added e2e it became politically possible within FB to add the same to Messenger (as long as it behind a few conversation gateways that made it hidden for most users) but FB leadership did _not_ support adding e2e to WA and certain groups continued to fight against adding it to Messenger because it was going to close off a channel for the ads team to pick up signal by spying on user conversations.
The Silicon Valley of the 20th century had its share of politics and backstabbing, and certainly money was a big deal; Shockley's former employees enlisted the help of a businessman and investor to found their new company, Fairchild Semiconductor (named after the investor, not after any of the engineers!).
I'll absolutely agree that many of the big names in SV software businesses are greedy outfits that are actively making the world worse, but it's incredibly disingenuous to suggest that's all it is, and ignorant of history to suggest this is anything new.
The piece should be titled "How I Was Naive About Life and Finally Realized It's Not All Roses".
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.
> ...it would’ve just taken a bit longer
Yeah, we are in-agreement: "[Facebook] put its growth on steroids".
You said they couldn't have possibly been the behemoth's they are. That's just patently false, their growth trajectory pre-facebook would've had them just as big as they are today 6 YEARS later. Post-facebook their growth actually stalled, it took them almost 4 years to double their user base from 2016 to 2020 - previous to that they were doubling every year.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthly...
We may never know what might have actually happened but the Stratechery article I linked to in my original comment has this tit-bit (albeit related to Instagram):
...Instagram was a product, and its business model was venture capital funding. To be sure, this wouldn’t be the case forever, but on April 9, 2012, the road from popular product to viable company was a long and arduous one. Instagram would not only need to continue growing its user base, it would also have to scale its infrastructure, figure out a business model (ok fine, advertising), build up tools to support that business model (first a sales team, then a self-serve model, plus tracking and targeting capabilities), all while fighting off larger and more established companies — particularly Facebook — that were waking up to the threat Instagram posed to their hold on user attention.
Or Systrom and Instagram could offload all of those responsibilities to Facebook and continue being "extraordinary product leaders", and pocket $1 billion to boot...
The difference from Zuckerberg — Instagram’s real CEO — is stark. Facebook launched in February, 2004, and sold its first ad two months later. True, “Facebook Flyers” bear little resemblance to the News Feed ads that power the company today, but Zuckerberg’s immediate instinct to build not just a product but a company is notable.
Advances in sales and marketing categorically don't do that. By definition they move value around that was pre-existing.
> 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 think SVs decline will be more like jumping the shark in ideology than monetary failures.
1) Going global as quickly as possible. He aggressively moved into a lot of countries as quickly as possible with the same formula, and for the most part it worked.
2) He created an entire industry by having the balls to lower prices to the point where it fundamentally changed transportation. Everyone ubered everywhere (before the pandemic) and I know many people who sold their cars because ubering was cheaper.
The downside was that both are extremely capital intensive, which showed in how much money they raised. But I would say both techniques are extremely innovative and what most startups these days are trying to strive for.
There is another small downside: They still need to be profitable.
If it turns out in the end to just have been about transferring money from investors to Kalanick and employees, I’ll grant that it’s a clever scheme.
You used the fact that he was a billionaire to qualify that he is a genius, so it seemed like a pretty reasonable follow-up.
Sun's Solaris for hippies to arrive next week.
https://www.theregister.com/2005/01/19/sun_cddl_solaris/
John Gage was on Richard Nixon's Enemies List.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkHax19CUJ4&ab_channel=ROBER...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage
California inspired: from flower power to Silicon Valley. How 1960s Bay Area radicalism helped shape the technological powerhouse of northern California.
https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2017/07/california...
>Gage first arrived at UC Berkeley as a maths student in 1960, becoming involved in the Free Speech Movement and towards the end of the decade in George McGovern’s presidential campaign against Richard Nixon. It wasn’t until 1975 that he completed his bachelor’s degree at Berkeley. At the university he became friends with Joy. [...]
>Brand argued in his essay ‘We Owe It All to the Hippies’: “The counterculture’s scorn for centralised authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless internet, but also the entire personal-computer revolution.”
