Silicon Valley, every mention
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tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Benedict Evans 111Toni Cowan-Brown 22Bernadette Kevins 8Jay Goldberg 1Benedict Catton 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Silicon Valley comes up
Most people and companies aren't tool-builders
- ▶ 9:24 Benedict Evans Um, and what this is, you know, it's kind of the point I made at the beginning of the essay, was there was this whole story, kind of, 1015 years ago in the Valley, that like,
What jobs are AI jobs?
- ▶ 24:39 Benedict Evans Which, if you're in the valley, sounds completely insane, and then you think, but this is a water company.
How does OpenAI compete?
- ▶ 5:17 Benedict Evans So if you're going to make your own experiences, then you are competing with the whole of Silicon Valley and the entire tech industry in trying to invent new experiences on this technology. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:40 Benedict Evans A couple of weeks ago, I heard, I had someone from Open Hour on a podcast from an old colleague of mine from A-Six Agency, Martin Casado, and he said something like, you know, we really, we were really surprised to discover that outside of… 2 times in the scene
A double episode: AI differentiation, and Apple does F1
- ▶ 5:42 Benedict Evans And there is this sort of bubble talk in the valley that, oh my god, no one uses Google anymore, which is just not true unless you're in the valley. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:28 Benedict Evans I have no answers to these questions, but I just think like this, this disconnect between how everyone in the Valley is obsessed with like Claude is three percent better than ChatGPT this week and next week Gemini is overtaking Claude.
From SAAS software to Formula 1
- ▶ 2:33 Benedict Catton Well, especially in Silicon Valley, where it's a one, what's the one industry town?
- ▶ 5:50 Toni Cowan-Brown And it was really interesting because I, I, you've probably seen this in Silicon Valley, how
- ▶ 13:33 Toni Cowan-Brown And I think I'm seeing this a lot, actually funnily enough in Silicon Valley, it's a lot of tech people who've all of a sudden gotten very interested in formula one, obviously because we're talking big data and we're talking storage.
Tiktok, Apple and Temu
- ▶ 28:14 Benedict Evans Of course, the, the, the interesting dynamic for Timu and Sheehan is, um, that this is the old joke in Silicon Valley.
Google Gemini and AI bias
- ▶ 12:12 Benedict Evans And, you know, there is, there is a sort of dumb Silicon Valley answer to all of this, which is to say, well, math isn't biased, which is, well, the math isn't biased, but the data can be.
AI and Everything Else
- ▶ 4:31 Benedict Evans Stories that as a percentage of what's on the front page of Hacker News, that's kind of a pulse on the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley geeks. 2 times in the scene
Threads
- ▶ 0:13 Benedict Evans So, um, for anybody who is not deeply involved in the Silicon Valley bubble, um, Meta slash Instagram launched a sort of Twitter competitor, sort of not Twitter competitor called Threads two weeks ago.
- ▶ 3:06 Benedict Evans Um, and it was kind of a byword in Silicon Valley as a place where good people would go and be unable to get anything done.
- ▶ 7:46 Benedict Evans He's like one of the OGs of Silicon Valley, and it's just like a whole bunch of just really stupid stuff.
Vision Pro, two weeks on
- ▶ 32:24 Benedict Evans It's an obscure Silicon Valley reference.
The right questions to ask about TikTok
- ▶ 14:16 Benedict Evans Um, and, you know, although the web was invented at CERN, you know, the consumer internet has always basically come, been driven out of the U S and in particular, you know, the tech industry has evolved, sort of evolved over time to be… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:39 Benedict Evans I mean, there was an observation for a long time that Pinterest was sort of like invisible in Silicon Valley, because basically like 80 or 90% of the user pay, it's in New York. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:08 Benedict Evans This, this would be like a great, great, like Silicon Valley phrase to somebody who said, man, you're thinking you said landscape mode.
- ▶ 34:34 Benedict Evans Then this would be Benedict Evans, American right-wing libertarian at Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
- ▶ 38:03 Benedict Evans Um, as opposed to YouTube, which has created a network to get people to create content, which is a Silicon Valley kind of a conversation.
Amazon's $40B advertising business
- ▶ 28:32 Benedict Evans Yeah, in fact, ironically, you don't get it nearly as much in, um, if you live in, in, in Silicon Valley.
Why are chips interesting again?
- ▶ 12:04 Jay Goldberg If you go, I was reading up recently on the early history of Silicon Valley, and Intel didn't start out making CPUs.
