Silicon Valley

“One of the unique advantages the Valley has is that the ecosystem is so developed and so broad. You've basically got everything that you need to build a you know, a great technology company all within a 25 mile radius. You know, the talent the investors, the n…”

“Moving forward, I expect a lot of the world's greatest companies to be started outside of Silicon Valley.”

“And, you know, the best rounds and the hottest companies in the valley now will not have one or two investors in them. They will have a good eight or nine or 10 because it's a network effect.”

“It's gonna take several, you know, maybe even decades for it to catch up to Silicon Valley just because the West Coast has really been a breeding ground for innovative tech companies for a while now.”

“The New York startup ecosystem is just still behind Silicon Valley.”

“So in the earlier days of a startup outside of the valley, probably prices are a little bit lower for them, right? Because there's just, there aren't as many VCs in your local market, and there aren't as many VCs who are willing to fly to your local market.”

“No. No, because I would say London is, is certainly becoming a center of FinTech. I don't like to use the word Silicon Valley. That's a very unique ecosystem and geography and community. But I would certainly say that London is, you know, I, it's funny, I hear…”

“About 98% of those companies die. And they die because there is no money to fund the next step, which is to build a team and build something really substantial.”

“As a foreigner, you get judged on your merits. Actually easier than Americans. Americans, you know, they do ask which school did you go to each other, and it doesn't matter what the answer is. But if you're a foreigner that, that doesn't play a role.”

“IOS first, which is very typical here in the Valley. No one does Android first unless they are, you know, somehow politically minded to make that choice. No rational business person does that.”

“I think, to be honest, I think being in Silicon Valley on Sand Hill Road exposes you to just every company out there, and you get to see what everybody's talking about, and you just invest in what everybody's talking about.”

“I would say there are certainly other startup ecosystems in which investors are willing to take a risk on startups, but not at the same level of Intensity, I would say, and it's certainly not nearly the same nearly the same level of concentration of investors.”

“One of the key factors that sets Stanford apart is, is proximity to Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay area in general, and the density of successful technology companies as well as startups that that have been built or, and being built in the area, as w…”

“It's a great moment right now to be investing in Europe but there's definitely an opportunity to bring a bit of, like, that style and expertise to Europe, right?”

“Well, listen, I think that, you know, whether you know, what drives the growth is venture capital, and we're fortunate in that we are a close proximity to Silicon Valley.”

“So I think it's been actually a huge asset living abroad. Sometimes I think, you know, had I stayed in the valley where everyone is just so remarkable, it's kind of like the top tier is really competing to stand out. I think when you change countries, by defau…”

“The progress and the development that I have seen since arriving in France has really just outperformed Silicon Valley.”

“No, unequivocally no, and I think, I hope Foundry would serve as a case study that that's not the case.”

“The advantages of being in Silicon Valley close to all of these investors were outweighed by the advantages of being in a city where we have an amazing network, and we have access to this incredible pool of Really talented engineers and designers.”

“I think, you know, you just have a larger fraction of people with money, In the Valley have money from being involved in entrepreneurial ventures. So they have relative experience. Whereas, you know, I grew up in Ohio, like the people who had money there, you …”

“I think that what we've seen in terms of seed and pre-seed and even Series A in New York is is much more much more practical valuations. I mean, I don't think it's super crazy here, here in New York. Certainly out in the valley, I think you're seeing I think y…”

“There's this rule in Silicon Valley called the rule of two to three. ... You know, your first, like, two to three meetings, your first two to three introductions are free, but, sort of, if you, if they want more than that, there needs to be some type of, sort …”

“I think we've returned to a moment where startups and Silicon Valley and tech have become fashionable, and everyone wants to do it, which means you're gonna have too many companies, too much money, and too many people who aren't truly entrepreneurs, kind of cl…”

“For us, we go there every, like, six to eight weeks, you know, you get back into the flow of information”

“Now that no longer matters. Now what matters is the fact that we have all these great successes up there. That act as heroes to the rest, and you have management second layer teams that have been watching that success firsthand and saying, hey, I can do that. …”

“When you write about this stuff every day, you're under no illusions about how difficult it will be, about how arduous the fundraising process will be, and how most consumer startups fail, right? Especially coming from Europe, it's much harder.”

“New York really focuses on building sustainable businesses. Silicon Valley and San Francisco is a dollar in a dream mentality.”

“How London's sort of kind of catching up at New York, but it's still a ways away from where Silicon Valley is”

“We did the, probably the best ever decision by moving every one of the company in in the Silicon Valley at that time.”

“One thing people often ask us is, would it make sense to open EF in Silicon Valley? And we always say no. And the reason is, you know, go back to that idea I talked about earlier of default career paths. And our mission at Entrepreneur First is to shift the de…”

“I think in Silicon Valley, we have a workaholic culture is really sort of transactional.”

“Valley was not that much better. I would say it was even worse in that sense that I met a lot of people there, but I thought that the quality of the people were not great.”

