You can’t hear it over the banshee howl of the BART under the Bay and the ppppffffsshshsshffffssf of oat milk being foamed for an overpriced latte, but Silicon Valley (in its current form) is breathing its last breaths.
The toxicity of Silicon Valley culture is not the result of malicious intent or money-grubbing market plays, though examples of these can certainly be found. The vast amounts of wasted wealth and talent, the arrogance and self-importance of out-of-touch technocrats, the ‘bubble’ itself, can be chalked up to something that seems on the surface, to be a positive: the confidence that founders and employees of founders have in their product and its ability to improve the world.
Work hard, believe in the vision, move fast and break things, and you too can change the world. These messages are packaged and repackaged by guru after guru for consumption by entrepreneurial chumps that mean well and truly believe. The advice is good: you need to have confidence in your vision, a clear mission and goals, persistence, and drive to start a business and make it work.
The issue is that ideas are cheap and most of them aren’t that great. “Gurus” like Gary Vaynerchuk and Tim Ferriss need to spend less time telling people they can do anything and more time telling people that they shouldn’t just do ANYTHING, their idea is lame and they should either get a better one or help someone who already has one.
There are companies out there building technology that will push the human race forward and solve real problems for real people leading to real increases in general welfare. There are also companies out there building an app that saves 1000 people 15 minutes a week dealing with their email or booking a flight.
The employees of these companies all believe that they are out to improve the world and help people. And they’re not ~technically~ wrong, but that doesn’t take the $4million raised by High-Fives-as-a-Service, Inc. and give it to someone actually making a difference.
That $4million was spent on rent for an office in the most expensive parts of San Francisco (which also happens to be the area with the highest density of used needles on the sidewalks), Amazon server and hosting services, $15 burritos, and salaries high enough to support humans in the whirlwind of overpriced everything that is the City by the Bay.
An entire sector of companies has arisen whose sole mission is to make starting a company easier, or make running a startup easier, or make managing expenses easier. You have people raising money to start companies to make raising money easier.
The seed of creativity and innovation that the counterculture and cypherpunk movements of the 1960s planted in the Bay Area sprouted, flowered, and has now decayed into a self-consuming, internally focused cesspool of “economic experimentation” with the guiding principle that if we keep churning out enough bullshit the gems will rise to the top. The VC model is based on a 1-in-100 approach that bets that while 99% of startups will fail, that 1 big winner will make up for all of them in return. And this is what we call “smart money”?
Even more egregious than the wasted money is the wasted time. Money is a renewable resource, we print it, we lend it, we move it around. Human hours spent working is not.
The greatest minds of my generation are polishing the look and feel of a single button on a single app in the arsenal of a mega-corporation or increasing conversion for a Bullshit-as-a-Service application.
The young engineers, the dreamers, the creators, are convinced they are stretching their imagination because they got to choose the version of node.js the backend was written in. The smartest, most energetic group of people in the world are being sold a narrative and a vision for a future world that they can help create, if only they work through lunch and don’t speak too much at the meeting.
What was the opportunity cost of the engineering team at Facebook that built Paper just to have it thrown out not spending their time on something that matters? What is the opportunity cost of so many kids farmed out of school into tech companies that are building unnecessary products?
As we move forward, investment MUST transition into truly smart money, mindful investors with subject matter expertise that put money into projects in which they believe and with which they are intimately involved. Reign in the bullshit, align investor incentives with social incentives, reward the people actually doing and ignore the people out to build an app for finding the closest roll of toilet paper.
As we move forward, we MUST reevaluate how we are using our pool of creators and thinkers, make research sexy again, breathe life into doing the hard and important things and stop focusing on the surface-level nonsense. While you are out there running Facebook ads for a better chew toy or making yet another app for video messaging your friends, the world is going through a lot and needs your help.
Step up!
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