Category Archives: Silicon Valley and Europe

Who in tech still has the courage to publicly oppose Trump in Silicon Valley?

Leave a reply

In recent weeks or months, I have been discovering with amazement or embarrassment that many people in Silicon Valley have apparently turned their backs to support Trump’s policies in the United States. It’s quite impressive, even if it’s not as impressive as we think. I already addressed the topic in July 2024, at a time when I believed Kamala Harris would be elected president. It was titled Politics and Silicon Valley. And I indeed discovered that former Democrat “sympathizers” were turning to Republicans such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, or Marc Andreessen. Worse, it seems that even Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google) or Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) were going in the same direction. After all, in Europe, we are never shocked that a boss is right-wing and the least favored are left-wing. Again, you can reread my post on the subject. In reality, Silicon Valley is so Democrat in its voting that it was perhaps difficult to position oneself otherwise, and today, people position themselves more openly. Votes are also evolving as illustrated here.

So I asked myself the question: who is opposing Trump today in tech and Silicon Valley?

I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were figures like Bill Gates and Michael Moritz:

– Bill Gates is a moderate and not active politically. But I quote him from Bill Gates says he’s surprised about his fellow billionaires’ rightward political shift: ‘I always thought of Silicon Valley as being left of center’ : “The fact that now there is a significant right-of-center group is a surprise to me.” while “incredible things happened because of sharing information on the internet,” social media has had major downfalls. “You see ills that I have to say I did not predict,” While Gates is by no means an open Trump supporter, he said he’d do his best to work with the president. “I will engage this administration just like I did the first Trump administration as best I can,” Gates told the NYT.

– Michael Moritz is less well known, but given that he funded Google, Yahoo!, PayPal, Apple, Cisco, and YouTube, we can appreciate what he has to say in Trump’s tech backers are ‘making a big mistake,’ Trump’s tech financiers and supporters were “making the same mistake as all powerful people who back authoritarians.” He wrote that wealthy financiers believe “they will be able to control Trump,” or else are committing “another cardinal error: deluding themselves that he will not do what he says or promises.” “That has not been the modus operandi of authoritarians over the centuries,”

Paul Graham, whom I respect, wrote an article on wokeness that deserves careful reading, but it’s not really an opposition to Trump; rather, it seeks to explain a movement. Please read The Origins of Wokeness. For example I’m not going to claim Trump’s second victory in 2024 was a referendum on wokeness; I think he won, as presidential candidates always do, because he was more charismatic; but voters’ disgust with wokeness must have helped. And “Trump and wokeness are cousins”.

Steve Blank is rather silent but I discovered that in 2020, that he resigned from a Department of Defense advisory board, protesting the Trump administration’s decision to oust most of his fellow board members and replace some of them with political loyalists with no defense or business experience. See here.

Who else? I’ve searched a bit in vain. My “heroes” are rather silent, but they always have been, so what can I conclude? Hopefully, some will wake up and dare to oppose them, whatever the cost…

PS: I found a little more, for example, Larry Page: “I intend to tell the president that we are with him and that we will help him in any way we can. If you can reform the tax code, reduce regulations and negotiate better trade agreements, the US technology industry will be stronger and more competitive than ever3, he would be quoted as saying by Andoidsis.

Roger McNamme is another investor: Well, everything about Trump seems like a payback, right? All these executives are giving a million dollars each. These are rounding spreads. This is money they find between the cushions of their living room couch. But, you know, this is essentially a precautionary payment. And in Musk’s case, the investment he made in Trump, which was a quarter of a billion dollars, or the investment he made in Twitter, which was about $44 billion, has paid off, obviously, many, many times over. I think Trump and Musk will eventually part ways. I don’t know Trump at all, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would support someone who competes on the same level as Musk. But we’ll see how it goes. See here.

And of course, yes, there is Reid Hoffman, the founder of Linkedin, “one of the tech bosses most fiercely opposed to Donald Trump and Elon Musk“. See here or there or again là.

