Silicon Valley

“And so in the last five years alone in the valley, the tech companies have hugely increased their focus on their internship programs. And basically the goal is to get all of your best students as interns and then be able to basically get them locked in at leas…”

“All of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, artificial intelligence is dominating the R&D agendas of the most important companies in Silicon Valley and outside of Silicon Valley.”

“The people who work for me in LA, there's about a thousand people who work in LA that, on all the aspects of content they all think they work at the greatest entertainment company in the world. And I hope they, I think they're right. And I think there's about …”

“The whole efficiency driven thing is very Silicon Valley. And the whole quality driven thing is very Hollywood. And rarely do those things meet.”

“A lot of it is coming, for example, out of places like Europe and Asia, And actually it's not really centered in Silicon Valley, and I think that's partly why, is it's kind of a counter movement to what's happened.”

“And for everyone here, there's just 30 or more in Silicon Valley.”

“And I don't want to speak for the UK, but like in Germany, if there's a bankruptcy on your resume, that ain't very good. So the risk tolerance, I just think is just so much greater in Silicon Valley still.”

“Silicon Valley just has a 60 year head start of this beautiful combination of the universities, the money, the, frankly, the weather.”

“Ironically, I think there's many, many HR people in the Valley don't have a lot of knowledge in that area.”

“I think that people expect kind of, sort of expected that, oh, well, if we just focus on building software companies like Silicon Valley, we can be like Silicon Valley, and that's been largely a mistake in that you can apply, you know, policy and tax breaks an…”

“I think there's a little bit too much in the Valley right now of the pivot. And the lean start, you know, the lean startup and the, you know, the, everything's an experiment and minimum viable product and failure is good. And kind of all these excuses to be ab…”

“And since since the early seventies we think there's been tons of Globalization and limited progress in technology. Almost all that progress has been confined to IT, which of course we know all about in Silicon Valley.”

“If you think about a lot of countries in fact, a lot of cities in the U.S. And a lot of countries around the world want to have their own, quote, Silicon Valley. The answer probably is not to have their own Silicon Valley. It's probably to have a different kin…”

“I tend to think the bubbles always required the public to be involved in a very big way, and there were these psychosocial phenomena on some level, and this, the public is not really involved because the companies are not going public until extremely late in t…”

“The expectation of Detroit is that 50 years from now the three big car companies will be Ford, GM, and Chrysler, right? The expectation of Silicon Valley is the opposite. Like we don't know who the big three tech companies are going to be, but they're almost c…”

“Relationships, the relationship between the government and Silicon Valley from, in terms of all these issues, is at an absolute low point. Like, It's one of those low points where you can't imagine it getting any lower, although it probably can.”

“Or what my thesis is that it's not a binary answer anymore. It's not like, should you move to the Valley or not? It's like, okay, you're in software business. When and how and how often should you spend time in the Valley? And what are the other places where y…”

“As any startup, in order to win the incumbents needs to be 10 X better than that incumbent. It's impossible to be another Silicon Valley and be 10 X better than the Silicon Valley that already exists.”

“That's, yeah. That's a recent pointer was Paul Graham wrote a great essay on this topic, is that reminding the American public and the tech scene that if you look at the statistics, if you look at the probability or the distribution of the top tech talent in t…”

“But in, in my experience, the Competition on tech talent and the top engineers in the world in Silicon Valley has grown to a point where that if you hire a person outside here, like you go to even Portland or Seattle or Vancouver, or even London or Tokyo, whic…”

“If there's one business on planet Earth that makes Silicon Valley look normal and sober and level-headed for sure, it's your business.”

“It amazes me how across the region and in Iran, maybe even more so, I find more women entrepreneurs than I find in Silicon Valley.”

“Probably the biggest disadvantage that we have if you compare us to Silicon Valley and some other cities is that they have to be able to raise the money that they need to grow their companies.”

“Most places that have tried to create the next Silicon Valley have not succeeded largely because they focus on specific institutions in isolation without understanding that one of the most important dynamics is the opening of boundaries Between firms and finan…”

“Every industrial region, every innovative cluster that we've seen has started, you know, from imitation and improvisation.”

