There was already a lot of uncertainty in the valley before this happened.
The first bubble was a great purge of bad ideas, and people (based on skill or passion), it was fuel for the next evolution.
Any major change to the status quo is going to send some waves through the community, and I honestly think that were long over due for a correction not only in the broader market but in tech as well.
I can't tell whether you're endorsing this view or not by saying "that's the hope, anyway". If so, it seems obviously false. As anyone who has debugged code knows, even if what you have is bad, randomly making changes rarely ever makes it better.
We live in a golden age of humanity. War is less frequent, crime is down, technology is increasing at an incredible pace, medicine is better than it ever was. What is wrong with what we have?
I would definitely classify them as terrible and oppressive not "good". It has (had?) reached a point where you could literally lose your job for saying on Twitter that you support Trump. You would certainly be punished professionally for it. The media and our university system are very much at fault for creating such a culture of intolerance.
You've been caught in an echo chamber giving you biased info like many liberals. In the South, saying you're for Obama or Hillary can get the same results. You also get deleted off many people's social media if you push them on it.
This is one of those things that happens on both sides but the echo chambers tell each it only happens to theirs. Keeps people's attention, ad revenue goes up, and great divide remains strong.
Sadly the echo chamber I'm trapped in is our industry. If it were just a choice of media or people I knew from high school I wouldn't care. It's appalling to me that any political opinion can terminate your hard earned career in tech just because the people at the top feel they have a monopoly on the truth. This attitude is cultivated by the media and the universities they attended, which is why I view them as the root of corruption.
Oh, I might have misread you. So, you're saying the jobs you've worked disallowed all politics except stuff they dictated? That would be bad, too. The universities can make it worse.
Yes precisely. It's ok to talk about supporting Clinton but saying you support Trump brings instant retribution. I don't support either and even that wasn't something I could publicly state without great risk. Just like look at some VC's Twitter accounts.
The funny thing is that the VC model of maximizing the return on investment for a few while giving little to the many is the prime M.O. of Republican business. They also tend to target middle class and up in their offerings rather than aiding the poor. Hell, even the VC model promising it will deliver enough unicorns to make up for the others the fund loses money on is reminiscent of real estate promises & profit extraction of Trump's. Just quite a bit less bullshit and more well-off people getting results on Silicon Valley's end of that. ;)
So, they can't talk down to Trump supporters in businesses given all the overlap created by their elites extracting profits from bubbles or uncertain markets they create with little concern for others. There's certainly differences like with the immigration discussion. There's more common ground than they'd like to admit, though. Except for Thiel whose seems to be clear that Trump and his interests align. It might just be Thiel's personality but the business strategies match, too. That part was barely discussed here at least when I was in the YC vs Thiel threads.
Trumps scams benefited hardly anyone but him at cost of many. The SV model created many companies that benefited large numbers of people, a few disrupting entire industries for the better, most of the wealth going to a tiny few as usual, and possibility it's a bubble that can pop.
Much, much, less bullshit than what Trump was doing. Much more benefit overall. They're not the same. I'd take SV businesses over Trump's businesses any day.
There are underpinnings of a Grand Narrative in it; "good ideas" carry forth, "bad ideas" die. Evolution with "progress" and "always better" buried in the metanarrative. Even the metanarrative of evolution as having some sort of benevolent directionality.
I am not being snarky, and I am genuinely interested in how "bad ideas" (specifically what is a "bad idea") factor into the causation, as well as "skill" and "passion"?
Anyone correct me if I'm wrong, and this won't be comprehensive but here are some bad ideas
1. A me too idea
food delivery service for san francisco #5978978974
another online payment app like the 5 you have downloaded
pretentious chat app #749857987
As someone ramping up through vetting stages of successful founders to pitch to VC firms, and reading their feedback, they are so tired of me too ideas, and san francisco solving san franciscos own app problems. There multibillion dollar industries living off off excel files with almost zero people who know sql much less the structure of their own databases, but people dont want to innovate in those industries because its not sexy enough. Even VCs are like please stop if I hear about one more chat app today...
