
Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you - Caveman_Coder
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/08/dear-silicon-valley-americas-fallen-out-of-love-with-you/
======
brm
I spent a decade of my life in the valley and I do believe it's relevant to
remember that what used to be a homebrew mixing of nerds, hippies, academics,
researchers, teachers, makers, marketers, tinkerers and capitalists is now in
large part skewed to marketers and capitalists. This is not necessarily good,
bad, or romanticized it just is. So here are some tips:

Don't hustle.

Don't crush anything.

Try not to have to give a stage presentation with a mic at the corner of your
mouth.

Your creation is not completely superlative or world changing yet, speak of it
realistically.

The internet is not a substitute or replacement for you having to deal with
humanity.

Be nice.

Follow your curiosities and interests. Have curiosities and interests.

Don't claim false passions. You're not passionate about "revolutionizing HR"
or "remaking the way people buy nail polish".

Learn how tech relates to the world and how you relate to it, don't make tech
its own world.

Maybe get a hobby.

Be kind.

~~~
Caveman_Coder
+100. I spent almost two decades in SV before moving to PHX and agree
completely with your tips.

I've found that since moving to PHX, the hustling and "revolutionizing/world-
changing/disruptive" rhetoric is kept to a minimum. Tech isn't its "own world"
as much here and most of my friends and co-workers in the tech community end
up talking about things we all enjoy doing as hobbies, or our families, more
than anything. It's nice to find professional peers who enjoy hiking in
Sedona, not worrying about how many PRs their open-source project has, or how
many retweets their presentation at RubyConf got.

Its totally subjective, but its my kind of environment.

~~~
aj_g
Hah. I live in Montana, and I find myself lusting sometimes for the inundation
of tech in SV. I wish I could nerd out with more of my friends, instead of
talking about hiking/skiing/whatever. I guess the grass is always greener :)

~~~
cirgue
> I wish I could nerd out with more of my friends, instead of talking about
> hiking/skiing/whatever. I guess the grass is always greener :)

I would be happy to trade!

------
austenallred
People generally _do_ love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media
that doesn’t.

Ask the average person what brands and products they like and use the most (or
just look at the data on where and how they spend their time and money) and
you’ll see that Silicon Valley is doing just fine in the eyes of the populace.
In fact, Silicon Valley has never been more influential.

Ask people to go to a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, Uber/Lyft and
they’ll call you crazy. But the media knows that, so it goes after the losers:
It’s easy to point and laugh at the 100 things that look stupid, without
realizing that “lol this social network for college kids thinks it’s worth
$150m” seems just as crazy. Silicon Valley is the place that will be wrong
funding Juicero in order to be right funding Facebook. You can’t have one
without the other. (As an aside, I’ll never understand why people get so upset
for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money.)

But the media that sees itself losing its power, losing influence, and losing
money. Of course they hate tech.

~~~
bogomipz
>"People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates."

No, your average non-techie consumer knows and cares very little about Silicon
Valley. People like convenience and innovation that leads to convenience in
their lives. There is no transitive property where if I "love" ride-sharing I
"love" Uber's leadership, business tactics and company culture.

>"Ask people to go to a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, Uber/Lyft and
they’ll call you crazy"

Again people like the convenience of the products these companies produce -
being able to keep in touch with far away friends and relatives, and the
convenience of on demand car service etc. This does not imply that they love
surveillance, loss of privacy, sexist office culture, messianic and arrogant
CEOs, lack of diversity, tax avoidance schemes or sweat shop labor.

~~~
plussed_reader
>"This does not imply that they love surveillance, loss of privacy, sexist
office culture, messianic and arrogant CEOs, lack of diversity, tax avoidance
schemes or sweat shop labor."

Could you differentiate this from the financial sector, please?

~~~
lovich
Does anyone love the financial sector? The fact that the two are becoming
difficult to distinguish from would be more evidence that people are falling
out of love with Silicon Valley

------
carbocation
As someone outside of SV (Nevadan living in Boston and practicing medicine), I
think this article largely misses the mark.

I think it is true that there is a diversity problem in SV, just like there is
a diversity problem in medicine. It’s a problem, because there is no a priori
reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying
fields. But that’s probably the only point that resonates.

The criticism of Juicero and Theranos being emblematic of focusing on the
wrong problems is not sensible. Companies fail, sometimes spectacularly,
sometimes due to dishonest behavior, etc. If Theranos had the tech they
claimed to have, it would have been richly rewarded (outshined only by the
consumer surplus it would have created).

The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV,
and then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate
that problem as it proceeds to its logical extreme.

~~~
xversilov
There is no a priori reason that society feels comfortable acknowledging, but
for anybody without those hangups, the reasons are actually quite obvious.

~~~
jacalata
Do explain.

------
staticelf
As a non-american and as a person who has never been to SV but love the idea
that is described in the article that anyone can start up a company I would
like to adress the points in the article.

1\. Your ideas are only as good as the people in the room. And your door is
shut to most people.

Well, if anyone can start a company the door isn't shut. I don't buy that
white men only invests in white men. I think people invest in companies (for
the most part) where investors think they will gain the most money from.

2\. Your rainforest of innovation has turned into a factory farm.

Totally agree, this is why startups should bootstrap and perhaps not start up
in Sillicon Valley. Perhaps it is better to start up somewhere cheaper.

I think countries of the world should make it easier and less expensive to
start a company. That is the best recipee for success in my view. If it is
less of a risk to create a company, more people will do it.

I have been wanting to start a company for years but haven't just yet because
of the economic game. I am still planning to do it, hopefully pretty soon but
I want to save up enough so I can run my company for at least 1-2 years
without any other income.

