What is Silicon Valley?
And why is it killing your industry?
There’s a common refrain you’ll hear in education, journalism, publishing, and virtually every other knowledge industry changed by the internet:
“We have to beat Silicon Valley.”
“We can’t let Silicon Valley take over.”
A lot of people are worried about the undue influence they feel Silicon Valley is having over their industry. In education, they’re worried because there’s suddenly a lot of big money invested in subjugating tried and tested structures for teaching and learning, like universities, in the name of making a profit rather than, you know, educating people.
In journalism, they’re worried because newspapers are less viable than ever, and fewer and fewer people are watching the news. Meanwhile, more people get their information via sources like Facebook than anywhere else.
In publishing, they’re worried because a few large companies are running small presses — and sometimes large ones — out of business through predatory business models, and killing the independent bookstore.
But what is Silicon Valley? Why is there so much money tied up in internet businesses, and why does it sometimes feel like people are getting millions of dollars to build ridiculous things when these important industries are dying?
First I’ll discuss the history of Silicon Valley, and what Venture Capital actually is (as well as other forms of startup financing). Then I’ll discuss criticisms of Silicon Valley, and where it can go off the rails.
Let’s explore.
Silicon Valley is a state of mind
Actually, no, it’s not. Silicon Valley is a place.
This is a map of the San Francisco Bay Area. The southern half is a valley, surrounded by hills and mountains. They’ve made computers there since the fifties; hence the nickname Silicon Valley.
The whole area is mostly green. You can jump in a car and be in pristine wilderness in thirty minutes or less. Although driving from San Francisco to San Jose takes about an hour, Silicon Valley is very small.
Stanford University — near Palo Alto — started leasing out office space for businesses a little before WWII. As war raged across the world, the businesses there began building radar equipment and other helpful technology.
After the war, there was an influx of students, many of whom were subsidized by the newly-enacted GI Bill, which used government money to help returning soldiers get an education. Stanford itself also attracted significant research grants from the Department of Defense. In turn, Frederick Terman, the Dean of the School of Engineering, encouraged students to start high tech businesses, helping to fund them.
Through an agreement with Stanford, the employees of those companies were able to pursue graduate degrees in engineering while continuing to work. (Some of this graduate work included those DoD research projects.) In turn, some of those employees could go on to start businesses of their own, continuing the cycle. These companies — Hewlett-Packard is probably the most famous — had alumni of their own, and their impact grew over time.
As the impact of these companies grew, Stanford continued to be the center of gravity. Even today, Stanford students are heavily represented in startup workforces. The university owns or has owned significant stakes in Google, Cisco, Yahoo, and hundreds of other major Silicon Valley companies. It invests in every single startup to go through Y Combinator.
Meanwhile, San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland aren’t part of Silicon Valley — but I’ll come back to them.
Silicon Valley is a state of mind
Okay, okay, it is a little bit.
Most other cultures have a degree of fatalism associated with ventures. If you bring up a business idea, you’ll see people shake their heads quietly, perhaps muttering something along the lines of, “it’ll never work”. And then if you try it, and it doesn’t work, you’ll hear reactions along the lines of, “I told you so”. The onus is on not taking a risk and starting something new; failure, in turn, is seen as catastrophic.
In Silicon Valley, they “yes and” you. The responses you’ll get might be questions along the lines of, “have you thought about ..?”, or offers to introduce you to people who can help. Moreover, if you try something and fail, as long as you weren’t obviously stupid, nobody will hold it against you. They’ll support you the second time you try. And the third. As long as you’ve learned from what went wrong the last time.
There are lots of reasons for this: Californians are genuinely pretty laid-back, which helps. But more importantly, there’s easy access to a giant support network with deep institutional knowledge, so you’re not alone. Making use of this proximity to decades of knowledge is vital.
The relatively small size of Silicon Valley is important here, too. It’s not enough to have access to the knowledge; there’s huge value in being able to go for a coffee with someone, or even to bump into the same people in the burrito line.
In reality, you can’t separate the state of mind from the place. Silicon Valley is both.
Of course, there’s another, even more vital thing: access to capital.
Introducing venture capital
Early Silicon Valley companies centered around semiconductors: one of the crucial hardware building blocks in electronics and computing.