No Soup for You! Regulating tech M&A
- ▶ 25:01 Toni Cowan-Brown No, but it's an important piece that I think if you're, if you're not living in Silicon Valley, and you're not part of this, you know, startup culture, you don't actually realize, um, the founder's mentality of if you truly believe in a… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 26:12 Toni Cowan-Brown But it's contextual because it sounds like from the outside, again, if you're not in Silicon Valley, it sounds like,
The FTX face-palm
- ▶ 3:26 Benedict Evans Um, and so then, obviously, finite, um, Silicon Valley people kind of raise an eyebrow that Sequoia put a hundred and fifty million into this thing without taking a board seat, although those same Silicon Valley people would probably have,…
- ▶ 5:06 Benedict Evans Well, so if one were being cynical, you know, one analysis of Theranos is that what Elizabeth Holmes did was sell Silicon Valley disruption to non-Silicon Valley people. 2 times in the scene
Lighting and tech diffusion
- ▶ 3:12 Benedict Evans It's not software, it's not Silicon Valley, it's not even, I mean, it's probably coming out of Shenzhen in some form, but it's no longer the tech industry, it's the lighting industry.
- ▶ 14:08 Benedict Evans Another, maybe another hall, you've got Schlager and Yale, and they're wearing slacks and black polo shirts with a logo embroidered on their, on the chest, and they're a locks company, and they're not Silicon Valley people, 3 times in the scene
The FTC's antitrust thesis
- ▶ 3:43 Benedict Evans Part of the whole sort of Silicon Valley ecosystem is big companies buy small companies as a combination of hiring outsourced R and D or building a market position, a position in a market that they want to get into.
Three ways to say no
- ▶ 17:35 Benedict Evans Um, and that's sort of a reaction sometimes from Silicon Valley is, do you want us to make it harder to get the data out or easier to get the data out?
- ▶ 24:59 Benedict Evans But you kept, one kept sort of seeing people from Silicon Valley sort of, you know, the politician says, you know, the police are trying to catch his child abuser.
Stories in the noise
- ▶ 37:55 Benedict Evans Um, and of course, you know, there's always a sort of the person in Silicon Valley that says, I don't get it. 2 times in the scene
Netflix isn't a tech company
- ▶ 27:26 Benedict Evans I mean, it's kind of my point, you know, these are all LA questions, not Silicon Valley questions, but it's not like anyone in LA knows.
Are you a seal?
- ▶ 26:46 Benedict Evans Nobody in Silicon Valley can see it, if you see what I mean.
Talking about crypto
- ▶ 0:08 Benedict Evans Yeah, it's kind of a boring, a true topic that, you know, super geeky and nobody outside Silicon Valley is remotely interested in.
- ▶ 7:23 Benedict Evans Um, Logan Bartlett, who's, um, a sort of, um, VC at a, at a, at a, at a sort of a very small and insignificant firm in Silicon Valley, um, and, um, um, made this comment, you know, he's, he's got a kind of good line and he's got, does good…
- ▶ 39:01 Benedict Evans Yeah, I mean, I was talking, you know, I was an, I was an event kind of 10 days ago, and some of the, one of the guys who's speaking there was, one of the people who was speaking there was a general partner at a, a large Silicon Valley…
The retail reset
- ▶ 29:13 Benedict Evans Well, it's also, it's like, I mean, there was a joke going around the valley a few years ago where somebody said, no, I heard my friend talking about her engagement, and I said, oh, with what brand? 2 times in the scene
Asking the dumb questions
- ▶ 4:43 Benedict Evans Infrastructure, or has very little, and then, well, I mean, like, you know, the Silicon Valley has one train line with a stop every five miles.
- ▶ 18:57 Toni Cowan-Brown Maybe is it, is it because there are so many tech companies out there today that we can't keep track that we're so focused on these potential four, five, six gatekeepers, because it's easier to keep track of them because every day there's… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 35:44 Benedict Evans Um, I mean, a few years ago, I met the chief executive of a water company, giant water company, um, utility, water utility, and we had the whole, you know, did the whole, like, A-S-E-Z presentation thing, and explained how the world worked…
How to think about tech
- ▶ 4:52 Benedict Evans It's also the plague of Silicon Valley is, you know, I have a degree in computer science,
- ▶ 16:28 Benedict Evans Yeah, that's because they're twenty-something male, white male guys in Silicon Valley.
- ▶ 20:58 Benedict Evans That doesn't change anything for anyone in Silicon Valley.
Metaverse - beyond the buzzword
- ▶ 38:10 Benedict Evans You know, what are all the cleverest people in Silicon Valley working on at the weekend?
Regulation - Who will notice?
- ▶ 11:15 Benedict Evans Um, so you, actually the vast majority of this stuff doesn't actually affect most people in Silicon Valley very much.