In my country Sweden, unfortunately, smaller companies get taxated pretty hard
which makes any earning disappear. You will need a pretty good stream of
incoming cash to be able to survive. Since I do want to create a product and
not simply be a consultant this is much harder to achieve.

~~~
s73ver_
"Well, if anyone can start a company the door isn't shut. I don't buy that
white men only invests in white men. I think people invest in companies (for
the most part) where investors think they will gain the most money from."

Numbers don't lie. And there are countless examples of times where women-led
startups couldn't even get meetings with VCs, but after adding a male founder,
suddenly were asked to come in for meetings.

"I think countries of the world should make it easier and less expensive to
start a company. That is the best recipee for success in my view. If it is
less of a risk to create a company, more people will do it."

Most of the costs are not something that countries can help with. You're still
going to need funds for equipment, salaries, and such.

~~~
staticelf
> And there are countless examples of times where women-led startups couldn't
> even get meetings with VCs

Lol, please provide countless examples. I dare you to find even one. My guess
is that if you find even one, you will find 10 reverse where women get
meetings because of their gender.

> Most of the costs are not something that countries can help with. You're
> still going to need funds for equipment, salaries, and such.

What I meant was that new, small companies should not be taxated as much as
companies that is established.

------
RestlessMind
The article is shallow and it would be easy to rip apart most of its arguments
(eg. [1][2]). But the worrying trend is that such articles are now appearing
very regularly, and at some point perception becomes reality. At this pace, SV
will be the Wall Street in no time, if it is not already.

[1] > You’re churning out companies that are raising hundreds of millions of
dollars, and going bankrupt in literal satires of themselves

Yes, and that is an aspect of capitalism. You take risk on crazy ideas. Some
of them will be a fancy juicer, but some of them will also be an electric car.

[2] > Your companies are now solving “my-world problems” (food delivery, cold-
pressed, on-demand juice) versus the “real-world problems” you used to solve

Google wants to deploy Loon in Puerto Rico to offer connectivity. Tesla
offered to rebuild Puerto Rico electrical grid based on Solar energy. If these
are not real world problems affecting everything, I don't know what the author
has in mind.

~~~
gggdvnkhmbgjvbn
Yeah I think little has changed in SV in the last year compared to the near
180 in public opinion. My theory is that journalists and readers who used to
hate trump as a hobby are bored with the lack of scandal and have turned to
SV, the only other interesting new thing in the us.

~~~
Applejinx
If there was another interesting new thing, how would you know?

------
Apocryphon
Two things that the article missed:

1\. The startup scene's smarmy feel-good rhetoric and forced friendliness. The
cutesy aesthetics, the wacky company names, and most gratingly the lofty
mission statements that cover up at best business as usual and at worst actual
corporate malfeasance. How did we get to here? When did "making the world a
better place" become the mantra of Silicon Valley, and why did this laughable
cliche get created? Was SV truly idealistic at one point, or has it been
trying to cover up its true mission all along by pretending to be better than
Wall Street or Hollywood, those other synonyms for wealth generation and
inequality?

2\. Silicon Valley can't even make the Bay Area a better place, never mind
America, or the world. The extreme inequality in San Francisco and its
environs is largely due to local government and broken politics, it is true.
But SV companies should spend more of their lobbying efforts not in D.C.
clamoring for special statuses, but in local legislatures securing better
housing and infrastructure. Both their employees and the local populations
will benefit, and like them more for it. Instead, what's the most high profile
example of an SV executive interacting with local leaders? Steve Jobs
presenting the new Apple headquarters plan to the Cupertino City Council in
2011. How's the traffic on Stevens Creek these days?

~~~
tempodox
“Making the world a better place” is simply the cheapest marketing gag you can
get. And in a way, they did make the world a better place—it's just for a
select group of founders and investors only.

~~~
Apocryphon
That's true, but why did Silicon Valley pick that shtick when other industries
don't seem to except maybe when they're trying to greenwash.

------
kevmo
The overlords of Silicon Valley need to do a bit more to turn America's best
minds towards solving serious social problems.

Personal anecdote: Right now, I am building software that automates the
process of filing super-simple Chapter 7 bankruptcies. We give the product
away for free.[1] Technologically, this is a really straightforward problem
and solution: You just collect some documents and fill out a long
questionnaire, fill out a PDF, show up to a couple of meetings, then you've
discharged a bunch of unsecured debt and have a fresh start in life and the
economy.

There should literally be millions of these Chapter 7 bankruptcies filed every
year[2]... but nobody has built the software before! Despite its enormous
potential impact and amazingly low cost (we have two full-time employees,
though we could use more), nobody has really tackled the problem because
there's no way to simultaneously get rich while building the most successful
product.[3]

There is a crazy amount of low-hanging fruit out there like this. Much of it
could be plucked by small, bright teams of the sort Silicon Valley has in
abundance. The most powerful people just need to dedicate a little more money
and 5-20% of their time to it - not just money, but serious, ongoing advice.
[4]

\-----

[1] [https://Upsolve.org](https://Upsolve.org). The product is free and we're
a non-profit because you trigger an avalanche of regulatory activity if you
try to make money doing this. We've also been able to garner an incredible
amount of institutional (judicial) buy-in because we are a non-profit.

[2] [http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~miwhite/white-jleo-
reprint.pdf](http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~miwhite/white-jleo-reprint.pdf)

[3] Our #1 success metric is simply "number of Chapter 7 bankruptcy discharges
received".

[4] Real advice - not sending it down the black hole of billionaire
philanthropy. Without even getting into the subject of how those institutions
grind their founders' personal axes, there is a huge qualitative difference
between their advice and Silicon Valley-level "Let's build a huge thing on a
lean budget" advice.

~~~
existencebox
A tangential curiosity, perhaps you can give some insight on a very naive
question I've had regarding nonprofits:

You mention re: avalanch of regulatory activity if you try to make money;
where does the line get drawn between providing competitive salaries and
"making money"? I've always been somewhat curious of the band Non Profits have
to operate in to maintain that status vs. what pragmatic benefits it gives. (I
realize this is a very broad question, so any "sparknotes" breadcrumb you have
would also be welcome)

~~~
kevmo
The avalanche I'm referring to there has to do with whether the company itself
is for-profit or non-profit, and the legal, institutional, and PR
ramifications thereof.

