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Silicon Valley's Loony Cheerleading Culture Is Out of Control
Nerval's Lobster writes "Kernel editor-in-chief and noted firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos swings away at Silicon Valley's current startup culture, noting that it's resulted in herds of wannabe founders and startup groupies who don't exactly have a track record of starting successful companies or even producing solid code. 'Though they produce little of value, they are the naive soft power behind aggressive capitalist machines in Silicon Valley: the trend-setting vanguard of the global Web and mobile industries,' he writes. 'We should be very wary indeed of these vacuous cheerleaders whose vague waffle about the transformational potential of photo-sharing apps is more sinister and Orwellian than anything dreamt up by a dictator.' How long can such a culture continue before it dries up, and the whole tech-investment cycle begins anew?"
While the content being generated by these startups may be vacuous, there is at least the spark of new ideas (in some cases) or tangental thought that leads to other ideas. Someone else does the real legwork if it's a good spark, if these small startups can only talk the talk. Contrast the want-to-do's with the Microsoft archtype of staying safe and not innovating or thinking fresh.
There is some value to the cheerleading, even if it's just to provide grain for others to mill.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
How long can such a culture continue before it dries up, and the whole tech-investment cycle begins anew?
As long as people with money keep getting sucked in by it
than the attitudes prevalent prior to the dot com bubble (and subsequent bust) in the late 1990s? All of that money being poured into companies with little to no revenue and no solid plans to generate revenue. It blew my mind at the time.
"War makes me sad." - Me
As someone who has optioned sub-rentals on a lot of garages in Silicon Valley, I can't complain. Nothing attracts VC money like showing off how you're young, hip, and working in a garage in Silicon Valley!
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
What we're seeing here is that Silicon Valley has become no different than any other business/industry group. Flash, buzzwords, bullshit, business lunches, golf - People that are good at appearances rule in the business community, mostly to the harm of everyone else.
In every boom there are con men who see piles of cash and people desperate to invest it. It has always annoyed me when these guys skip in from low-integrity industries like property development, come up with an idea that might even be impossible: "cluster smartphones into supercomputers for small business", round up millions of dollars, have the biggest booths at the local tech conferences, hire up a bunch of dillweeds, rent A+ locations, appear in dozens of self promoting articles "Top 40 under 40", drive around in $90,000 leased cars, and then flame out in a huge way. The only good thing is that when the bankruptcy people liquidate their stuff the stacks of unopened Aeron chairs and the Alienware computers go really cheap.
The massive downside is that they give a black eye to, or outbid, anyone with a valid product trying to raise money, hire developers, and rent locations.
"the transformational potential of photo-sharing apps is more sinister and Orwellian than anything dreamt up by a dictator."
Flickr is worse than Hitler? What?
No, Milo's prose is worse than a triple shot cappuccino addled New York Times intern.
Sounds like somebody got a hold of something too strong at Burning Man. Slow down guy, it's not worth getting that worked up about stuff like this.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
(If he'd had a modern PR team, he'd have branded himself Hitlr)
Dot.com 1.0 in the 1990s. A.I. and Pen computing in the 1980s. COBOL in the 1960s.
It reaches this point when pundents say "eveyone should be a programmer". "It should be taught to 8 year olds and English majors." I've even heard some politicians say this in the last year. Not everyone has the temperment, motivation, special creativity to be a good programmer.
The field turns into a bubble, it collapses and compuer science departments shrink. Inevitable.
I think someone is upset at the changes Yahoo is doing now that they have Tumblr. All of his llama porn was de-indexed.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
They do it because it's hot, new, cool, chic, hip, swag, fly, swank, vogue, and gosh-darnit a whole lotta fun!
The real legacy of Steve Jobs was to engender feelings of inadequacy in a whole generation of tech bosses. So instead of solid, maybe a little boring, mostly behind-the-scenes approach to technological development, we have everyone and their grandmother trying to emulate the once great king of consumer tech (long live the king!) with dramatic unveiling ceremonies that remind one more of a pop concert than a product release. Frankly, in some cases it's a little embarrassing, because not everyone can pull it off. In fact most people can't. So don't do it because you suck at it. I'm also looking at you, TED.
When investors realize that new =/= good (and in most cases = shit), then we might finally witness the inevitable implosion and with any luck a healthier restructuring of the tech industry. But until then, thundercats ho!
Well its the old rant - English majors who get upset when the status quo looks like it might being moving slightly to valuing technical skills.
You forget the "crash" step.
I am "bootstrapping" my latest venture and we are Doing quite well. But, I simply can't stand to talk to other startups. It is always "how much money we raised" or "how much are you raising" - the conversations never are about how much cash you are making and how many paying customers you have.
There is a lot of allure to raising money and a lot of back patting, which is why I just can't stand them.
Welcome to Zombocom! www.zombo.com
I would agree Milo is laying it on waaaaay too heavy here....but, honestly, have you met the people he's describing? "Evangelists", "Community Developers", "Mentors", "Facilitators" and their ilk? They have no technical skills to value.
In the site/book Stuff White People Like, the article about "Awareness" summed up much of this mentality:
Getting clean water consistently in a hell hole like much of Africa is a truly transformative experience for many people. Public sanitation, reliable electricity, etc. Nothing your mobile/web app is doing is as transformative for the world as replicating consistent, basic utilities for all of mankind. It's unsexy work that is more commonly associated with redneck laborers (guys who actually make these systems work) than hipsters.
Of course there is always the view that the language you "learn" with in school is largely irrelevant, learning how to develop software and solve problems is the skill. The underlying concepts are what's important, not that you understand the specific syntax of the language -- My undergrad program was taught *entirely* in Java -- I haven’t written a single line of Java code since graduation.
