Silicon Valley

“You know, I always think that this is kind of a perverse thing about Silicon Valley in a way, which is that, you know, people decide often that they want to start a company before they even decide what they want to do. And that just feels really backwards to m…”

“We knew that people could easily copy us, and we didn't want someone else to be the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley. Like, we wanted to be the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley, and I remember Paul saying, we gotta go out there, and I remember thinking, like, ah, …”

“I still do. That could tip someday. And you can still live cheaply kind of in the nooks and crannies of the Valley.”

“In most places outside Silicon Valley, it's really hard to fundraise. And that's because, ah, there doesn't exist a local angel, you know, investing ecosystem.”

“So if you watch any episode, just pay attention to the stuff in the background, because like the show is designed to be possible. Like you can freeze frame anything and like look at the documents, for example, in their hands or like the whiteboards in the back…”

“One is Mr. Robot. And even when I was on Silicon Valley, I kind of said like, this is the gold standard for both playback and technical accuracy.”

“I think that, that like we, the show would not go after anyone unless it were sort of like already kind of like a big story. A lot of what the writers end up using is, is, You know, stuff that gets pulled from the headlines.”

“I think in the second episode we hid an Easter egg in some C code. That we like had just sort of like flash on screen for like a second. Pausing it, copying it over and actually compiling it. And it was kind of cool. I wrote like a really simple compression al…”

“Before every season, they actually come up to San Francisco for, I think, like a week or two weeks and meet with a bunch of startups. So they, like, every writer goes through this kind of like you know, crash course to get up to speed.”

“Most of the job is actually just sort of, like, sitting and listening, and it's very rare that you actually have to speak up and sort of, like, help them course correct.”

“They ended up pulling directly from our experience with Yard Sale launching a beta, and sort of, like, not being totally sure at first, like, whether this thing is working or not.”

“Any time, like one of the characters says anything technical, that was something that, that either I wrote or reviewed.”

“I actually, I created a GitHub profile for playback purposes, right? So just, like, we wanted an authentic looking GitHub profile. The best way to do that is just to make a GitHub profile for that person. Yeah. So I made one for Winnie and we had to populate i…”

“Because a lot of people will use the term and actually don't actually, in fact, know what it is, don't know how to measure it, don't know the different kinds of network effects, Don't know, like, network effects in growth, network effects in engagement, networ…”

“But actually, in fact, it's the fact that we intersect technology invention with business invention, where that business invention includes such things as network effects, new business models, and so forth. And then in seeing those, we realize that certain of …”

“I think in 2013 and 14, a lot of the blockchain tech was being built in New York and Europe and far ahead of Silicon Valley. And I remember having a lot of conversations with people here in New York and Europe and just the level of thought outside of Silicon V…”

“I think San Francisco and Silicon Valley got interested when the ICO craze happened. When you suddenly had projects raising tens, you know, 20, thirty-five, hundred million dollars, suddenly everyone was like, what the hell is going on? What's happening? And i…”

“And so they end up having to rely on proxies for that. And a good proxy often is, you know, where's the venture funded companies happening and venture funded companies have tend to happen closest to where VCs happen to live because they don't like to travel th…”

“Helps me realize how things here in the valley are just not, like, they're not normal, and they are maybe solving the problem for a small amount of the population, but that's not how everyone thinks out there.”

“Leaving the valley, as soon as I leave the valley, I'm able to see or look at things from a different perspective. I'm not in the nitty gritty details anymore. I don't really care about how it's being done operationally. I can think about the big picture and c…”

“It feels like every, every city internationally or a lot of them think like, how do we build the Silicon Valley of like, you know, South America, or how do we build the Silicon Valley of like Peru? And it's like, that's not really the right approach. I don't t…”

“If you're in the valley, all, everyone talks to each other. Assume that all the information is out there. If you're not in the valley, it's maybe tuned down a little bit, but still, like, don't get caught lying. It, it's not worth it. It doesn't make sense.”

“That particular shift, that sort of darkening almost of the tint was happening even as I was kind of wrapping up the manuscript for Penumbra, and I remember very vividly the last few passes in the summer of 2012 before it came out that fall, going through and …”

“It sort of tends to be a minimum in the tens of thousands of dollars, up to a maximum of, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars, usually.”

“There is a giant amount of arbitrage left, ah, because most investors in Silicon Valley will only fund you with an intro, or they'll only talk to you with an intro. And it is, honestly, I think, by and large, a fairly insular network.”

“We try to beat that idea out of people during YC and thus, most of the people, mistakes in Silicon Valley of that sort in the last decade have not been ours.”

“And if I disagree with anything, it would be how quickly that will spread outside of Silicon Valley. I think it may happen relatively quickly. So there's still a question of how long, there's still a question of how long does Silicon Valley Remain the absolute…”

“I'll tell you straight away that I'm not doing it to make money. In effect, I feel like where I came from on the East Coast, when people want to give back, they give money to charity and they go to Gallus which I never understood. And strangely, here in the Va…”

“And I think, especially in Silicon Valley, there's too much of a, Lens of, well, if it's not a billion dollar outcome or if it's not a ten billion dollar exit, it doesn't matter. And there are lots of motivations that people may have. And so the first step, I …”

“I think that prizing certain teams at companies, so it used to be sales teams, now it's engineering teams, is I think prizing certain teams is actually a coded way of prizing certain races and genders.”