“When I would talk to entrepreneurs, they literally couldn't raise a million dollars in Silicon Valley. They could either raise a tiny amount of money from angels and friends and family, or They had to go straight to a five million dollar series a round with a …”

“I'm originally from the Boston area, and anytime somebody wants to talk about their idea, they want you to sign an NDA, and you know, they're really secretive and closed, and when I came to Silicon Valley back in 2000, it was so different. You know, sign NDAs,…”

“And contrast that with the sort of rather superficial sort of self-conceived philosopher, philosopher kings you see in other parts of the valley where there's a much lower quality and depth and diversity of thought, but it might highly do your confidence.”

“I think the talent war at Silicon Valley would be one with Better equity comp than salary comp.”

“More importantly, the pillar of having a culture of failure is super important. I'm from Detroit. And for many years, they had creative class, they had money, they had lawyers, they had people who could work there. They had great ideas, but they lacked the abi…”

“And I think it's laughable that there are people on the coast and primarily in Silicon Valley who openly say you can't build a big business in the Silicon Valley. It is that myopic arrogance, which makes me, it makes me laugh because that gives us great opport…”

“Silicon Valley, which, by the way, is a great show, and sometimes gets things so, so right, it is , you know, it is painful to watch.”

“In my view, was a lot more meritocratic than things in academia and government, where it seemed like if you are very smart and hardworking, it's almost impossible to fuck up in working in tech in Silicon Valley. You will have a good outcome if you are a smart …”

“I really think that there is enormous human talent being wasted here on highly unproductive activities.”

“My perspective is, I think that you do not need operating experience to be a great investor, right? So first off, I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley believe that you need to be an operator in order to invest and to be a good VC. I don't believe that's t…”

“I think starting our career on the East coast kept us a little outside the eco, you know, the echo chamber. And I think that did give us some perspective. We weren't around all the VCs every day.”

“I think Silicon Valley actually confuses or dissuades people from focusing on the unsexy stuff that matters in exchange for all the headlines we're bombarded with.”

“Silicon Valley's slice of that pie has been decreasing monotonically for the last 40 or 50 years.”

“We in Silicon Valley use this term pivot as this catch-all Friendly term to just say, Hey, we're going to change our business strategy. But what it actually means is that you've failed as an entrepreneur. You know, you've, your strategy, your mission, your obj…”

“And I think what's happened today is there's been this overly segmented kind of focused investing in, in areas that in many ways are just afterthoughts so there's funds that are just focused on AI or funds that are Just focus in other particular verticals, and…”

“The more you're going from the centers of venture capital, you know, like we're going from Silicon Valley, you're going from Silicon Valley to New York, you're going from New York to London, you're going from London to Berlin, from Berlin to Lisbon, from Lisbo…”

“It's tragic that most of the board meetings that are practiced in the Silicon Valley involve over 10 PowerPoint slides. I think that's criminal.”

“Maybe the fear of missing out as a driver in investment decision-making process, and that contributing to some misguided capitalization of companies.”

“Generally in the Valley, you'll find independent board seat is a very rare thing, and it's a very prized thing. So you know, if you offer it to someone, very rarely will they want to turn it down or decide it's not a good thing for them.”

“I think there's just such incredible talent in Silicon Valley, and I think it is largely going to waste. I think that way too many incredibly talented people are working on incredibly trivial things, and I see it around me a lot where people are going through …”

“There's this thinking in the valley that there's one right way to do a startup. That you launch it on TechCrunch, you have a press cycle, you network at all these parties, but really there's so many different ways of doing it. There's this whole world of incre…”

“If we wanted to build a world-class firm, we had to have a presence in Silicon Valley. We were not going to do that remotely.”

“And there's dozens of incredible hardware companies here, but they just don't have kind of the mindshare that I think some of the social media companies do.”

“You know, I think one of the most frustrating things is that the companies that get the most funding aren't the companies I wish got the most funding. I work with a lot of really interesting, like biotech companies, people working on some really interesting pr…”

“I actually do think that the ability of large incumbents to go mount a counter-revolutionary strike is Is actually not as atypical as a lot of people in Silicon Valley mock them for.”

“Silicon Valley, more often than not, and I would say vastly more often than not, is building something that gets flipped and destroyed.”

“I think it's pretty obvious now, whether it's companies like Spotify or Supercell or Atlassian or other companies of that form, that that is now an outdated view.”

“And so I think it's a true renaissance that's been happening of Silicon Valley going from being a physical place to being, in some cases, an entrepreneurial mindset that's not physically based here.”

“In general, I think most companies, especially in a capital rich VC environment in Silicon Valley, most of companies are largely make the mistake of stepping on the gas too quickly. And I think wasting precious capital or founder dilution, depending which way …”

“I think one of the things that is in short supply in Silicon Valley these days, and certainly required of great leaders, is Conviction around ideas that are right, but not consensus, and the willingness to sort of keep doing the thing that you believe will wor…”

“Well, I think we really need continued improvement in access to early stage capital for first-time entrepreneurs especially the ones who don't come in with deep connections here in the valley where the plurality of VC investment comes from.”

