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Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

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Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#41

Post by coldtea »

barrkel wrote: post #25
matte_black wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So don't build an AirBnB-like solution.

This means you will never build anything with zero marginal cost. That cuts out a lot of opportunities - and with software eating the world, more and more opportunities over time.

Only few companies can "win the world" by definition -- and besides work, it takes tons of luck, relinquishing control to VCs and stock markets, and boards, and all the right stars aligned. Plus the personal toll.

One is better off building something smaller, where work and talent is enough to maintain it.

There are more opportunities in those companies (e.g. a $1 to $50 million dollar business) of which there are tens of thousands, than to build the 1 in 100 behemoth.

You'll have more chances of success, and you'll live and sleep better. Because money, above a certain amount, also has a marginal utility curve and diminishing returns.

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#42

Post by soperj »

timewarrior wrote: post #12
sailingparrot wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do not have world conquering ambitions - which kinda works against them. Works against them towards what? Not wanting to conquer the world is legitimate, I don't see why everyone should absolutely want to become the next Bezos.

Imagine you build an AirBnb like solution limited to Switzerland market. AirBnb will eventually come and eat your lunch. In today's globalized world - if you are not one of the bigger players and do not have moat (govt contract, some other kind of exclusivity) - other bigger players will come after you.

You say that, but there are cases even in small countries where this didn't happen. Like trademe in New Zealand which was just like ebay. Ebay still hasn't become the major place to do auctions in new zealand.

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#43

Post by coldtea »

whatshisface wrote: post #8
sailingparrot wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do not have world conquering ambitions - which kinda works against them. Works against them towards what? Not wanting to conquer the world is legitimate, I don't see why everyone should absolutely want to become the next Bezos.

Sure, but if nobody in your country wants to conquer the world then the others will never reap the benefits of someone having conquered a piece of it.

No, but they'll reap the benefits of being decent people.

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#44

Post by rconti »

fuzzieozzie wrote: post #6

That lifestyle is possible in SV too .. it's a matter of how you choose priorities. At www.compilerworks.com we are purposefully bootstrapped to enable a high quality lifestyle (there are 3 of us in the Bay Area and 5 internationally).

I've worked a number of tech jobs in the valley, and while the expected work hours aren't exactly European, I can't really think of a time where I worked weekends other than being on call perhaps 1 week in 4 or 5, and I find the work hours quite regular. Then again, I'm not exactly a game developer.

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#45

Post by nextstep »

fuzzieozzie wrote: post #6

That lifestyle is possible in SV too .. it's a matter of how you choose priorities. At www.compilerworks.com we are purposefully bootstrapped to enable a high quality lifestyle (there are 3 of us in the Bay Area and 5 internationally).

I can work in SV and use great, reliable public transportation to get everywhere I want in my life, often in under an hour? And I can have 5 weeks paid vacation per year? I wasn't able to find these things when I lived there...

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#46

Post by Karrot_Kream »

timewarrior wrote: post #26
quickthrower2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Behind Silicon Valley on best technology and product building practices by at least 2 years. Can you elaborate on that? Are these "best practices" around technology or process? Are they found in books, or are the books out of date and you just have to 'be there' to discover them?

I used to be in SF and in South Bay. Recently moved to Seattle , closely associated to the India and Swiss tech ecosystem. In my experience further away you are from SF, less cutting edge you are. In my experience even South Bay is 6 months behind SF. SF is a big melting pot, where a huge amount of talent are trying out new things and they are open to sharing their experiences - be it about latest technologies or lat…

What does "cutting edge" mean? They don't use modern deployment startegies? They don't use recently popular web frameworks? "Cutting edge" is so vague it's not clear whether SV just cargo cults more or whether it's actually more technically innvovative.

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#47

Post by dekhn »

I worked for a major biotech company in Silicon Valley that was part-owned, then later fully-owned, by a large Swiss pharmaceutical company. Well, it wasn't really a pharma company so many as a collection of wealthy Swiss families that maintained cross-investments in each other's pharma companies because it was a profitable sector. But I digress.

Anyway, every year, the Swiss would send their top IT people to come look at our IT systems, and ask us questions about how we did things. What software we ran, how we administrated it, etc. They generally thought we were quite lazy and lax; noting that our sysadmins were from a wide collection of countries, one commented "At Roche, we only hire Swiss citizens to administer the SAP servers."

Later, Roche bought Genentech because it was far more profitable than any other investment Roche could make, and they generally adopted Genentech's approach to IT throughout the larger company. Pretty sure the SAP servers are still administered by Swiss citizens.

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#48

Post by hueving »

timewarrior wrote: post #26
quickthrower2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Behind Silicon Valley on best technology and product building practices by at least 2 years. Can you elaborate on that? Are these "best practices" around technology or process? Are they found in books, or are the books out of date and you just have to 'be there' to discover them?

I used to be in SF and in South Bay. Recently moved to Seattle , closely associated to the India and Swiss tech ecosystem. In my experience further away you are from SF, less cutting edge you are. In my experience even South Bay is 6 months behind SF. SF is a big melting pot, where a huge amount of talent are trying out new things and they are open to sharing their experiences - be it about latest technologies or lat…

This is satire, right? You're suggesting that ideas don't make it from SF to mountain view in less than 6 months with thousands of people commuting between the two each day and cross pollination of meetups on both sides.

Containerization and its orchestration all started in the south bay. Pray tell, what was in use in SF for 6 months before it hit the startups based in MV, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, etc.

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#49

Post by beatpanda »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #40
toomuchtodo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great observation: we need better accelerators to incubate startups that are more realistic and not willing to salt the earth to win at all costs [1]. [1] I'm not referring to YC specifically, but investors and incubators who are comfortable with Uber-esq behavior.

> "This is a great observation: we need better accelerators to incubate startups that are more realistic and not willing to salt the earth to win at all costs [1]." We already have that. They're called banks.

There's a huge gap between investments banks consider too risky and the kinds of things SV investors in particular want to fund.

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#50

Post by Karrot_Kream »

timewarrior wrote: post #26
quickthrower2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Behind Silicon Valley on best technology and product building practices by at least 2 years. Can you elaborate on that? Are these "best practices" around technology or process? Are they found in books, or are the books out of date and you just have to 'be there' to discover them?

I used to be in SF and in South Bay. Recently moved to Seattle , closely associated to the India and Swiss tech ecosystem. In my experience further away you are from SF, less cutting edge you are. In my experience even South Bay is 6 months behind SF. SF is a big melting pot, where a huge amount of talent are trying out new things and they are open to sharing their experiences - be it about latest technologies or lat…

I don't read the bit about the South Bay but that's absurd.

gRPC - Mountain View

Cgroups - Mountain View

Golang, Rust - Mountain View

Protobufs - Mountain View

Blaze - Mountain View

React - Menlo Park

Buck - Menlo Park

Thrift - Menlo Park

And this is only a fraction of it. Do you even work in tech? You sound like a talking head...

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