Hardware manufacturing has a high startup cost: you need premises and equipment both for research and manufacturing, as well as distribution. In a high tech industry, there may be a high degree of experimentation and risk, and long lead times. It would be very difficult to start a semiconductor company using just your own money.
In 1959, eight employees of the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory became so irritated by that company’s founder that they left. They convinced Fairchild Camera and Instrument, a military contractor with existing contracts and distribution infrastructure, to open a semiconductor startup as a subsidiary.
While some funding came from Fairchild, they needed more money. Laurance S Rockefeller, the fourth child of the oil tycoon John D Rockefeller, had founded a firm as a conduit for all the Rockefeller children to invest. They invested in exchange for a stake, betting that the new subsidiary would grow, based on the success of previous companies in the market. Thus, venture capitalism was born.
As Rockefeller’s firm became successful, more and more rival firms started popping up. Usually, they opened their offices around Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto — which adjoins Stanford University.
What is VC?
Venture capital (commonly referred to as VC) is a banking product.
In VC, financing is provided to small companies which have the potential to grow, in exchange for shares in that company. The VC firm makes a profit when those shares can be sold at a higher price than they bought them. Because shares in private companies can’t be bought or sold freely, this usually happens either when that company is sold to another company, or when it IPOs and starts selling its shares on the public market.
Venture capitalists don’t use their own money. They’re an investment firm, with their own customers: so-called “Limited Partners”, who are also seeking a return. Limited Partners are often more traditional institutions, like pension funds, or university endowments (like Stanford’s). They can also be very high net worth individuals (super-rich people). LPs will invest their money in a set “fund” that usually lasts ten years; after that date, they expect their money back, and their share of the profits. The VC firm usually takes around a 2% management fee, as well as 20% of any profits.
Because of this structure, and contrary to what you might have heard, VCs don’t like taking crazy risks. They usually wait until a company shows signs that it’s likely to grow quickly: the product probably exists, and it’s probably already gaining traction in the market. Sometimes they’ll take a seat on the board, giving them a say in how the company is run, to further protect their investment.
When you see seemingly-crazy startups raising large amounts of money, there’s usually something else going on. Food delivery startups are often logistics startups in disguise — local food delivery is a great way to test algorithms and approaches. Similarly, Amazon launched as a bookstore, but is arguably a distribution company (both for physical goods, and digital goods via AWS). Simple services can be proving grounds for far-reaching technology with potential to change industries.
There are always exceptions: for example, very high-profile startups can be used to attract more LPs for the next fund. The earlier a VC invests, the better the deal they get from a company, so early deals might be made with startups founded by people with a proven track record of returning a profit to VC firms. Still, VCs can’t invest willy-nilly.
VCs need to sell their shares for high multiples of their buying price, within the time limit of their fund. Profit through direct revenue, which might come to them as dividends, is rarely strong enough to provide this turn. The emphasis in VC-funded companies is, therefore, on driving the share price higher, rather than direct profitability.
Nonetheless, it’s not always just about the money: impact investing is a particular form of VC where in addition to returning a profit, the fund commits to invest in startups that will have a positive social impact. This might include particular educational or environmental goals. In these cases, the social impact usually needs to be quantifiable, because the LPs want to measure how their money is being put to work.
Early-stage investing
While VCs wait to see if a company has growth potential, often startups need money before that point.
Investment takes place in rounds. VC rounds are more structured, and alphabetically named: Series A, Series B, and so on. Earlier rounds are less well-structured, but the very first one — I swear I’m not making this up — is called friends, family and fools. (Sometimes the and fools is dropped, depending on the audience.)
As the name suggests, you’re supposed to raise your first money from the people closest to you. While most investors are, by law, required to be accredited (i.e., rich), you can have up to 35 non-accredited investors as long as they meet sophistication requirements (they understand what they’re doing, and you’ve given them the proper documentation). Some investors watch this carefully: if you’re not willing to take money from people you care about, do you really believe in your venture?
One so-called friend is your university, or funds associated with your university. By this point, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that Stanford is often an initial investor in startups founded by its alumni.
Startups might also be able to convince other wealthy individuals to invest at a very early stage. On Broadway, wealthy patrons who put money into failing theater productions to keep them open became known as angels; somehow, that term made the jump to Silicon Valley, so we call them angel investors. They’re rich people who, like VCs, want to see a return — but aren’t limited by the structure of a fund, and may have other, personal reasons for investing in a company.