“The thing that I believe that maybe many people in the industry disbelieve, I think that as opposed to the mythology of Silicon Valley of there are these sort of superheroes out there, and they have these amazing superpowers that the rest of us don't have, the…”

“I think we in the Valley have probably erred to on the side of founder friendly, and especially given, you know, companies are staying private longer as almost 10 to 11 years before they go public. I think the board composition really needs to adapt from Not j…”

“I think Silicon Valley will continue to play an important role in the tech ecosystem. However, I do think in the future, you will actually see the tech ecosystem be a triangle between Silicon Valley, Beijing, and Bangalore. I don't think it will, it'll no long…”

“The M&A process in big corporate America is not an emotional exercise. Any emotion is really sort of manufactured as part of negotiation. People storm out of conference rooms and things all the time, but it's not the deal. Whereas like that's, Fundamentally di…”

“By and large, and this isn't necessarily true for Square, but across Silicon Valley, once that term sheet is signed, that's a pretty high outcome rate. I wouldn't want to guess a percentage, but those deals usually close, but before you have a term sheet, befo…”

“So we kind of did what you're not supposed to do, which is decide to start a business and then go hunt for an idea. However, I think that actually gets a very bad rap here in the And it's a very tried and true method. You know, Amazon did that. Microsoft did t…”

“I believe that the decentralization of Silicon Valley is the biggest trend that we're going to live through in the next 20 years.”

“Even though there are fewer VCs here, the very best companies are getting priced at a very similar level to those in Silicon Valley.”

“I don't believe in the binary outcome that Silicon Valley has been sort of talking about for the past 10 years. You know, it doesn't matter what the entry price is because the outcome is either going to be huge or nothing. I think that even if that were true, …”

“And I think if you believe that great entrepreneurs and great businesses can be born absolutely anywhere, but this is probably still the best place in the world to incubate them, then finding those teams and finding those people who maybe don't look, you know,…”

“The one thing that irks me, and I think a lot of people is, is the arrogance that the Valley has. And somebody once told me, you know, at the end of the day, we're just building websites. And that's true, right? We are just building websites.”

“Silicon Valley is, losing its primacy for startups. You're seeing great startups getting going in lots of regions throughout the U S and throughout the world.”

“These are global trends and really for the first time are flattening technology markets so that the interplay between China and the U.S. Where we're focused and other markets as well is as vibrant as it's ever been, and that's where I think some of the folks W…”

“So I think there's, you know, there's a real view in Silicon Valley today, particularly with founder-driven companies that are able to transform their businesses moving from one business, which may be a pure software business, to being what I often call a soft…”

“I think just in the same way that Wall Street has been transformed by technology over the last decade and platform businesses have built, I think you'll see the same thing in Silicon Valley, where technology will transform it and platforms will be built.”

“I think that in Silicon Valley, too many people are stuck on Amazon as the primary model for what will succeed as a company, and Amazon is actually the exception versus the rule. In other words, Amazon is a company that went for very high market share with ver…”

“I think people have forgot what capital efficiency means, so I think To me, it's not impressive if you spend four hundred million building a hundred million dollar a year business relative to the same group spent a hundred million to build that thing, right? A…”

“The other thing is solving hard and or interesting problems. It's like the number of Fitbit for dogs and Uber for Ikea assembly is, you know, disheartening. This is what the best and brightest is working on.”

“The average tenure in the Valley is about 18 months”

“So I think simply building a company in one market like Silicon Valley is harder than ever before to sustain. In fact, I think it's unsustainable for 99% of the companies out there.”

“So what I would expect will happen is actually, over time, crypto companies will actually recentralize in large part to Silicon Valley.”

“I think we will. I think Silicon Valley has managed to produce significantly harder innovations than fixing housing, but I think that's the ticket to becoming the home for things like cryptocurrency and longevity, because ultimately people need to be able to a…”

“I think that it definitely could really use some improvements in the diversity of the people who are making those decisions. You know, whether it's corporate boards or it's managing directors, it is amazing, the homogeneity.”

“By and large, you're better off having the benefit of experience. I mean, if I think about where I was in terms of the experience as I've had when I started FBN versus going back 12, 1314, 15 years to when I was first started a business, I is night and day in …”

“Silicon Valley, the actual geographical Silicon Valley, and basically San Francisco, and, you know, the area between San Francisco and Stanford is, I think, less important than it's ever been for tech and for innovation.”

“I think that that trend will start outside of early stage tech and outside of Silicon Valley. So it'll start first in an industry where there's a ton of data and where business models are largely the same.”

