Enough with being known for evil.
Silicon Valley needs to get back to being known for good.
This morning I’ve been thinking about how much I hate that Silicon Valley’s name has become tarnished in recent years.
I’ve lived here my whole life, so I guess I have some foolish pride in the place. But I miss the days when Silicon Valley was known as a hopeful, equitable place where a better future was being invented. Today, the name is often used in the media as a metonym for greed and toxic culture.
I supposed the turning point may have been Facebook. Twenty years ago, an East Coast kid rented a house in Palo Alto and built a company that was supposed to “connect the world”. But then it turned out that his whole strategy was actually to suck us in with dopamine hits and then get rich by sucking the privacy out of us.
And then came Theranos, FTX, data breaches, a pandemic fueled by disinformation, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and stupid products like a $700 juicer and a failed pizza robot. Even Google, founded on the principle of “Don’t be evil”, eventually became an evil monopoly.
For me, the seeds of Silicon Valley were planted by the hippies I grew up with. The Grateful Dead played on Tuesday nights at St Michael’s Alley in Palo Alto. Joan Baez played on Thursdays. In nearby Los Altos, a high school kid named Steve Jobs borrowed some electronics parts from Bill Hewlett to build his school project. Later he took some LSD and teamed-up with Steve Wozniac to create and sell illicit devices that could hack telephone lines so anyone could make illegal free long-distance calls. Power to the people.
In fact, the counterculture movement was a big part of what drove Silicon Valley back then. All the big companies were on the East Coast, and this quiet valley on the Left Coast was the place where upstart renegades were obsessed with coming up with innovative new ways of “sticking it to the man”.
Computers had always been giant IBM machines that only the elite could access — so we democratized the world by inventing personal computers. The internet was once only available only to academics, researchers, and the military — until we created a consumer web available to all. Netflix freed us from the bastard cable companies. Steve Jobs personally destroyed the record label cartel by giving us iTunes where we could buy songs for a dollar. Power to the people.
In the late 1960’s Hewlett Packard became the first company to implement a maternal leave policy. Fairchild Semiconductor implemented the notion of stock options so that all employees could participate in equity upside, not just the top executives. Because of stock options, when Apple had their IPO in 1980, over 300 employees became millionaires that day. Wealth distribution for all, baby.
We were very proud of all the good created here, in liberal Silicon Valley. Sunshine, delicious tacos, and lefty politics for all.
But despite these very liberal roots, in this year’s election cycle Silicon Valley became associated with right wing politics. Tech bros like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and Marc Andreessen are seen as espousing and fomenting right-wing political views and then essentially buying the pro-crypto President they wanted.
But here’s an important thing: these are not Silicon Valley people. Jeff Bezos built a company in Seattle and now lives in Florida. Elon Musk is an immigrant from South Africa who lives in Texas. Peter Thiel holds a New Zealand citizenship. JD Vance is a midwesterner. None of them are from Silicon Valley. The three counties that make up Silicon Valley voted almost 75% for Kamala Harris. It’s still as blue as blue can be here.
I hope we can get back to being known for creating good, because this valley has a whole lot of great things going on right now. The life sciences firms are doing incredible things creating new cures for debilitating diseases. AgTech startups are helping small farmers around the world to improve their yields and adopt sustainable methods. Fintech is driving financial inclusion. New sustainable energy sources are being developed. Because of Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship has been democratized all over the world. All three of the great universities here have programs dedicated to applying Silicon Valley methodologies for entrepreneurship and innovation to solving the world’s great problems.
Out of all the products to have come out of Silicon Valley, iOS/Android smartphones probably have had the greatest global impact. On a planet with 7.9 billion people, today there are 5.8 billion iOS/Android devices. Anyone who has one of those, anywhere on the planet, is connected to all the knowledge available in the world today.
That’s an incredible thing. Power to the people.
And if you open up one of those devices, you will find the entire history of Silicon Valley inside — amplifiers from Lee DeForest, transistors from William Shockley, chips from Gordon Moore, TCP/IP from Vint Cerf, search from Larry and Sergey, and design elegance from Steve Jobs.
As we approach 2025, I choose to believe that Silicon Valley remains an extraordinary place and the most powerful source of innovation for good that the world has ever known.
This was adapted from my weekly missive for entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors.
