To help with that, we've changed the title above to the what high school English teachers would call its thesis statement.
Imagine the development of a "thought keyboard" that could be used by someone with motor neurone disease to communicate with their family or drive a robotic arm - young me was excited!
While it's true that the field had shifted towards machine learning in the decade preceding, that wasn't because ML techniques showed any amazing promise or were likely to be the foundation of any breakthrough. Quite the opposite, in fact - there was strong evidence to suggest that the "ML revolution" would go nowhere, but that's where all the grant money was.
So day after day, year after year, hordes of researchers would churn out ML papers they knew would yield no fruit simply because that was the path of least resistance. Occasionally they would get a "breakthrough" result that never generalised to other datasets. It could be the case that ML is showing genuinely amazing results in other biomedical fields, but after going through that I'm always a bit skeptical. (For anyone wondering, I left after a year and basically gave up the right to ever study a PhD in Australia again.)
That narrow problem space where ML has become revolutionary is classification problems where the cost of a false positive is marginal. In the industry we frequently refer to it as “professional judgement” and anyone who has ever referred to that statement in the course of their work should be concerned because ML is coming for you. As far as the false positive part of it, we’ll no on bats an eye when a surgeon loses a patient, but we’re unlikely to accept the same from a computer any time soon.
The biggest area where I can think of that this narrow problem space exists to be capitalized on is...search. Not surprising then that Google became a king of ML because to them it was actually a revolutionary leap forward to their core problem.
"We are going to challenge existing players in $market" gets you nothing, "We are going to disrupt $market with blockchain/ML" gets you a eight-digit seed round.
ML has been used and is being used to significantly advance image processing, video processing, image classification, speech-to-text, natural language understanding, medical imaging interpretation, medical notes and differential diagnosis, warehouse management, shipping and delivery, transportation, networking, agriculture, biomedical research, insurance, law practice (document scanning), journalism, politics (through better polling, targeting, gerrymandering, whatever), probably other things I'm missing.
Any intuitive skill that can be built through hard work and years of experience seems to be within the realms of what AI/ML can learn to do. Separating background from the subjects, guessing the 3D shape of an object from a 2D image etc. Anything that people can master through experience, including stuff like "sensing that there's something fishy but can't tell exactly what" kind of intuition.
I bet that there would be welding machines that can help an amateur to weld like a master by learning and imitating the way a master welder does its job.
The idea that ML could magically classify signals from sensors above the dura/skull was laughable. Your signal (and therefore training data) is affected by basically any thought of action the user has, and is then spatially low pass filtered by a big fat slab of bone and flesh.
Imagine trying to train a "cat recogniser" by showing it low-resolution pictures of a random location in a room where a cat is. It was a joke then and I suspect still is now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23657403
I suspect the Pollyanna tone is why people aren’t actually engaging with the material in it. Applying machine learning to medical science is indeed exciting, but it’s hard to envision what exactly is the product that causes “The nexus of machine learning and medicine, biology, and materials science will be to the coming decades what Silicon Valley has been to the late 20th and early 21st century.” Not to mention, I would wager most commentators are not equipped to address his point about SV being unable to deal with medical regulations, seeing as there’s been medtech startups that have already attempted to flout FDA regulation.
> The hubs where that knowledge can be found are not the special province of Silicon Valley
Isn’t South SF a biotech hotbed?
His points about regulators actually doing able something substantive towards big tech platforms, and the end of “casino capitalism” also feel too Pollyannaish for our current lamentable moment. Maybe it has to all get worse before it’s foreseeable.
O’Reilly certainly calls it out as he sees it with the social commentary:
> When the “superstar firms” ruthlessly compete with smaller firms that come up with fresh ideas, not only starving them of talent but often introducing copycat products and services, there is decreased innovation from the market as a whole. Cities are dominated by a new class of highly paid big-company employees driving up housing costs and forcing out lower wage workers; wages and working conditions of workers in less profitable industries are squeezed to drive the growth of the giants. Their very jobs are made contingent and disposable, with inequality baked in from the beginning of their employment. Governments are starved of revenue by giant companies that have mastered the art of tax avoidance. The list is far longer than that.
Honestly, this article’s a great read.