PS2: April 15, 2025. On the day Harvard University rejects Donald Trump’s requests, I just read a few marvelous pages from the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Here they are:

There came a day when Herr Settembrini directly confronted his pupil, and so betrayed his own pedagogic uneasiness. “But in God’s name, my good engineer, he is just a stupid old man. What do you see in him? Can he do anything for you? It is beyond all reason. It would be clear enough — though not necessarily praiseworthy—if you were simply taking him into the bargain, if in seeking out his company you were seeking out that of his current sweetheart. But it is impossible not to notice that you pay almost more attention to him than to her. I implore you, help me understand this.”
Hans Castorp laughed. “By all means,” he said. “Agreed! The fact is, as we know—permit me to say—fine!” And he tried to ape Peeperkorn’s cultured gestures as well. “Yes, yes,” he said, and laughed again. “You find that stupid, Herr Settembrini, and certainly it is vague, which in your eyes is worse than stupid. Ah, stupidity. There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst. Hello! Why, I think I’ve just coined a phrase, a bon mot. How do you like it?”
“Very much. I cannot wait for your first collection of aphorisms. Perhaps there is still time, however, to ask you to take into account certain observations we have occasionally made concerning the misanthropic nature of paradoxes.”
“It shall be done, Herr Settembrini. Absolutely—shall be done. No, in this bon mot of mine, you do not see me in hot pursuit of paradoxes. I was merely trying to point out the great difficulty one has in defining ‘stupidity’ and ‘cleverness.’ It is so hard to keep them separate, they are so intertwined. I know very well how you hate any sort of mystical guazzabuglio and are a man who believes in values and judgments—value judgments—and I quite agree with you. But the issue of ‘stupidity’ and ‘cleverness’ is at times a complete mystery, and it must be permissible to concern oneself with mysteries, always presuming it is an honest attempt to get to the bottom of them, if possible. Let me ask you this question: Can you deny that he has us all in his pocket? I’m putting it crudely, and yet, as nearly as I can tell, you cannot deny it. He puts us in his pocket, and somehow or other he has the right to make fun of us all. But why? And how? And where does it come from? It is certainly not a matter of his cleverness. One can hardly speak of cleverness in this case, I admit. He is much more a man of fuzziness and feelings, feelings are his cup of tea, so to speak—if you’ll forgive me the colloquial phrase. What I am saying is this: it is not by way of cleverness that he puts us in his pocket, not through intellectual prowess. You wouldn’t stand for that. And it really is out of the question. But surely it is not physical prowess, either! It cannot be because of his broad captain’s shoulders, or any raw brute force, or because he could lay any one of us flat with his fist—it would never occur to him that he could, and if it did, why, a few civilized words would calm him down. And so it’s not physical, either. And yet the physical dimension does play a role, without a doubt—not in the sense of brute strength, but in another, more mystical sense—the moment anything physical plays a role, things always get mystical. And the physical merges into the intellectual, and vice versa, and cannot be differentiated, and stupidity and cleverness cannot be differentiated. But the effect is there, the dynamic effect, and we find ourselves stuck in his pocket. And for that we have only one word at hand, and that word is ‘personality.’ We use the word in another, perfectly reasonable sense, too: we are all personalities—moral and legal and all those other sorts of personalities. But that is not what I mean. I’m talking about a mystery that extends beyond stupidity and cleverness, and that is what we need to concern ourselves with—partly to get to the bottom of it, if possible, and partly, to the extent that it is not possible, to edify ourselves. And if you are for values, then, in the end, personality is a positive value, too, I should think—a more positive value than stupidity or cleverness, positive in the highest degree, absolutely positive, like life itself—in short, a value for life and in that sense suitable for our earnest consideration. And that’s how I thought I should respond to what you said about stupidity.”
Herr Settembrini let silence reign. Then he said, “You deny that you are in hot pursuit of paradoxes. By now you should know that I have an equal dislike of seeing you in hot pursuit of mysteries. By turning personality into an enigma, you run the danger of idol-worship. You are venerating a mask. You see something mystical where there is only mystification, one of those hollow counterfeits with which the demon of corporeal physiognomy enjoys taunting us on occasion. You have never spent any time in theatrical circles, have you? So you do not know those thespian faces that can embody the features of a Julius Caesar, a Goethe, and a Beethoven all in one, but whose owners, the moment they open their mouths, prove to be the most miserable ninnies under the sun.”
“Fine, a freak of nature,” Hans Castorp said. “And yet not just a freak, not just something to taunt us. For people to be actors, they must have talent, and talent is something that goes beyond stupidity and cleverness, it is itself a value for life. Mynheer Peeperkorn has talent, too, no matter what you may say, and he uses it to put us in his pocket. Set Herr Naphta in the corner of a room and have him deliver a lecture on Gregory the Great and the City of God, something well worth listening to — and in the other corner have Peeperkorn stand there with his strange mouth and a brow raised in great creases and say nothing except, ‘By all means! Permit me to say—settled!’ And you will see people gather around Peeperkorn, down to the last man, and Naphta will be left sitting there alone with his cleverness and his City of God, although he can express himself so clearly that it makes your blood and spit run cold, to use one of Behrens’s phrases.”
“You should be ashamed of yourself, worshiping success like that,” Herr Settembrini chided him. “Mundus vult decipi. I do not demand that people flock around Herr Naphta. He is a dreadful obstructionist. But I would be inclined to stand at his side in the imaginary scene you have just painted with such reprehensible relish. Go ahead and despise distinctions, precision, logic, the coherence of the human word. Go ahead and despise it in favor of some sort of hocus-pocus of insinuation and emotional charlatanry—and the Devil will definitely have you in his—”