“One of the things that we didn't quite touch on about Silicon Valley here, and it's odd to me that people often don't focus about it, which is just simply the network effect of talent that's there, that the more better, the more the excellent people are there,…”

“Iran has an incredibly highly educated population. Of course, it has been cut off in all sorts of ways, and there's also a huge, very successful Iranian diaspora, which I suspect will I know in Silicon Valley they've been dying to contribute back, so Iran is v…”

“The notion of trying to create the next Silicon Valley is, is completely the wrong question. And it's a wrong question for lots of reasons. But most importantly, each different geographic region, any city in the world, has different natural resources.”

“I believe, you know, based on talking to all the wise men I've been able to talk to in Silicon Valley, that there are three more turns of the crank. We go from 14 to 10 to seven to five. The industry can see its way to five.”

“Richard Florida, about a year ago, did this wonderful bit of research where he basically found the center of Silicon Valley by geo-coordinating current investments, and, you know, once upon a time, the center of Silicon Valley was in Santa Clara, and now it's …”

“Denard scaling, which was really the most important part of Silicon Valley, stopped in 2006. Just stopped dead. Clock speed stopped advancing, and so you went to parallelism and all these other kinds of technique.”

“It used to be a manufacturing center, and now it's a marketing design center”

“I have seen a lot of companies in the Valley get funded that are working on Me Too problems, or problems that only affect extremely wealthy people in extremely wealthy countries. Personally, that's not very compelling to me, and I don't think those types of bu…”

“I think it's actually led to a really dangerous culture in the Valley and in tech companies in general, where there's this pressure to get as many patents as possible, as quickly as possible. And then what you end up with is a bunch of really crappy patents an…”

“There are real honest to God entrepreneurs just as visionary, just as exciting to work with inside some of these large organizations as you walk down the street here in Silicon Valley.”

“I definitely believe that software will eat the world. It's just it won't necessarily crap out kind of rabidly free market kind of Silicon Valley cronyism. You know, there will be other models that will emerge from networks and software and those kinds of thin…”

“A more diverse vision of technology will outcompete a white male rich version of technology.”

“I think the other thing we're increasingly seeing very strongly with our companies is that the cost of engineering talent in the Valley relative to here means that there is actually, has Ted said, an arbitrage play available of raising US money on US terms and…”

“I think the flip side of that is it is like I personally find it to be a cultural wasteland. Anytime I go over there after I'm there for two weeks, I'm craving going to a museum or being able to see that film that just came out or having more variety in my soc…”

“And similarly, I think the reason why there's so many culture related startups in London is because that's a very London thing about fashion and, you know, media and music as well. I think there's a lot more startups in London focusing on those problems as opp…”

“I actually think we would have never got off the ground in Silicon Valley because the people would have just said, you know, you just can't do this.”

“That world is also changing very quickly and maybe innovating at a pace that's faster than what I see happening in Silicon Valley.”

“In India, I actually see the attrition problems to be as significant as in Silicon Valley. You do see that a lot of engineers move across startups. They switch every two years or every three years, and there's heavy competition in terms of compensation and pay…”

“What you may not know is that Iguodala signed with the Warriors in part to be near Silicon Valley and the tech scene.”

“A lot of people in South Africa and Africa and the rest of the world read those blogs and think that's the holy grail, but there's only one metric and that's cashflow. And advertising is not a business model. One day we'll sell to Google is not a business mode…”

“A lot of them find as they, as they're growing, they scale out of their cities. So, you know, Chicago had Groupon, and, you know Foursquare had, it was in New York, and they can only hire so many engineers, particularly engineers, but also the senior executive…”

“Like Silicon Valley loves software companies because you get a repeatable product to market with a really high margin and high multiples. But if you start looking around a lot of the open source business models, it looks a little bit like a PSO company, which …”

“I don't think the Valley has it figured out. I think it's very spotty, and I think it's because it's just, it's all people issues, and I think, frankly, it's all the same people issues you see in any organization, and I think our companies probably struggle wi…”

“If I had to summarize Ben's management course, it's make sure everybody understands what you understand, and people coming in from the military have that perspective much more deeply ingrained in them than 95% of people who are in management roles in Silicon V…”

