Please look at this pitch. It’s hard to come away unimpressed with what he and his founder were creating: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C1UUVdN3kdQ
I love when someone extremely smart and dedicated succeeds. Much better than a VC thought leader that happened to luck into the right startup and is now dispensing money and advice with abandon. That is luck and privilege.
Pointing out the rare advantages Dylan had in founding Figma doesn't take away any of his accomplishment. Privileged people accomplish things and overcome things and do good stuff.
The point is to highlight that the privilege is load bearing - that a good idea and an amazing drive is not enough and that you often need to seem nice and likable to wealthy people in order to get that idea off the ground.
It's not that Dylan should have had to work harder, but that millions of other driven people's ideas die for lack of exposure.
Part of it is ... sort of generically true in any chosen power structure in the world (easier for powerful people to do things for you if they like you, in theory). But because so much of this dealmaking and the like, and the completely capricious nature of VC funding in particular, means that if you're wanting to fundraise your job ends up being "be friends with the people with money".
And because it's so informal and based on friendships, each generation of money is... well, it's replicating culture from the previous generation. At least in more formal power structures there are exams or something to stop it from _just_ being about hiring people you like talking to.
The silver lining is I bet there's a huge untapped market in helping fund people in environments that don't require you to listen to a VC talk about how BTC is about taking power away from oppressive governments or whatever.
I bet there are loads of people who are interested in funding, in seriousness, and not necessarily looking for more drinking partners.
Almost the entire if superficial opposite of what created the Silicon Valley of wonder and lore.
Once he graduated from high school, the way he differentiated, including being friendly to future VC’s was his own doing and drive.
I think this only makes sense if you believe that "being friendly to future VC's" is entirely independent from "the family you were born into" - to which I would add social class and family connections. Given my experience with friendships and professional relationships I think you would have an advantage in getting to meet a VC and then making a good impression if you had experience interacting with people like them.
None of this is to say that it's impossible to make it without those advantages, but they do exist.
Saying someone is privileged because they graduated from Stanford highly discounts a person’s agency in their life.
Ok, I did. Figma is absolutely valuable as evidenced by its customer base.
This said, it is impressive in a mild sense. While convenience / access (the pitch's main take away) is a huge factor in the macro-state creativity - if these affordances are not paired with meaning, a sense of taste, or purpose - then one quickly ends up with 'animate all the things' level thinking (the micro-state of today). For some, this means a great income and massive economic mobility - not something to sneeze at. However, designing everything to be the same, from securing reproductive care to hailing a car, sterilizes the lives lived through software.
See how quickly Quark lost the most loyal and hegemonic user base to Adobe InDesign just over Adobe choosing to use the TeX paragraph formatter. Gone in eight quarters. Figma doesn't have itself embedded in national scale print plant with degree level of user education and per seat licensing including the multiple necessary third party adaptations at >$10k per seat.
The Silicon Valley Suicides: Why are so many kids with bright prospects killing themselves in Palo Alto?
It means people from there tend to have quite high achieving in life, at a pretty high mental health cost that follows them for life. It’s an open secret if you ask folks who graduated from there.
Of course, people with a bit more connections / more money just send their kids to private school instead.
I'd argue that a well motivated student would do better by being in a slightly worse school
When we were house-hunting we took it as a consolation that we couldn't afford to live in Palo Alto!
Now if you have a top student in a lagging school, most likely the classmates will drag them down. In my school good students were physically bullied by the “cool” guys.
I think that classes need to be divided based on the performance of the students, that will be assessed on regular intervals. Let the good students go as fast as they need to, focus for the lagging students to get at least the basics right. There is no reason to pretend that we are teaching advanced calculus to lagging students, when they cannot even do simple arithmetic operations.
I once talked to an admissions counselor for a “selective” university who could name the challenging coursework and reliable recommendation letter writers at all the best high schools in the region she covered.
Elite colleges have required suicidal amounts of pressure to be admitted, for decades. I went through that, just that I got in. Typically with serious Attention Deficit Disorder and no treatment, there's no way to get into the top 6 schools.
