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Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

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Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#61

Post by stcredzero »

vikiomega9 wrote: post #46
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #30

One of the attributes of The Valley that are not easily reproduced is the forced cross pollination of knowledge and experience among the tech work force. This is forced through layoffs as companies, industries and the economy run through their cycles. This cross pollination leads to several outcomes: 1. the workforce is diverse in experience; 2. employees tend to work harder and longer hours in order to keep their jo…

Is there a model for this? I'm asking because cross pollination can happen through other means. High density of conferences, strength of networks among other means. This argument is reminiscent of reformations and the political landscape of Europe way back when.

This argument is reminiscent of reformations and the political landscape of Europe way back when.

Frank Herbert, the author of the Original Dune books, once made the observation that corporate hierarchies are very much like feudal hierarchies.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#62

Post by user5994461 »

icu wrote: post #8

With the greatest respect for Mr. Thiel and his accomplishments I'm skeptical. I've travelled the world and my experience is that very few places in the world have America's, often irrational, can-do attitude, appetite for new venture risk, and societal acceptance of new venture failure as an important part of the entrepreneurial process. I just don't think it's that easy to graft these cultural norms to other cultur…

The issue is not about the culture, it's the market size.

USA has 300 million high value customers. Any successful company will be massive.

There is hardly any other big market like that in the world.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#63

Post by rothbardrand »

rdiddly wrote: post #57

There really is no rational reason why the phenomenon of Silicon Valley should exist. And at this point if there were anything special Silicon Valley knew that nobody else did, that knowledge has been pretty widely disseminated. And yet for all that, I suspect he's still wrong.

He's right, but "Silicon Valley" only exists in the minds of silicon valley maximalists who live in a bit of a filter bubble.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#64

Post by rothbardrand »

twblalock wrote: post #11
dmode wrote: post #3

This is not a profound statement, but rather obvious. If may calculations are right, there are roughly 6 billion 993 million people outside of Silicon Valley

Why did Silicon Valley ever become what it is, and why did it continue to be dominant in the tech industry for so long, when there were billions of people outside of Silicon Valley the entire time? Clearly population numbers are not sufficient in themselves to explain why the situation will change.

Silicon Valley is not dominant now. It is merely perceived as dominant by a cult of silicon valley, which exists primarily in the heads of people who live in SV.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#65

Post by gitah »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #24
melling wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He referenced China. Any big startups come out of there?

China is a different case. Any successful tech company will be ruthlessly copied and scaled in China by mercantilist policies which work quite well. But there are no Chinese brands that are widespread household names out of China. Even if a billion Chinese use renren the rest of the world uses Facebook (and maybe vk). Even if a billion Chinese use Baidu the rest of the world uses google (and maybe yahoo, in Japan, fo…

Just walk around a BestBuy in the US and you'll quickly realize how many Chinese brands there are: TP-Link routers, Huawei routers and phones, Lenovo laptops, Hisense TVs, ZTE phones, DJI drones, Haier appliances, Ninebot scooters, Instantpot press cookers, etc. If you also count brands owned by Chinese companies than include GE appliances and Motorola, Alcatel, Blackberry smartphones.

Go on Amazon.com and Chinese brands are bestsellers in many electronic categories: Anker/Sunvalleytek in phone accessories, Yi in action cameras and dash cams and security cameras, TCL in televisions, etc.

Also the rest of the world isn't just US. Chinese smartphone brands have 50% marketshare world wide. Xiaomi, Huawei, OPPO are growing fast in South Asia, South East Asian and MENA. Transsion (you've probably never even heard of this company) owns phone brands that dominate Africa and is the marketshare leader there. Chinese home appliance and consumer electronic brands are also big in non-western countries.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#66

Post by CalChris »

derekp7 wrote: post #21
aaron-lebo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did say SV, which is probably true. Europe may or may not have the culture you are suggesting, China might have that hunger but no business started there is safe from gov control, Russia has that control without the economic growth, a lot of places are too small. But...there's probably a dozen cities in the US where you could get everything you can in SV (ok, maybe not the monoculture, the crazy VCs, the crazy cos…

I wonder why Chicago isn't more of a major destination for tech companies. The city is highly walkable, has excellent transportation infrastructure, and low cost nice housing is plentiful within an hour commute by train or car. You can get a nice house for less than 200k, apartment rent is around 600 - 1000 a month. In the city, there are a lot of old 3-4 story houses that have been converted to each floor being a re…

University of Chicago isn't a bad school. I am, however, straining to think of another Chicago research university. But then compare it to Stanford+Cal+UCSF and it just isn't a fair fight.

An underrated advantage in SV is its top tier legal and capital talent. WSGR, Cooley, Fenwick, ... are outstanding. For VCs you can start with Sequoia at the top and work your way all the way down to angels. L+S did a demo in Andy Bechtolsheim's garage and walked away with a check for $250,000. That just ain't happening in Chicago.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#67

Post by nostrademons »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #25
tomaha wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there are nice options in the US and you'll have a much more comfortable life. But if you want to learn as much as you can, if you want to have as many options as you could possible have, and quiet frankly earn as much as you could, you'll likely should move to SV and no other place in the US will even come close to that. The bleeding edge of technology is and will be in SV and China (and China is not re…

You can learn an unbelievable amount sitting in your room in your underwear and work with and on world class projects. There are more free resources than ever before, location is not a constraint.

The difference is largely in the domain knowledge. You can learn just as much about web or mobile development on the web as you can at Google (more, probably, since Google's stack is largely proprietary and bound by lots of legacy code). You can learn as much about databases and programming languages. You can even learn all the machine-learning algorithms you'll need.

But you won't learn as much about search as you would at Google, or about logistics as you would at Amazon, or about psychological manipulation as you would at Facebook. All that knowledge is locked up in the corporations that profit from it, and if all your software knowledge is based on what's publicly available, you probably wouldn't even know it exists. You might learn how deep learning works and how to apply it to MNIST digits from a web tutorial, but you won't learn anything about how to apply it to other problem domains or even what those other problem domains it can be applied to are from it.

And economic returns are all based on supply & demand, so if you're supplying a service that everybody else can learn too, your economic returns are bounded by what all those other people are willing to work for. The big bucks accumulates to monopolies, those firms and the people who work within them who know things that nobody else does.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#68

Post by CalChris »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #60

No idea if Mr. Thiel is right in this decade, but long term silicon valley has lost its main advantage: silicon. The physical business of building computer parts, especially chips, involves a lot of hard science and deep magic and requires a kind of priesthood steeped in that magic. SV's original success was built on this -- it got rich because it is where the silicon priests lived. But now things have evolved so the…

An argument can be made that when it was first called Silicon Valley it should have been called Metal Oxide Valley. Originally, SV lived off defense, then made disk drives and now Google, Apple, Facebook, Oracle, ... reign supreme. I think SV will continue to shape shift. It is however, getting kinda expensive.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#69

Post by CalChris »

tryingagainbro wrote: post #7
jayjay71 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a uniform distribution.

Huh? Me and Warren Buffet together are worth about $81 Billion, it varies daily but around that range.

Another way of phrasing that is that if Warren Buffet walks into a baseball stadium, on average everyone there is a millionaire.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#70

Post by davesque »

I suppose when you support and promote a fascist to run the country, it's only logical that you'd then turn around and predict the country's tech economy will fail and that people should look elsewhere. That's one helluva long play, Mr. Thiel. Well done...well done.
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