This is just an ignorant hot-take though that once again blames upper middle class tech employees for a housing problem caused solely by bad govern policies.
There is no “domination” here considering that tech employees are well. 21 percent [1] are now considered tech jobs and the FAANG employees clearing $500K+ to afford houses make up a small fraction of that.
> Governments are starved of revenue by giant companies that have mastered the art of tax avoidance.
SF tax revenue has been climbing the whole decade [2]. CA is the same [3]. The governments are absolutely not “starved of revenue”. They have been operating in a completely inept fashion for decades and the waste/corruption is eating everything up. Double the tax revenue in California and politicians will have it squandered in the year.
This is just another lame attempt to blame the tech boogeyman for a failed government. How much homelessness, high housing costs, high tax rates, failed public infrastructure, etc do we have to endure before we realize crying about one of the few major successful industries isn’t an answer?
1. https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/14/tech-employment-bay-a... 2. https://sftreasurer.org/annual-report-fiscal-year-2018-19 3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/313176/california-state-...
Your rebuttal appears to miss the point that O'Reilly makes.
First: This page [1] shows business tax is about 1B of 6B total for San Francisco. In most cities in the United States, business tax is a relatively small part of total tax revenue. Most cities derive the largest proportion of tax revenue from property taxes. For SF, it is 2B per year -- the highest of any tax revenue category. SF property prices have risen a lot in the last ten years, so property tax has also risen. I understand some of this could be attributed to a strong economy combined with difficult regulations to build new residential housing. Thus, SF has seen a historic rise in housing prices.
Second: Speaking more specifically to O'Reilly's point about the "art of tax avoidance": Are you familiar with "base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS)"? Sometimes you hear the term "Dutch Sandwich" or "Double Irish arrangement" in media. Global (tech) companies can greatly reduce national taxes by using these tax strategies. Thus, they deny much needed tax revenue to various countries where they operate. Please note: These tax strategies are not only limited to tech. Any industry that is heavily weighted towards "intellectual property", such as pharma, uses similar tax strategies. (General Electric was one of the earliest and most aggressive.) Famously, even Starbucks, which isn't a very "IP intense" industry managed to pay zero national taxes in the UK one year. After some embarrassing news stories, they offered a voluntary payment to the UK nat'l gov't.
[1] https://sfgov.org/scorecards//finance/expenditures-and-reven...
I've been hearing the trinity of information technology, life sciences and materials science for over a quarter of a century again and again. Since the first time and ever since it reminds me of these tests where you are presented a list of words that are related somehow and you have to find the one word that doesn't fit in the set.
For me materials science seems to almost fit at first glance, but not really when you look at it. Both the other areas have already changed our life more than anything in the past decades and there is good reason they will continue to do so even more in the near and intermediate future. I don't see this to be true for materials science. At least there seem to be at least a dozen fields that are equally influential.
Does anyone know why materials science is so often included?
That said, materials science is vital for incremental improvements like modern composite airplanes or SpaceX rockets etc, and if we ever do get to space elevators or room-temperature superconductors, the potential is life-changing.
For a good stretch, the bay area was the place to be. Lots of people wanted to be there, whether or not they were engineers. The cost of living made these ambitions completely unreasonable, except for the well compensated engineers.
Monoculturalism is a failure to diversify, and it stems from an inability to build an effective dense urban region. The bay area could have had human AND financial capital rivaling NYC, a megapolis perhaps in league with Tokyo, but this failed to materialize so instead the region will likely go the way of Detroit: rising and falling in step with the industry it's built around.
What if it's the other way around? Public school didn't teach me about the Second Great Migration of black Americans westward during and after World War 2, and I was unaware that there was basically zero black population here until then. Check out the first graph in particular in this article: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/racial-segregation-san-franci...
It's impossible for me to ignore the time correlation between these demographic changes, the civil rights movement, and the birth of California's various anti-housing policies like Prop 13. All the houses in my area of San Francisco had racial deed covenants making it illegal to sell them to non-whites, and this was new construction in the 1940s and '50s! That obviously became illegal in the 1960s so segregation became economic, locking in existing segregation by pricing out newcomers and letting existing residents pass homes to their kids down with no tax reassessment: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OEHRENWBSHNO
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3012949
I don't know if it's wise to pursue this under Trump's supreme court though
I doubt folks would accept a significantly more dense living if they were the engineers of tomorrow. They’d expect the single family home and yard for their work.