WE OWE IT ALL TO THE HIPPIES. Stewart Brand. Forget antiwar protests, Woodstock, even long hair. The real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution.
http://members.aye.net/~hippie/hippie/special_.htm
>The third generation of revolutionaries, the software hackers of the early '80s, created the application, education and entertainment programs for personal computers. Typical was Mitch Kapor, a former transcendental-meditation teacher, who gave us the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3, which ensured the success of IBM's Apple-imitating PC. Like most computer pioneers, Kapor is still active. His Electronic Frontier Foundation, which he co-founded with a lyricist for the Grateful Dead [John Perry Barlow], lobbies successfully in Washington for civil rights in cyberspace.
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.
> 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?
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 )
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.
But as far as your original post, I couldn't find anything polarizing and controversial about why seeking and trusting the best would bring peace of mind, or how that is somehow a call for overconsumption.
It's strange how differently the same words can be understood by different people.
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.
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
Colleges and universities?
Snort.
I know that’s probably unfair and I genuinely try to treat unrelated arguments independently from the person arguing them - but it’s rare to see something this wrong while the author revels in their own ignorance.
This isn’t coming from a place of politics, though there’s no way for me to prove it to anyone - it’s just coming from the place of being a reasonably educated person.
Wait, what? Just a paragraph before he is talking about having voted for Obama. So either you voted for someone for the first and only time and didn’t bother looking into the VP on the ticket. Or it’s just a lie.
The entire thing reads like something by someone who’s done too many hallucinogens and is a little fried.
That appears to be a non sequitur, given the author is also, objectively, a "reasonably educated person", as well as being a talented engineer/programmer and a successful entrepreneur, indicating a somewhat broad range of capabilities.
What is it that makes it utterly impossible for an educated/intelligent person to hold the view that US/Western politics is so dysfunctional and corrupt across the board that even a crazy-seeming rank outsider like Kanye could be better than the status quo?
Nancy Pelosi is not the mayor of SF for instance (or the DA, or on the state legislature), city policy is not her job or responsibility. There's more than just that - the essay is riddled with inaccuracies and confused misunderstandings the author dismisses by just saying 'they don't pay attention to politics'.
If I wrote an essay riddled with technical errors staking a position about technology and then dismissed details as 'I don't pay attention to maths' would that be similarly accepted? It'd be dismissed as stupid. Why is it different for politics? [0]
The belief that everyone is equally bad/corrupt is wrong and it just makes you a mark. People attempt to signal intelligence or deep wisdom by pretending they're above the fray, but it's not actually smart or wise. [1]
The essay is rambly, over-confident, and in the end even mean spirited.
> What is it that makes it utterly impossible for an educated/intelligent person to hold the view that US/Western politics is so dysfunctional and corrupt across the board that even a crazy-seeming rank outsider like Kanye could be better than the status quo?
Clearly it's not impossible as evidenced by the essay, but it's still wrong.
[0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jeyvzALDbjdjjv5RW/pretending...
"If I wrote an essay riddled with technical errors staking a position about technology" - this is not really an apt comparison, because politics is something that everyone is meant to be qualified to comment on, by virtue of the fact that every adult is considered to be informed enough about politics to vote. So it's the directionality of the argument that matters, not every fine detail. And given that the real topic of the essay seems not to be politics but leadership, as a successful company founder the author is very qualified to comment on that, and his mistaken beliefs about political details are not central to the argument.
In the case of the particular error you point out, sure it's technically incorrect of him to refer to "the city and county of San Francisco she controls", but as a Democratic Party congressperson representing that area, she could easily influence policy to improve the running of that city/county. So he's not completely off target with that critique.
"The belief that everyone is equally bad/corrupt is wrong and it just makes you a mark"
I don't think that's what he's saying, and it's not what I said or what I believe.
As for “pretending to be wise”; he doesn’t seem to be offering a neutral position and by virtue of writing a very long, reputation-risking post on the topic, he’s not avoiding investing resources, so that post doesn’t seem to be relevant.