The non-profit competitive salary question is one which people endlessly
debate. Some people think it is ridiculous that the head of the Southern
Poverty Law Center makes a $300k salary despite SPLC's tremendous success and
the fact that he could clearly command much more in the private sector.

~~~
existencebox
Thanks for the response, To be more precise to the second part of my question:
I was more wondering how the 300k would be decided; e.g. why not 400k or 200k?
(Personally that seems like a very acceptable salary, but if non-executives
are scaled down to something commensurate as opposed to squeezing the
distribution, that becomes harder to sell.)

~~~
kevmo
Haha, as I said - The non-profit competitive salary question is one which
people endlessly debate!

------
d_burfoot
Here's another view of the problem: the "average Joe" American is starting to
hate all the centralized and monolithic institutions in the country, because
he sees them as being corrupt, privileged, and primarily concerned with
cementing their own power. It used to be that SV was a rebel and outsider
going against Washington and Wall Street, but increasingly SV is just another
pillar of the power structure.

~~~
debt
I think it'd be an interesting startup idea to decentralized all the
monolithic services. Create an Uber for City X(ie Uber for London, Uber for
Chicago, etc.). Allow the municipalities to run those services. And do the
same for Airbnb, Yelp, Google, Facebook etc.

~~~
Can_Not
I love this idea. I use to work for a "The WordPress of $INDUSTRY" startup and
letting people rum their own thing and self brand was very fulfilling work. I
think it's important to protect specific categories of small businesses (or
simply markets that shouldn't need to be overly centralized) from the growth
of underhanded heavy hitting centralized monopolies. I call it AmaZoning when
a large player comes in and says "I'm the new middle man".

------
julianozen

        To you, in the words of one Silicon Valley investor, this seems like “the only logical conclusion.” 
        To the average person, this seems like the height of arrogance. People are uncomfortable with 
        universal basic income because you’re essentially saying their labor isn’t worth anything — but you don’t see it!
    

I think this point is really missing from most UBI conversations that happen
on HN. UBI is the answer when you believe that all economic productivity must
come from the US coasts.

I think a lot of start ups have thrived trying to solve the problem of high
density cities. Airbnb and Uber are start ups that get created when your
biggest problems are high rent and poor public transit. I would be interested
in seeing startups trying to solve suburban problems and producing suburban
jobs. I think the fact that are very few companies like this is indicative of
our increasing cultural divide.

~~~
dragonwriter
> UBI is the answer when you believe that all economic productivity must come
> from the US coasts.

No, it's not.

UBI is the answer when you recognize that capitalism directs the gains from
productivity (whether made in the US coasts or anywhere else) to a narrow
class of megacapitalists, that it's gotten more efficient at that over time,
and that the welfare state of the modern mixed economy is an overly
complicated, inefficient corrective measure for that that leaves lots of gaps
for people to fall through and responds slowly to changes in the details of
the mechanisms of capitalist wealth capture. UBI is the simple, low-overhead,
responsive implementation of a mixed economy, which gets out of the
way—compared to classic welfare state programs—of realizing the value of
labor, especially including labor marked as worthless and prohibited from sale
by minimum wage laws.

~~~
ianai
With UBI there wouldn’t need to be a minimum wage. Probably gen the 40 hr work
week could be disrupted.

------
calebm
> "As evidenced by the major backlash over the recent launch of a company
> called Bodega — where the founders and investors genuinely didn’t understand
> why the name was problematic — you don’t always have the best handle on how
> your ideas will be received outside of the Silicon Valley bubble.""

I find it ironic that the article claims that people in the "SV bubble" don't
understand why "Bodega" is a bad name... if you took a survey, I imagine an
extremely small percentage of people would find anything wrong with that name
(personally, I had to Google around a good bit to find why people had a
problem with it). I think you'd have to be in an ultra-pedantic PC media
bubble to extract outrage out of a name like "Bodega".

~~~
calebm
"Thoughtfully, Fast Company asked McDonald about that. He replied, “We did
surveys in the Latin American community to understand if they felt the name
was a misappropriation of that term or had negative connotations, and 97% said
‘no’.”" ([https://www.eater.com/2017/9/13/16302386/bodega-startup-
corn...](https://www.eater.com/2017/9/13/16302386/bodega-startup-corner-store-
silicon-valley))

------
wpietri
The description of the symptoms here has a lot of resonance for me.

I was just talking with the CEO I worked for in 2001; she's busy putting
together her next startup. We had a good conversation about what I was calling
"unicorn fever", the way the desire for instant massive valuation has
distorted so much of what we thought good about the startup ecosystem. The
article calling this factory farming seems spot on to me.

~~~
8draco8
It's not the problem of Silicon Valley it's the problem of investors throwing
money at anything that is located in SV. You can still make some good money in
SV you just have to invest in a startup with real future not just a good
pitch. I don't think there will be big D-day when all unicorns will fail. We
will see more and more stupid startups to fail (Juicero, Soccer Genomics etc.)
and lower willingnes to invest into dumb startups but those that have the
future like Dropbox, Github, WeWork etc.

------
jedrek
What this piece misses the obvious financial privilege that many startups
have. Uber is slaying yellow/black cabs around the world, but only by
massively subsidizing its rides through investment capital. Amazon is the
world's largest store, by working on margins that don't let people who
actually expect a return on the investment compete.

It's gotten to the point that if a company actually does things the old
fashioned way: taking a small seed, creating a product that people want,
selling it and expanding based on that revenue... we ooh and ahh, calling it
"organic growth". Everywhere else, it's just called "building a business".

