Whatever large numbers of talented people get into seems to have a Clump Phase and a Chump Phase.
Clump Phase comes out of highly intelligent peoples' natural desire to be around each other (clumping) even at economic cost. This goes back to the medieval universities, but now is seen in technology companies where people would rather be a average fish in a huge pond than be the big fish elsewhere.
Now you have a lot of big fish in a school, or "clump". Then the spearfishers, usually rich, fat white men, spot it, then come along and start getting their take. Those are the MBAs who swept into Silicon Valley and are now the most powerful players, despite most of them having not written a line of code since college.
When there are more spearfishers than fish, the ecosystem gets to a point where decline is obvious and rent-seeking/musical-chairs behavior sets in. That's the Chump Phase.
That's where the Silicon Valley ecosystem, with its high rents and VC supercapitalists, is now.
And the spearfishers will maintain SV is still in 'clump' phase as long as plausible to attract more chumps, right? So as someone who's interested in finding his own clump, I've got to filter out the suits from the shirts myself. This seems non-trivial, and frustrating..
Clump Phase comes out of highly intelligent peoples' natural desire to be around each other (clumping) even at economic cost. This goes back to the medieval universities, but now is seen in technology companies where people would rather be a average fish in a huge pond than be the big fish elsewhere.
Now you have a lot of big fish in a school, or "clump". Then the spearfishers, usually rich, fat white men, spot it, then come along and start getting their take. Those are the MBAs who swept into Silicon Valley and are now the most powerful players, despite most of them having not written a line of code since college.
When there are more spearfishers than fish, the ecosystem gets to a point where decline is obvious and rent-seeking/musical-chairs behavior sets in. That's the Chump Phase.
That's where the Silicon Valley ecosystem, with its high rents and VC supercapitalists, is now.