“I think you could have the inspiration for ideas come from underserved markets, but I wouldn't be surprised if the really big winners in crypto actually sort of re-centralize around Silicon Valley.”

“That's the place with the Silicon Valley is likely to be Quantum Valley the way things are right now.”

“In 2005, what we were doing was so unusual that people in Silicon Valley just regarded us as very irrelevant.”

“And I think one of the big fallacies in Silicon Valley is everybody thinks that they're Amazon and they basically say every business model should be Amazon's, which is I'm going to charge as low of a price as possible so I can get as much market share as possi…”

“And it's inevitable that at some point that'll happen again. And I think that will cause an enormous sea change in terms of how people do things.”

“In fact, I think in 2018, at least in Silicon Valley, it's easier to start a hard startup than it is to start an easy startup.”

“I think we, Flexport could only be founded in Silicon Valley. We'll see if that's true in 10 years from now, but I think that's still true today.”

“In 2007 and 2008, the prevailing thinking in Silicon Valley was that you should actively not charge money. You should actively be not making money. That was the prevailing thinking. It sounds really, really crazy now. But at the time, the logic went that Twitt…”

“I think one of the things that's amazing about Silicon Valley is you actually can raise money. As an unknown twenty-two-year-old to go make a rocket company. It's happened several times at YC.”

“One of the many problems with the deferred life plan is everyone can kind of tell that that's what you're on. And you're not that serious about, you're not that committed to either. And it just never works. I mean, it must work sometimes, but I've seen it fail…”

“It's an incredibly privileged thing to be able to do this, but if you are in the position between jobs where you can take a year off, I highly recommend it. I think it was like one of the two or three best career things that I ever did.”

“My problem with the way that Silicon Valley does it is they, they've always had this, like, Wall Street is the bad guys. They're all about making money. Silicon Valley is about, you know, building the future and, you know, like, achieving, like, the American d…”

“I think the best high growth companies are still going to be built in Silicon Valley for right now, or at least they'll have an executive team in Silicon Valley.”

“And when you think about the fact that a hundred companies are going IPO this year in the Silicon Valley, we are having billions of dollars of wealth transferred to the founders, investors, and employees of companies who all on average come from the top 20% of…”

“And my freshman class at Stanford was the first class to start with Facebook. And I think that that really changed so much in Silicon Valley where young people now were seen as people that could innovate and that could bring kind of game changing ideas to mark…”

“Silicon Valley has actually this deeply ingrained stereotyping around technical, People. And, like, for the most part, I think that's a seat of privilege. Like, if you are an engineer, if you've got, like, coding chops, if you're a hacker, like, there's all th…”

“This happens a lot with technologists. That happens a lot with Silicon Valley, where they start with the technology I think is cool, and they try to find a market for it second.”

“A lot of the folks who are most approachable when you are a first timer, or when you're just moving to the area, or you're trying to break into the industry, the friendly people that want to talk to you are often The most exploitative, and they're the people …”

“The highest status job in the early stage startup world is investor, right? It's the one everyone wants to meet, everyone's talked to, everyone seeks approval to.”

“The kind of people that would have gone into very Blue chip kind of jobs are entering tech and startups that would not be caught dead doing in the past.”

“And I know Silicon Valley, you know, we like to talk about A-B testing. Of course, I do a ton of A-B testing, but contrary to what many people think, A-B testing is now one of the slowest tactics in my menu, because it's just slow to ship it.”

“Running a startup is an oral tradition. There have been a couple of nucleating times in history where, like, a really remarkable group of people have kind of figured it out from scratch. Like, I think PayPal was like this, but almost always beyond that, it's l…”

“Should I go there? And the answer is the same now as it always is. Yes, you should. You can go there for a bit and then come back, but you should at least go.”

“There's a pay it forward culture in Silicon Valley. That's different from anywhere else I've been in the world, maybe anywhere else in the world at all.”

“When you move to a big pond, you can measure yourself up against known big fish, and you can see how big a fish you are. Surprisingly often, the news is good.”

“Silicon Valley is the place where people go from being nobodies to billionaires faster than anywhere else in the world, and so someone who had a taste for being really nice to nobodies, you know, the kind of person who sees the nobody walking along on the stre…”

“YC now has a lot of data about this, and the startups that go home after YC don't do as well as the ones that stay. Startups that go home back, startups that go back home after YC are only about half as likely to become unicorns”

“You could make it the Silicon Valley of Europe. That job is still up for grabs.”

“Ron Conway is probably the most imperfect example of this phenomenon. All he does all day long is help people. He doesn't even keep track of whether they're his own portfolio companies. He doesn't even remember most of the favors he does for people, and this a…”

“So if you have a board, like classic Silicon Valley board would be two VCs, two founders, and an independent. That's supposed to be fair because it's two and two balance. That is basically just investors control your company.”