I generally agree with the author. I don't have hard evidence but basically feel that the culture, ethos, magic, whatever you want to call it is gone. Does this mean innovation is dead? Of course not! As the author pointed, it will just likely be more spread out.
Also, I think it's important to appreciate that the formation and growth of Silicon Valley was a remarkably special thing but was bound to eventually hit the diminishing returns phase of faster compute, faster internet, smarter software, etc. Silicon Valley started with a transformative and enabling technology (the transistor) and from there we built a remarkable hardware and software ecosystem over the span of a few decades around that technology. Those seem to be the two elements in order to 'replicate' SV: a transformative technology that spurs an ecosystem of technologies, all of which interconnect and benefit from each others innovation.
I generally agree with the author, but his timeline is completely wrong. Silicon Valley as an ethos and as a concentration of free-wheeling globally-uniquely-great-at-their-jobs engineers in aggressive, innovative companies has been dead since at least the late 90s.
Naming Musk as a key example of innovation just shows how far we have fallen. Contrast with SGI, Sun, 3dFX, Nvidia, Cisco, maybe Google, etc. Yes, many of these are unglamourous or dead now, but their lives are totally different than the Teslas (heavily reliant on government subsidies), the Ubers (mostly just matchmaking playing chicken with regulations), and so on.
> a transformative technology that spurs an ecosystem of technologies, all of which interconnect and benefit from each others innovation.
Biotech, especially gene editing, comes to mind as a fast developing field. However, because it's health related, extensive testing and regulations means it will never evolve at the same pace as hardware and software did.
The one silver lining of this catastrophe of covid is that the FDA process has been turned up to 11. There is some hope that it'll stay that way after/if a vaccine is made. The ModeRNA vaccine is looking to be some amazing stuff and it would have taken at least a decade to get through before covid.
CRISPR-CAS9 technology and a faster FDA should result in some very good outcomes for all humans. The biotech centers of San Diego, Boston, NC Research Triangle, and Denver should see growth from that kind of a boom.
> Yes Amazon (which is not based in Silicon Valley) made online shopping better. However, it is fundamentally just another middleman, and will not stand the test of time.
Personally, I think Amazon's legacy will be AWS rather than online shopping. More than anyone else they've turned computing power into a utility. Like electricity this has made whole new types of businesses possible.
Edit: Still reading the article and want to note I don't mean this as a crticism. I'm really enjoying this story.
Not all innovations need to be what we consider modern tech. I've always viewed Amazon as the modern equivalent of what Sears was, what Sears did with railroad and mail order Amazon did similar with the internet. It will likely last at least 50 years.
Though you are right, I think the part that will survive the longest and have the largest impact will be AWS more than the Amazon marketplace itself.
Reminds me of this quote from Michael S. Malone in The Valley of Heart's Delight (2002)
> When will it end? I knowingly predicted Silicon Valley's imminent demise in 1980, 1985, 1989, and 1994. Eventually, I learned my lesson. The rest of the media world obviously has not--regularly indulging in yet another paroxysm of features about how the Valley is losing its crown to Austin, Orange County, Bangalore, even Boise.
> Perhaps. All I know is just months after the last time I predicted the Valley's end, I found myself regularly having lunch in a Chinese restuartant in Campbell with two young entrepreneurs... The company they were building was called Ebay.
Housing in Silicon Valley is much more expensive than it was then. It’s hard to live let alone innovate. It’s a FAANG goldmine where engineers are the miners.
> For example, Facebook is not an innovation. Facebook did not make socializing better. It made it worse. Was it at one point a new web site? Yes. Does it make money? Yes. But it is not innovative.
This is surprisingly hollow. Facebook took Instagram and WhatsApp and basically put it on steroids. Those apps couldn't have possibly been the behemoths they are now without Facebook's ample innovative, world-class sales, marketing, engineering weight behind it [0][1].
> Next consider Amazon. Yes Amazon (which is not based in Silicon Valley) made online shopping better. However, it is fundamentally just another middleman, and will not stand the test of time. True innovation, like the silicon chip itself, stands the test of time.
No no no. Amazon is probably one of the most innovative companies right now. You don't go from selling books to building a wildly profitable IT Enterprise business to winning the Emmys by resting on your laurels or being complacent.
His take on Amazon is incredibly ignorant. People act as if Prime 2 day shipping was a simple business decision because that's all they see. They can't see the supply chain optimization behind the scenes that allow this to be economical.
> Facebook took Instagram and WhatsApp and basically put it on steroids.
Ok, I’m tracking.
>Those apps couldn't have possibly been the behemoths they are now without Facebook's ample innovative, world-class sales, marketing, engineering weight behind it [0][1].
Wait what? How on earth did you land there? From your own video, Facebook left WhatsApp alone, and the value they got from Facebook was increased velocity. Absolutely nothing in that video indicates they would have failed or not continued the trajectory they were already on, it would’ve just taken a bit longer and probably had a different back-end.