But this notion that is morally incumbent for everyone to endorse and vote for a major party candidate is, in my observation, usually an attempt to guilt/shame people into supporting the proponent's preferred party.
How is it not acceptable for an educated person to adopt such a view as: "this whole circus is a stupid game orchestrated by media behemoths, financial institutions, military contractors and other cronies and rent-seekers, and it serves mostly to divide and exploit ordinary individuals and families in order that a small number of elite insiders can profit, and I choose not to play a role in perpetuating it"?
I'm not saying you have to believe that; clearly you don't, and nor do I, completely. But I know of people, educated, objectively intelligent people, not just fringe conspiracy-theorists, who hold this kind of position very sincerely, and whether it's completely valid or not, I don't see how it's an unquestionably wrong or immoral position to hold.
I don't agree with this. Just because you have the right to vote does not mean you're informed. Just like the right to free speech doesn't mean what you say is worth listening too. The freedom to comment doesn't mean the comments will be any good.
> but as a Democratic Party congressperson representing that area, she could easily influence policy to improve the running of that city/county.
This just feels like a rationalized excuse to me. He criticizes her for changes unrelated to her responsibilities or power and then it's not off target because she could have tried to fix those things anyway? She's not involved there - I doubt you can effectively engage in two complex policy/politics arenas and be effective.
She wouldn't know the specific details and wouldn't have time/access to work with people in the state government on it. To me it's like blaming a cardiologist for stomach cancer because they work in the same general medical field, it shows a complete lack of understanding of basic government.
> As for “pretending to be wise”; he doesn’t seem to be offering a neutral position
He's making a false equivalence between two major party candidates with the general message being they're equivalently bad so let's try a third crazy person instead (with some weak justifications). The 'everyone is bad' argument is the above the fray pretending to be wise bit. Then he gets the details wrong.
> But this notion that is morally incumbent for everyone to endorse and vote for a major party candidate
Not voting for a major party candidate is equivalent to not voting in its effect. It's basically a position that either major party candidate is similarly bad.
> How is it not acceptable for an educated person to adopt such a view as: "this whole circus is a stupid game orchestrated by media behemoths, financial institutions, military contractors and other cronies and rent-seekers, and it serves mostly to divide and exploit ordinary individuals and families in order that a small number of elite insiders can profit, and I choose not to play a role in perpetuating it"?
I know this position well because it was often held by people around me growing up. It's a position that sounds smart, but isn't - and feels a lot like the being above the fray pretending to be wise signaling. I've never met someone who holds it and has a good nuanced understanding of the issues - they're always just dismissing things out of hand without having tried to understand any of it. I recognize this could be read as me just putting people I disagree with in a class of 'no nuanced understanding', but look at this essay as an example. A strong position from someone who is openly admitting they have barely learned anything about what they're talking about.
I'm not arguing there aren't problems in government (perverse incentives, cronies, rent-seekers, etc.) - doing something complex at scale is hard, but it's possible to learn about policy and what people are actually doing and come to an informed decision about the details. You can read things like The World As It Is, you can read about people that work in the government (or work there yourself). You can see the real effects of policy in action and the effects of legal shifts on history.
The position you mention is intellectually weak as well as wrong, people are free to hold it - but when I read a long screed about it (this essay) filled with even dumber arguments (and conspiracies) pushing for a crazy person to hold the office I'm compelled to call it out for what it is.
[Also - as an aside I appreciate the thoughtful back and forth. The discussion is in good faith, the wording above isn't an attack of your comment - I'm happy to try and make how I think about this clearer/disagree in a pleasant way.]
Can't believe I read the entire thing. What the hell did I just read
It's true that the startup hardware scene in SV died around 2012, since VCs don't like the risk or long timeframes, but that just means more software startups.
As an illustration, if you live outside SV, try telling your friends and family, "I'm quitting my day job to start (or work) at a startup" and watch their reactions. Especially in Europe or Asia.