Where in the USA is this not a challenge? Single family zoning is everywhere and existing residents in most American cities have little reason to want that to change.
Simply put, the fact that prices go up in densest parts of SF and NYC basically confirms that there's people that enough people want real cities to bootstrap the process.
Millenials have show a preference for good cities, %50+ of SV engineers are immigrants from all over the world. A truely urban SV would be amazing.
I think this might be more of a wish than based in any sort of reality. Perhaps if it _does_ go the way of Detroit then I can afford to move there!
> rising and falling in step with the industry it's built around
The tech industry is definitely still rising
https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail/status/1372201054213787660
Silicon Valley probably has a role to play in suppressing cybercrime.
References:
Cybercrime, $945B: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/07/cybersecu...
Climate, $258B: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/01/world-hammered-by...
Let's drop "cyber" for a second.
Suppose some (potentially, foreign state sponsored) actor starts to physically attack/kidnap company employees in company's home country that is starts to affect the bottom line. No one would say "They have to start investing more into security". It would be normal for the company to totally offload the problem on the home state.
Now, getting back to "cybersecurity": why company is supposed to handle it instead of offloading the problem on the state?
Humanity has a self-preservation instinct in not letting that happen, just as corporations have a self-preservation instinct for not losing all their money to cybercrime. But one advantage corporations have is that they can generally act as one body, while getting all of humanity to agree on something is usually not possible until it's too late.
1) Cybercrime activity has an immediate impact, whereas the impact of climate-changing activity will be felt for many years, and
2) The impact of climate-changing activity results in actual destruction of value, whereas cybercrime results in only the transfer of value (from the victims to the perpetrators).
Of course, the threat of cybercrime results in other value-destroying activity, like the effort spent on cybersecurity ($200B/year according to Statista).
SV has probably had just as much a role in enabling cybercrime as fighting it.
McAfee's report "The Hidden Costs of Cybercrime"[0] seems to be the source.
[0] https://www.mcafee.com/enterprise/en-us/assets/reports/rp-hi...
The IETF in particular has had a huge role in facilitating phishing via SMTP.
> A few states, such as California, Montana, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, totally ban non-compete agreements for employees, or prohibit all non-compete agreements except in limited circumstances. [1]
There is also a massive augmented wave coming that is heavily underestimated and will change everything. The future is heavily content creation in new phases of technology which are huge. Overall, it is better to have a virtual economy that uses less resources than a physical one.
The new markets are definitely remote and that is how you communicate with most people now even in the same building, so being physically in California isn't as needed. Though the policies of not recognizing non-competes needs to go nationwide. Non-competes are anti-innovation, anti-worker, anti-business, anti-competition and only help the bigs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#United_Stat...
I'm certainly not a fan of non-competes but note that, even in California, a company can drag you into an expensive court battle over non-solicitation clauses, NDAs, etc. It's also a matter of non-competes not being enforceable in general. A small company may still choose not to hire you if they think there's a possibility they may need to go to court.
There's your salary. If the company works out or not later, well, you're a founder and has the experience, it's easier to get a job anywhere.
It takes a rich person to take such a risk, but yay, meritocracy!
I wish I could have had a chat with Milton about the Friedman doctrine [1]. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. From my perspective, shareholder value is a relatively easy measure that acts as a proxy for the true goal of a corporation: creating sustainable customer value.
Within the context of his original article, Friedman was arguing that customers, employees, and shareholders could choose to give to charity, for instance, but it is wrong for a corporation to do it on their behalf. The concept is not intuitive but it is far from promoting selfishness.
Is it? I think it's dying with the generation that believed in that culture. What are the collective intelligence projects created by young inventors?
Even this article is written by someone who is of an older generation
Much of the traditional spirit of open source seems to be coming from Europe and South America.
This is not "ideological flamewar", it is a fact that international contributions are monetized and governed in America.
A CEO of a large company in 1980 would be considered a small CEO in 2020. There are more employees everywhere and necessarily more layers of management (and the same goes for the startup/VC ecosystem, and the same goes for democratic structures which require more stringent rule so everyone lives on the same planet). Concentration is more a side-effect of population than any other trend.