Angels are becoming a more significant source of investment. As Harvard Business Review wrote in 2013:
Non-VC sources of financing are growing rapidly and giving entrepreneurs many more choices than in the past. Angel investors […] fund more than 16 times as many companies as VCs do, and their share is growing. In 2011 angels invested more than $22 billion in approximately 65,000 companies, whereas venture capitalists invested about $28 billion in about 3,700 companies.
Accelerators like Y Combinator fill the gap between angels and VCs. Here, a very early-stage startup will receive a smaller cash investment, as well as services, contacts and training that may help them find the growth they need to attract full VC investment faster than they otherwise would.
Impact investors occupy this space, too: for example, Matter Ventures seeks to find solutions for the media industry. Usually the accelerator will take 5–8% of the company, for an investment of somewhere between $50K and $150K.
Because a product at this stage is still nascent, early-stage investments are almost always in the team themselves, and hinge on the investors believing these individuals can build something that will grow and succeed.
Does modern tech need investment?
There has been lots of criticism of modern Silicon Valley investment. Whereas semiconductor firms needed startup capital, software and internet services can be created for almost no cost. Open source software has driven this down further over the last decade; launching a web server running your own software costs literally pennies.
But a product is not a business. Sure, you can build the first version of something for relatively little money — and modern investors use this as table stakes. (If you can’t build something without investment, how can you be trusted to succeed?) But building a software product is not the same as building a viable, growing business.
As the cost to building an initial product has gone down, the cost of marketing it and finding growth has gone up. Startups are now competing with thousands of other startups. Finding an iteration of your product that meets customer need and has a market to grow into takes time. Growing into that market also takes time, and once you’re there, building and maintaining a product for millions of people is a very different prospect to building a prototype.
Let’s say you’re running a social network. There are around 3 billion internet users in total; “growth potential” for a service is now defined at around a million user accounts. How long do you think it’ll take you to reach that number? What do you think you’ll need to do?
Or, let’s say you want to bootstrap and reach profitability instead of seeking VC investment. Facebook makes around $9 per user per year. Without its clout, you might be able to make $3 (which is generous). Let’s say you’re a very slight team of two developers. An engineer’s salary is around $100K, but you’re happy to live on ramen at around $50K, at least for now. (Living costs vary nationwide, but $50K in the Bay Area is very hard.) Including overheads, taxes and technical infrastructure (but not marketing), that probably means you break even at $200K. You would need to bring in almost 70,000 users, quickly. How? And once you’re there, do you think it’ll cost the same amount to run? Not to mention that consumers are now used to getting services for free.
Or, you could run an enterprise software startup and charge much higher prices. But the sales lead time for enterprise software can be as high as 18 months — after the initial product has been developed. What are you going to do until then?
And how are you going to learn from your users, keep iterating on the product, and continue to innovate? Software is never finished, and the big service providers literally push out new versions hundreds of times a day.
Investment is a vital part of the startup ecosystem. It gives you the time to make better decisions and do better research. It also, in theory at least, makes startups more accessible to a wider group of people: otherwise, only the independently wealthy could build startups.
Investment is also not just about the money. Over time, investors build contacts, gain an understanding of markets, and learn playbooks for common situations. An investor isn’t just a wallet; they can be a crucial part of your team, and a force multiplier for a business’s success. In many cases, investment is sought purely for this reason. The value of having Ben Horowitz on your board probably outstrips any amount of money he brings in.
Of course, just because investment is useful, it doesn’t mean the existing structures for it are optimal. It would be interesting to explore co-operatives, for example. Still, finding a way to prolong the time before you run out of money so you can test your idea, and bringing on people with deep experience in what you’re trying to do, are both important core ideas.
After all, you want to make a dent in the universe, right?
Global inequality
For all the change it has brought about, the growth of Silicon Valley has also created enormous inequalities. As Mother Jones reported last year:
A recent study on global income inequality by the International Monetary Fund identifies technological change as a top factor driving the split between rich and poor worldwide. Specifically, the study’s authors found that the growth of technology accounts for nearly one-third of the widening gap between the top 10 percent and bottom 90 percent over the past quarter century. Other factors include the globalization of trade and finance.