Pair that with the "thought leaders" who dismiss businesses that allow people
to build a life for themselves and their families. Because Silicon Valley
isn't really about making things anymore, it's about making financial bets.
And that's a shame - watching billionaires blow money on reinventing the
vending machine isn't much fun.

~~~
jartelt
Uber/lyft are also slaying yellow/black cabs because the cabs chose to just
milk their monopoly for maximum profit for 30 years rather than invest in any
technology or make any improvements to rider experience or comfort. It's not
just the subsidies. It's the fact that calling random 800 numbers trying to
get a cab is really frustrating, especially when they do not show up 20% of
the time.

For Amazon... are their margins really that much smaller than Walmart, Target,
Costco or anything other big box discount retailer? Many products at Amazon
can be found cheaper in a store. It's just really damn convenient to order it
on Amazon and have it shipped the next day.

~~~
jonbarker
Amazon's stated goal is to have no margins (Bezos 'your margin is my
opportunity'). So yes if they are following their zero margin strategy they
should be lower than WMT, whose only claim is low price. If something is
cheaper elsewhere it is because Amazon has not figured out how to deliver that
particular item to the consumer at cost yet. So for example if you find
something cheaper at WMT it may be that WMT has a great distributor license
and is an exclusive channel, something like that.

~~~
tome
Huh? So how does Amazon actually make money?

~~~
mcguire
When did they start making money, again?

~~~
jartelt
They have posted a profit the last 8 quarters.

------
shoefly
The small midwestern town from which I hail is rotting. The residents could
never afford the luxuries flowing here in the valley. They are angry. They are
huge Trump supporters. They don't want handouts. They want jobs. They want to
contribute. They don't want to leave their homes. They are stuck.

~~~
Clubber
I think this is the main reason the Democrats got swept, and will probably
continue to get swept. They aren't offering what most people want, honest pay
for honest work. They are offering welfare, which most people are to proud to
take, let alone want.

This isn't just a problem in the Midwest, this is a problem for almost
anywhere that isn't a large city on the coast (with some exceptions). This
problem affects probably 90% of our land mass and the problem has been
consistently growing for the past 45 years or so.

Neither political party knows how to solve this, or if they do, don't have the
political will to solve it.

~~~
s73ver_
That's not true at all. Clinton had plans with job retraining for coal miners.
They were offering jobs. They got swept because Trump came in and said, "We'll
keep coal mining," despite having no actual plan for what to do.

~~~
Clubber
Yes, but coal miners are such a small subset of middle America. I'm talking
about all the blood letting between VA and CA. And (I'm not being snarky) but
what would you retrain them to do? Unless those cities grow an economy, they
will just be retrained, still unemployed people.

Unless you have a massive migration to large cities, it's not going to do much
good.

I mean think about that for a few steps. You have millions of people in small
towns all over America in ghost towns. Training will help, but until these
towns start growing businesses, then what? I mean read about the Walmatization
of America. Read about all the factories moving to Mexico after NAFTA. It's
all dead.

The Democrats used to serve the middle class, but they stopped after Carter
got demolished by Reagan. Bill Clinton pushed that retrain idea, but the blood
kept flowing. Why would it be any different now?

Like it or not the default vote for most of middle America is GOP. The Dems
have to actually come up with something that works to get these smaller cities
and towns vibrant again if they want the votes. I don't think the
establishment Dems understand America outside the coastal areas.

The latest plan from Schumer is the same. Would probably do a lot of good for
the working poor in cities, but won't do much for middle America. Same ole
same ole. Like I said, it's a problem neither party knows how to solve, or
doesn't have the political will to solve it.

~~~
tomjen3
Then have the migrate to the cities. Seriously, the US was founded by people
moving over the Atlantic in search of better opportunities and the west was
converted the same way.

~~~
Clubber
50 million people? Simple dismissive answers to complex problems isn't going
to solve anything.

~~~
dragonwriter
Yes the vast majority of the non-urban population is going to become urban for
economic reasons. That’s been going on since the dawn of civilization (it's
literally where the name “civilization” comes from), and it's not going to
reversed any time soon.

~~~
Clubber
So the solution is train 50 million people and tell them to move to large
cities? Will the government pay for the move, or no? What about the
skyrocketing rents in the large cities with the large influx? What about their
homes and land they own now? Write it off? What exactly would you train them
to do?

That's got a lot of red flags in the details. Ignoring that, it doesn't sound
anywhere near ideal solution. I would expect something better. I think getting
the federal government into building things again instead of contracting it
out would be a start, similar to FDR's works programs. I'm sure it will get a
lot of resistance, but the same way we've been doing things isn't working.

~~~
dragonwriter
> So the solution is train 50 million people and tell them to move to large
> cities?

No, that's not a solution or what they need to be told to do, the move is just
what is largely going to happen over time.

Insofar as there as a policy solution, it's supporting the effected population
through the transition, which, certainly includes funding retraining those who
can benefit from that, assisting relocation, and assisting those who can't
benefit from retraining.

(While it's politically unlikely in the near term, UBI could address much of
that with less friction and overhead than targeted programs.)

> I would expect something better. I think getting the federal government into
> building things again instead of contracting it out would be a start,
> similar to FDR's works programs.

Whether it's government jobs or contractor jobs makes no difference; FDRs
works programs weren't significant because of that but instead because of the
scale of the work. But those were to deal with a major business cycle
downturn, not an effort to hold back the long-term rural→urban transition.

Unless your works program is a permanent one building monuments to waste in
rural areas, it’s beside the point of the problem you are trying to address

------
Mefis
>and eight men control half the world’s wealth.

This is wrong. Eight men control as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the
world's population.

[https://www.theguardian.com/global-
development/2017/jan/16/w...](https://www.theguardian.com/global-
development/2017/jan/16/worlds-eight-richest-people-have-same-wealth-as-
poorest-50)

~~~
binarymax
The grammar is ambiguous. "half the world" == "the poorest 50% of the
population". "half the world's wealth" == "the wealth of the poorest 50% of
the population"

------
Caveman_Coder
After living in SV for most of my life, I decided to move to the Southwest to
work in an industry that, in my opinion, is actually a public good (utility
industry). It's a bit slower paced, but the engineering problems are the same
and the community is much better.

~~~
bluetwo
I'm curious about 'community is much better'... any more info?

I don't live in SV.