In particular, I really like his way of looking at good startups and good companies: the ones that don't simply intercept or capture value, but that instead create it.
Seems to be implying that cheap capital is ending? Isn't the narrative everywhere right now that capital will remain cheap (almost) indefinitely and one of the reasons why many fear inflation and money is rushing to wallstreet and sv-casino (SPACs)?
I have been repeating the second part of this statement as a truism for decades as internet advertising keeps growing.
Apparently I have have been living it too because nearly 100% of the searches I make have zero targeted ads.
To the gatekeeper companies controlling the www today there appears to be no commercial/non-commercial distinction.
For these companies and all those who ride their coattails, data collection for the ultimate purpose of internet advertising is fair game anywhere and everywhere.
"Silicon Valley is a mirror of what is wrong with our economy and corporate governance, not the cause of it, or even the worst exemplar. (Tobacco, oil, and pharma companies vie for the top spot.)"
Tobacco, oil and pharma are all highly regulated industries. SV is highly unregulated.
It is curious to me why financial services did not make the the list of exemplars. Meanwhile the author then proceeds with a criticism of "casino capitalism".
Perhaps there are links between the rise of "casino capitalism" and the rise of the www as a promoted commercial prospect, in the late 1990s/early 2000's and again more recently.
Google has pretty much eaten all advertising they can eat, there is no more to eat no matter how many ads they add. They can pretty much set the prices of their ads arbitrarily high since they have control over both advertisers and publishers.
> financial services did not make the the list of exemplars
Yeah, from the outside , SV currently seems to be Finance #2: greed is good, morals are for losers, grow fast and gtfo mentality
- The foundational organizations and proximity to an intense congregation of early innovation orgs, many of which started in Silicon Valley, or always had a large presence from the early days
- Proximity to a delta of good universities (large hiring pool, of ready to work post grads helps a lot)
- The incubation of VCs that despite many attempts to lure them, are still largely located in Silicon Valley
I think these over arching factors are the biggest reason Silicon Valley is unique. They're also not often talked about in this way very often in the 'mythos' of SV, but are very much the bedrock
It also doesn't make SV unique, per say (I think for medical device startups, states like Minnesota would be a good fit for your company, since they have a lot of investment in this area by multiple entities, as well as the same university graph so the pool of students you can hire is pretty good, and I feel this is pretty key to a lot of it)
Edit: Looking for Tech in PK is like looking for tech in D.C China’s “bay area” is in Guangdong in the GZ, SZ, DS triangle.
For every Uber there is a Didi. Microsoft there is a Tencent...
Etc. but they don’t play at US scale, they play at China scale.
However, the western world was unprepared and despite being rich, failed it's people... Especially the USA and UK.
O'Reilly is right that we need to switch gears and solve climate change instead of more social media ad tech development. And he may be right the skills needed are elsewhere.
Solving climate change in relevant timescales involves severe cuts to consumption, which will cause havoc because it will mess with all the economic growth projections people expect, which will cause short term pain even if it accomplishes long term gain. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
This narrative continues to frustrate me. Eleanor Roosevelt famously said:
> Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
The big idea behind Theranos was that combining multiple microfluidic tests could produce a lab-on-a-chip. Theranos failed to combine more than a handful of microfluidics together and scrambled to find alternatives to bridge the gap.
Ultimately they were foiled by brain-dead regulatory tests that specified blood draw volumes of blood. This regulatory test has to change to accommodate fingerpick volumes of blood; a key feature of microfluidic tests.
Our collective small minds couldn’t focus on anything but the people involved. The core idea is still an outstanding hard problem.
As I understand it, for many of the tests Theranos was aiming to do there's no real way to achieve it with the tiny volumes of blood they were trying to use: the concentrations of the substance they were testing for were so low the statistical variation of the amount in any given small volume of blood would invalidate the test, even if you could accurately count it.
This is exactly the right question to ask. Right from the start we should have had a scorecard of the common lab tests doctors request (under 50 I think). For each test you should ask “is it possible with microfluidics?” and then “has it been combined on a single strip/card yet?”