When an industry is overfunded inefficient and bad ideas can get funded too, as people pointed out in the .com crash alot of companies died, including people selling cat litter bags online, way before amazon prime existed or any type of optimized shipping or payment plan. People were just selling things online because they could, even if it was not more economical or beneficial for the customer.
Those ideas died off, and good too, because we were able to hone in on real economic problems or set backs and focus on providing those solutions
and we need that to happen again. Everybody needs to stop trying to be paypal and facebook and look at the other problems out there to solve, because there is alot, so I just have little sympathy for people who are failing with their me too ideas.
Now whether any of Trumps policies result in that or not I do now know nor am I educated enough to have an opinion on. Reading Goldman Sachs and UBS wealth management reports this morning post election, alot of details remain to be seen based on his appointments, which people have little idea of at this point, as he is such an outlier even in his own party and has been abandoned by much of it.
But it is true Silicon Valley has been expecting a bubble bust for months now, and that is clearly documented on almost every tech forum I read, so immediately
1. Blaming any outcomes on Trump is just inconsistent with the Valley's own prediction for itself
So given that we could quibble over Facebook and what social media is, it did come after MySpace. Me too?
How many things are "me too" in a culture? All design and art is iterative, and it would at least seem feasible that they build on the pieces around them.
Further, how many ideas[1] ended up hugely successful monetarily that existed previously in very similar incarnations? Hint: Think of any joke or quip and Google or search Twitter. Shockingly, you aren't the first...
One can only wonder how many of those VC investors are ignoring the contexts of chance and the contemporary culture timing?
There is also a cultural bias at play as well; the notion of one's thought / idea / concept as value of unique, versus cultural byproduct. Likely a Postmodern bit of theory in there, for another day...
WSJ uses referrer to determine their paywall. Most of us just copy the title and search it from Google as they don't wall users that come from Google traffic.
People are dreaming too much about this guy policies.
To me, he looks exactly like Sílvio Berlusconi: a self-centered egocentric, with the attention spam of a spider and the temperament of a 10 year old boy.
Like Berlusconi he simply wont be able to understand detailed policies or complex problems and doesn't have the intelligence or patience to stitch alliances and deals to implement those policies. Like Berlusconi, the only thing he understands is the "art of the small deals" that bring advantages to him.
Speaking as someone who suffered through four years of having a "Crack Mayor" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Ford), you're underestimating the damage a person like this can cause. He's someone who lived a life so ridiculous that the movie Tommy Boy is the closest anyone can get to explaining it. The parallels are surreal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUY6lDja-DE
Rob Ford would declare things as done long before votes had even been called, he would bully people into voting his way, and then he'd declare victory. Anyone who opposed him would be ground down, harassed, and if he couldn't fire them he'd persecute them until they got out of his way or they were no longer a threat.
Rob Ford didn't care what the rules were. He didn't care about decorum or tradition. He didn't care if what he said was unworkable, or if he lied, or if he offended people. He just did whatever came to mind, without question, without checking if he had the authority to.
Rob Ford was born into privilege, inherited an ownership position in a company worth millions of dollars, and has never had to work a day in his life. He was famous for showing up to work at 2pm and leaving by 4. He had the audacity to brag he'd never missed a day of work on a day he was missing work because he was in drug rehab.
Trump will do whatever he wants and there's not going to be anyone there to stop him. This is a man who's never been held to account for any of his actions. He has no concept of morality, nothing to keep him centered.
If anyone opposes him, he'll have them fired, blackballed, or tormented until they quit either in disgust or humiliation. He'll make George W. Bush look like a wimp, a man of half-measures, of someone who had too much empathy for his opponents.
If he's anything like Rob Ford, which Daniel Dale (https://twitter.com/ddale8), who covered Rob Ford in depth during his tenure will surely attest, we're looking at multiple scandals per day.