“And you don't get that sitting in a cube in, you know, San Francisco or Silicon Valley. You get that from walking the halls Of these big organizations and really understanding, you know, what their initiatives are and how you're to be able to map up what your …”

“There's also a lot of enthusiasm in the Valley from our own companies that we can completely overtake the automotive industry, and I think this is a fallacy. Completely obliterating it and making Silicon Valley the, you know, the next Detroit, it's hard for me…”

“What can a corporation take away from Silicon Valley or from any other innovation ecosystem is not the fact that you come into touch with Two or three or 10 startups is the fact that there is a set of now best practices, and one of these that you can take away…”

“Just because you're establishing a fund, it doesn't mean that now you're going to start seeing a tremendous deal flow and the right deal flow”

“As wonderfully collaborative as the Valley is, it still matters who you have a relationship with. And people still have, like, they're just, they're both relationship businesses. They're just different networks, and they're different languages.”

“And so we think very, very much about the fact that DC and Silicon Valley are inevitably smashing together. In a whole bunch of different ways, but one of them is actually methodologically.”

“There was a guy named Scott who started Rise, R-Y-Z-E, in 2000, which was LinkedIn two years before LinkedIn. But he wasn't Reid Hoffman. And Reid knew the top 4000 people in Silicon Valley and emailed. And then once we were on, all the guys in New York wanted…”

“If there's a critique of Silicon Valley that I at least somewhat agree with, it's we are a relatively insular community. We live in a special place and special time and, you know, socioeconomic kind of bubbles of where they don't usually like, but there's a li…”

“In Silicon Valley, there's this thing, all that matters is product. Whoever's the best product wins, and this and that and the other. If you're short on product and you, it's going to take you some time to get there, the thing that actually can make the compan…”

“Like, everybody has features and bugs in Silicon Valley parlance, right? Like, I have a lot of bugs, but you've got to find the place where the features are valued, right? And you're going to be successful in those jobs and not in others, right?”

“And then the example of someone whose brand has changed a lot for the better would be Bill Gates. If you know, some of you are too young, but like he was just particularly in Silicon Valley, but I think widely hated because of their hardcore business behavior.…”

“We need so much of that because a lot of the folks here, they are running large companies, but like, they've never run a thing. They're out of a dorm into their new dorm with kombucha and massage tables.”

“There's going to be another Silicon Valley where the quantum ecosystem is, it kind of comes up.”

“I actually have reached the point where I think that all of the ideas in tech and all the ideas in Silicon Valley are good ideas. I don't think there actually are bad ideas. I mean, maybe we could pick a couple, but they actually all seem to be good ideas. The…”

“Yeah, there is actually, there are new, actually, Silicon Valley starting, there are new actual supersonic jet companies in Silicon Valley, which is not something I ever thought would happen.”

“I know of exactly two Trump supporters in Silicon Valley.”

“I just think the sphere of issues that are being politicized, at least, In the valley, in tech, in economics, is just really broadening out, and I think it's really corrosive to, it's certainly corrosive to discourse.”

“I think people start companies that solve the problems they understand, and I think that's why so many of the startups that come out of Places like Silicon Valley are addressing the issues of twenty-something males who live in cities because those are the type…”

“And actually a lot of, by the way, the cryptocurrency movement, it's not a coincidence, isn't coming from Silicon Valley. It's coming from other places.”

“Academia, it's allowing you to do more experimentation. It's set for that. And at Berkeley, we are in a privileged position. Of course, being close to the Silicon Valley, we have a lot of feedback. From the industry. So we are very anchored in what are the rea…”

“And there was a time when the goal of a startup was to build a real business. You know, you think about you know, the founders of Silicon Valley, they didn't have any idea that they were going to get acquired. They had the idea that they were going to build a …”

“And so it's partly for that reason, I think, that Silicon Valley effectively dismissed a lot of the potential of Bitcoin. It just looks like such the wrong thing. If you could, you know, beat the throughput of Bitcoin with a SQLite database in your phone, why …”

“There's about a thousand people who work in LA that, on all the aspects of content, they all think they work at the greatest entertainment company in the world. And there's about 4000 people in Silicon Valley who think they work for the best tech company in th…”

“The whole efficiency-driven thing is very Silicon Valley, and the whole quality-driven thing is very Hollywood. And rarely do those things meet.”