I’m not sure if any concentrations are too low for microfluidics rather than the dilution required to meet the volumes specified in the standardized tests. Are fingerpick volumes too small or are the regulatory tests outdated?
The same issue applies to self administered rapid antigen tests during the pandemic. Regulators focused on the “gold standard" PCR tests and ignored the benefit of cheap and easy unamplified tests that can be used in a daily regiment.
The basic idea was very straightforward. I can come up with lots of great ideas if I ignore whether there's any reasonable path to a solution. Hey! Let's have a Star Trek medical tricorder implemented in a watch. Let me know when you're done implementing it. I'll be at the beach.
Nothing to do with regulator bogeyman.
The scamming came after the failure of the core premise of the startup: microfluidic lab-on-a-chip. My point was not to excuse the scamming, it was to switch focus back to the core ideas and not the people sporting black turtlenecks.
I suspect that if the original strategy worked the story would be different. Transparently reporting technical/business failure is an admirable trait but it is a different thing than innovation. Journalists and analysts should have been reporting on the scorecard (strategy/tactics/execution). When the company did a technical pivot why was this not enough to investigate the underlying cause? I'm a potential customer that wants this solution; I feel like I've been cheated by all involved.
QUESTION: if someone else succeeds with a microfluidic lab-on-a-chip can the regulators validate its efficacy?
I’ve been travelling and I’m currently wondering if I should come back or not...
I ask because I thought SF wasn’t a very nice city, due to the large scale of homelessness. Seeing how much money there was, I wondered why tech companies didn’t just throw money at the problem so that they’d have a nicer environment to live in.
I know that homelessness is a multifaceted problem, but (especially in the states) high housing costs and lack of public services are major, solvable, factors.
In my home city in the U.K. we have a major homelessness problem, but we don’t have the wealth to do much about it. Looking at SF it’s not clear that generating wealth helps. And my overriding impression of Americans is that they’re far more generous with their cash than the English.
https://rsmus.com/what-we-do/services/tax/state-and-local-ta...
I was born and raised in the area, and have watched as friends and family are forced out due to rising costs. These are folks who legitimately loved the area and were actively involved in their communities. And they get replaced by people who seem to only care about big paychecks and spend more time complaining about the area than actually doing anything to improve it.
The rise in remote work due to COVID seems like a perfect opportunity to correct this misalignment. For those that don't like it here, I think everyone would be better off if you moved to somewhere that suits you better. And as a bonus you can take your big paycheck with you. I don't mean to offend, it just gets a little old seeing people complain about a place when they are perfectly capable of leaving.
The problem is that your parents go to every community meeting and get all the housing projects shut down to prevent "greedy developers". That's been happening consistently since the 70s.
But some tell me I just don't understand, which, in fairness, is also a true statement.
Even today, none of FANG is HQ'd in San Francisco.
I've never understood why so many tech companies over the last decade went up to SF. Before that most were down the peninsula and in San Jose. I'd pick the lower peninsula over SF no question.
If you like office parks upon office parks and parking lots then yea sure... go to Sunnyvale or Santa Clara etc...
Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world. There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. Despite having much higher educational standards even in 3rd world countries, the best the world could do is China which just stole US ideas and then built a firewall to keep others out.
Do I like what Silicon Valley has turned into? Hell no. I like the 90s version so much better, where nerds were tinkering with cool stuff and writing software because they loved software, not because they want to increase engagement by 1%. But it is what it is, and Silicon Valley will change with the times, I'm sure. I would love to see another dot-com-bust and clear out some of the chaff, but it doesn't seem like it's going to happen this time around.
If there's anything that will kill Silicon Valley it's that people since 2010 have made *too* much money. Practically anyone at a FAANG is now a multi-millionaire no matter what you've worked on. One of the factors I listed above, greed, is now missing for the most part. People have too much money, and with that they stop getting hungry. The hunger for making money, which propelled a lot of the advancement in previous decades, is absent in many people here. Even I've become a multi-millionaire over the last 5 years by doing nothing differently except buying a house and working at a tech company. This causes a financial convection current, which you're somewhat seeing, of the bored rich Googlers moving on and doing other stuff. The incentive is gone for many.