It got so bad near the end of Rob Ford's term that he'd give a press conference in the morning and have to apologize in another press conference in the afternoon and even then would almost fuck that up so badly he'd have to give another apology.
His main problem was substance abuse. That led to the the massive circus that was his last two years in office. Trump does not have this issue (or at least, doesn't seem to) so I don't think the comparison is justified.
You're being overly dramatic about Ford in general. His first year was actually productive and he delivered on many of his promises (freeze property taxes, repeal registration tax, privatize garbage collection, kill transit city). This isn't just me being generous, I'm echoing Robyn Doolittle, who was the reporter that broke the scandal, followed subsequent scandals and published Crazytown.
Thing is he destroyed everything he could touch. He "balanced" the budget by depleting cash reserves, he cost the city a fortune by cancelling projects that were already under-way, and his legacy is a single subway stop that costs $3 billion that we still don't know how to pay for. This is quite an achievement from a man who campaigned against the "gravy train".
It'll take twenty years to unwind the damage he's done, and we're just talking about a city where the Mayor is just one vote, they have very little executive authority.
He didn't have access to the most powerful military in the world. He didn't have a political party backing him up. He didn't have nuclear weapons. He did about as much damage as he could do.
Trump has a history of heavily relying on his own advisors for his own company, so I'd have a hard time believing he will cast this off. I do know when he does it is not pretty, but I don't believe that he does not listen to any of his advisors, so maybe if his advisors are good they will be able to adequately run realms of policy and run them well.
I have no idea if this is true or whether his experience with advisors that have served him well financially in the past would translate well to policy management in the white house, but it is not true that he does not rely heavily on advisors, which could turn out to be a good thing for everyone depending on who he appoints.
This does not mean I support Trump, but he is going to the President, and even before he was President jumping to assumptions does not help anyones point, if anything is disqualifies and gives more power to Trump and his party which daily offends many people, including myself.
This is happening though, and unlike the Mayor of Toronto, Trump has a history in successful business and turning bad neighborhoods in NYC and has alot of old school respect from people who remember the impact he had. You can contribute economically in a positive way to society and still be a crummy person. Alot of business men are like this, and think it entitles them to women as if they are goody bags.
This is coming from me, a woman, who cannot even begin to articulate the offense his words about women muster in me. But I know the women who are liberal who scream victims end up being victims even more. I wish calling people out on their crap worked but I know first hand it doesnt. So I was like WELP
I can drink whiskey for the rest of my life in an introductory level Engineering job and hate my life, and we live on in this old school inequality, or I can show that I have what it takes and I can take on the challenge.
Now, lets be clear, I still drink whiskey from time to time, but not every night anymore out of emotional distress.
I sympathize, but I have to get up and go to work everyday and earn respect from men to get ahead in life so I can scream and moan and yell or I can act like an adult and try to understand what makes these people successful and often times there are elements about them that are very intelligent that people never learn because they are too busy hating them. People need to learn that you can be successful and be a dickbag, and to be a successful non dickbag you will at some point interact with dickbags. You can learn from them and set the example that you too can be a leader in many ways without having to act like them, which is really the biggest weapon we have against people like this, or you can cry about it.
And lets be clear, men like this that I work for now, do not treat me this way, because they know that I don't put up with that crap. I change the way I interact with men to make it clear it aint gonna work. It's not a judgment of other girls and victims of Trump, it's just me and my experience working with men in business who have egos bigger than Trump.
Again, I'm not giving this guy free rides or condoning him, but we need to be realistic moving forward. SO many of my female friends are in tears still and yelling and screaming, and yo, I gotya girl, I do, so lets like be awesome together and show them we can do it too because crying just gives men like this more power.
Or perhaps not, for as you point out, many, they're mostly the GOPe(stablishment) types, hate him. Hard to negotiate with such people, will no doubt be harder after all the lame duck session stunts they'll pull.
