31–40 of 96 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, typically "girl," like "boy," refers to a child. Ms. Livingston is obviously an adult, so to many people the term "girl" comes across as belittling.
The correct term would be "the lady" or even better, "the interviewer".
One reason to live in the Valley is the opportunity to exercise outdoors in shorts and a t-shirt 365 days a year. That's why I want to move out there, anyway. Winter is highly overrated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world is better off when companies like Dropbox exist as large transformational forces of technology progress. If they all get strangled in their crib's progress slows. Imagine if Yahoo hadn't flubbed the acquisition of Google? We'd all be worse off.
What are you basing your comment on other than utopian world views?
It's pretty hard to prove these sorts of things, since it's hard to set up solid experiments with good controls in economics, but there is some interesting research around the what-drives-innovation question, and it's not an unreasonable hypothesis, at least.
Zuckerberg said he would stay in Boston or move to New York, in consideration with moving to Silicon Valley, if he was starting Facebook right now, and knew what he knows already. He would start a company in a location where it was commonplace to build sustainable businesses, with employees who grow within a company. He admitted that six or seven years ago, when he didn't know anything or anyone, he could not have done Facebook without being in Silicon Valley.
My thought is that if a big consumer-facing/social tech company like Facebook was successful in Boston (now or in the future), many more companies like Zynga and other startups would be based in Boston as well. Facebook's and Google's success (and their willingness to buy startups that may or may not have a viable business at the time) causes a side effect where highly paid employees save up money and quit these and similar companies in order to create startups just a few miles away.
After all, Zuckerberg also stated he believed that the next wave of applications will have to integrate with social networks or else will die. If this is true, he must expect that a ton of startups would be started in garages and incubators all around where such social networks are based (Facebook and Twitter, which happen to be in Palo Alto and San Francisco.)
It would probably be more accurate to believe that Zuckerberg means that Silicon Valley is the best place to start a company, but he wishes it had a startup culture that he believes other cities like Boston and New York have right now (while they don't have very many giant web properties headquartered there).
He doesn't realize that a Facebook in Boston would mean that 1) investors were more likely to invest in startups than they really had been and 2) the built-to-flip companies of ex-Google and ex-Facebook employees (and those of other companies) would now be based in Boston or New York, both factors changing the startup culture of that city.
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I'm guessing the reason you are being downvoted is because "the girl" is Jessica Livingston, a partner at YC, who has earned a lot of respect here on HN. I agree that Zuck seemed unprepared and rambled, frequently forgetting what he was talking about, but that's not something the host can control.
She also wrote Founders at Work, probably the best collection of interviews with tech founders around. We're going to need a little better critique than she "was not so good at it" to discredit her as an interviewer.
Instead, she continued asking the same question. For example: "What did you do right?". Come on, is she seriously trying to get a coherent answer out of Mark with that? Is there a SINGLE thing that Mark could've done right to build a successful worldwide product? It's like asking for a silver bullet for startups. There's none. And then she kept asking that question over and over again..
I'm not sure if anyone else caught Jessica trying to follow up about the serendipitous meetings of people like Sean Parker in the Valley. I think he's completely discounting some of the experiences and chance happenings that acted as a catalyst to Facebook's success. It goes back to what PG said at YCNYC that apparently he caught a lot of flack for - these types of occurrences, while they happen, are just far too inf…
Paul's example would better be supplemented by other stories like the telecom startup which was having a rough time, got in touch with Ron Conway who was an investor or FoF, Ron replied that he knew a telcom exec, and the company was saved.
You can absolutely create a scalable startup elsewhere but you have to be the right person with the right business.
One reason to live in the Valley is the opportunity to exercise outdoors in shorts and a t-shirt 365 days a year. That's why I want to move out there, anyway. Winter is highly overrated.
It got boring. Now I'm in Seattle and the weather is actually interesting. It rains a lot, and we have very occasional snowfall, but most of the time I can still motorcycle.
I'm not sure what this has to do with HN, except that outside of SF, Silly Valley weather is generally drama-free and leaves you more time for work. :)
One reason to live in the Valley is the opportunity to exercise outdoors in shorts and a t-shirt 365 days a year. That's why I want to move out there, anyway. Winter is highly overrated.
Silly Valley weather is mostly nice most of the year. I used to motorcycle all of the time (spent several years without a car). Off the bike, I wear sandals. Cow-orkers of mine were known for their invariant shorts-and-flipflops. It got boring. Now I'm in Seattle and the weather is actually interesting. It rains a lot, and we have very occasional snowfall, but most of the time I can still motorcycle. I'm not sure wha…