~~~
Caveman_Coder
Warning: totally subjective opinions to follow...

The PHX community is "much better" in my opinion because the people I meet at
various Dev groups aren't doing it because they want to be "software-developer
famous"...if you know what I mean. When I was in SV I went to tons of meetups
where it seemed like the devs were just trying to create something to get
themselves "likes/favs/PRs/followers/etc" on HN/GitHub/Twitter. It was a weird
kind of in-group celebrity that I detest.

Here in PHX, I don't really see any of that. I went to a Linux Users Meetup
and it was pretty chill, nobody was pushing their GitHub repo/blog/Twitter on
the audience, it was just a laid back discussion on the latest happenings, but
not the software-developer-gossip nonsense. When I go to a .NET developer
group meetup, we discuss .NET Core and Azure...just the facts. We don't
discuss the latest thing Scott Hanselman said on Twitter, or what so-and-so
said about the latest <insert topic>. The discussion tend to be about the
tech, how to use it, and what the new features allow us to do, that's it.

Some of us don't want to be famous for our GitHub, we want to work with nice
teammates on cool engineering problems that matter. I found my current
employment (working on electrical grid software for a major SW utility
company) to fit perfectly with my interests and background.

~~~
bluetwo
Thanks for the insight.

~~~
Caveman_Coder
No problem, glad I could provide some insight. Also...

The whole "diversity-in-tech" is less of an issue here (from my anecdotal
experience). My current team is 70/30 men/women and while we'll occasionally
talk about the larger tech community, rarely does it devolve into talks about
diversity/gender representation/social issues. My team cares about technology,
solving problems related to the electric grid, and maintaining our systems so
the operators can ensure power is restored quickly and promptly to our
customers.

Its a pretty good gig in that respect. My lead is a Mexican-American female
that if you asked her about it, she'd say she is an professional Electrical
Engineer first and foremost. I like that kind of environment, as opposed to
when I worked for Google and it was a constant barrage of "women/diversity
candidate/veteran in tech." My wife is a software engineer as well and she
likes the fact that her current company doesn't treat her as the token female
developer, something that she experience all too much in SV.

------
CalChris
_Your rainforest of innovation has turned into a factory farm._

If ever any sentence better described YC, its brethren incubators and demo
days, I haven’t read it.

------
jabot
This article bashes Juicero - rightfully, in my (humble) opinion; it is a
stupid and wasteful idea, and ridiculously overpriced.

However, it has that in common with Keurig - which is a huge success.

My point is that just because something is stupid and wasteful it doesn't have
to fail...

~~~
ghaff
That's actually fair and I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point in the
whole Juicero debacle, someone uttered the phrase "Keurig for Juice" or
something along those lines. The thing with Keurigs and the like is that
there's actually a market for making single cups of hot coffee. I don't
personally own or want one but it's a compromise that a lot of people are
willing to make both at home and the workplace in exchange for convenience.
(Really Keurig is effectively positioned as a better instant coffee.)

But there were very real differences between Keurig and Juicero that make one
costly/wasteful/but fills a niche and the other just stupid.

------
relics443
I stopped reading when the author suggests that people are falling out of love
with silicon valley because most companies hire mostly white males. What a
terrible racist/sexist thing to say.

------
redleggedfrog
The fundamental problem with this article is it presupposes that America used
to love Silicon Valley. I think Silicon Valley loves Silicon Valley, and
investors kinda-sorta love Silicon Valley, and the rest of us like Apple and
begrudgingly use Facebook, because, well, what else is there?

It'd be nice if Silicon Valley did something other than make software to keep
our noses in our phones.

------
Animats
_You haven’t produced a new firm that has cracked the world’s top 200 since
Facebook’s founding in 2003._

That's a significant point.

Of the 15 companies that entered the Fortune 500 this year, only one, Lam
Research, is in Silicon Valley. And they're in Fremont. (PayPal made the list,
but as a spinoff of eBay.)[1]

[1]
[http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2016...](http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2016-only-12-remain-
thanks-to-the-creative-destruction-that-fuels-economic-prosperity/)

------
postramus
Silicon Valley will eventually be seen as yet another textbook case of a new
industry getting away with externalization of costs initially unrecognized as
such.

Enjoy it while it lasts, I guess, but don’t expect to escape liability for the
foreseeable consequences of the systems you build for all perpetuity.

------
joshuaheard
Great article, but I'm surprised it didn't mention the left-leaning politics.
There is the alleged censorship by Twitter and Facebook of conservative views;
the firing of the Google diversity memo guy; and even House of Cards raising
the nefarious search engine manipulation meme. Silicon Valley is starting to
get the "liberal Hollywood" treatment by the conservative media.

------
kazinator
> _Your companies are now solving “my-world problems” (food delivery, cold-
> pressed, on-demand juice versus the “real-world problems” you used to solve
> (getting affordable computers in the hands of everyone; inventing the
> Internet)._

You can understand where these hapless doofuses are coming from, though:
whatever you come up with has to have _paying_ customers, and be something
someone won't steal two weeks after release. In other words, some plausible
return on investment.

Inventing the internet was fun hacking paid by cushy government grants. You're
not easily gonna get that today, or not for just any old idea that pops into
your head.

Affordable computers in the hands of everyone means optimizing existing
commodity stuff down to razor-thin margins (if not indeed taking a loss) plus
all the logistics of actually reaching everyone.