I suspect he's considering a 2 year campaign against a "Do Nothing Congress" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80th_United_States_Congress) as a threat to get them in line, and/or to get rid of a bunch of them in 2018 so he can accomplish a bunch of his promises that require the cooperation of the Congress.
you're very smart. Your comparison with Berlusconi is accurate and entertaining. But here's the problem.
Smart isn't enough. You need generosity. The main problem with the past 70-years Hayek/Randian "every man for himself" dogma is that it leaves large parts of your fellow, less intellectually talented, human beings, behind. But believe it or not, those "lesser" human beings are often the very source of your happiness, because they are the ones who are not striving for financial gain. They are the ones who soothe your soul. They have non-monetary skills which you will never have. They are the ones who glue a society together. You're clever, and you owe them for the healthy society which they, unlike you, are intrinsic to. Trump, obliquely, has tapped into that disjoint.
Let me put this more simply. Imagine a world exclusively populated with disdainful high-iq people such as you. I call that a smart but heartless place. Hell.
I agree with your point that we terribly undervalue non-financial contributions, but I think you're wrong to put intelligence and kindness at opposite ends of a scale. I've never seen anything to suggest that they're not orthogonal.
Silicon Valley is about to put a third of Americans out of jobs, and rather than having the entire bay area sacked and pillaged Trump has somehow managed to shift the blame onto immigrants and minorities.
Innovation has always and will forever put people out of jobs while simultaneously creating new ones. Are you suggesting that innovation is just as bad for our country as Donald Trump?
Will the people being put out of work be skilled enough to operate these new jobs? What happens when we get AI that is comparable in capability to the average worker?
The uncertainty is worse for highly regulated industries, like financial services. It's unclear what will happen with Dodd-Frank, FRTB, DOL fiduciary rule, etc. This has potentially large, adverse impact on consulting and RegTech firms - customers prefer a "wait & see" approach where costs and decisions are deferred during periods of regulatory uncertainty.
54 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 97.9 ms ] threadThere was already a lot of uncertainty in the valley before this happened.
The first bubble was a great purge of bad ideas, and people (based on skill or passion), it was fuel for the next evolution.
Any major change to the status quo is going to send some waves through the community, and I honestly think that were long over due for a correction not only in the broader market but in tech as well.
Frankly, it might be a good thing.
This is one of those things that happens on both sides but the echo chambers tell each it only happens to theirs. Keeps people's attention, ad revenue goes up, and great divide remains strong.
So, they can't talk down to Trump supporters in businesses given all the overlap created by their elites extracting profits from bubbles or uncertain markets they create with little concern for others. There's certainly differences like with the immigration discussion. There's more common ground than they'd like to admit, though. Except for Thiel whose seems to be clear that Trump and his interests align. It might just be Thiel's personality but the business strategies match, too. That part was barely discussed here at least when I was in the YC vs Thiel threads.
Much, much, less bullshit than what Trump was doing. Much more benefit overall. They're not the same. I'd take SV businesses over Trump's businesses any day.
There are underpinnings of a Grand Narrative in it; "good ideas" carry forth, "bad ideas" die. Evolution with "progress" and "always better" buried in the metanarrative. Even the metanarrative of evolution as having some sort of benevolent directionality.
I am not being snarky, and I am genuinely interested in how "bad ideas" (specifically what is a "bad idea") factor into the causation, as well as "skill" and "passion"?
1. A me too idea
food delivery service for san francisco #5978978974 another online payment app like the 5 you have downloaded pretentious chat app #749857987
As someone ramping up through vetting stages of successful founders to pitch to VC firms, and reading their feedback, they are so tired of me too ideas, and san francisco solving san franciscos own app problems. There multibillion dollar industries living off off excel files with almost zero people who know sql much less the structure of their own databases, but people dont want to innovate in those industries because its not sexy enough. Even VCs are like please stop if I hear about one more chat app today...