- ▶ 34:27 Benedict Evans Maybe it's just because I suck, and maybe it's because it's not good, not any good, not any good, but it's like, it's the, the popular stuff I write, the stuff that gets clicked through from Silicon Valley is not the stuff about…
Apple's metronome
- ▶ 1:13 Benedict Evans It was, it's basically, it's basically the Met, um, the Met Gala of Silicon Valley.
- ▶ 16:14 Toni Cowan-Brown Users that aren't people who live and work in Silicon Valley. 2 times in the scene
Telcos and Tesla
- ▶ 32:13 Benedict Evans We should have said this right at the beginning, but like, there's this sort of common narrative in Silicon Valley that we know, you know, software people will make better software than people trying to learn software. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 39:00 Benedict Evans There's a very standard presumption in Silicon Valley that software companies can learn other industries faster than those other industries can learn software.
Creativity and Optimism
- ▶ 3:02 Benedict Evans I mean, I spent five years in the valley
- ▶ 21:18 Benedict Evans So, you know, the average person in Silicon Valley, you know, it's quite a lot of people in Silicon Valley will still, he'll still look at the Jackson Pollock and say, that's silly, my son could do that.
'Digital transformation' - beyond the silly slogan
- ▶ 8:23 Benedict Evans Um, so there's that long cycle of like you're in Silicon Valley and you think, yeah, that mainframes are over, PCs are over.
- ▶ 20:24 Benedict Evans Um, I mean, I think the other interesting sort of, sort of particular substrate in this, if that's not too Silicon Valley a word, is, um, machine learning.
- ▶ 42:40 Benedict Evans You know, if you were, if you're in Silicon Valley and think, what would you do for them?
Tech in china, from inside and outside
- ▶ 11:21 Toni Cowan-Brown The other thing that I've realized is every time we talk about tech, it's always, I mean, you made this point ever so briefly, Bernadette, but you focus about tech in Silicon Valley and how American tech and tech built in America for… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:59 Benedict Evans So there is that sort of slightly interesting sort of actually quite narrow view in Silicon Valley of what you can and can't copy. 2 times in the scene
Paying attention to Apple again
- ▶ 13:49 Benedict Evans It makes a lot of people in Silicon Valley go. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:18 Benedict Evans And so there's a sort of, there's a, there's a kind of person in Silicon Valley that thinks that advertising is evil, and advertisers shouldn't want to know anything about us, and I never bought anything from advertising either, and I…
App stores: arguing like it's 2009
- ▶ 0:04 Toni Cowan-Brown And today we're going to talk about something that when you talk about it, I feel like it's a very insider Silicon Valley story, but actually the more we talk about it, then realize that the implications are far broader than Silicon Valley. 2 times in the scene
Who's in the office? Notes on a year of remote work.
- ▶ 21:20 Benedict Evans I mean, back to Clubhouse, obviously, where like all the stuff in Silicon Valley is happening at two and three o'clock in the morning London time. 3 times in the scene
Shopify and digital transformation
- ▶ 9:27 Benedict Evans But if you were a Silicon Valley company, what would you say when you heard we have two and a half million invoices a year, you would start thinking of product.
- ▶ 36:32 Benedict Evans And we had this, this observation, we talked about this before, that I looked at my shopping patterns on Amazon before I moved to Silicon Valley, and when I lived in London and worked in central London, I would go to the shops around me. 2 times in the scene
Clubhouse and the endless cycle of social apps
- ▶ 3:10 Benedict Evans I think the, there was a moment where it's like, oh, this is just like a dumb Silicon Valley thing. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 31:11 Benedict Evans That is the most super anxiety and recent horror at Silicon Valley conversation about the hot new social app, but still invite only and most people can't even use.
Bezos and the Amazon machine
- ▶ 14:27 Benedict Evans Sorry, I spent too long in Silicon Valley.
- ▶ 37:27 Benedict Evans Yeah, I mean, to my, you know, it's interesting, just as a personal anecdote, and we should wrap up, but, um, I went through and looked through my Amazon history, and, you know, I moved, so I moved to Silicon Valley in, beginning of…
Two Europeans talk about China
- ▶ 16:07 Benedict Evans It's a combination of the consumer behavior and the idea, and even like three and four years ago, there was still this idea in Silicon Valley that all China does is copy stuff, and again, I wrote a column about, another slightly different… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 26:22 Benedict Evans So sort of to my earlier point, I mean, I was in a room with a general partner at a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
There's no such thing as data
- ▶ 10:54 Toni Cowan-Brown Especially in Silicon Valley right now to help people analyze and make sense of the data that they have on people.
- ▶ 11:04 Benedict Evans Well, there's part of the interesting thread here is that we have these new two big pieces of proposed legislation from the EU, the Digital Service Act and Digital Markets Act, and these are sort of, what's a lovely Silicon Valley word,…
The history of doom-scrolling
- ▶ 0:04 Toni Cowan-Brown And today we have a very insider Silicon Valley story, which is what, at the intersection of Silicon Valley tech and tech media? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:00 Benedict Evans Well, you too, you talked about the Silicon Valley and, and newspaper journalist bubble.
