267 karma · joined March 25, 2017
Boston was used to the corporate mindset where information is an asset that can't be shared. That free flow of information in silicon valley made innovation progress much faster.
This is a great explanation: https://psmag.com/social-justice/innovation-thrives-richard-...
"The boston area was organized around these big, vertically integrated minicomputer companies — dec, data general. They were classic postwar american companies, with vertical hierarchies and career ladders. Planning and research happened at the top of the organization and then funneled down. Whereas in silicon valley you had, really by chance not design, a series of flat companies, with project-based teams that moved around. People moved between companies much more fluidly. At a time that technology and know-how were sort of trapped within the vertically integrated companies of route 128, they were being continually recombined in silicon valley. That gave them a real edge in innovation."
However for me I what I really wanted to know about in silicon valley is less lead-up, and more the development and the technical innovation.
I fixed that statement you mentioned about Arthur Rock to specify it was the first private firm. Definitely a good distinction. Super interesting that Arthur Rock was a student of George Doriot.
George Doriot was the first person to take advantage of SBICs (government funded small business investment companies) that was created by the SBA to encourage more entrepreneurship. Where I think Arthur Rock was particularly innovative was that he raised all of this money from wealthy individuals looking to do private investing. While I agree the VC industry wouldn't have been started if it wasn't for Doriot, I think private money being used to fund startups is really the inflection point in the industry. Government money can't last forever.
I'm thinking web browsers, early internet startups / bubble, social & web 2.0 and the sharing economy. Any suggestions?
They segment users that visited each product on Facebook with a custom audience and then create ads for similar products that they show you. This is all done programmatically.
My all time favorite example of great culture is Valve the video game company. This is their employee handbook http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...
Once you understand your user as a person (keep in mind they are probably pretty similar to you) then it will be very easy to know where to find them. Just because it's a slack based application doesn't mean you have to get them from slack.
By the way I love the product. One thought: stackoverflow ads? https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/advertise
"I have been a believer in Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Crypto since 2011 and my confidence in this macro investment thesis gets stronger every day. And I will continue to critique the sector, calling it out when I see things like greed, infighting, or other issues that get in the way of its collective success. One could do a similar lookback on my roughly decade long obsession with social media that led me to blogging and ended around the time I fell for crypto. I tend to get obsessed about one thing and write a lot about it. Which creates a public record. You can’t hide from that, but then again blogging is the opposite of hiding."
IBM realized this and tried to make a speech-based computer but there were obvious problems with integrating that to workplaces
But if you ignore the technical legal points, am I really harming anyone by posting 75% of Paul Graham's essay on medium. It's definitely providing value to all of the people on Medium who wouldn't come across it normally, and Paul Graham isn't losing any valuable traffic or sales from this.
So really what's the harm? Just because precedents have been set in cases involving much more monetary risk doesn't mean that what I'm doing is harming anyone. In my opinion, it's helping.