When an industry is overfunded inefficient and bad ideas can get funded too, as people pointed out in the .com crash alot of companies died, including people selling cat litter bags online, way before amazon prime existed or any type of optimized shipping or payment plan. People were just selling things online because they could, even if it was not more economical or beneficial for the customer.
Those ideas died off, and good too, because we were able to hone in on real economic problems or set backs and focus on providing those solutions
and we need that to happen again. Everybody needs to stop trying to be paypal and facebook and look at the other problems out there to solve, because there is alot, so I just have little sympathy for people who are failing with their me too ideas.
Now whether any of Trumps policies result in that or not I do now know nor am I educated enough to have an opinion on. Reading Goldman Sachs and UBS wealth management reports this morning post election, alot of details remain to be seen based on his appointments, which people have little idea of at this point, as he is such an outlier even in his own party and has been abandoned by much of it.
But it is true Silicon Valley has been expecting a bubble bust for months now, and that is clearly documented on almost every tech forum I read, so immediately
1. Blaming any outcomes on Trump is just inconsistent with the Valley's own prediction for itself
2. Not necessarily a bad thing
You mean the same tech forums that have been predicting a bubble burst for 5 years now?
How many things are "me too" in a culture? All design and art is iterative, and it would at least seem feasible that they build on the pieces around them.
Further, how many ideas[1] ended up hugely successful monetarily that existed previously in very similar incarnations? Hint: Think of any joke or quip and Google or search Twitter. Shockingly, you aren't the first...
One can only wonder how many of those VC investors are ignoring the contexts of chance and the contemporary culture timing?
There is also a cultural bias at play as well; the notion of one's thought / idea / concept as value of unique, versus cultural byproduct. Likely a Postmodern bit of theory in there, for another day...
To me, he looks exactly like Sílvio Berlusconi: a self-centered egocentric, with the attention spam of a spider and the temperament of a 10 year old boy.
Like Berlusconi he simply wont be able to understand detailed policies or complex problems and doesn't have the intelligence or patience to stitch alliances and deals to implement those policies. Like Berlusconi, the only thing he understands is the "art of the small deals" that bring advantages to him.
Edit: I am not the only one saying this: http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21709984-americans-coul...
Rob Ford would declare things as done long before votes had even been called, he would bully people into voting his way, and then he'd declare victory. Anyone who opposed him would be ground down, harassed, and if he couldn't fire them he'd persecute them until they got out of his way or they were no longer a threat.
Rob Ford didn't care what the rules were. He didn't care about decorum or tradition. He didn't care if what he said was unworkable, or if he lied, or if he offended people. He just did whatever came to mind, without question, without checking if he had the authority to.
Rob Ford was born into privilege, inherited an ownership position in a company worth millions of dollars, and has never had to work a day in his life. He was famous for showing up to work at 2pm and leaving by 4. He had the audacity to brag he'd never missed a day of work on a day he was missing work because he was in drug rehab.
Trump will do whatever he wants and there's not going to be anyone there to stop him. This is a man who's never been held to account for any of his actions. He has no concept of morality, nothing to keep him centered.
If anyone opposes him, he'll have them fired, blackballed, or tormented until they quit either in disgust or humiliation. He'll make George W. Bush look like a wimp, a man of half-measures, of someone who had too much empathy for his opponents.
If he's anything like Rob Ford, which Daniel Dale (https://twitter.com/ddale8), who covered Rob Ford in depth during his tenure will surely attest, we're looking at multiple scandals per day.
It got so bad near the end of Rob Ford's term that he'd give a press conference in the morning and have to apologize in another press conference in the afternoon and even then would almost fuck that up so badly he'd have to give another apology.
This shit is real and it's ugly.
His main problem was substance abuse. That led to the the massive circus that was his last two years in office. Trump does not have this issue (or at least, doesn't seem to) so I don't think the comparison is justified.