But as long as more immigrants from other countries come to Silicon Valley because they've heard about how rich people come, that will continue to fuel things for decades to come. These days, if you get funded by a VC, you're getting $5 million for 20%, which is a lot of money. Deals like that can't be matched elsewhere and another reason why you won't see people trying to raise money elsewhere, they will just come to Silicon Valley with their greatest ideas and keep propelling it.
Silicon Valley will never die.
> Silicon Valley will never die.
Silicon valley is already dead in many sense. It has long stopped being the place where bunch of nerds could meet and make interesting stuff purely for the soul in the game. In last 20 years it is replaced by "i want to get rich" crowd who are building crappy products, VCs in suites who just get lucky every now and then, Big Tech which is a bog in itself, greedy and corrupt politicians squeezing people. The joy of building stuff is replaced with pressure of white board coding, and folks are large cos are not really solving interesting problems but haggling over promos and TC on teamblind.com.
SV of today is just another wall street where people spend their 20s and 30s doing back breaking work so they could get out of this place in their 40s. It is a soul less place.
I think SV will die eventually (so will NY, London or any other city) over sufficiently long period.
Tel Aviv has it. Beijing has it. SV’s big advantage over them is the internal market and Beijing will acquire that soon enough.
> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US.
True enough in software but see SAP. DeepMind was British, no? Give it time. Germany was the epicenter of the chemical industry before and to a large extent after WW1. It's still a big deal but Detroit is still a big deal in the automotive industry too.
> Despite having much higher educational standards even in 3rd world countries, the best the world could do is China which just stole US ideas and then built a firewall to keep others out.
There is no credible interpretation of this. In CS the US’ dominance in research is so great I’m not even sure what the best non-US university even is, perhaps ETH Zürich?
I very much doubt it. Israel and china have something in common like all rising powers do, strong nationalism. Foreigners getting funded before locals is I am sure completely unthinkable.
Probably the most ignorant comment I've ever seen on HN.
I can think of Tencent from China in terms of company valuation, but my impression is that Tencent's dominance is confined to China instead of the world.
Over what time period? It’s absurd to say this and mean forever, if you have ever opened a history book. Even America itself will pass out of dominance, as all superpowers have. Rome, Britain, etc. Change is the rule, not the exception. It is the natural way.
To your point, I do think the amount of money being thrown at employees in Silicon Valley (and Seattle, and...) has been detrimental to the ability to build hardcore technology startups. The cost of building a critical mass of highly qualified employees has made doing so effectively unachievable in many domains that require such employees to have any chance of executing successfully. This has created an arguably pathological selection bias for the kinds of startups that can be funded or the kinds of founders that can plausibly start a given company.
Silicon Valley isn’t dead but as a place to build a tech company it is looking less differentiated with each passing year. Some critical future software deep tech is now developed almost entirely outside of Silicon Valley (cloud, AI, etc) even at companies headquartered in the Valley.
A few examples:
Nokia (the sleeping giant will awaken again :))
Nordic Semiconductor
The Qt Company
Unity Technologies
I might be influenced by living in Scandinavia. :)
There is a nice little scene of companies in Espoo filled with some incredibily talented technologists who all got their start at Nokia.
Even if Nokia itself doesn't return, I expect at least one or two major technology developments out of there. I have my eye on ICEYE and have even thought of maybe working there.
ASML
The US is however rotting from within. The political disfunction will eventually destroy everything.
Young people might not remember but 10+ years ago, Nokia used to be the market leader in mobile phones.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-mobile-phone-mark...
The Chinese will for sure have their own version of Silicon Valley and their giants will rival ours, no doubt.
I think there will be other critical centers of tech innovation, similar to how Hollywood is Hollywood but NYC has an industry as well.
Why should I come to SV? Living standard, taxes, workforce cost, housing... I may get $5m funding, but that would only buy an office and couple of employees for a few years. And if I ever make it, VC and California taxes would eat 90% of my profit.
And do not even let me start on family and children cost and friendliness. Buying $3m house, so homeless guy can expose himself in front of my daughter... :(
Raising funds is not that big deal, there is so much free capital now. New trend is residency in tax heaven (UAE, Singapore, Cyprus) and globally distributed team.
You’re talking about a few limited neighborhoods out of an entire metropolitan area.