~~~
Applejinx
>cushy government grants

Dare we say… 'handouts'? Gee, seems like that might not be such a bad thing
after all.

Want flyover America to grow economies and produce stuff to perk up SV's ears?
Pay it to do so.

People treat economics as if it's a merit-evaluating system capable of
managing the ground its actors grow from, and it's absolutely not. Money is
better considered as a vote, or like water in the environment. You can't have
it function both in its fundamental property of facilitating commerce, and as
a score indicator. I think something akin to 'likes' ought to replace money as
the score indicator, and money ought to be entirely allocated to population-
wide commerce.

That means entirely abandoning the connotations of 'value' it has, reimagining
it as 'abstracted power', and leaning much harder on the capacity of
populations to innovate. It is stark madness to assume that the capacity to
accumulate abstracted power (money) signifies ANYTHING other than itself, plus
the ability of that power to convert back into actions (easily mistaken for
merit or virtue!)

Anyone who's seriously dug into the genetic algorithm ought to be able to see
the merits of doling out 'power' (money, ability to act in an economic system)
across a massive population of organisms who're on the whole still
individually more intelligent than AI could hope to be.

Starving populations of humans to death for the crime of not being as
economically powerful as Silicon Valley is not only immoral, it's a grotesque
and foolish waste of intelligence and innovation resources. Elon Musk is a
clever and interesting fellow, but he's WAY less intelligent/innovative than a
supported POPULATION of humans. You only think he's that much more clever,
because his resources are almost unmeasurable compared to the fellow (times
10,000) in Boise Idaho with just a garage, who've got almost no resources at
all.

Genetic Algorithm says to focus solely on giving more resources to Elon is
producing a local maximum and screwing yourself in the long run. We can't
afford to make that mistake.

------
atonse
This article feels mostly spot on.

Except I do see at least investors like YC making an effort to broaden the
kinds of investments they make, more into actual "public good" type companies
like in the education, health, and non-profit sectors.

------
emerged
I'm praying for a day when SV has been replaced by largely remote and
decentralized teams. Spreading the wealth and opportunity beyond the privilege
bubble and exposing the industry to a more representative distribution of
political preferences.

It may just be a dream, but I do feel hope as SV has been getting backlash for
it's identity politics and new blockchain tech is looking to be a way to
enable decentralized remote organizations.

------
vasilipupkin
this article is so nonsensical, it's almost comical, I don't even know where
to start. Ok, how about calling it a problem that 19 out of 20 investments
will fail. Willing to invest like that is a great thing about SV, not a bad
thing!

~~~
mixedbit
19 of 20 investments fail because VCs equate success with > 1B$ valuation.
Among the failed companies there are plenty that produce great and useful
products but need to shut down because the VC deals forced them to grow to
unsustainable size.

~~~
vasilipupkin
ok, but those 19 investments didn't have to take VC money. if they produced
great and useful products, then why couldn't they grow organically, borrow
from a bank, etc.? I mean it's just complete nonsense to complain about the
fact that you failed using someone else's money.

~~~
mixedbit
They could grow organically and there are plenty of companies that do, but
this is not the Silicon Valley way, and this is what the article is
complaining about.

~~~
vasilipupkin
well, to be honest, I don't get that criticism. Why does it need to be the
silicon valley way? you want to build a 10 million dollar business? you can do
that in Boise, Idaho without VC funding. I mean the article is just clickbait.

------
hienyimba
Techcrunch forgets its a "Part" of Silicon Valley. Most Valley stories cannot
be told without Techcrunch in it e.g the T.v show - Silicon Valley.

~~~
snerbles
The author danced around but missed the detached, holier-than-thou elitism
that radiates from the entire Bay Area.

~~~
CalChris
There's a huge difference between being _elite_ (we are and I sure am) and
_elitism_. In fact the author stabs at the heart of Silicon Valley elitism:

    
    
      Your ideas are only as good as the people in the room.
      And your door is shut to most people.

~~~
Clubber
I don't think I've ever heard someone call themselves elite outside of a
gaming session. You should probably use the numbers 1337 though.

Wouldn't calling yourself elite, seemingly unaware of what that projects to
people count as elitism?

~~~
CalChris
If Michael Jordan calls himself elite, is he an elitist? If a quite successful
Valley engineer calls himself elite, am I an elitist? These are different
words. Populists will call SV elitist. That doesn't make them right.

~~~
Clubber
That's kinda the point. I don't believe MJ ever called himself elite. He
didn't really need to, did he?

~~~
CalChris
He did. He may have never used that word but he was the biggest trash talker.
At the Olympic workouts there was an All Star's All Star game and afterward he
told Magic Johnson there was new sheriff in town.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/magic-johnson-trash-
talking-m...](http://www.businessinsider.com/magic-johnson-trash-talking-
michael-jordan-story-2016-5)

Elitism is a self-protecting cabal. SV doesn't really do that. That's the
point of disruptive technology. You're disrupting an existing order. That's
anti-elitist.

~~~
Clubber
So, for one, he said that in private, you called yourself elite on a public
form. Two, that's MJ, are you saying you're the MJ of SV software engineers?
(please do, that would be hysterical).

~~~
CalChris
Really.

------
nadam
"So, what can you do about it?" As much as I love the Sillicon Valley,
disproportional concentration of venture capital and brain drain to a
geographical location is not the healthiest thing in the world. I am a big
proponent of democratization of early-stage investment for years. Now it
started to happen in the cryptocurrency world. It is wild west now, but who
knows how it turns out?

------
RickJWag
It's the synthetic, fascist mono-culture.

Free thought isn't allowed-- Silicon Valley enforces thought control like
Weinstein did over Hollywood.

