Silicon Valley

“You never change a system by taking the existing thing and reworking it. I don't believe I've been in Silicon Valley and tech business long enough to know that you're better off changing it just by creating something brand new.”

“Generally, at least in the tech business in Silicon Valley, great people have great outcomes. You just have to be patient. Every person that I met at the beginning of my career, 20 years ago, where I looked at it and said, wow, that guy or that gal is super ca…”

“This is a criticism I have of Silicon Valley, that what they often do is they take something that a human does, they define its role very, very narrowly, devise an algorithm or a technology which replaces that very narrow role, and then assume that the human b…”

“Silicon Valley is, is well known for celebrating failure. Although, you know, people are usually only comfortable celebrating failure after they've achieved success which is sort of a paradox. Cause then you don't get to see any ordinary people failing or peop…”

“Silicon Valley is the sort of, Greatest concentration of wealth creation that I think has ever existed in the US on a per square mile basis, potentially that has existed ever in the world, right?”

“I think countries and also regions within countries we won't see so much convergence. We'll see a lot of divergence. So it used to be in America, in the post-war era, America's poorer cities were essentially catching up to the wealthier cities. But nowadays, s…”

“I had term sheets by all the dream venture capitalists that sort of however stipulated that I would have to relocate the company to, you know, Silicon Valley or a place like this, which I then walked away from.”

“Where in Silicon Valley, where, you know, like, some companies are sort of pushing in their R&D teams, 12 months average tenure for staff, like, that is a silly investment to make.”

“It seems like Silicon Valley can support, like, two to potentially three breakout companies at a time, which is not true about any other place, but that's the difference.”

“I read a piece quoted some Silicon Valley guy who says, success is never accidental. You make your own luck. And I don't agree. I think luck is a real thing and it's important and it's inherently unfair, but that's life.”

“What led to my success wasn't really my intellect, ambition, or talent. It was really luck. I just happened to bump into someone who knew someone who, you know, knew our first engineer. I, you know, one of our Major investors literally overheard me pitching at…”

“In Silicon Valley, the norm has been, you know, we, they don't let their kids use social media and that's been going on a long time.”

“Part of what's gone wrong in modern Silicon Valley is that everybody believes he's the rule, right? So all sorts of character flaws have become forgivable, because hey, look at Steve Jobs, and look what he did. And flaws have almost become a good thing, becaus…”

“I'd moved out of Silicon Valley in about 2001 because I just felt like it was dehumanizing me. And so, even though I still had teaching and research at Stanford, we kind of escaped about two hours north where I, where we moved to live next to a river, and the …”

“Especially in, in a tier two market like Canada, if you will, as opposed to Silicon Valley, you know, there's less unicorns born here. So we are looking for the solid, but mid hundreds of millions of dollars exit as opposed to the billion dollar unicorns.”

“Silicon Valley is kind of funny because there's this concept of we're friends. And I like to joke that we're startup friends because it's such an overused word. And what it means is like we met once in person for coffee. And if they, you know, I need something…”

“A lot of what happens in Silicon Valley is friction reducing activities, but these friction reducing activities create their own sort of friction. Because maybe you don't know Reed, and maybe you don't get introduced in that one setting where things would have…”

“One of the great things that America brought to the world of innovation, in my view, is a relative tolerance of failure. Compared with Most European countries. The fact that you've started a business and it went wrong was actually quite often a good thing in t…”

“When I kind of go through the entire world, there's basically two places that embody this fighter pilot terminology called an OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, act. It's how fast you make these decisions through this kind of, this framework, both as individu…”

“When I kind of go through the entire world, there's basically two places that embody this fighter pilot terminology called an OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, act. It's how fast you make these decisions through this kind of the, this framework, both as indi…”

“The gorilla in that space at the time was a big, big company in Silicon Valley called Siebel, and so they were a fantastic company, two billion revenue, fastest company to ever get to a billion revenue in the history of Silicon Valley, amazing success story.”

“The research shows, by and large, the reason why Silicon Valley wants two founders is because the number one risk for investing in a company is that a founder gives up. Number one.”

“If you went to most of the, like, larger acquisitions in the Valley, and you, two weeks after it was closed, interviewed the management team of the acquiring company and the acquired company, and you asked them, like, what does success look like two years from…”

“I guess it felt like a little bit of a prisoner's dilemma, because I think the result is that you know, tech progress itself decelerated. You have, like, the smartest people of a generation basically retired in place, working at places that, you know, the worl…”

“Like incredibly sincere, I think. Basically what you see is what you get. Like you're not trying to be something else. It's like authentic, but like, you know, even humble in that respect, right? Like I'm trying to do this thing. The opposite, I mean, and it's…”

“If The founder and the CEO does not exercise agency, you know, then it's actually a political game, and then you have sort of fiefdoms that are fighting it out with one another, and the leader is not there, then you enter the situation where, ah, neither the l…”

“And so YC early on was very good at taking very talented people who weren't part of the core networks in Silicon Valley and basically inserting them into those networks and helping them succeed.”

“Silicon Valley had technical brilliance, but lacked organizational discipline. Precisely the gap that Grove, with his Eastern European understanding that systems mattered as much as individual genius, was uniquely positioned to fill.”

“Having spent a ton of time in China over the past 20 years, it's hard for me to adopt this mindset of vilification that's heavy amongst many in Washington and now many in Silicon Valley.”