While globalization predates the internet, it would be hard to argue that its existence didn’t accelerate the process. After all, the internet is a global network that allows data, including financial data, to be transmitted anywhere, instantaneously. Internet businesses can reach a global market as easily (arguably more easily) than a local one.
VC creates an incentive to prioritize growth over revenue. That means there are suddenly lots of mass-market products and services made available for almost no cost, displacing existing industries. Industries have also been automated at breakneck speed, putting entire classes of workers out of a job before they have an opportunity to adapt or retrain.
Because there’s no revenue to spread across a broad spectrum of the population, and because low-skilled workers are being automated out of their jobs, venture capitalism has concentrated wealth in a relatively small set of people.
This is a tricky line to walk. On one hand, scientific and technological progress is generally good. But if it’s done without an eye on its social impact, it can be counterproductive. What worth is having the technology to live in an amazing Jetsons future if only 1% of the population gets to live that way?
That said, neither VC nor the technology industry are responsible for global inequality in isolation. Creating global inequality isn’t something that anyone wants (although individuals may disagree over its causes and solutions). Some VCs are even taking an interest in distributing marketplaces, hoping to create truly peer-to-peer commerce that could, just maybe, lift people out of poverty.
There’s a stereotype of the technology industry as a libertarian bastion, filled with people like Peter Thiel and Tim Draper. There’s no doubt that many investors are fiscally conservative. But Silicon Valley is largely left-leaning.
The tech industry comes in waves, and there’s no denying that the idealism that characterized the original internet industry (let alone the revolutionary attitude that powered personal computing) has given way to a 1980s Wall Street mentality, filled with people in it for the money alone. Still, those idealists are still there, thinking of new ways to empower people to have a voice, and attracting like-minded people to join their cause.
As Jennifer Brandel and Mara Zepeda wrote in Sex & Startups:
Yes, we want to build businesses that succeed financially. But we also want so much more than that, and we aren’t alone. Most of the founders we know, many of whom happen to be women, are driven to build companies that generate money and meaning. And they’re in it for the long haul — not just to get their jollies, make their names, and exit.
In other words, it’s complicated. There are no easy answers, although it’s clear that the status quo is far from acceptable.
While other studies have found links between housing costs and venture capital investment, high levels of innovation, high concentrations of high-tech industry and venture capital startups (looking at you, San Francisco), the issue of inequality is a complex one. “There are some common drivers across the world, but the drivers vary,” Dabla-Norris [lead author of the study] says. “Policies to alleviate inequality have to be country-specific; there is no one-size-fits-all.”
Of course, Silicon Valley is just a place.
Local inequality
You would think that for all its technical innovation, Silicon Valley would be a glistening center of creativity and culture: a shining temple to human achievement.
Much of Silicon Valley is suburban tract peppered with strip malls, warehouses, and faceless office buildings with mirrored windows impersonally reflecting the glare of the cloudless sky. The El Camino Real, which once linked California’s missions, now links its drive-through burger joints.
Meanwhile, San Francisco was the center of a social revolution. In the sixties and seventies it attracted populations of people who changed global society. In doing so, they terraformed the city into a cultural haven. From artists and activists to the gay community, San Francisco was home to diverse, beautiful communities.
It’s no surprise that tech moved north.
San Francisco has seen a population explosion that it wasn’t prepared for. As companies moved in, partially encouraged by tax breaks, house prices were driven higher. Worse, companies still based in Silicon Valley did their best to compete for talent with San Francisco startups by raising salaries and running free buses down to the Valley. Those employees could pay higher rents, but they didn’t spent most of their money in the local economy. Large parts of San Francisco became bedroom communities for rich people who worked in other cities.
The people who made San Francisco so special were driven out, because they didn’t work in tech and didn’t see any economic benefit. First, they moved to Oakland, before the tech workers followed them there, too; latterly, they moved further afield, to cities like Portland, Oregon. It’s gutted the soul of San Francisco, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-owner of the City Lights bookstore, told the Guardian:
He complains of a “soulless group of people”, a “new breed” of men and women too busy with iPhones to “be here” in the moment, and shiny new Mercedes-Benzs on his street. The major art gallery in central San Francisco that has shown Ferlinghetti’s work for two decades is closing because it can’t afford the new rent. It, along with several other galleries, will make way for a cloud computing startup called MuleSoft said to have offered to triple the rent. “It is totally shocking to see Silicon Valley take over the city,” says Ferlinghetti, who still rents in North Beach. “San Francisco is radically changing and we don’t know where it is going to end up.”