Technology companies have produced remarkably brilliant new opportunities and efficiencies, but they have also raised the specter of lives bled of purpose, of the inhumanity of the new social structures that are emerging. What do we do to keep everyone gainfully occupied when globalization and technological change render the bottom two thirds of society redundant?
This is a point that I always feel gratified reading, and it really cannot be stated often enough. We are reaching a stage where we simply don't need as many people employed as we used to. Instagram was worth $1 billion when it was bought by Facebook, and it had only 13 employees. Could you imagine thirty years ago any business at all being worth that sort of money with a dozen employees?
It isn't just web services though, it's the manufacturing and retail / service sectors too. Even down to those obnoxious self checkout machines in supermarkets, which are costing several people a job while at the same time making the customer do more of the work.
We're already in a position where job creation is lagging population growth. How much worse will it need to get before people actually start discussing this?
(My pet solution is a guaranteed minimum income, enough to allow people to live comfortably with a decent amount of disposable income.)
Someone found a thesaurus!
"The artifice of start-up culture is a portent of what is to come."
"At once the zenith of the cult of excessively educated bourgeois bohemians and nadir of a glossy new venture-capital-funded geek culture..."
This reads as a writers masturbatory exercise.
I had a good position in a large, solid software company for over 8 years, but last year I was feeling bored of doing the same things for so long, and my thinking was: "well, I live in Silicon Valley so I should give a start-up a chance", so I started looking around. The sheer amount of start-ups out there with grandiose visions of changing the world is insane!
I can absolutely validate some of the comments on this thread as I've seen them myself, but what I really want to emphasize here, is that start-up "CEOs" will lie, and will promise you infinite wealth with no backing whatsoever. It not only about the products, which many times sound good (even if they are just smoke and mirrors), but it's also about their business practices. Many of these companies don't yet have a culture other than "survive and grow", so ethics and even business appropriate behavior is not there. Many times their HR is just an external service and there is no recourse if you have an issue.
I ended up leaving my position, joining the start-up and working my ass off for almost half a year when I realized this was really going nowhere. One day, out of the blue, the CEO called me to his office and said "we need you too leave" just like that. No explanation other than "there is no fit". Later on I realized he was right, I was no fit for their "culture", and I ended up coming back to my former employer, this time in a better role with 20-25% more pay than I had before. But I know I was also lucky. It could have been way worst.
So here are my lessons learned in hopes that this will be useful to anyone out there:
- Do your homework. Research the leadership team, their track record of success or failure as well as each one of their investors.
- Don't trust in anything verbal. Every promise must be clearly in writing
- Negotiate your contract. Never take their "stock contract" that only protects them. Invest in a legal service ahead of time and have your own template.
- Make sure you negotiate your exit as part of the contract. It's like a pre-nuptial agreement. You can't imagine it's going to be useful some day. - When you are evaluating a company, leave your passion, your beliefs and your ideals at the door. It's business. Look at them as a business that will be the source of your livelihood. How viable are they really?
If any of the points above don't click, then leave. Don't take it. There are another hundred of them out there. Most will die but a few will make it. Do everything in your power to choose wisely.
also: NASA and NIST have major presence in Boulder...i think Deep Impact control was in Boulder?
the Boulder tech sector is mini, but it exists...it's alot of little ad-on companies that have one institutional client (usually military)
technically, if two GIS PhD's take their geospatial mapping program they developed for their thesis and then use their connections from their academic program to basically implement their thesis project into some government project...
technically, that's a "startup" but I don't think it applies in this context...
because of things like facebook, people think of a "startup" as a small new company planning to become big that provides a product or service they would use
many "startups" are not that...they are just an extention of academia into the government contracting sector
even Microsoft started that way...the military wanted a computer on every desk, and IBM was the contractor...IBM needed to find some company that would shut up and follow orders...enter Bill Gates...
it was the money from that contract that made M$ successful...sure it's a 'startup' and no one would turn down those riches...but in analyzing 'what's wrong with startup culture' we have to make sure we know what we mean
Thank you Dave Raggett
is scale
in all facets...data travels faster, what was text is now video, 'mobile', cpu speeds are exponetially higher...
which means *we can do more*
my example is Goldman/Sach's style high speed trading...they use Erlang to make trades litterally as fast as the wires can transmit the data and exploit latencies for $$$...were talking microseconds...
that means a market changing scale of trading (profit) in a non-human readable timeframe...
that is different
I surely agree that somewhere in the comparison between the original '.com bubble' and now you can say, "it's all the same...it's all just X"
TFA lists out 5 differences that I think are *very insightful*
Now, if you said that 1 & 3 were as true in 1890 as in 1990 I would agree...still comparitively now might be stronger
#2 is a hardcore truth that could make someone a billion dollars...the sheer ease at which a person can switch social networks or copy and share music is a technical advancement that fundamentally alters the economic factors in consumer decisions...a 'game changer' as they say
one billion users could leave facebook with 4 clicks of a mouse in a day (if you had good IT guys running your servers ;)
IBM never had to *consider* a mass exodus of subscribers in such a fasion
#4 & 5 go together and represent valuable 'case study' data...you can't know if Silicon Valley guys are truly 'tech' unless you talk to them, look over their shoulder, etc...a Shaun Parker can make himself out to be a Shaun Fanning easily...
heh, it's sort of like when Oliva Munn was on that Gamer show...the controversy over whether she was really a 'gamer' or just a hottie bimbo...I always said I assume the latter until I play her in SFII turbo *myself*
So yeah, it's different...and IMHO, for the 5 reasons in TFA, I think that difference is significant
Thank you Dave Raggett