You're being overly dramatic about Ford in general. His first year was actually productive and he delivered on many of his promises (freeze property taxes, repeal registration tax, privatize garbage collection, kill transit city). This isn't just me being generous, I'm echoing Robyn Doolittle, who was the reporter that broke the scandal, followed subsequent scandals and published Crazytown.
Pretty sure he doesn't drink or anything because of what happened to his brother.
It'll take twenty years to unwind the damage he's done, and we're just talking about a city where the Mayor is just one vote, they have very little executive authority.
He didn't have access to the most powerful military in the world. He didn't have a political party backing him up. He didn't have nuclear weapons. He did about as much damage as he could do.
You mean like how the CEO of Grubhub is doing an "ideological cleansing" of his company now[0]?
[0] 11/10 http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/11/10/boss-tells-pro-trump-em...
I have no idea if this is true or whether his experience with advisors that have served him well financially in the past would translate well to policy management in the white house, but it is not true that he does not rely heavily on advisors, which could turn out to be a good thing for everyone depending on who he appoints.
This does not mean I support Trump, but he is going to the President, and even before he was President jumping to assumptions does not help anyones point, if anything is disqualifies and gives more power to Trump and his party which daily offends many people, including myself.
This is happening though, and unlike the Mayor of Toronto, Trump has a history in successful business and turning bad neighborhoods in NYC and has alot of old school respect from people who remember the impact he had. You can contribute economically in a positive way to society and still be a crummy person. Alot of business men are like this, and think it entitles them to women as if they are goody bags.
This is coming from me, a woman, who cannot even begin to articulate the offense his words about women muster in me. But I know the women who are liberal who scream victims end up being victims even more. I wish calling people out on their crap worked but I know first hand it doesnt. So I was like WELP
I can drink whiskey for the rest of my life in an introductory level Engineering job and hate my life, and we live on in this old school inequality, or I can show that I have what it takes and I can take on the challenge.
Now, lets be clear, I still drink whiskey from time to time, but not every night anymore out of emotional distress.
I sympathize, but I have to get up and go to work everyday and earn respect from men to get ahead in life so I can scream and moan and yell or I can act like an adult and try to understand what makes these people successful and often times there are elements about them that are very intelligent that people never learn because they are too busy hating them. People need to learn that you can be successful and be a dickbag, and to be a successful non dickbag you will at some point interact with dickbags. You can learn from them and set the example that you too can be a leader in many ways without having to act like them, which is really the biggest weapon we have against people like this, or you can cry about it.
And lets be clear, men like this that I work for now, do not treat me this way, because they know that I don't put up with that crap. I change the way I interact with men to make it clear it aint gonna work. It's not a judgment of other girls and victims of Trump, it's just me and my experience working with men in business who have egos bigger than Trump.
Again, I'm not giving this guy free rides or condoning him, but we need to be realistic moving forward. SO many of my female friends are in tears still and yelling and screaming, and yo, I gotya girl, I do, so lets like be awesome together and show them we can do it too because crying just gives men like this more power.
Does he need to?
Has at least 2 years of completely republican rule.
I suspect he's considering a 2 year campaign against a "Do Nothing Congress" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80th_United_States_Congress) as a threat to get them in line, and/or to get rid of a bunch of them in 2018 so he can accomplish a bunch of his promises that require the cooperation of the Congress.
Smart isn't enough. You need generosity. The main problem with the past 70-years Hayek/Randian "every man for himself" dogma is that it leaves large parts of your fellow, less intellectually talented, human beings, behind. But believe it or not, those "lesser" human beings are often the very source of your happiness, because they are the ones who are not striving for financial gain. They are the ones who soothe your soul. They have non-monetary skills which you will never have. They are the ones who glue a society together. You're clever, and you owe them for the healthy society which they, unlike you, are intrinsic to. Trump, obliquely, has tapped into that disjoint.
Let me put this more simply. Imagine a world exclusively populated with disdainful high-iq people such as you. I call that a smart but heartless place. Hell.
Just putting things in perspective...