“No, no, absolutely. That is what the United States has that will, even though these other countries are doing a better job of figuring out what to do with their government investment in space and how they're spending those dollars, the United States has Silico…”

“I contacted the HBO folks who were doing the TV show Silicon Valley and said, hey, I want to come work on Silicon Valley, and the CEO of HBO, Richard Pepler, said, well, we need a, like, technical consultant, but, like, we can't, like, pay you to do it. And I …”

“In terms of how much it matters for diplomas in Silicon Valley, I think a crucial is just like getting the first meeting.”

“So there is a phenomenon in Silicon Valley where if you get accepted at Harvard and you drop out on day one, you are much more attractive.”

“I'm not aware of anybody out here who does an IQ test. In the hiring pipeline. I think anybody who did would probably find themselves under a tremendous firestorm or controversy.”

“When the game gets a little tired at times, people say, oh, the valley's over. But it doesn't. It discovers new technologies and then reinvents itself.”

“Swedes are in general more frugal and more cautious. There is this saying that a Swede think that a million dollar is a lot of money.”

“And one of the advantages of Silicon Valley, I think people talk about how there's more engineers and there's more Investors, but those are frankly everywhere. But the big difference is VP marketing, VP sales, VP engineering, and then all the product managers …”

“There's very few, very strong product organizations in Silicon Valley. Google has a great product org. Facebook has a great product org. There's a handful of them.”

“If you had asked me 1520 years ago, will there be another Silicon Valley in the U.S., I would have said yes, for sure. In fact, just the opposite has happened. The Valley's lead has gotten bigger.”

“So it is going to happen in China. I have no doubt about it.”

“I remember a startup founded at Mark's alma mater, University of Illinois, and great group of people, they could hire great young engineers because it's one of the best engineering schools in the country, but they couldn't get the kind of middle and upper leve…”

“One of the differences between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, this is a town of relationships and emotional connections. I would characterize Silicon Valley as a little bit more transactional. If I need you, I will get together with you and we'll do something. …”

“And so I think the valley is actually going to become more central, not less central, even though the technologies that we're building are making it possible for the world to distribute.”

“It really is in the last, like, three years, it feels like a bunch of the Valley companies are really starting to decode culture, A bunch of the big, I mean, Netflix being, you know, Netflix sort of, you know, sort of setting a new model, but now being, you kn…”

“Well, I think liberal arts education unfairly gets a bad rep in Silicon Valley, which I don't agree with.”

“70% of the core working group of residents in the Silicon Valley who are engaged in computer and math related occupations are foreign born, are foreign national.”

“This is probably a contrarian view, even in Silicon Valley, but I would build for mobile first, and I would build your app before you build your website, because it will drastically unlock different ways of thinking.”

“What we're seeing is a massive pool of very, very talented people who are highly educated, actually, have an excellent university system. These are people with, you know, degrees in math, science, technology, Engineering. And what's happening is they're coming…”

“I think there's a bug in Silicon Valley, which is that at our core, I think we're fundamentally a product shop and we are really, really, really good at helping entrepreneurs build products. But we are not that good at helping entrepreneurs build go to markets…”

“Where Silicon Valley, I think, strays is when we start doing things which, frankly speaking, are outside this very small circle of software, and I get a little nervous when, you know, companies are doing a lot of hardware because there are other hardware cente…”

“So I think the autonomy software stack will probably for a long time be in, in, in Silicon Valley.”

“So what the general public though will consider the autonomy moment is when you meet somebody who doesn't live in Silicon Valley, doesn't work in technology, and they've done, they've had an autonomous ride. Maybe it's on college campuses, maybe it's an airpor…”

“I think there's no path to autonomy that doesn't go through Silicon Valley and Detroit.”

“So once you become, you know, successful in some way in Silicon Valley, whether that's, you know, you've been executive at a company that's, you know, rocket ship unicorn, or you've started a company, you know, the world opens up, right? People want you to be …”

“The best entrepreneurs here The ones who have created lasting companies and lasting value, they stick with their thing for decades, you know, and that's what impresses me most now, and I wish that I had kind of realized that, you know, before.”

