Silicon Valley

“And it's not just Silicon Valley that's guilty of this mentality, but Silicon Valley is doing it better than anybody else right now.”

“In venture capital, if you fail, the risk is largely on the venture capitalist. I mean, in Silicon Valley, failure is on the part of the founder, so long as you conduct yourself in a way that's honorable, it's a badge of courage that you gave it a go. And we h…”

“Silicon Valley is the most peculiar place in the world, because it's the only place where incentives are aligned with that sort of positive sum mentality. Whereas in places like DC, no one ever turns down talking to the press because it's information trading. …”

“I've talked to founders recently who are former teachers. I've talked to founders recently who, you know, have worked in the department of defense as procurement officers. And it's like, they're not the normal people we would say are the founders of, 10 years …”

“I, now looking back on it, I think we had between five and 35% of a story, and I know that's, like, probably triggering to a lot of journalists that they have that little information.”

“One thing that we do in Silicon Valley is we overrate, overvalue growth rates and undervalue durability. And he's like, that doesn't make sense for a technology company because all your profits, the vast majority of profits are 20 years in the future. And so i…”

“Well, the rule used to be you couldn't go public until you had over a hundred million dollars in revenue and you were profitable. Like, if you didn't hit both, check both of those boxes, you weren't gonna IPO.”

“All the things we just talked about, Silicon Valley itself, for God's sakes, wouldn't have existed without this.”

“So by the end of the decade in 1959, just four years later, Lockheed Missile Systems employs almost 20,000 people in Palo Alto and Sunnyvale. And a few years later, by the mid-sixties, they would employ 30,000 people. This makes Lockheed by far the largest emp…”

“One of the very first tenants of Stanford Industrial Park. Ben, you were talking about customers. Customer who would go on to become the single largest employer in the area in proto-Silicon Valley by a huge margin. Was a new secret division of Lockheed.”

“What LMSC, Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, did, I honestly think, like, it is bigger impact to the country, to the world, and certainly on business to Lockheed and to Silicon Valley than Skunk Works.”

“The biggest semiconductor company in all types, digital, analog, everything at that time was not in California. It was in Dallas, Texas. It was Texas Instruments.”