Spotify, ATI, ARM, BlackBerry?
We need a return to greed and a rise in hunger and competitiveness, which creates innovation. Too many talented individuals resting on their laurels cashing RSUs instead of starting a company.
No they're not. A multi-thousandaire maybe.
You can get to millionaire status if you buy a house and pay off the loan, but for that you need more than 10 years of working in SV or an inheritance.
> Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world.
Nothing lasts forever. Some time ago, Detroit would have been on your list, too:
"so tired of random writers trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. It's like saying Detroit is doomed. Detroit has the critical mass of talent and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world."
IDK Wall Street seems pretty irrelevant to me. The only thing that matters these days is the Fed.
As detailed as your comment is, it doesn’t seem germane to the OP at all and appears to be responding to merely the title and the identity of the author.
So where was WeChat and ubiquitous QR codes for everything stolen from? Silicon Valley still haven't figured out how to do Ubiquitous contactless payment... it's like going back in time every time I travel there, and I have to swipe a credit card and sign with a pen.
Or Taiwan's COVID/PPE Supply tracking system's?
Sorry... Silicon Valley is dying.
You can't really believe that compares to the innovations to come out of Silicon Valley, right?
Contactless payment systems are everywhere now, the big push being COVID.
Taiwan isn't China, any Taiwanese will tell you that. Taiwan did a lot of things right when it came to the COVID response, but it's easy to do when you have a population of 23 million on a tiny island. I have several friends who are living in Taiwan and I've been jealous of them throughout the pandemic because their government handled it correctly. However, the US vaccination response is the best in the world. Even I have been vaccinated.
Silicon Valley isn't dying. It's literally the biggest creator of wealth in the world, and it's so much that it's causing a horrible amount of income inequality, especially in the Bay Area itself. It's almost being a victim of its own success, as I already mentioned.
Companies have tried QR codes and other payment schemes long before that (including the unfortunately named ISIS), but again, no traction.
1. Consumer internet founders are not great at life sciences
This is a distraction. Most of the money in internet has been with automating or supporting business operations for medium to large sized businesses. Life science tech brings unique challenges which is why so many life science tech companies are based in the valley or have offices here. Just to pick out one example the highest resolution ultrasound machines made come from a company based in the valley. This statement appears to be based more on the distracting powers of social media and consumer tech.
2. Internet regulation is upon us
This is good thing because regulations give consumers confidence in the reliability and safety of new technologies. Even the most care free developers do not expect that the current order of things will endure.
3. Climate response is capital intensive
This is a distraction from the fact that the most promising technologies for addressing climate response are extremely well represented in the valley. Analysis of orbital and aerial sensor data, automated sensors, control systems for solar and wind generation, modernized electrical grid support systems, and more were all led in part by companies in the valley. More to the point all of these technologies were initially developed by small companies for small applications. Real progress with climate response is likely to involve some big projects, but these projects will be successful because they are based on much smaller works.
4. The end of the betting economy
Economies are based on bets and consist of bets, as is said, all the way down. The difference is that the terms are changing. Instead of throwing money at pets.com or Facebook plugins or cryptocoin wallets founders are going to have to be more careful and sparing of resources. This is actually a good thing and is likely to at least in part lead to a return to business success competing with hype for available capital. The situation now is that investors can outspend customers in any sector so the venture capital space has become disconnected from genuine business success. Squeezing the slop out of the system should be good for everyone.
The analogy that comes to mind is being told that the future is being researched and started at universities and then concluding that frat parties do not yield meaningful tech progress, frat parties are consistently targeted for regulation, frat parties do not address social issues, therefore universities are not actually likely to host research and development that shapes the future. And yes, in this example the current giants in the valley are what amounts to a loud frat party.
In fact, a concentration of people who’ve been there done that is probably that hardest thing to find in one place outside the respective central cities.
That's exactly the SV problem. Lure a bunch of inexperienced young people who give away their best years to a corporation in hopes of becoming rich. Very few do.
The vast majority spend their money on NYC-level high taxes and rent.
No, it is people who haven't peaked yet not even coming in the first place.
It’s like if Bill Gates leaves Seattle. Nothing happens because Gates is done in his career.