“And so we ended up going out and raising money for our seed round of, you know, over 90 different investors from all over Silicon Valley because I felt like it would be really good to have those investors on our side and recommending Atrium as a channel partne…”

“Yeah, the most entrepreneur-friendly, and the one that I think generally predominates, quite frankly, particularly in Silicon Valley, is what you would call a one X non-participating liquidation preference.”

“Now, participating is slightly different, and it's actually much more advantageous to the venture capitalist, and quite frankly, deleterious for the entrepreneur. We generally do not see it very often, particularly in Silicon Valley, but it's good for you to u…”

“Because the growth motion, which I'm going to talk about, is really a marketing led motion, B to B startups can now really come from anywhere. And that's just not been the case in the past. There's really been very, very few centers for real strong B to B comp…”

“Any of the important companies, any of the important products take like a decade or more to build”

“Actually, probably one of the most notorious large breaches of a tech company in Silicon Valley happened this way, and it started with something as innocuous as a barbecue.”

“I mean, I think that Silicon Valley is guilty of this all the time, of introducing very revolutionary ideas without doing the groundwork of connecting this new idea to something that people are already comfortable and familiar with.”

“I think a lot of what's called AI alignment today is not really aligning with what the average human being wants. It's aligning with like what the sort of Silicon Valley average sensibility is, which I don't think it's good.”

“I think one of the big theses that I have learned in this traveling is that which is happening among emerging markets among themselves is more shared in many cases than their compatriots in Silicon Valley or even Beijing.”

“And it's the good with the bad, right? It's the, it's why you get Silicon Valley, it's why you get Hollywood, it's why you get all the new ideas, it's why you get all these new things, right? It's not an accident, right? But it's a total package.”

“Yeah, so it's a big thing that Bob Noyce kind of rooted out of Intel... At its core. I mean, he got rid of All of that East Coast idea. That was actually the birth of the Silicon Valley culture, amazingly. ... And ironically, the term meritocracy came from Bob…”

“It became more of a cultural thing, right? And it became very much a Silicon Valley thing too, that people should just be, you should feel confident with what you pay each employee. It, and if somebody else finds out about it, you should be able to justify it.”

“There are some very prominent Silicon Valley people who have created microschools, pods, and so if the upper, upper tippy top of the socioeconomic stratum starts to do that, and that's the highest class thing to do, then you could imagine a future system in wh…”

“What they want is regulatory clarity. Like, that is the way, like getting, I believe, getting ahead on regulation, whether it's, again, AI, crypto, whatever the, emerging area might be is the best way for a country that you need other things. You need good uni…”

“Between 1950 and 1980, the largest employer in Silicon Valley was Lockheed Martin.”

“I am. I think it is a marker for what's happened, I think, in broader world events. I think there's more ability to see how you as an individual innovator or investor can contribute to the you know, to the American experience, to American dynamism, dare I say …”

“It was more of a surprise for the people in Silicon Valley, many of whom who still had funds that were operating in China. It was more of a surprise for them. And now I don't think it's a surprise for anyone. I think everyone's gets the thesis and is, is on bo…”

“I often say D.C. Got what we were doing a lot earlier than the people in Silicon Valley, but now it's just sort of an obvious thing.”

“I think, let's say, 10 years ago, there was more controversy on should you do defense or not. I think that's all basically gone in Silicon Valley”

“And it turns out Silicon Valley Is getting an injection of people that have spent their careers working on ads and games that as they go through their careers go, I want to do something that matters to me.”

“I think there's a relatively small set of companies in Silicon Valley right now that Get AI, building AI-native products, and just, like, work their butts off and ship products at high velocity. That's kind of the magic recipe right now, I think, and there's, …”

“I've always suspected in tech, we, in Silicon Valley, kind of, we underestimate the power of just kind of brands and consumer inertia, and I think you're sort of seeing that today with ChatGPT of just like such a Household name, like overnight almost that even…”

“Scientists, if you ask us, we're not actually good at predicting the future of the, of future in terms of, like, our will this investment result in productivity? I mean, actually, frankly, neither is Silicon Valley, right? You can't say, you can't promise me t…”

“Coming from Silicon Valley, where we move fast and break things, you do not have that opportunity in the United States government at this level.”

