Silicon Valley is basically this American generations Detroit.
We deify all the Silicon Valley bullshit.
But what if this is all leading us down the wrong path?
He talked about failing fast whilespeaking to Stanford Business School students.
Fail fast has become the conventional wisdom of Silicon Valley.
And when it comes to consumer businesses and apps, that makes sense, says Palihapitiya.
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But that formula doesnt work for anything that really matters, he says.
It is not how you solve diabetes.
It is not how you use precision medicine to cure cancer.
It is not how you educate broad swaths of the worlds population.
Moderate growth, moderate compounding, that is the key.
Could you imagine an executive having to present to a group and talk about moderate growth?
Some of those guys would probably commit suicide before doing that.
Its valuations and growth metrics.
Its whatcouldbe there, essentially.
That growth culture 10x!
is very associated with Silicon Valley.Thats not necessarily a good thing.
The jobs issue
Let me venture to make this as clear as possible.
The culture of Silicon Valley is driven by engineers and people who generally seek efficiency in doing things.
But heres whats bad: trying to create friction-less experiences usually involvesremoving humans.
The states that helped Trump win the election?
All states with high job loss.
He spoke of jobs often.
The correlation is there.
I guffaw anytime I see someone say Automation will create more value-add roles for humans.
Executives dont think that way.
If they did, wouldnt we have more value-add rolesnow?
But tech is unavoidable, right?
you’re free to go live in a cave if you want.
But its probably not wise.
But instead of deifying tech, we should think about tech.
No one really seems to think this way.
In every job Ive had, the thinking is always:
This is software becoming shelf ware.
It happens because we deify tech.
We justassumetech will solve our problems.
Its not always true.
You could actually argueit reversed some industries, i.e.
They just saw something.
Unfortunately, thats too rare a commodity.
A lot of people in our industry havent had very diverse experiences.
Hes lived in a walkup in San Francisco working overnight on his net promoter score disruption app.
The sameness of Silicon Valley white, male, capitalist-driven will eventually doom it.
Detroits on the rise now, but it was a shit show for a long time.
The same thing will happen to SV.
Now can we cease the deification for a second?
Story byTed Bauer
Blogging, largely about work and how to improve it.