Sooner or later (looks like sooner) everyone realizes Silicon Valley is 90%
white and Asian male. All the politically-correct talk is lipservice alone.
(That's probably why the self-virtue-signaling went into overdrive in the
first place.)

------
jeffdavis
Sincere question: what is problematic about the word "bodega"?

~~~
Klockan
Cultural appropriation of Mexican small shops. Note that I don't really see
the issue, the name describes their business well.

~~~
southphillyman
Bodegas traditionally are run by Puerto Ricans and Dominicians in the NE (Not
Mexicans). Taken into a NY-centric context it's easier to understand the
backlash in a rapidly gentrifying and appropriating atmosphere.

~~~
jeffdavis
I still don't get it. Cultural appropriation is everywhere, and the inevitable
and obvious result of cultural mixing. What makes this different?

Maybe it has more to do with economic competition than cultural sensitivities?

~~~
Apocryphon
It is a Xoogler-founded startup called Bodega offering a product that would
compete with, and potentially replace, real-world working-class owned bodegas.

~~~
jeffdavis
I get that people would be worried about the economic impact, and who would
feel it.

I don't get how the name is a problem, other than it being a little too
accurate.

~~~
Apocryphon
There's a certain "startup style" that appeared in the marketing for tech in
the Web 2.0 period, maybe kicking off when Google adopted "Don't be evil" as
their corporate slogan. (I allude to it here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15436272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15436272))

The name being too accurate falls into the stereotypical Silicon Valley trap
of cheerfully "disrupting" with negative consequences for "regular people."
Not only does the product ostensibly challenge the economic security of bodega
owners, they're using the name of their livelihood to brand their own company.
So the name becomes an extra sore spot. It's insult to potential injury. It's
banally Orwellian, in the Ministry of Peace sort of way.

~~~
jeffdavis
I am starting to see it: the name is too cheerful -- almost boastful about a
powerfully-backed business beating their less-powerful competitors.

Markets are brutal sometimes. This still seems to rank pretty low on that
scale. For a long time competition was looked at more like a non-violent form
of warfare, and this wouldn't even register. Now, I guess we have a more
cooperative view of business (or perhaps some people have just never been in
business and don't know), so they should be sensitive to the plight of their
competitors.

~~~
Apocryphon
There's a colonization sort of dynamic emerging when sharp differences in tech
are involved. A VC-backed state-of-the-art startup going against old-fashioned
brick and mortar shops is like tanks against spearmen in a game of Civ. Or
gentrification through other means.

------
johnrichardson
This article's dumb. 8 men control half the world's wealth? All of a sudden
the word 'bodega' is racist? Too many white men contributing value is
'problematic'? Articles like this are the reason why Trump won.

------
fnord77
tech wasn't always this ... douchey. I don't know what happened. I've been a
programming since the early 1990s. It used to be fun. Now I don't tell people
what I do.

------
d0ee670a
I agree with this statement - as a cybersecurity professional, I feel this.
"Your ideas are only as good as the people in the room. And your door is shut
to most people."

------
nitwit005
This focuses on finance, and honestly doesn't seem that different than the
gripes people had against banks 50 years ago. White men in charge? Not helping
solve inequality?

------
autokad
sv has a diversity problem, but I think its more geographic than related to
skin color.

~~~
ryanb23
what does that mean?

~~~
autokad
people from the midwest and south are largely not represented in sv companies.
sv has done a great job at basically hiring the same type of person over and
over. I believe this is mostly because of their preference for a narrow set of
universities, among other things.

------
sprague
These same criticisms were lobbed at Microsoft 15 years ago (and IBM before
that), but then, as now, people forget that part of why some of us love
technology is that nobody can rest on past success. Ten years from now, some
new upstart is going to make everyone wonder what the big fuss was about.

------
dsfyu404ed
SV will adapt or die. It's how stuff like this always goes. What's left of
domestic manufacturing adapted. Coal is basically dead.

If SV picks latter option I just hope the corpse doesn't stink up the rest of
society.

(obviously this is a long ways off because inertia but it's something to think
about if you think you'll retire by selling your SV property to the next
sucker)

------
have_faith
Silicon Valley isn't a brand. People don't fall out of love with London or New
York when some stupid products fail there.

~~~
aylmao
Funny how one of your examples is New York, probably one of the world's
strongest city brands, especially after the whole "Big Apple", and "I _heart_
NY" campaigns targeted at promoting tourism.

------
grabcocque
That's not the real reason public opinion has shifted sharply against denizens
of the Valley.

That would be Uber. A company so sociopathic, so awful, so entitled, so full
of loathsome self-aggrandising bullies they became an unwitting figurehead for
hatred of the Valley. And Uber make it so easy to hate them.

~~~
onewaystreet
The fact that Uber hasn't suffered any noticeable loss of business suggests
that this is false. Or at least that it doesn't matter if people love you or
not.

~~~
grabcocque
You don't have to be loved to be profitable. That said Uber is currently
neither, nor is it likely to be any time soon.

But my point is that Uber's reputation plumbing the abyssal depths, and to a
lesser extent AirBnB's, is dragging down the reputation of the rest of the
valley.

~~~
emidln
Comcast is the poster child for hated but profitable.

------
thatonechad
I seen a commercial advertising googles "home" device and was a cringeworthy
moment. The partner to the NSA, the SJW brigade is now trying to have me
purchase something that sits in my home and reminds me of what a pathetic
corporation it has become. No thanks.

------
mrexroad
What about the role that private / investment banks have been increasingly
playing in fundraising over past 5-10 years?

Things seemed a lot different 10 years ago. I mean, some of us even had to
take pay cuts to join pre-series A startups...