No matter how otherwise intelligent, too many points lost to disorganization. Like can't start essays until last minute, forget the test that was coming up, 0% on some homeworks, very little sleep because of the procrastination that was a direct consequence of that condition, huge late penalties, when you need 90% averages for semester grades for all courses, an 89% is an F in that setting. Like then you gotta pull off miracles to make the grade back up. And for that you have to be desperate. That was the hard part, SAT was easy and fun, extracurriculars were competitive but cool, also fun, hard part was the GPA. Crazy standards.
It's a process with many satisfied quiet survivors and a smaller number of very visible tragic deaths.
I was pitching an Open Source developer tools startup around here at this time. VCs laughed in my face since there's no business model in OSS or in developer tools.
And getting between MV and PA has always been pretty easy via Caltrain, and the various corporate shuttles that connect it to destinations.
The one bit that didn't resonate for me, as a local, was the reference to "City Center in Palo Alto". I've lived here for a long time and never heard a reference to "City Center".
There's "downtown"/"University Ave.", "Cal Ave.", and "midtown" (though there's not much there). Has anyone else ever heard of "City Center"? Were they literally just walking around City Hall or something?
Relevant: "The Creation of University Park Which Later Became Palo Alto" https://ralstonworks.com/RE-history/UniversityPark-PaloAlto....
"[In 1885] Leland Stanford and Jane Lathrop had in mind to establish a town across El Camino Real to support the needs of Stanford University, including student housing, shopping, and recreation, but no liquor. The Stanfords asked the leaders of Menlo Park and Mayfield to close their saloons, but were answered 'No.'"
"With Stanford University's support, saloon days faded and Palo Alto grew to the size of Mayfield. On July 2, 1925, Palo Alto voters approved the annexation of Mayfield. The two communities were officially consolidated on July 6, 1925."
The sense i got of the place was one who's grandeur had passed. The furniture and the houses there seemed so dated, walking around the neighborhoods exposed all the cracked concrete on the sidewalks and the graffitis under the tunnel leading up University.
Take a short walk and you're in the great lawn at Stanford, such a shame how a beautiful city like that is not treated as it should be. I had far better experiences of public infrastructure during trips to poorer countries. The airport felt ignored, the caltrains felt dated and inefficient on the inside, i don't know. . . it just felt like everyone was waiting for a nuke to level the place and rebuild better than making it better right now.
FWIW, Caltrain is being electrified and there are people fighting for more development and density.
I travel internationally for work and when my return trips land in SFO occasionally, it feels like i've travelled back in time to an alternate timeline where the US lost the war or something.
My impression of Palo Alto as a single person was that it was beautiful, but quiet. It seemed to be oriented around family life, and families are generally not out and about after 9pm.
People looking for nightlife tended to gravitate towards San Francisco.
It almost felt . . . suppressed.
As far as feeling suppressed, $4,000/mo rents for small apartments will generally do that to a place.
You're not alone in disliking the place. I did a three-year postdoc at Stanford, and after my first year I moved to SF because it was clear that's where all the social life was.
Also important to note that the author was nowhere near as high profile or rich when this occurred as he is today. This interaction happened when Wealthfront was just beginning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Nash_(executive)#Career
He doesn't explicitly state this in the piece, but it was pretty easy to infer from the things he does say. He has the connection to Nash precisely because he impressed him when he was interning at LinkedIn, before Nash became a VC, and before he founded WealthFront.
This is not a story of privileged connections in the slightest.
You're defining "success" as making billions of dollars, right?
In any case, if that's someone's definition of success and they make it, wonderful. It's great for them that they had luck and privilege. The greatest thing anyone can do for children and even yourself is to maximize "privilege".
I suggest you also talk to people with a more diverse outlook on life too though, I think it will be even more eye-opening. Take a random walk in a rural farming community, a small town, an average city or suburb, etc. You will find many people who have found success and happiness and are content because their idea of success is to raise and provide for a family, or own a home, or run their modest small business, or whatever.
I’m not interested in discussing race or gender politics here, but it’s worth pointing that out since your comment comes off as completely dismissive of systemic advantages, environmental factors, and personal networks that all contribute to success, as if to say that any personal success is the product of a single factor alone: grit.
But in modern times Masayoshi Son, Steve Jobs as well.
Same with Jobs and Masayoshi, other people also knew the people they knew, but only they did do what they ended up doing.