- ▶ 45:06 Benedict Evans So we're probably not going to solve it in Silicon Valley in twenty-twenty-one.
What comes next?
- ▶ 6:44 Benedict Evans Um, the thing that the other candidate, the candidate that does float around a lot in Silicon Valley, and which has been one of those Tourette's buzzwords is, is VR and to some extent AR.
- ▶ 11:00 Benedict Evans And what would you do if you took 50 people from Google or from Silicon Valley to change that?
- ▶ 22:29 Benedict Evans Um, and so that, that paying attention is important, and particularly, you know, I think sort of people in Silicon Valley should sort of just be thinking, like, you are going to get regulated like a telco or a bank.
- ▶ 24:48 Benedict Evans And that company is not worried about somebody in Silicon Valley working out a new way to make engines.
The FTC and Facebook
- ▶ 23:11 Benedict Evans yeah, I spent six years in the Valley. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 28:42 Benedict Evans You know, there's people in Silicon Valley saying, what are you talking about?
Slack, Salesforce and the future of work
- ▶ 8:03 Bernadette Kevins I wonder that as it, as it moved out of Silicon Valley and moved into big companies, like how many people at News Corporation are actually using this to manage all their different robots and all their different cloud platforms?
- ▶ 9:09 Bernadette Kevins Um, and there's always been this sort of dream amongst people in Silicon Valley who make cool enterprise
- ▶ 13:56 Bernadette Kevins Um, and so you, all that money is going on working out who needs this, working out how you can get it to them, working out how they can buy it, and I'm sure there's all sorts of stuff buried inside that, helping people install it, and this… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:28 Bernadette Kevins Google, Microsoft, you know, if you live in Silicon Valley, of course, why would you use Office? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:15 Bernadette Kevins I mean, meanwhile, it's just an interesting observation, two, well, two, sort of, two, like, kind of Silicon Valley law observations.
Is content moderation a dead end?
- ▶ 0:53 Benedict Evans I mean, there's a, um, there's a sort of an entertaining framing here, which is number one, people in Silicon Valley are all clueless bros who don't have passports and don't understand anything about the global complexity of the world.
- ▶ 13:11 Toni Cowan-Brown Um, and again, do you want a tech CEO in Silicon Valley?
How do you destroy a tech monopoly?
- ▶ 28:56 Benedict Evans I think another, to use the kind of the Silicon Valley word, orthogonal problem in this, is how do you even think about what you're trying to do?
- ▶ 37:50 Benedict Evans One of the comedy, about comedy, sort of, pieces of all of this are the sort of, the sort of, the narrative that says, you know, people in Silicon Valley are all idiots, and they don't understand 2 times in the scene
Amazon and eCommerce
- ▶ 8:18 Benedict Evans Um, and so an awful lot of retail was actually not, you know, for all, if you live in Silicon Valley, you think everything's online.
- ▶ 27:16 Benedict Evans This is actually, you know, this is in a sense of a alien conversation for a lot of people in Silicon Valley, because, you know, a lot of people in Silicon Valley are the sort of the jeans and sneakers and t-shirt view of like, what do you…
What the Apple and Facebook events tell us about their product cycles
- ▶ 13:35 Benedict Evans Um, the Facebook thing also, you know, was not just white men, but it was also much more conscious about the social role of this stuff and how it gets, how it arrives in the broader world rather than how it gets used by, you know,… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 31:40 Benedict Evans Yes, look out, yeah, living in Silicon Valley, you look out for the autonomous car kits, you know, with the stuff on the roof. 2 times in the scene
Is Europe a market?
- ▶ 0:48 Benedict Evans And we decided that today we would talk about that old Silicon Valley and Europe question, is Europe a market? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:43 Toni Cowan-Brown If you're asking the stupid questions like that, I think you spent way too much time in Silicon Valley.
- ▶ 12:54 Toni Cowan-Brown You know, a tech CEO in Silicon Valley, who's made this decision around, you know, political ad campaigns, um, which is fascinating to me because that's not a thing that would, I don't think ever be allowed or appreciated in Europe, um,…
- ▶ 26:08 Benedict Evans And Silicon Valley is yes, the global cluster, but, but there's a huge sort of huge and growing software ecosystem, um, in all sorts of other places, including, you know, parts of China, parts of Japan, parts of Korea, Vietnam, but also…
- ▶ 31:46 Benedict Evans I mean, even since I, you know, I moved to Silicon Valley in 2014. 2 times in the scene
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