“So I think we don't spend enough time talking about mental health. I think athletes are constantly working out. They're going to the gym and trying to hit peak performance. Silicon Valley is a world of people whose peak performance is around their mental state…”

“Silicon Valley has a lot of companies and cautionary tales that raise a lot of money early on, and when you raise a lot of money early on, you have to be very big very quickly, and you have to be very loud, and you set your expectations sky high from the first…”

“I think the advice that you need to be in Silicon Valley to build a company is a complete lie.”

“So execs with that kind of scale-up experience is something I think you get a lot of in Silicon Valley, and really not a lot of in London yet.”

“I believe the government can work for us. Being here in Silicon Valley, there's a very strong libertarian ideology, and there's a very strong notion that, oh, government's just this terrible thing, and it can never work, and it's always screwed up, and I worke…”

“And what strikes me here is while we have this adoration of entrepreneurship, the way we're supposed to build companies is like a monoculture. There's traditionally like one way to build a company, one way to fund your company, One way to do things X, Y, and Z…”

“I think there's this thing in Silicon Valley where compensation is kind of like this weird topic that people don't talk about because you need to be like mission driven. And if you're compensation driven, you're bad, right? You're evil because that's like bank…”

“Silicon Valley has gotten a little insular, sometimes a little cocky, and when I hear people say that essentially no breakout company, you know, no big, iconic, successful company can ever start outside of Silicon Valley, I think that's crazy, and so getting p…”

“In general, the companies in places like Silicon Valley, New York City, and Boston probably are a little overvalued because of the supply-demand dynamic, because most of the venture capital is based there, and most of the venture capitalists want to be able to…”

“The rational thing to do is, is headquarter here, be here, raise money here because capital is relatively abundant and Valuations are high. It's a very founder-friendly place to be, but it isn't rational to spend money here. The rational thing to do is to go a…”

“In the Valley, it's apparently 1.4 years average duration at a company today.”

“And actually academics who have studied why Silicon Valley beat route one, 28 in Boston, they will point to this as a feature, which is in Boston. You basically settled in a deck or Lotus, and you basically spent your entire career there.”

“Having people leave every 18 months, that's not good for your company. And so I learned a lot about how to inspire loyalty and certainly taught me a lot about staying in place when things didn't look like they were going well, because it's hard enough building…”

“I think the way that we reflect or the way that we are viewed across the rest of the country. I think in the last few years, there's been a number of issues that have popped up that have made technology leaders look like They're out of touch. They don't unders…”

“I believe that great technology companies and kind of like great engineers and great talent can be found anywhere that I think a lot of people historically felt like, oh, if you're going to build a company, then you need to come to Silicon Valley. To actually …”

“I would say this is one of the most frequently offered pieces of advice in Silicon Valley that is the least Frequently followed.”

“We've pretty much conceded, almost as a community, the consumer product or the hardware world to other countries. We've conceded a lot of fundamental technology research that used to be our hallmark to other countries, and we've really given a lot of ground to…”

“I think the dirty secret of Silicon Valley is that no one in Silicon Valley thinks that Silicon Valley is going to be what it is today in 10 years. And so, I think we're in this period of change right now where more and more companies are coming up across the …”

“And I actually have to give kudos to the initialized guys for taking down the notion of sort of hustle porn, as I would say. There's this concept in the valley that like you should just grind to the limits of your existence and think about yourself secondarily…”

“I think I would like to change the bragging culture. I found this kind of difficult to adjust to when I came out here, where everyone's kind of crushing it, or, you know, in the press, it's like, I raised this much, and you throw these vanity metrics out there…”

“There is that analytical component, but there's also the emotional component, and even though it seems like everybody in Silicon Valley says that data is the most important thing, what I found in my brief time in this world is, yeah, data is important, and tha…”

“I don't fault people here in the Valley for saying video conferencing is done. It's not going to happen again. It's a race to the bottom. There's no room for a new player.”

“And if you want to attract managers and executives of that caliber, the depth of that talent pool exists in Silicon Valley. And so I think it's particularly important to recruit out of that ecosystem at some point in the life cycle of the company.”

“The idea of wanting to build companies that go for 1020 plus years, is something that I think is actually becoming more common than not.”

“I think this trend is going to permeate everywhere. That's just, what's going to, it's going to boil down to. And some folks in places are probably a little behind just because of the amount of investors in that area, amount of sophistication in the area. But …”

“And then the other thing that we're doing right this time is, I was kind of off the mindset that, like, ideas don't matter back then, and yeah, people go through this, like, Silicon Valley goes through this phase. Sometimes they're like, ideas don't matter, ju…”

“So I think that there's an overemphasis in the Valley on, on options and sort of becoming instantly overnight, huge billion and multi-billion dollar company, rather than talking about like, how does this fit into my lifestyle over the next five to 10 years, wh…”

“It's been really interesting to see. I think this is something that It will be a growing trend in Silicon Valley.”

“Ultimately, at the end of the day, I think the common theme across the best investors in the Valley over time is that they're actually just people that founders want to work with based on the experiences that other founders over time have had in the great comp…”

“There's one dollar here to 12 in the valley. That's the math per capita.”

