Silicon Valley

“So, my single biggest fear for Silicon Valley is the cost of living. And the reason that matters is if you're a startup and you need to pay your engineers 250,000 dollars to, so that they can afford to live, almost by definition you can't afford that many engi…”

“Well, it turned out, I think their entire engineering team is in Beijing. The fully loaded cost per engineer, if I remember correctly, including equity and everything else, was 40,000 dollars a year. The fully loaded cost for any other software company has got…”

“I see it as the biggest renaissance for business, maybe in the history of the world, and that should and will include everybody.”

“Silicon Valley's market value has gone up 40%. 40% in the last two years. 11 trillion dollars a market cap.”

“And if someone is foolish enough to go take their money outside America and not invest in Silicon Valley because of a one or two percent tax, do it. America is going to still, it would be a dumb bet. Like, we still have the largest growth possibility. And so I…”

“I think what has shifted very much is failure culture. So I think that's something we've really very much learned from, You guys, and like by looking at, you know, the Silicon Valley more as a guiding North Star.”

“You cannot think about investing in African startups the way you would think about investing in Silicon Valley today, right? It's not gonna work because we're stuck in the seventies.”

“I would gather that there is a historical trend line that shows a waxing and waning of where the top talent go. Like where are the best and brightest out of college go? How many of them are going to Goldman Sachs? How many of them are starting, going to startu…”

“One of the adages of Silicon Valley that I hear really often is build it and they'll come, right? It's this belief that if the product is good enough, people will find it on their own, they'll download it, they'll pay it, and the company will be successful. An…”

“You don't need 10 years of work experience to want to solve a problem, and that if you're someone who's intellectually curious and willing to work really hard, you can, in your early twenties, start making a huge difference to solving these problems and actual…”

“When we are in powerful networks like Silicon Valley, it's very easy to shove your product down people's throats. It's very easy to convince a startup, your friends, your VCs, et cetera, like, hey, please use my product. But when you see that organic expansion…”

“One of the things that entrepreneurs or builders need to understand about the valley is if you're not overtly aggressive about Representing yourself. They'll just assume that, you know, you're, it's not real.”

“Any time you have a clustering of people who are high in openness, inevitably they're on the political left and usually very far to the political left.”

“I think they've upgraded the technology that is the company.”

“Over the past, call it, you know, 15 years Silicon Valley had developed a tremendous arsenal of enabling technologies that you know, we're reaching in some ways kind of a maximal use in, in the context of, you know, social media and all the things we love buil…”

“And I feel like at any given moment in time, there's one or two companies that are going through this kind of golden age period where you're expanding rapidly. You're soaking in all the best talent. You're launching multiple product lines. You have this, Diver…”

“The DOD is built around execution. Execution of processes and PBE and whatever. Silicon Valley is built around innovators who create new things that never existed before. And here's the rub. The executors never come up with innovation processes. I mean, they'l…”

“On a good day, China operates like Silicon Valley, and if we're really lucky on that same day, the DOD is operating like General Motors.”

“You could teach startups this as a process because the other mistake that goes on in Silicon Valley is thinking sales to the DOD is just simply complicated enterprise sales in the commercial market. And I laugh hysterically when I hear that having done both.”

“There are these, like, strong mimetic bubbles in Silicon Valley, where people don't even really think they're busy, and they're like, all my other friends care about existential risk, I'm in, you know.”

“And then you can get this, at some point, you can get this very, very fast preference cascade, and something like this happened in Silicon Valley in the last few years. It was a buildup that took a few years for people to realize that, you know, Things were ve…”

“There was a incredible felt sense among all the top CEOs I know in Silicon Valley that there's all the stuff you can't talk about. There are things they tell me behind closed doors that are very different from what they feel they can say in public. And the gap…”

“If you're gonna replant your, the sort of commanding heights of your economy on knowledge work, then what you're gonna do is you're gonna slam basically all economic growth into the cities, right? Because you're, which is what Silicon Valley has done, right? S…”

“And that's one of the reasons why like Annalise Exynian's regional advantage is so key about the not having, you know, anti-competes is because it allows that spinoff from a large company to go do that. And I think that's one of the things that made California…”

“I think the Democratic Party really did alienate a section of Silicon Valley and the tech people, Whether it was attacks on crypto, whether it was, you know, kind of just attacks on big tech, you know, all these things.”

“Certain people reached out and said, you know, I'm excited that you're doing this, and I could never really speak up in my company. You know, I kind of always stayed a little bit quiet. Because I couldn't promote my support for this administration. And so a lo…”

“This is moving at tech speed. This is moving at Silicon Valley speed. And they're actually getting stuff done. They're actually shipping things.”

“And we've seen a lot of folks leave Silicon Valley and start new small businesses. So start from scratch using AI and absolutely clean up shop in their towns.”