Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

There's a Silicon Valley I see on the news and Twitter that I've still never once seen in real life.

I moved to SF in 2008, and it was the most magical place on the planet. I met amazing people everywhere I went... smart, interesting people who just wanted to make cool things. I loved every second of it.

And it's still that way to me. And I say this as a person who's been to my share of fancy VC parties. Sure, things have changed a bit, but the greedy, out of touch caricature of SF I see online doesn't match what I see in person.

Even during the past 72 hours, I got dozens of texts and emails from people checking to see if my company was okay and asking if they could help. Everyone I know is genuine, hard-working, passionate, curious and kindhearted.

It's become clear the pervasive impression is that people in SV are rich, out of touch and barely work. Maybe that's true and I just don't know that version of SV. But I think the Musks of the world have won the perception game, and we're all going down with them.

I do not live or work in SV, but it's kind of interesting to me that this comment has no responses. Is that because what the parent states as being true is not actually the case, or is there some other reason why there are no responses to this comment? From my own experience with startups many moons ago (albeit on the East Coast, first Philadelphia and then New York) the parent comment rings true: it was my experience that startups totally helped each other out with (as examples) required documentation (e.g. regulatory stuff that's base-level, non-negotiable for specific spaces), tech-type things (e.g. you will probably encounter this question/problem, here's how we handled it) and other stuff too. Granted, this was in situations where the "helper" was not a direct competitor to the "helpee", but often they were at least in the same general market, otherwise the help being offered wouldn't even apply.

Edit: clarification

For starters, there's two SV's: the FAANG and "2nd tier FAANG" companies and the startups. Also, the ethos of SV has changed over the decades. What started off as "let's change the world" in the 60's and 70's has led to the "let's make lots of money" ethos we see today. Things may appear the same from the trenches but they've definitely changed at the top.

The issue isn't with the people, its with the products.

Outside ML, there has literally been zero innovation on the tech front in the past decade or so. We all got our internet phones, and the tech shifted into how to extract money from people (or sell people in the context of advertising) through these phones.

The main goal became to do whatever it takes to get users, then monetize the user base, then sell to/get acquired by some random company with lots of cash to burn to expand their portfolio with another item that generates revenue.

Then, after some time, monetization of the user base wasn't even a goal anymore. It was sufficient to just get users, which translated to companies valuation, which then translated into stock price that you can take to a bigger company and let them pay for additional development once they acquire the company.

Ive met (and interviewed) plenty of smart people from SV as well. Most of their experience is something web adjacent. They talk about setting up distributed systems, building pipelines, automating stuff, all for a product that is in the end ultimately worthless to society - the value is all generated through hypothetical stock price in terms of how much someone would pay for this in the future.

So these people all just pawn in the game perpetuated by the finance sector that only gives a fuck about a number. And they participate in it because of another number. We could all have much better lives if SV was about tech instead of numbers.

I lived there for 10 years and worked startups, not FAANG. Place after place, all run by people I’d never trust. Shady, dishonest, near criminals. Was happy to leave. I feel like Stanford basically produces criminals.

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