“Let more people in. This place can and should compound at much higher rates.”

“Pivots are extremely tough to go through psychologically. What it means is that, you know, we have to basically change the entire company and change what we're doing altogether, but they're very common, right, in Silicon Valley, and I guess they should be cele…”

“I think we are starting to feel the switch towards instead of just growing really quickly at all costs, grow more thoughtfully. You still have to grow, but grow more thoughtfully, which I think more and more folks kind of getting their head around.”

“Right now, I would say about a quarter of our investments are in Silicon Valley, about half are in the rest of the U S US, and then another Quarter or so in the rest of the world, primarily Europe and Africa”

“If you look at the True Ventures portfolio, we had three very big exits over the last two years. Ring.com to Amazon, Duo Security to Cisco, and most recently, the Peloton IPO. Now, these three companies have one intriguing thing in common. They were all built …”

“I think if you take some of the companies, Twitter, or almost any of them, Uber in particular, Lyft, and you move those to Kansas City, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, New York, they would have been so much more successful, so much more quickly.”

“I think they're like old Hollywood. So when you hear stories about old Hollywood, and everybody wants to be an actor, and even though they're working as a job, as a waiter, they're trying to get discovered. And that's the way Silicon Valley works. So no matter…”

“Yeah, I think it's becoming much more socially acceptable and in this, I guess, especially in Silicon Valley, you know, where people are looking for all these performance optimization things and they're intermittent fasting and eating keto and meditating and l…”

“Silicon Valley really rewards some types of failure.”

“Frankly, I hate it. I don't believe in celebrating failure. I think that being a founder is so hard and running a startup is so hard and I've never seen a case. Where a successful startup didn't almost die multiple times.”

“I think when I first started the firm almost a decade ago, we were like 90% investing around here. I think the number is somewhere around 60% now around here, maybe, maybe kind of mid, maybe 60 to mid-sixties, and I could very easily see it going down to 40 or…”

“What's really happened here is there's like five or 10% of people who are on one political extreme who've really hijacked the conversation and who've kind of pushed forward this kind of cancel culture, who have kind of pushed forward stuff that really resemble…”

“I'd love to see more pragmatism over principles a little bit, which is like, Thought is becoming too much of a religion right now, and I really love just, we talk to our newsroom about this a lot, like, add nuance. Don't take nuance away, and how can we solve …”

“If you're not intentional about it, you'll just have one accidentally. And so if you're not intentional about your brand, you will end up with a brand anyway”

“I bought a two-door Honda Civic, and I drove out to Silicon Valley, and I slept on the streets of Palo Alto for about three months.”

“I would probably, and this is on behalf of all of our friends we've spoken to in Silicon Valley, I feel like we want to remove them from Silicon Valley and move them somewhere else. Everyone just complains about San Francisco and the culture and everything the…”

“I would bet that upwards of 90% of Silicon Valley is very supportive of the military, and the perception that it's not is a symptom of another problem, which is that a very small group of radicals have managed to hijack the narrative and convince everyone that…”

“There are very few companies, and particularly in 2017, when Andrew was founded, there wasn't anyone in Silicon Valley building a new defense contractor that wanted to compete with Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.”

“In the venture business here in Silicon Valley, I would say maybe one or two, but a lot of people in the venture business hang out with one another for this exact reason, as well as deal flow, et cetera.”

“There's a thing that I think has infected Silicon Valley, the kind of corruption of data-driven decision-making. People just haven't really looked at the kind of history and philosophy of science to see how rigorous you have to be to have kind of the scientifi…”

“You no longer need proximity to venture capital to get your project funded. You don't need proximity to existing companies to be able to hire talent.”

“They are far, far, far too homogeneous. We need much greater representation in decision makers and boardrooms and, you know, people who are the ones making decisions at VC funds. We need much, much greater diversity and representation.”

“That I would love to add to the culture, and some people haven't, like, for example, the Airbnb founders, you know, all of Brian, Nate, and Joe, is not only to think about the success of your individual products, and the success of your business, which both ca…”

“I'm not one of those people that says Silicon Valley is dead. I don't think it is, but I really hope that there'll be more ecosystems like Silicon Valley in the world.”

“Silicon Valley texting is quite insular. It's funny you ask this, because to some extent, I suppose the texting in the UK is definitely smaller, but it's actually, I think, much more positive and uplifting to some extent. I think, you know, the rest of British…”

“It's incredibly lemming-like, very internally focused, a giant echo chamber. I really love not living in Silicon Valley so that I can maintain enough objectivity and external perspective.”