At the time of writing, a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco will cost over $3,000 a month to rent. (Down in Silicon Valley, it’s closer to $2,200.) The city ranks first in the nation for economic inequality.
In response, Facebook has started building its own apartments. One can easily imagine new, tech-centered cities, much like the ones built by the industrial revolution in the 1800s. It’s interesting to think about what those communities would look like.
Diversity
Remember how early-stage investors are looking at teams rather than the products themselves? That’s good and bad.
Both investors and startups will often fall into the trap of pattern-matching people. (In startup hiring, this is often referred to as finding “culture fit”.) Part of it is trying to short-circuit the path to success: if a particular kind of person has been successful for them before, they figure they’ll try and find that kind of person again. Part of it is, knowing they’ll be working closely with someone, looking for someone they’d like to do that with.
The result is that people tend to invest in or hire people who are like themselves. Which means, for example, that if your team is largely white, male Stanford graduates, you’re more likely to work with more white, male Stanford graduates.
Some companies — notably Medium — work to overcome this. Many don’t. The result is that teams full of young, white, male graduates are common in Silicon Valley.
It’s a thoughtless way to build teams on the face of it: teams that look for people with more diverse backgrounds are widening the contexts and skill-sets they can draw from, and allowing themselves to take advantage of highly skilled people who are being overlooked by other companies. The same goes for investors: women-led companies, for example, perform better. Diversity is a competitive advantage.
There’s a systemic problem, too, which is harder to crack. The tech industry’s lack of diversity, and bro-iness, has created a hostile environment. Abuse is rife: 60% of women in tech say they’ve experienced harassment.
Understandably, this puts off some people from even studying computing. It forces many other people out of the industry before their careers have even left the ground. The lack of diversity in technology isn’t a problem limited to attracting more diverse students to enter the workforce; it’s a systemic, cultural issue that hurts the entire industry. Beyond the economic impact, these companies and ecosystems are shitty places to work, and an industry that prides itself on creating the future should have moved beyond this kind of harassment.
The first programmer was a woman; so was the first person to write a compiler. In fact, software was dominated by women — until the money started rolling in.
Many people are working to change this state of affairs for both women and minorities. CODE2040 creates access, awareness, and opportunities for top Black and Latinx engineering talent to ensure their leadership in the innovation economy, working with companies like Google and Medium. Women Who Code is a non-profit helping women realize careers in engineering all over the world. Organizations like Double Union create spaces for women.
More certainly needs to be done. For one thing, a lack of diversity — and in particular, a lack of minority voices — means Silicon Valley has sometimes had a blind spot with regards to freedom of speech.
Privacy
We’ve already established that VC-funded startups prioritize high growth over revenue. Taking money from people creates an unacceptable roadblock to growth. Eventually, though, they all need to start making money somehow.
If you’re a consumer startup and you can’t make money through selling to consumers, you’ll find other ways to make revenue. Typically, the answer to this has been advertising.
Theoretically, this is fine: free access to services has made software more accessible than ever before. It’s meant that people all over the world have access to email, instant messaging and networking opportunities. If we put a price tag on those things, only people in wealthier nations (or even wealthier communities) would be able to use them.
But ads typically need to be targeted. The more information you can get about a person and their buying intentions, the better you can sell to them. So businesses started tracking users across the internet, taking note of what they read, what they bought, and who they communicated with. These are similar to the tracking big stores use to predict whether you’re pregnant. They can predict your gender, your sexuality, your political preferences, and your religion. Sometimes, services require that you use your government name (i.e., the name that’s on your credit card) to improve the value of their profiles.
That’s all well and good if you’re a white, male, affluent Stanford graduate. There’s very little this kind of profiling can do to hurt you. For people whose relatives were thrown into concentration camps for being Jewish, or had their careers ruined for being a communist, or are being droned in Pakistan for communicating with the wrong people with their phones, your attitude towards tracking might be markedly different.