“While it's very hard for the government to compete with Silicon Valley on compensation, we do rule on mission.”

“The people on my team who, you know, came from Silicon Valley who are working in my department, What they were doing was just, they would just, you know, on their personal phone, they were using ChatGPG to help them do stuff”

“What Silicon Valley does have, what we have here is, you know, companies worth trillions of dollars, which is not something that any other country is able to claim.”

“Percentile is the single biggest lie in Silicon Valley. It's like a complete fabrication.”

“Silicon Valley will classically go, we'll put it all in simulation and that will solve it. Nope, that's not going to work.”

“We have our kind of blind spots, and a classic one for us tends to be well, everything should be done in See us. Everything should be done in software. Everything should be done in bits.”

“This is actually one of the things that I think people don't realize about Silicon Valley. You start with, what's the amazing thing that you can suddenly create? Lots of these companies, you go, what's your business model? You go, I don't know. You're like, ye…”

“My sense is that people are in Silicon Valley are kind of pulling back from the, let's call it imminent AGI narrative.”

“I think we're in an era of Silicon Valley where it's like very very get rich driven. And that makes me a little sad. And that's partly why I moved the company out of SF.”

“25 years ago, if you looked at the market cap of the largest 10 companies in the world, 25 years ago three of the top 10 were American tech companies. Now that is nine of the top 10, 25 years later.”

“I've always said that I think the social network had probably the greatest influence of the twenty-tens in terms of being a defining movie of what technology means.”

“That level of emotionality, like, it had its moment, and I think it's just over now, and I think we, and, you know, hopefully, you know, hopefully we, and hopefully a lot of others are just kind of, you know, back, back to, back, you know, in a lot of ways, ba…”

“The weirdos, like, the weirder the better, right? Like, and it, it's gotten to an extreme where it's like, this is actually not reflecting Silicon Valley. It's just the, a slice of it.”

“There's A huge need on that side to have determinism here. Of which an agent builder with nodes that kind of like helps enforce this thing ends up being very, very helpful. But I think a lot of us, especially in Silicon Valley, don't really appreciate that. Th…”

“A fair amount of our cons are actually aimed at Washington because again, it's like if you're a policymaker in Washington, and you're sitting there 3003 thousand miles away, and your entire information source is like East Coast newspapers that hate Silicon Val…”

“And that really Is a confidence game, for lack of a better word, in that, you know, it's very difficult to run an organization when you don't know what you're doing which nobody does when they're an inventor, and you get tremendous amount of advice, and advice…”

“If Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone's white collar job, Meaning primarily democratic shaped people met whom I grew up with, highly educated people who went to elite schools or went to schools that are almost elite who vote for one par…”

“It is the single biggest mistake people make in this area is because they're intelligent in one area, they assume they're intelligent in all areas. And a big failure mechanism in the Valley is every Valley person is forced to present as if they're the smartest…”

“If we could get rid of the cultural misunderstanding, we could get pretty close to agreements here. But you, you're dealing with worlds that never, ever, ever talk. And don't have an ability to talk to each other.”

“The diffusion of AI capability is going to take longer than people in Silicon Valley realize.”

“It's going to be, you know, a number of years for this sort of diffusion to roll from what we're seeing in Silicon Valley, what we're seeing as tech startups all around the world into the rest of knowledge work.”

“Every major Silicon Valley company is overstaffed.”

“I don't think that's true, by the way. Like, I think that's a happy talk. If you know, like, one thing you learn when you go to different countries is they're very different. Like, the laws are different, the policies are different, the governance are differen…”

“They actually had a lot of trouble fundraising in Silicon Valley. They had to kind of go to Saudi and all of that”

“AI is overhyped in Silicon Valley, but underhyped in Iowa.”

“There are real motes to these things. Like, there are structural reasons why a Microsoft isn't going anywhere. And then, I guess, This is sort of a little antithetical to what most, you know, most people in Silicon Valley would say, like, I want to start up to…”

“Silicon Valley continues to be ahead of every other ecosystem is the level of speed that people operate.”