> “Today there is no patient money in Silicon Valley,” he says. “And that means that there isn’t enough time to make a similar kind of breakthrough.”
Is this true? If this is indeed true, what are the underlying factors? What does it mean "to change everything?"
One example: I suspect that lots of people fall into the trap of monetizing businesses in ways that trap them into old ways of thinking. Advertising is a prime example of this. I think advertising is obsolete. We should be using social graphs to make people more efficient at correctly judging products and extracting value from the transaction. (Amazon is doing some of this already, but the groups engaging in this are at arbitrary social distances. Make it easy for people of close social distance to collaborate, and you will have a game changer.)
Much of the social fabric of North American society has fallen apart. The kind of social capital that old communities had was powerful. Networks can be used to build this kind of social capital to great effect. (Witness the Arab Spring.) The emphasis should be on emergent trends, with some way of enabling users to efficiently filter information without deluging them.
No. But in terms of deals done it makes a much smaller percentage than the ones which expect a faster return. Any chip startup, and most hardware startups, are 'patient' money as there is a lot of R&D to pay off.
Many (most?) people put the 'start' of the technology culture in Silicon Valley around the same time that Stanford started the Applied Electronics Lab [1]
IMO, Silicon Valley's "early days" starts with the founding of HP.
In any case, I don't think 1986 can be considered "Early days" by any stretch of the imagination. Even if you're just focused on the modern era of the Valley, I don't think you can reasonably make a case for anything earlier than the mid-1970s. To put the dates in some perspective (not for you but those who think 1986 are the "early days"), Jobs had already been pushed out of Apple by 1986.
The founding of HP is an interesting place to start, most people put the 'Silicon' in Silicon Valley with the founding of Fairchild [1] in 1956, it was the making of transistors, and later integrated circuits which really drove investment. I didn't arrive until '84 nearly 30 years later and in what was clearly the twilight of semiconductors as the driving force (also in a pretty big recession). HP's founding in '47 pre-dates Shockley coming to the valley but all of them were friends with Terman who created the Applied Electronics lab.
Some people use 1971, the introduction of the Intel 4004 as the seminal moment, but those folks are more 'computer' focused and less 'technology' focused.
The bottom line is of course that was definitely wayyyy before '86 :-)
"For Menuez, so much of the current tech scene is preoccupied with profit, whereas the digital word he documented, at least at the beginning, was less interested in making tons of money and more interested in fundamentally changing the world."
I haven't spent a lot of time in SV or around the people in that tech scene, but this seems like accurate portrayal of the current situation.
Sure, the engineers here are interested in building cool stuff, sometimes it becomes wildly profitable stuff, then a bunch of profit seeking types swarm in and try to figure out how to get that wealth, the snap and fight, much like piranhas stuck in an evaporating side pool, becoming increasingly unethical until it blows up on them. Then they die off and the folks working on stuff get to do so again with fewer interruptions.
Sadly they re-use the office buildings and so we lose the fossil record. It would be a fabulous art installation to do something along the ruins of Pompei but with places like Webvan, Pets.com, and Flooz.com.
There's a picture entitled "Sunlight, NeXT. Sonoma, California, 1986." with the text "At tech startups it was rare to get outside or even see the sun for days at a time. A young NeXT employee working on an original Macintosh at a company retreat focuses on the task at hand."
But to me, the device clearly looks like a Macintosh SE, which wasn't manufactured until 1987.
Are you asking what is the background behind the caption?
"A Steve Jobs “to-do” list made at a company brainstorming session, with a set of very difficult technical challenges remaining for his team to solve in order to complete the NeXT Computer."
Menuez: "A couple of co-workers who were falling in love celebrating with abandon at the Adobe annual holiday party of 1988. They were married shortly after the party but divorced a few years later."
The phrasing here bothers me. I'd rather it read: They were married shortly after the party and divorced a few years later.
Using "but" is editorializing to me -- like saying they shouldn't have gotten married in the first place, since they later divorced.
You put just 23 lines and some amount of research into purely shitting on the submitter's choice of title. Did that do anything to help your obvious disappointment?
"purely shitting on the submitter's choice of title."
It's the title of the article. It could also have been re-written by the admin's even if the submitter had chosen a different title (which no doubt would have resulted in less points).
Your comment smacks of "look what you waste your time on" in a belittling way. Perhaps I type fast, work fast and I'm not lazy and would prefer to back up the point I am making if I decide to make a point about something.
You're verbosely bitching that the article you got didn't live up to your expectations salted with the inference that the submitter was somehow whoringly complicit in your perceived deception.
Re-read what I said because the submitter was not "whoringly complicit" (I like your creative use of language by the way I'll give you an upvote for that.)
Wow, WIRED has really declined. It is nice to see these photos, but the text is so often completely wrong, nonsenseical or misrepresentative that I'm just astounded.