Neeraj Arora: "You saw the result of that [Facebook's acquisition] because when we sold the company [WhatsApp] in 2014 we had 450M monthly active users and I think we doubled or tripled in a few years after that. So, it kind of shows that our speed of execution went up... it was just that we were able to hire aggressively, we were able to get a lot of other technical help from Facebook on the storage, on the server side of the things. They brought a lot of those things that we were trying to build ourselves that they already had... So, combining the two really turbo-charged the growth of WhatsApp. So, I think I'd say execution was flawless in terms of the deal."
> ...it would’ve just taken a bit longer
Yeah, we are in-agreement: "[Facebook] put its growth on steroids".
I'm leery to put advances in sales and marketing in the same category as engineering. An engineering advance adds total value, value that was not there before.
Advances in sales and marketing categorically don't do that. By definition they move value around that was pre-existing.
I agree that it's ignorant to call everything outside of programming and product ideation non-innovative. Though also, much of those giant companies' successes come from simply having a critical mass of dollars. At some point, it's sheer brute force.
I admit I'm not the most poetic of people, and often have trouble reading between the lines or finding deeper implications, but this:
> I would put the precise date as November 7, 2012, the day Dustin Curtis published his infamous blog post “The Best”. [...] When I first read it I thought it was brilliant satire. Then when I realized he was serious, I decided to leave myself. Dustin and his ilk had completely perverted the message of Steve Jobs.
completely baffled me. I don't get this, at all! I read that mentioned post, and it looked to me like an appreciation of working for quality that went beyond simply producing goods to be sold. I feel weirdly stupid because I cannot figure out what TFA is trying to imply there.
I recall that post being pretty polarizing on HN. I think PG himself showed up and ranted about how the people calling it consumerist schlock had it all wrong, and this was a sign of HN's decline or something. Anyway personally I found the post fairly repulsive. It reminded me of my thought patterns during some of my grossest excursions into materialist obsession - spending hours researching what "the best" thing to buy is, when I would have been much, much happier just getting something at random than agonizing about it - or just not buying anything at all.
I thought that this article was going talk about how 2020 broke apart SV and caused everyone to scatter. But to say it was 2012? No way. That totally misses out on Uber, Stripe, Coinbase, Lyft, Plaid, and many more.
1) Going global as quickly as possible. He aggressively moved into a lot of countries as quickly as possible with the same formula, and for the most part it worked.
2) He created an entire industry by having the balls to lower prices to the point where it fundamentally changed transportation. Everyone ubered everywhere (before the pandemic) and I know many people who sold their cars because ubering was cheaper.
The downside was that both are extremely capital intensive, which showed in how much money they raised. But I would say both techniques are extremely innovative and what most startups these days are trying to strive for.
I loved it and his writing style, I agree that it's rough premise and although there are counter arguments e.g. Stripe/Uber/Coinbase I think the overall argument is correct, the culture has changed.
But it's interesting to see so many argue that this is written in a self-aggrandizing, self-important style. Generally I agree with those people when it comes to LinkedIn style articles etc. e.g. [0] is a prime example.
But this one really resonated with me and comes across as extremely genuine hence my surprise at the reaction.
> [Amazon] is fundamentally just another middleman, and will not stand the test of time. True innovation, like the silicon chip itself, stands the test of time.
> Most importantly, Tesla continues to innovate.
I'm not sure what his definition of innovation is, here. Both Amazon and Tesla took existing technologies and ideas, put then together in a novel way, and iterated on them. Is it because Amazon (excluding AWS) doesn't build something physical? And if we include AWS, how can you argue that changing the way software infrastructure is managed not innovative?
Readit News
Also, I think it's important to appreciate that the formation and growth of Silicon Valley was a remarkably special thing but was bound to eventually hit the diminishing returns phase of faster compute, faster internet, smarter software, etc. Silicon Valley started with a transformative and enabling technology (the transistor) and from there we built a remarkable hardware and software ecosystem over the span of a few decades around that technology. Those seem to be the two elements in order to 'replicate' SV: a transformative technology that spurs an ecosystem of technologies, all of which interconnect and benefit from each others innovation.
Naming Musk as a key example of innovation just shows how far we have fallen. Contrast with SGI, Sun, 3dFX, Nvidia, Cisco, maybe Google, etc. Yes, many of these are unglamourous or dead now, but their lives are totally different than the Teslas (heavily reliant on government subsidies), the Ubers (mostly just matchmaking playing chicken with regulations), and so on.
Biotech, especially gene editing, comes to mind as a fast developing field. However, because it's health related, extensive testing and regulations means it will never evolve at the same pace as hardware and software did.
The one silver lining of this catastrophe of covid is that the FDA process has been turned up to 11. There is some hope that it'll stay that way after/if a vaccine is made. The ModeRNA vaccine is looking to be some amazing stuff and it would have taken at least a decade to get through before covid.
