Silicon Valley's Big Lie

HughPickens.com writes: Danny Crichton writes at TechCrunch that startups in Silicon Valley run on an alchemy of ignorance and amnesia and that lying is a requisite and daily part of being a founder, the grease that keeps the startup flywheel running. Most startups fail. The vast, vast majority of startup employees will never exercise their options, let alone become millionaires while doing it. But founders have little choice as they sell their company to everyone, whether investors, employees, potential employees, or clients. "Founders have to tell the lie – that everything is fine, that a feature is going to launch even though the engineer for that feature hasn't been hired yet, that payroll will run even though the VC dollars are still nowhere on the horizon," writes Crichton. "For one of the most hyper-rational populations in the world, Silicon Valley runs off a myth about startup success, of the lowly founder conquering the world."

Comments

There have been 4 "Silicon Valleys".

[Anonymous Coward]

People often refer to "Silicon Valley" as if it were a place, but it's more like a term for a generation of individuals and companies, rather than just a place. Confusingly, there have been 4 distinct generations of "Silicon Valley", all using the same name.

The First Silicon Valley was from the time of WWII to around 1980. This was the pre-Internet Silicon Valley, which was dominated by the defense industry, heavy manufacturing, and the electronics industry. Lockheed, Shockley, Fairchild, Intel and Hewlett-Packard were some of the companies from this time.

1980 proved to be a turning point. At this point we saw the rise of personal computing and networking. Computing was going mainstream. Defense and heavy industry gave way to light computer hardware and software. This was the Second Silicon Valley. Apple, Sun, SCO, Oracle, Cisco and NeXT made their names known.

Around 1995, at the dawn of the World Wide Web, we saw another transition take place. This was when Yahoo, Netscape, eBay, PayPal and other Web-related properties, whose main focus was software, took off. This was the Third Silicon Valley generation.

The Third Silicon Valley generation was pretty much destroyed by the tech stock market collapse in early 2000. For several years people were unsure if there would even be another generation of Silicon Valley.

Much later, around 2005, we saw the rise of the Fourth Silicon Valley. This is when companies like the revived Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter really started making themselves known. They aren't about software so much as they are about advertising and the collection of personal data, with computing merely a tool to enable this on a massive scale.

The Fourth Silicon Valley also corresponds to the influx of "Hipsters" into the industry. The focus of software and service shifted from being useful to the consumer toward being "pretty" and otherwise satiating the Hipsters' desire for "creativity". We all know the trouble this has caused, from Windows 8's awful user experience to the destruction of Firefox's UI, through to the utter decimation of GNOME.

With any luck, the Fourth Silicon Valley will be coming to an end soon. It has proven itself to be the worst so far, in terms of what it has produced, and the harm it has caused. Every industry needs a renewal periodically, and the Fourth Silicon Valley is due for one.

The Fifth Silicon Valley will likely be made up of companies like Tesla, who are trying to provide useful and innovative products to the masses. It should be noted that many of the people behind such ventures are from the Third Silicon Valley. Not being Hipsters, these are people who knew how to make a real difference, not just take the hard work of others and ruin it.

No, Fourth Silicon Valley, which is rife with Hipsters and social rejects, will not mine asteroids. But I think that the Fifth Silicon Valley very well could! Unlike the Fourth Silicon Valley, the Fifth Silicon Valley will likely be made up of people who truly are gifted, and who will bring improvements, rather than the devastation of computer hardware, software, privacy and usability that the Fourth Silicon Valley's Hipsters have subjected us to.

Avoid companies that are there just to IPO

[tompaulco]

If you believe in the product you are creating, don't build it at a company whose vision is to build the company just to sell it or to IPO it. They don't care about the product, only selling the company. They will shortchange everywhere they can, cut corners, not test or QA, and eventually, once you have the product built, they will let you go before you get a chance to cash in.