“With hims and hers, we're going public in the next couple of days. By the time people are listening to this, we might actually already be public, and the company is about a hundred people, 150 people, and that's incredibly small relative to Traditional Silicon…”

“Exceptional talent, like, Mozart-level brilliant, exceptional talent is very, very rare in the world, but it's evenly distributed, and, but opportunity isn't, and so it is bad for the world that so much of the opportunity for crazy, exceptionally talented, cre…”

“I think that you kind of idealize it from, you know, externally, and you think that everything is thought out, and then when you realize that it isn't, when you kind of get thrown into it, and you ask, you know, people that you respect, and that you thought wa…”

“I do think there's an echo chamber that exists in Silicon Valley that has actually perpetuated some of the problems in venture capital in the Bay Area and overlooking huge categories like prop tech.”

“If you want to build a company to scale, it's probably the best place in the world to build it, and it's because of the people that you have around.”

“If you take Silicon Valley and Seattle out of it, the US actually would be worse than Europe if you took those two out of it.”

“I think that the common belief at the moment in, especially Silicon Valley lore, is that the founder should always be the CEO. And I don't agree with that at all. I don't think that that should be the case. When it works, it's incredibly powerful, for sure. So…”

“Having operated inside of Silicon Valley, like We've tried to sort of borrow some of the ambition that you find in companies there. Like, I think you don't necessarily get that in the Midwest.”

“Yeah, I think one of the most destructive myths in Silicon Valley is the Airbnb story and myth, because the story is basically that they hung on and didn't have product market fit, and then just eventually things started going well, and they didn't really chan…”

“I've had some big ups and downs, obviously, in my career, and I think there's a platitude in Silicon Valley that you learn a lot from failures, and the only thing I've ever really learned from failure is how much it sucks and how much you don't want it to happ…”

“I think the stock options, for example, should be taxed the same way founder shares are taxed. So if you want to take a step in the direction of equality, that's the best thing you can do in Silicon Valley.”

“I think the government and the DOD want to work with Silicon Valley and innovative entrepreneurs. I think that the, it's ridiculous that, I don't think it is anymore, but it was so unpopular for a few years that people were like, oh, the government doesn't wan…”

“At the time when we did this, there was no other company in Silicon Valley innovating in defense.”

“Venture capital was decidedly a Silicon Valley and Israel, candidly, investment theme in the late nineties. You almost didn't see it anywhere else at the time. You know, New York wasn't a thing. London certainly wasn't a thing, and it wasn't China yet to the b…”

“They care about money. So if you have strong enough metrics, they find a way to get over themselves, no matter where you're from. And that's all. And that's why I tell my founders, like, Hey, there may be biases against you. People may say, if you don't live c…”

“And I now believe Silicon Valley is a disadvantage not even neutral, it's an actual disadvantage.”

“Alright, so in, in the tech industry, and especially in Silicon Valley, I think we have a very unhealthy practice where our identities are aligned with our work.”

“I think there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley you know, and elsewhere as entrepreneurs that grew up, whether, you know, they're first generation, whether immigrant, whether they grew up poor, that chip on the shoulder puts chips in pockets, as they say, …”

“I was a business guy, and as you know, business guys are not top of the totem pole in Silicon Valley, right, in general.”

“I don't have many friends that I hang out with in the venture business here in Silicon Valley. I would say maybe one.”

“Over the last six or nine months, the idea of hard work being the priority of a startup, it's back to the top of the list, that your job is to fight for customers and build cool products and recruit the best people, and this doesn't sound like rocket science, …”

“Harry, I'm going to say to you, not only do I feel it's not dead, I'm going to take a contrary point of view that what in fact is going on in the Valley today is going to create a whole new crop, a whole new generation, because all the downsizing that's going …”

“In Southern California, you know, so let me just start with the following... Failure comes with huge public humiliation... In Silicon Valley, you know, you fail, you get onto the next thing. Like failure makes you smarter, makes you stronger.”

“I think we definitely celebrate intellectual elitism for sure, right? I think we celebrate couching what is probably a pretty boring practical problem in like large language, gonna go change the world, but like, I don't know, maybe like building like an API fo…”

“What I was doing in a lot, like what, 99.9% of Silicon Valley is doing is building outside that regulatory perimeter.”

“I think Silicon Valley really isn't set up. To build regulated businesses.”

“The amount of investors that rejected us because they said, I like to ride my bike to my startups, I'm like, fuck off.”

“I actually think it's fairly lazy mantra in Silicon Valley and in tech in general to say strategy is easy and execution is everything. And look, to be very clear, execution is massively important. But execution without strategic clarity is basically frenzy. It…”

“The talent is very, very distributed. It will get more distributed, and I think you should get close to your customers.”

“Absolutely not. Well, there's amazing talent throughout the world. And even though the Valley has something special from the community and the ability to bounce ideas of one another, It's very clear right now. There's a lot of innovation happening elsewhere.”