This isn’t paranoia: IBM sold punch-card database systems to the Nazis in WWII, which were used to facilitate genocide. The tech industry has a sordid history. More recently, Yahoo provided information to the Chinese government which helped them jail a journalist.
Today, In-Q-Tel “identifies, adapts, and delivers innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the Central Intelligence Agency and broader U.S. Intelligence Community.” It only invests in companies that support this mission, and has supported hundreds of startups.
There are alternatives to tracking, but they’ve proven difficult to implement. It doesn’t help that up to 90% of purchasing decisions are made subconsciously, making it difficult to, for example, curate a profile manually. A detailed, automatic analysis of our habits is far more valuable than anything we could voluntarily provide. And it’s lucrative as hell.
Does that mean every Silicon Valley company tracks people? Absolutely not. There are lots of companies who are doing the right thing, and open source tech like Do Not Track provides badly-needed user control. It’s something virtually every engineer I talk to has worried about, and organizations like the EFF are widely supported.
Furthermore, we’re beginning to see a move away from targeted advertising. Patronage and subscription models are seen as more effective, and many startups are experimenting with them. Promoted content and so-called “native content” ads, which don’t require tracking, are also becoming more common.
The Silicon Valley of your city
When I lived in Scotland, they were trying to make “Silicon Glen” happen. I’m still not convinced Silicon Glen wasn’t literally just some guy called Glen.
When I moved back to England, they were trying to kickstart the tech industry in London. It became nicknamed “Silicon Roundabout” because it was so hyper-focused around a single traffic circle near Kings Cross.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read about cities trying to grow their own Silicon Valley. It’s always struck me as odd. Just as hiring for “culture fit” cargo cults what made a team successful instead of understanding what actually happened at the expense of allowing for real diversity, copying Silicon Valley outright runs roughshod over local cultures and specialties.
As I hope I’ve shown, Silicon Valley is a real place, with both strengths and weaknesses. It wasn’t created through sheer innovation and attitude: it is subject to the same kinds of histories and influences as other places in the world. Most importantly, its financial success wasn’t forged through individual achievement: it was foresighted planning, strategy from institutions like Stanford, and large amounts of government investment through subsidies and contracts — in addition to the creativity of the teams who worked on its products.
Ironically, if somewhere really wants to become “the new Silicon Valley”, the tech industry is full of examples of ways to do that.
Here’s how disruption works (emphasis mine):
“Disruption” describes a process whereby a smaller company with fewer resources is able to successfully challenge established incumbent businesses. Specifically, as incumbents focus on improving their products and services for their most demanding (and usually most profitable) customers, they exceed the needs of some segments and ignore the needs of others. Entrants that prove disruptive begin by successfully targeting those overlooked segments, gaining a foothold by delivering more-suitable functionality — frequently at a lower price. Incumbents, chasing higher profitability in more-demanding segments, tend not to respond vigorously. Entrants then move upmarket, delivering the performance that incumbents’ mainstream customers require, while preserving the advantages that drove their early success. When mainstream customers start adopting the entrants’ offerings in volume, disruption has occurred.
To become a viable competitor to Silicon Valley, here’s what a new location might try to offer:
- An academic virtuous circle similar to Stanford’s, with government involvement — but more accessible to a larger, more diverse group of people
- Easier funding for consumer business models other than ad tech (disrupting, not directly competing with, existing Silicon Valley businesses), at better valuations
- Silicon Valley’s “yes and” culture
I think there’s a strong argument that we don’t need a competitor to Silicon Valley — or at least, not one that works like it. Technology can take all kinds of forms; you don’t have to use the roadmap in use in the San Francisco Bay Area. Part of the joy of the internet is that anything is accessible from anywhere, and it can embrace many different cultures and values.
The three points above are in order. The first leads to the second, which leads to the third. But it’s not easy, and there’s no real recipe.
Technology has taken over countless industries because they weren’t ready to change. There’s an argument that Silicon Valley itself could be disrupted.
Either way, there’s both good and bad here. For now, at least, it’s undeniably the place to work in technology. For people in the industry, it’s beautiful and full of opportunity, while occasionally infuriating. I’m glad I’m here, and I’d love to show you around sometime.
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