CRISPR-CAS9 technology and a faster FDA should result in some very good outcomes for all humans. The biotech centers of San Diego, Boston, NC Research Triangle, and Denver should see growth from that kind of a boom.
Covid-19 was a biological/social Big Bang?
Strange loops indeed.
Personally, I think Amazon's legacy will be AWS rather than online shopping. More than anyone else they've turned computing power into a utility. Like electricity this has made whole new types of businesses possible.
Edit: Still reading the article and want to note I don't mean this as a crticism. I'm really enjoying this story.
decentralization, democracy = good and the opposite = bad runs up against fundamental value propositions of economies of scale and specialization
Though you are right, I think the part that will survive the longest and have the largest impact will be AWS more than the Amazon marketplace itself.
Deleted Comment
> When will it end? I knowingly predicted Silicon Valley's imminent demise in 1980, 1985, 1989, and 1994. Eventually, I learned my lesson. The rest of the media world obviously has not--regularly indulging in yet another paroxysm of features about how the Valley is losing its crown to Austin, Orange County, Bangalore, even Boise.
> Perhaps. All I know is just months after the last time I predicted the Valley's end, I found myself regularly having lunch in a Chinese restuartant in Campbell with two young entrepreneurs... The company they were building was called Ebay.
> For example, Facebook is not an innovation. Facebook did not make socializing better. It made it worse. Was it at one point a new web site? Yes. Does it make money? Yes. But it is not innovative.
This is surprisingly hollow. Facebook took Instagram and WhatsApp and basically put it on steroids. Those apps couldn't have possibly been the behemoths they are now without Facebook's ample innovative, world-class sales, marketing, engineering weight behind it [0][1].
> Next consider Amazon. Yes Amazon (which is not based in Silicon Valley) made online shopping better. However, it is fundamentally just another middleman, and will not stand the test of time. True innovation, like the silicon chip itself, stands the test of time.
No no no. Amazon is probably one of the most innovative companies right now. You don't go from selling books to building a wildly profitable IT Enterprise business to winning the Emmys by resting on your laurels or being complacent.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJl27KvUDn0&t=34m47s
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18065897
The YouTube video I linked to is Neeraj Arora, early WhatsApp employee, on what Facebook's acquisition meant for WhatsApp.
Ok, I’m tracking.
>Those apps couldn't have possibly been the behemoths they are now without Facebook's ample innovative, world-class sales, marketing, engineering weight behind it [0][1].
Wait what? How on earth did you land there? From your own video, Facebook left WhatsApp alone, and the value they got from Facebook was increased velocity. Absolutely nothing in that video indicates they would have failed or not continued the trajectory they were already on, it would’ve just taken a bit longer and probably had a different back-end.
> ...it would’ve just taken a bit longer
Yeah, we are in-agreement: "[Facebook] put its growth on steroids".
Advances in sales and marketing categorically don't do that. By definition they move value around that was pre-existing.
Deleted Comment
> I would put the precise date as November 7, 2012, the day Dustin Curtis published his infamous blog post “The Best”. [...] When I first read it I thought it was brilliant satire. Then when I realized he was serious, I decided to leave myself. Dustin and his ilk had completely perverted the message of Steve Jobs.
completely baffled me. I don't get this, at all! I read that mentioned post, and it looked to me like an appreciation of working for quality that went beyond simply producing goods to be sold. I feel weirdly stupid because I cannot figure out what TFA is trying to imply there.
1) Going global as quickly as possible. He aggressively moved into a lot of countries as quickly as possible with the same formula, and for the most part it worked.
2) He created an entire industry by having the balls to lower prices to the point where it fundamentally changed transportation. Everyone ubered everywhere (before the pandemic) and I know many people who sold their cars because ubering was cheaper.
The downside was that both are extremely capital intensive, which showed in how much money they raised. But I would say both techniques are extremely innovative and what most startups these days are trying to strive for.
I think SVs decline will be more like jumping the shark in ideology than monetary failures.
I loved it and his writing style, I agree that it's rough premise and although there are counter arguments e.g. Stripe/Uber/Coinbase I think the overall argument is correct, the culture has changed.
But it's interesting to see so many argue that this is written in a self-aggrandizing, self-important style. Generally I agree with those people when it comes to LinkedIn style articles etc. e.g. [0] is a prime example.
But this one really resonated with me and comes across as extremely genuine hence my surprise at the reaction.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24901940
> Most importantly, Tesla continues to innovate.
I'm not sure what his definition of innovation is, here. Both Amazon and Tesla took existing technologies and ideas, put then together in a novel way, and iterated on them. Is it because Amazon (excluding AWS) doesn't build something physical? And if we include AWS, how can you argue that changing the way software infrastructure is managed not innovative?