“We just honestly like vacation a little bit too much. We like coming home at five with the kids. Like we're starting to have other things that are other benefits, right? Because I mean, like, look, the very best people in the world in, in say AI or engineering…”

“I think part of Cloudflare's success was we were nobodies. Like we didn't know anyone and we didn't get invited to all the fun parties and we weren't part of the cool kids group. And I think as a result, there was, we just focused on How do we, you know, build…”

“My sentiment in a lot of Silicon Valley is that it's very, there, there's a lot of soulless greed, and just this desire to create these kind of you know, massive funds create massive attention, and I think, again, Sequoia is the best example of this, and 1789,…”

“When I want to talk about pricing, I talk to Italian, very successful companies that have been profitable since day one. I don't talk to many Silicon Valley guys.”

“Everything I saw going on in Silicon Valley was like spend, spend, spend. We did the opposite. We thought about monetizing immediately.”

“Sometimes the rhetoric and Silicon Valley of like, oh my God, life and death, whatever, is also just fucking stupid. Like none of us is, you know, gonna get shot at in the trenches of Ukraine if our stock price goes down.”

“That attention economy, once you get to the level of, I don't know, Silicon Valley, whatever, well, that, where money is less of the issue, that is much more important, I think. Way more important than money.”

“Every scale problem that you think of, 30 to 80% of the solution is technology.”

“We're no longer just the pirates and disruptors. We are the, we are part of the genetics of what happens in society, and we need to take, With power comes responsibility. We need to take responsibility of that, and the minimum beginning and responsibility is d…”

“Like, why does Silicon Valley work? Because the most ambitious and talented people in that area become founders. If the same thing happened, In the UK, in Europe, in India, we'd have very similar outcomes.”

“And then I think there was this moment last year that, that we just said, Hey, like I, there's just a way in which I believe we should run the company. And it's not very traditional. And I think a lot of people will probably, you know, it doesn't follow all th…”

“There used to be a vibe in the valley that said, oh, you've got to be an operator to be an investor, a venture investor. You've had to walk in the shoes, and that's changed”

“The fact that we had this sort of like low marginal cost, free distribution, very simple business model is sort of like a freak, you know, sort of outcome of the like mid 2000 to the like, you know, sort of late 2010.”

“That's an empirical result from a bunch of studies. Companies that, you know, there's been a study of Israeli companies in the Valley, New York companies. Like, it's just, the issue is, is that that's where the connections are, and it turns out Zoom only gets …”

“It is very strange from one hand for all of these people in Silicon Valley to be like, yeah, you know, AGI is coming. And then the applications they're building are like these very narrow, like, hey, I slapped something on top of llama. And you know, it's like…”

“I believe in God. Most people in Silicon Valley do not.”

“The highest concentration of talent working on what I think is going to be the next generation of problems That the world faces and the next generation of kind of generational segment defining companies. A lot of them are in California, man.”

“In our experience, what has worked significantly better is, is taking people, especially from central Eastern Europe who are really talented, extremely intelligent, hardworking, good, trustworthy people, but they've just never had the chance to compete at the …”

“Second thing that I think Silicon Valley showed and has learned is that there's insane inefficiency in each individual that you have working for you because there's very bad management.”

“We made a decision to start charging from day one, which is like a little bit against the traditional wisdom of Silicon Valley of just like give the product away for free, scale, scale, scale.”

“Honestly, I don't really have a strong sense that people work way harder in the Valley. I actually don't like, I know a couple of great friends who've moved over there and opened offices. And I have not heard from any of them that like, wow, people just work s…”

“I think the reality is you just become more effective and therefore you can do more more, more, more quickly. You have deeper relationships, you have deeper context on the company, you have deeper context on the customer base, and therefore you can be more eff…”

“For me, the way we operate is that the key is not so much about the country or the city, the key is to find the right director. I mean, you can have the best location, you go in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, and you have an average director, it won't work.”

“No, I strongly disagree. Look, I think from Barcelona where there was very, a very small ecosystem of tech and tech talent, we were able to build top notch technology. I don't think our technology had anything to envy our American competitors. So I fully disag…”

“With really in like, 2018 or 19, we really started to shift our business away from Silicon Valley based companies and needing to say every company needed IPO.”

“I think there's a lot of Silicon Valley hyperbole around software engineering getting replaced very quickly. I'm less sure about that.”

“It creates this internal funnel of your best employees moving from your HQ to Silicon Valley. Which by itself is not a problem. The problem is then they get recruited away by the whatever the hot Silicon Valley company is at the time. You know, like it could b…”

“Duolingo does not have an office in Silicon Valley or anywhere in California”

“If a young founder, European founder came to me, it's like, Hey, I have this brilliant idea of how to use AI or like a new model or something like that. What should I do? It's like a hundred percent. Go to Silicon Valley. A hundred percent. You absolutely maxi…”

“If I want to hire, let's say the next chief product officer, At Get Your Guide, it's almost impossible to do that in Europe and need to go to Silicon Valley because the density of people who have done that scale have served tens of millions of customers a year…”

“I think one of the things that's always driven me crazy about Silicon Valley is that it really is just a status game for most people. Like, People are just raising for the sake of raising. Their goal isn't to build some great product that solves an idea that t…”

“There's a big echo chamber in Silicon Valley and big negative bias towards SMB, but you can make it work in SMB. HubSpot and Shopify have shown it. Block has shown it.”

