I can't leave any comments on the actual blog so I'll just leave it here:<p>This is some bullshit written by a very entitled young man that is apparently aimed at very entitled young people. To wit:<p>"You didn’t even need to be a finance major to get aggressively courted by the bulge bracket firms. Goldman Sachs, in particular, seemed to have an obsession with taking the most liberal-arty kid"<p>Maybe if you are one of those kids that went to an Ivy, but this is so not true for the vast majority of college graduates in the US as to make the rest of this post really ridiculously meaningless.<p>It's not a backlash against "startups," it's a backlash against the same sort of douchebags that brought us CDOs now flocking to the tech industry cause it's a "hot scene."<p>I know I'll get voted down for this but everything about this guy and what he's writing about is exactly what's wrong with this country.
It seems that folks get upset at these types of narratives about SV because they're convinced that it's an attack on tech entrepreneurship. It's not: it's an assault on the Series A -> writing checks to Lamborghini lifestyle, and the poor allocation of resources that world rewards.<p>Real businesses that use tech as a lever are steps of progress that moves the world forward. You don't have to cure HIV, but you shouldn't receive a seven-figure check to pursue your dream of predictive music based on the color of cats you upvote on Reddit either. Anything that destroys the fallacy that working in this industry requires you to live in a tiny region in a certain state in a certain nation is good, and in a very small way, pushes humanity closer to the egalitarian ideal of the Internet.<p>Build a SaaS app that improves a dentists relationships with their patients from the middle of Minot, ND. Hell, take some kids in a village in the middle of Africa, teach them to code. Let them launch something using little more than a circa 2000 class laptop with a 3G connection, in a hut with a generator. $300,000 a year in revenue. Total. That totally changes the game for things like world hunger. That kind of business will revolutionize the world far more than 10-figure exits for photo-sharing apps ever will.
"The same way that VCs invests in 50 shitty startups and expect to make maybe one phenomenal exit, it’s unreasonable to expect every or even many startups to make something truly revolutionary and socially impactful."<p>I might agree with this, but if it's the case, then some folks need to stop pretending each and every hot internet startup is Disruptive, Revolutionary and Socially Impactful. And the weight given to What SV Entrepreneurs Think should probably be reduced if most of them are just building better ways to order a pizza.<p>There's nothing <i>wrong</i> with coming up with a better way to order a pizza. But it doesn't make you a noble visionary of things to come.
> Even if the vast majority of engineers and designers today are obsessing about...car rides<p>There's a lot I don't like about Uber, but that doesn't change the fact that it has changed the way I interact with transportation. I hate the word, but it is <i>disruptive</i>.<p>I would love to see every startup cause as much of a shitstorm as AirBnB and Uber have managed to do. At the very least, the public conversations they force us to have are incredibly useful.<p>Despite the fact that it flamed out spectacularly, think about how different the music industry would be today had Napster never existed.
I'm really glad that this is happening, because I think the character of "tech" has gone to shit in the past few years as assholes who care only about their gaudy, disgusting parties-- but don't actually love technology or want to improve the world for real-- have come into the game.<p>This elite isn't ready to rule. They won't even run companies that are decent to the people who build and maintain them. It's easy to take the Silicon Valley perspective and say that the old legacy elites are full of idiots (and that's true) but "our" "elite" is just as full of useless, garbage humanity that should not be trusted to manage a bag of rock salt. Let's start with the brogrammers, douchey VCs exactly like the caricature in that Tesla video, hipster turds who become managerial favorites because their mancrushing did-their-20s-wrong bosses live vicariously through them, sloppy coders who think they're "rockstars", horrible management at all levels and in most firms, and companies using "fast failure" as an excuse to unapologetically do the wrong thing, because it's somehow OK if you're the Next Steve Jobs.<p>I am really glad that VC-istan has, over the past year, developed a tropical wave of a morale problem that threatens to become a Category 5 showstopper, and I'm really proud of the part that I played in that. There are a lot of brilliant, innovative people out there in this country and I can't wait to see what they come up with once they start falling for cheap lies.<p>Nerds are such horrible judges of character that we tend to throw obscene amounts of effort when some smooth-talking ex-IBDer (fired because he was too unethical even to sell subprime) gives us the time of day and manages to convince us (by pure assertion) that his half-baked idea will "change the world". But I'm starting to work on that problem by exposing painful truths, and maybe we can change it in some timeframe like two-thirds of a generation.
"I find it difficult to distinguish what tech is doing to the valley and SF from what Wall Street has been doing to New York and London for decades."<p>I couldn't have said it better myself. And sadly the author doesn't see anything wrong with the statement while for many of us - this sums up EVERYTHING that is wrong.
The New Yorker article link is broken (it goes to Pocket). Here's the actual link: <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/27/130527fa_fact_packer" rel="nofollow">http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/27/130527fa_fact_...</a>
There is some truth in this article, and lots of great advice: read more, don't take shitty offers etc. But SV is changing the world, and some of other the articles listed here are, though maybe just for effect, superficial. Facebook and AirBnB have changed the world and are super valuable. Keeping in touch and creating new opportunities - Facebook has done both for me. AirBnB - I'm staying at someone's house in a small prefecture in Tokyo - this is money coming into the economy. This is change - the worldly kind.
Yes there are tons of shitty ideas and shady deals in the Valley, and we should work more efficiently not just more, and dedicate more time to our families and friends. But the point is, as with free speech, that nobody knows ahead of time what will be good and what will be waste - that's the whole point of startups. My invitation to the authors who mention Facebook as a useless tool - will you close your FB account and never use it again? Didn't think so.
Is this anything new? Hubris is woven into the fabric of human history. The world-wise won't take long to recognize a smoke blower. To the rest, good luck.
Wow. What a non sequitur at the end:<p>> <i>That is, until the NSA scandal broke. Nothing made the purported libertarianism of Silicon Valley more laughable and aggregious than the fact that many of these companies are tools of secret government surveillance. This is why I had to include Paul Carr’s article about Silicon Valley’s participation in our security state infrastructure.</i><p>This is not even a complete thought, never mind a pretty blithe treatment of the actual issues involved. And also, the companies most under fire, particularly Google and Microsoft, are not "startups"
Follow the money… or the self-image and self-interest.<p>The startup boosterism is a lie that everyone wants to believe: the VCs want it to be true (and they want other people to believe it), the new startup kids want it to be true (riches, fame), the older tech guard want it to be true (hey this thing we've been doing forever is finally cool). Sigh.<p>Apropos of this… I wrote an essay about startups called "Fuck Glory." <a href="http://unicornfree.com/2011/fuck-glory-startups-are-one-long-con" rel="nofollow">http://unicornfree.com/2011/fuck-glory-startups-are-one-long...</a>