Palo Alto’s first tech giant was a horse farm | Hacker News Reader

Palo Alto’s first tech giant was a horse farm

theatlantic.com

Kinda odd that the article names the Palo Alto Stock Farm as the "first tech giant" when it was Stanford's - the man, not the place - 6th industry to enter (lawyer, merchant, railroads, insurance, wineries, horses). Several of those - like selling equipment to 49ers, or completing the first transcontinental railroad - would be much more closely identified with "tech" than horses. Indeed, the outsize role of horses mentioned in the article was already being cannibalized by railroads when Stanford entered the business; arguably this is him entering the wrong side of history for nostalgia's sake.

The article has a very Malcolm Gladwell feel: take liberty with the facts and misrepresent what's important, so that you can write something that nobody else is focusing on, seem novel and interesting, and get lots of clicks or magazine sales.

Speaking of tech and horse farms, one of the early founders of Cisco cashed out pretty early (as I recall for a couple of hundred million, a small amount compared to what the company stock valuation inflated to during the peak of the dotcom 1.0 boom years) and retired to breed horses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Lerner

If you haven't seen that one scene in HBO's Silicon Valley, it was a fairly casual reference to that. Do I dare link it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GCtEXbOezM

I really think Jack in the show is much more of a parody of Microsoft execs and Steve Ballmer, with the conjoined triangles of success and all.

It's a fabulous farcical melange of quite a few tech execs. It's all about the box.

I do think there is a fable to be told about horses and american innovation, where horsemanship was rarefied and exclusive in europe and asia, but a basic necessity to survive in frontier america, and the moral protagonism horsemanship requires just to stay on one - which has been the basis for an officer class education for millenia - was spread more broadly and accessibly, and so americans invented "bootstrapping" as a part of their culture.

Farming is engineering, and city culture was really successful at retelling the story of the engineers they depend on as bumpkins. I'd wonder if, owing to their respective necessities and incentives (and layers of abstraction), cities mainly produce art and culture and people out in the country produce technology and engineering?

https://archive.ph/JTE6x

Literally faster horses! It seems like this would have been in the cultural milieu in Henry Ford's youth.

Excerpt from author’s new revisionist and heavy woke history of the area

https://archive.ph/S3ImA

Spoiler: everything should be returned to the original Indian land holders

> one of the most unequal and competitive school districts

That's literally impossible. Competitiveness necessarily includes equal opportunity. If demographics constitute >0% of the rubric, then by necessity merit constitutes <100%

Biased competition can result in unequal opportunities. One common example is a vocabulary question using culturally significant terms to favor or disadvantage some specific group.

> Competitiveness necessarily includes equal opportunity

No, it doesn't. Professional (American) football is highly competitive despite the fact that opportunity to excel is distributed very unequally. Women, for example, are extremely unlikely to be competitive in pro football, as is anyone with any kind of physical disability, or anyone over (say) 50.

In academics, children of parents who value learning are much more likely to excel than children of parents who think there is no value in reading.

But the remaining pool of candidates can still represent formidable competition.

Did you miss the whole equality vs equity thing.

Reminds of nope

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