“Silicon Valley has dialed up the intensity on company building, and if you want to build a ten billion dollar business today, you simply have to be willing or really to work seven days a week, like it or not.”

“In their kind of Silicon, pure Silicon Valley universe, they're the largest capital raiser at every stage, so by definition, they're doing the most deals and being the most aggressive.”

“I probably would not hire that Silicon Valley. Why? I think what you need to bring to the table is hunger, is lots of dignity, lots of dedication, lots of experimental mindset, and you cannot get there when you basically worked for, like, best-in-class compani…”

“Rippling have the Silicon Valley Illuminati around them, and in the same way for me, like, there are some media companies, which I'm not going to name because they'll hate me for it, but, like, they just have the Silicon Valley, the Collison's, and the YC's ar…”

“I don't think in any way, no business is hurting. If anything I think the war on talent is really tough in Silicon Valley.”

“First of all, Silicon Valley was founded on spite in the sense of if you look at, you know, Fairchild, if you look at Shockley, all those guys spun out the fair and did fair and Fairchild, which was a spite deal. And then they left Fairchild because they could…”

“And so, I do think if this goes as far as the folks that have Backing at want, you could have a Detroit in the Silicon Valley. Like, when it becomes a meme to do YC, or to do South Park Common, but then build, you know, get your money, build your team, and the…”

“Yeah, Nami and Zai, and they were like told by the VCs, the American VCs, like, you have to move your engineering center to Silicon Valley because otherwise everything's gonna go to shit, and they did, and it was a disaster, and they had it for a year, you kno…”

“Over the, again, I want to be over the medium term, the technology takes longer to diffuse than we in Silicon Valley allow, and people are more adaptable. So over the medium, I'm not, I don't see any kind of 10% plus tech of an unemployment.”

“The tech industry is more centralized in Silicon Valley than it has been in its entire existence, and I think it's AI.”

“And then the final thing is maybe being a bit away from the valley. There is some disadvantage in that. You're not plugged into the network and the gossip and the latest trends and vibes and all of these things. We're a little bit out of it here, but it does, …”

“And I felt that there was actually less competition here for that sort of talent. And we could even draw in the best talent from the top European universities. And that's what it was like in the early days of DeepMind. So I think it was a huge structural advan…”

“We need more public benefit charters in Silicon Valley and in technology, and I think we will get there.”

“And then the only part why, why 18 months is like not even a relevant window to me is I think diffusion is going to take longer than Silicon Valley thinks.”

“I think some of the best AI minds or the majority of the best AI minds want to be in Silicon Valley. Quite rightly, you're seeing the re-centralizing of power back to Silicon Valley more so than I think any of us ever expected post-COVID.”

“The whole notion of founder mode is an extreme reaction to extreme bloat that got created in most Silicon Valley companies over the last decade.”

“No one has raised as much money as Sam Altman in the history of Silicon Valley like that.”

“Silicon Valley is such a kind of herd mentality place. Even the people that previously rejected me, once they found out that this firm wants to invest, everyone starts to, like, rescinding their rejections.”

“And the parts of engineering that become less important are funny enough, the things that the Silicon Valley has really bragged about a lot, which is like, Competition winning or like Olympiad type. Are you like as fast as possible at coding? Are you, do you m…”

“There's a very common Silicon Valley fallacy, which is there's like research is like the pinnacle. And then there's engineers who implement the research, you know, they're not quite there, but you know, they're still great. And then there's sales and marketing…”

“My concern would be at this point in time, given the base at which technology is evolving, given the uncertainty in terms of what's going to work, what's not going to work, I'm worried that it might be too much euphoria and a bit of FOMO going around in terms …”

“Silicon Valley forgets every three years that the average American is not trying to be efficient, right? No one wakes up in the morning and says, I need to grind down my to-do list in Harlem. They're just living life. Yeah, they're doing their job, and then th…”

“I think that that is something that it sounds like Chamath would say, because frankly, that's how he's made his money.”

“And even companies that I thought would never be going back on prem are talking about going back on prem. Like some of the most innovative digital native companies in Silicon Valley are now thinking about moving their stack from, you know, one of the hyperscal…”

“I don't find it crazy, honestly. Like I think when I was at Plaid and we were competing with talent for like Stripe, that felt like no harder than what I'm doing now.”

“We created a truck now that goes around Silicon Valley, and so you can book the truck, and it comes to your home, and you can try the product live, so this truck has a bedroom built in, in, in the back of the truck, but now the truck also goes to specific even…”

“If they want to do, have a career, particularly in Silicon Valley as entrepreneurs, I think it's totally useless.”

“I think in Silicon Valley we understand really well building the best product, but I think we underestimate the importance of brand. Then, a great brand with a shitty product goes nowhere. So first is product, but then you need to be able to build a brand that…”