------
Mefis
What's wrong with naming a startup Bodega?

~~~
nailer
The startup was aiming to replace existing corner stores, which are called
'bodegas' in many parts of the US because they're typically run by Latino
people.

Using a Latino name for a company of (likely middle-class, likely Asian and
European rather than Latino) engineers seeking to disintermediate working
class bodega owners was the problem.

------
SamvitJ
_You haven’t produced a new firm that has cracked the world’s top 200 since
Facebook’s founding in 2003._

Facebook was founded in 2004.

------
jeffdavis
The primary content in this article is a link to a FastCompany article, which
actually tries to back up its claims.

------
Mugwort
People like Apple. Google and Facebook are a different story.

------
jswizzy
This author is drinking some serious anti captalist kool-aid. First off both
Bannon and Bernie are Leninists. True believers are interchangeable with one
another if you believe Eric Hoffer.

------
arjie
Yeah, but Silicon Valley doesn't need their love. It needs their dollars. And
they love giving Silicon Valley the dollars.

------
kpwagner
This article misses the mark. Spot on.

------
nsxwolf
Middle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the
problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300
square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a
building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is
going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore.

There will be torches and pitchforks coming for you.

~~~
api
It reminds me of the endless ghettoes of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy
(Neuromancer, etc.) where people are basically warehoused and left to jack
into "simstim" and rot.

In reality the pitchforks will come out as you say and this endless ghetto
will be paired with a total surveillance police state to contain the angry
aimless masses. Perhaps not coincidentally this is exactly what Silicon Valley
seems to be building.

Pro tip: cyberpunk fiction was largely _dystopian_.

I was briefly into the idea of basic income until I thought about it more
deeply. It's basically consigning the bulk of humanity to the status of
"surplus flesh." There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income
they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not
true. Humans are social beings. We are not going to become those things unless
we are surrounded by other human beings who are those things and that only
happens when we are surrounded by a lot of people who are doing things. That's
not going to happen if there's nothing to do. Without a culture of opportunity
and vision people turn inward to drugs (opiate epidemic), various forms of
Skinner box masturbation (game and social media addiction), or lash out. The
latter takes the form of disorganized lone nut mass shootings like Las Vegas
or organized political fanaticism like ISIS or neo-fascism. People don't like
to be worthless.

The solution is not basic income. The solution is a massive increase in our
ambition as a species. Here are some real first world problems we could be
tackling:

\- Radically extending the human life span

\- Exterminating mental illness through a deep and diligent study of the human
brain, and also possibly increasing human intelligence in general.

\- Colonizing the Moon and Mars

\- Replacing our entire fossil fuel based infrastructure with renewables,
storage, and possibly some nuclear in areas where those are not sufficient.

\- Connecting all our major cities with high speed rail or maybe even more
exotic things like underground hyperloop transit.

\- Rebuilding suburbia with modern knowledge about design including the social
impact of the built environment.

Options 3, 4, 5, and 6 would employ quite a few people.

... and so on.

Basic income is the conservative risk-averse option. The things I listed above
(and more) are for civilizations who are not afraid to spend a little money
and put people to work.

Part of the problem is the "developed world" narrative. Start with the premise
that our children should properly regard us as _un-developed,_ then commit a
few trillion to becoming developed. If our children and our grandchildren do
not look back at us as ignorant and backward we have failed.

"When I was your age we only lived on one planet, drove around manual cars
that burned dead stuff, and we only lived about 80 years and had a 100 median
IQ."

Edit:

I didn't vote for Trump but when he won I did hold out a little hope that he
might be some kind of crypto-liberal who would actually make good on that
"trillion dollar infrastructure plan" talk. (A trillion is too low but it's a
start.) Alas it appears that this isn't the case and he really is as bad as he
looked.

~~~
nsxwolf
Interesting that you come along with a hopeful vision for the future where
there's interesting and lucrative work for people to do, and your comment is
turning grayer and grayer.

~~~
api
I went back and watched some Star Trek TNG a while back. It's shocking. There
is no way anything that optimistic could be written today. People literally
can't even think it.

~~~
mschuster91
Well people can think of something like TNG but the (alt-)right will instantly
crapstorm you for being a communist. Just look at how they're opposing
healthcare for all, a society like TNG would be the ultimate enemy for them.

~~~
api
The alt-right is the logical endpoint. It kind of combines all the worst ideas
from liberalism over the past 50 years (postmodernism, identity politics) with
all the worst ideas from conservatism (nationalism, racism, biological
determinism) in the previous century.

I remember years ago having a discussion with a friend about "what's the worst
ideology you can possibly imagine" and it kind of resembles what I came up
with but (mostly) minus the theocracy (I pictured a pomo professor, a
Christian Reconstructionist, and a fascist hashing out a synthesis). In some
respects it's worse-- its obnoxious meme aesthetic is far trashier than
anything I would have ever imagined. No dystopian writer could have come up
with a fever dream as hideous as the collision of 4chan and Stormfront.

Maybe you have to hit bottom before things can bounce back. I have a tough
time imagining anything worse than this, but I'm sure people will try.

~~~
wutbrodo
> It kind of combines all the worst ideas from liberalism over the past 50
> years (postmodernism, identity politics)

Not to be pedantic, but those are _illiberal_ ideas. You're conflating
liberals and the left, which was mostly fine when they were in a coalition for
a while. But if you're talking about identity politics et al, you're very
specifically describing things that are almost definitionally illiberal.

~~~
snerbles
It's tragic that some consider "classical liberal" an alt-right dog whistle.

~~~
wutbrodo
Yea, liberalism just isn't in vogue anywhere on the political spectrum. The
kind of people you're talking about are particularly intellectually dishonest
and morally decrepit, but a rejection of liberalism seems to have taken root
all over the place.

------
yahna
I find it kind of ridiculous that the reasons why people supposedly hate
silicon valley ("it's all run by old white guys") are pretty much the opposite
of the reasons why I hear hate of silicon valley (virtue
signally/wrongthink/over concerned with diversity).

------
doener
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15431938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15431938)

