'The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We're Dancing on its Grave' • Hacker News Board

Re: 'The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We're Dancing on its Grave'

#121

Post by Bud » Sat, May 19, 2012, 7:11 AM UTC

redthrowaway wrote: post #65

Bud wrote: post #5

Who cares what this guy thinks? He doesn't count either the iPhone or iPad among the most important innovations of the last 5 years, but two of his 4 choices are about cars, and another is Google Goggles. He also surmises that Silicon Valley is dead because of a few observations about Facebook, while ignoring that Apple has become the largest company in the history of the known universe.

>Who cares what this guy thinks? "This guy" is Steve Blank[1]. He's kind of a big deal in SV and the startup scene in general. Whether or not you agree with his assessment of Valley culture, his personal cachet is such that it behooves you to take notice. []1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Blank

Thank you for explaining who this guy is; I honestly did not know. I agree that if a person has a record like that, it's reasonable to give them a listen.

But I still disagree with this particular opinion of his. :)

Re: 'The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We're Dancing on its Grave'

#122

Post by forensic » Sat, May 19, 2012, 7:33 AM UTC

tsotha wrote: post #69

b_emery wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> things that have a material effect on people's quality of life. As opposed to Facebook. As much as I dislike Facebook, there is some scientific evidence that increasing one's social ties produces measurable improvements to health, including longevity. If Facebook increases social connectivity, which in my limited experience it does, it's not a stretch to suggest that it could materially improve one's quality of lif…

>As much as I dislike Facebook, there is some scientific evidence that increasing one's social ties produces measurable improvements to health, including longevity. Yes, increasing those ties in person . I have yet to see any evidence social media has the same effect. Also, those studies may have the causality arrow going the wrong way. Sick people tend to stay at home and not get out much, so it may be that you're m…

>I have yet to see any evidence social media has the same effect.

Have you looked for these studies? Are you an expert on this corner of the literature?

There have been studies and they do show that internet socialization has an effect on a variety of relevant measurements. To summarize, Internet socialization is not equivalent to face-to-face socialization but it does provide some of the benefits and is also able to provide benefits that face-to-face cannot provide.

I find it strange how people such as yourself will make statements about the literature as if your opinion had value. Your opinion about the literature is only valuable if you have studied the literature. If you have not, then you should remain silent if you want to be a valuable contributor.

Re: 'The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We're Dancing on its Grave'

#123

Post by mtkd » Sat, May 19, 2012, 7:50 AM UTC

Kickstarter is starting to fill this gap.

Re: 'The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We're Dancing on its Grave'

#124

Post by atarian » Sat, May 19, 2012, 7:54 AM UTC

temphn wrote: post #116

jluan wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the point you make contradicts Steve Blank's at all; to me, Blank's thesis is that startups in the Valley no longer choose to pursue truly disruptive technological innovation because our ecosystem now almost exclusively rewards areas such as social media, where you have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are, to the detriment of "hard tech" such as biotech, robotics, and the semiconductors…

Elon Musk made his fortune with Paypal, an internet company. Google made its fortune on the internet. There is nothing that prevents people from making the easier dollars first in something like Zynga and then going and putting their personal $10M to work on something of substance.

This. A lot of people forget that Elon Musk spent a large portion of his own money to fund new ventures from Paypal. Bill Gates is helping many disadvantaged people around the world with the money he earned from Microsoft. I'd also like to point out that a lot of these Internet companies contribute to charities, so the money isn't just a 100% flow up the hierarchy.

Re: 'The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We're Dancing on its Grave'

#125

Post by rdl » Sat, May 19, 2012, 8:44 AM UTC

I'm not sure if I buy his argument, but if you accept it, I think there's a natural limiting factor: recruiting.

The best engineers will produce the best products, either for local-mobile-social apps or space exploration. At some level, good software people are somewhat fungible -- a great engineer could work on either, given some orientation.

I believe the best engineers would rather cure cancer, colonize space, create anonymous digital currencies, etc., and produce infrastructure and developer tools which support those things, rather than work on ad networks, games, photo sharing sites, etc., given equal access. The reason people haven't gone into space for the past 30-40 years is that working for NASA is a horrible experience for an entrepreneur, and creating software or technology startups is much easier.

Now that "software has eaten the world" (which I do believe), a great software engineer can effectively start a space company. Sure, your first 10-20 employees at a new ad network or game company might be able to make enough on equity to do it, but employee 50 or employee 500 would sure rather be working on something amazing like space than yet another ad network.

Re: 'The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We're Dancing on its Grave'

#126

Post by forgottenpaswrd » Sat, May 19, 2012, 10:03 AM UTC

po wrote: post #91

I think the valuations are a bit of a bubble, but social media is real. In the dotcom bubble of 2001 I heard the same thing except with "internet" replacing "social media". In the last bubble there were no customers. Facebook makes $4 per user. The users are customers. They produce real revenue. Nobody's debating whether Facebook can make money. This may be true but how much of that $4 per user is driven by the bubbl…

This. Of course social media is real, of course having 900M customers is worth something. But trowing infinite amounts of money means you spend more that what is worth, in other words, it is a bubble.

In Spain we had this houses boom, and everybody said: but houses are real, you need them, they are necessary so they will never go down.

It is not qualitative, but qualitative. They make $4, but they need $100 for the stock to be fair price.

Fb founders are selling as much as they let them, Goldman S are going to sell at least 50%. This is the biggest scam I had seen for a while.

Re: 'The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We're Dancing on its Grave'

#127

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 19, 2012, 11:37 AM UTC

JPKab wrote: post #6

waterlesscloud wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the real stuff?

Cars that drive themselves. Distributed power generation. Web connected sensors in everything. You know, things that have a material effect on people's quality of life. As opposed to Facebook.

[deleted]

Re: 'The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We're Dancing on its Grave'

#128

Post by sigkill » Sat, May 19, 2012, 11:37 AM UTC

JPKab wrote: post #6

waterlesscloud wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the real stuff?

Cars that drive themselves. Distributed power generation. Web connected sensors in everything. You know, things that have a material effect on people's quality of life. As opposed to Facebook.

Facebook(the platform, not the company) was pretty instrumental for the Arab Spring.

Re: 'The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We're Dancing on its Grave'

#129

Post by agentgt » Sat, May 19, 2012, 12:07 PM UTC

If he thinks the Valley is bad he should try to get investors to invest in something long term on the east coast (Boston).

On the East coast the first question is "What are your Sales number?".(yes they really are like Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank). And "How is this going to scale?" (Cause lets face it social scales very well yet ironically in the east we didn't have the vision to first invest in it :) )

Re: 'The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We're Dancing on its Grave'

#130

Post by po » Sat, May 19, 2012, 1:16 PM UTC

po wrote: post #91

I think the valuations are a bit of a bubble, but social media is real. In the dotcom bubble of 2001 I heard the same thing except with "internet" replacing "social media". In the last bubble there were no customers. Facebook makes $4 per user. The users are customers. They produce real revenue. Nobody's debating whether Facebook can make money. This may be true but how much of that $4 per user is driven by the bubbl…

Thinking about this some more the part that drives me crazy is this: Facebook makes $4 per user. The users are customers.

That just doesn't follow. The advertisers are the customers. They happen to pay $4 for every person right now. If the advertisers dry up - because say, they go out of business or decide facebook isn't great value - then the facebook users are 'worth' a lot less.