Do you know who owns the majority of rental properties in silicon valley? East coast and Midwest pension funds or investment firms using their capital. This includes office space and residential areas. Care to take a guess who's capital the majority of VC firms are investing? If you guessed east coast and Midwest pension funds, you're right.
Moving to silicon valley to get a good paying job? Prepare to spend most of it on rent, basically paying a significant portion if not the majority of your salary to the very individuals that own controlling interest in the company paying you. Going to silicon valley to start a company? Prepare to pay a significant portion of that funding you got right back where you got it for office space.
Imagine if you could take a significant share, potentially a controlling interest, in every major tech startup basically for free. You create an engine to suck productivity out of some of the most creative, technically proficient innovators in the US by owning land in northern California and convincing them that they have to go there and rent from you to get your money to make their big ideas happen. Now you get to own some of the most productive people on the planet. That's one hell of a profitable scam. And the funny thing, we all forgot why you had to go there in the first place, that the silicon was made there, and we just take it as gospel that you have to go there to work in tech, even though the silicon is all made in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and China now. And let's not even get started on the hypocrisy of pension funds that exist due to union lobbying doing this.
Now, if you're still considering going there, as an added bonus consider that you'll be surrounded by people that step over homeless people on the way to work where they will write social media posts about income inequality.
I don't buy that at all, the tech INDUSTRY was the result of attempting to extract value out of technology. I have to scoff at the inclusion of "algorithmically amplified intelligence" as one of the egalitarian core values of SV. If you hadn't caught on by then, you must have been heady off the fumes of it all.
From plenty of experience, SV open sources because it provides a business advantage, because it costs them nothing or because it's part of the business model of OSS+Support. Individual contributors are the heroes here, people doing it for the love of the software. The software industry will spin their work for a dollar all fucking day with no contribution back.
Oh wow! Larry Ellison, that one guy who lies about his cars putting literal lives at risk, a figurative vampire (infuses literal blood of young people into himself) and his thrall, and a company that hasn't been relevant since the 1970s all are leaving the Valley!
I don't even live there, and I never plan on living there, but they're not citing anyone all that meaningful. Larry Ellison is somehow the person who comes off the best out of that group! Larry Ellison! A guy who can best be described with a lawnmower metaphor! Come on!
And now a guy who corporatized free software to the point of it being completely unenforced and also coined Web 2.0 to sell you books is telling you to leave!
I'm skeptical about this "end" of the Valley, somehow. Almost seems like they're trying to get you to leave to devalue the price of real estate, scoop it up and then advocate once more for the Valley.
In fact I was just recently involved in some conversations that could see the spend of tens of millions on their Cloud platform and where they are seriously looking like the strongest contender on both the technical and the business side.
Second tier cloud providers should be extremely worried about Oracle eating their lunch. Eventually the big three might have to too...
> Is this the end of Silicon Valley as we know it? Perhaps. But other challenges to Silicon Valley’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora.
One particular super up-to-date cliché that annoys me is where it goes on about "casino capitalism". So today we're not attacking "Wall Street's short term thinking"? When you're against risk taking and conservatism, all you're saying is "people shouldn't make mistakes, blaargh". You're right, they shouldn't. It's been noted.
I don't think the whole thing says anything worthwhile at all, or contains any non-clichéd thought, so I think people who didn't read it should be excused.
All I want from a "thoughtful" article is some thought that is new and could be right or wrong. "Not even wrong" gets all the clicks.
I do agree with the article decrying humanity's chronic inability to act on preventable crises. But it seems (a) most of humanity is much more inert and passive than we are inclined to think and (b) the vested interests and/or the powers-that-be are really that powerful so as to prevent the action of everybody else.
At the same time the article is overly optimistic: it claims that the consumer internet and social media are coming to an end.
Since 1988, it gradually cane to be ruled more by Democrats, with the notable exception of the "moderate" Republican governor Schwartzenegger.
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-california-voting...
In both eras, its GDP and population went up, until it became the 5th or 4th largest economy in the world.
A bit of mean reversion occurs, after massive spikes in housing prices, wildfires and a pandemic and everyone loses their crap. Seriously, people... this is about as bad as cries of "CARNAGE!!" in 2016 when crime has a slight uptick after 10 years of decline.