Two great recent startup stories (not in Silicon Valley, but both acquired by Google) – part 2 : wiz.io

Leave a reply

Reading a few articles about Deepmind (part 1 of this post) and the founders of Adallom and wiz.io, I remembered other stories of European startups or those founded by Europeans. I’m thinking of Spotify (see my posts in 2022 and 2018) or VMWare (see an older post from 2010). We see that more or less curbed ambition has led to different results. Wiz or Spotify have valuations in the tens of billions, Deepmind, Adallom and VMWare (first acquisition) in the hundreds of millions, while the second acquisition of VMWare was also in the tens of billions. I don’t know if there’s a pattern or if I’m creating it artificially, but it’s a bit as if an acquisition in the hundreds of millions was a semi-failure linked to the fear of too much competition or the impossibility of pursuing an independent adventure.

The double adventure of the founders of Adallom and Wiz.io goes a little in that direction. I read a few articles which reference you will find at the end of the article. And I will give the lessons learned by Assaf Rappaport from these two stories. A first success, Adallom bought in 2014 by Microsoft for $320M then a second, wiz.com which Google offered to buy a few days ago for $32B (i.e. 100 times more…) Unlike Deepmind, I did not have access to specific documents, so I had to make some assumptions like some others (see [2]) and cross-check the information available online. Here are the two capitalization tables. But here too, the advice given (which I repeat below) is just as important as this data.

First of all, what I take from the tables:
– Four founders whose story is a classic in Israel (see [1]) created Adallom and then wiz.io. In reality, I am not a big fan of the concept of serial entrepreneurs, but wonder if wiz.io is not rather the scaling up of Adallom like VMWare (2nd period) was for VMware (1st period) or by pushing very hard the Nobel Prize of Demis Hassabis the scaling up of Deepmind! We read in the press that the founders had earned around $25M with Adallom according to some sources and $3B with wiz.io, also a factor of about 100x.
– The same venture capital funds and partners are the investors – Gili Raanan for Sequoia then Cyberstarts and Shardul Shah for Index. These are rare enough to be mentioned especially since these funds intervened at the seed stage.
– For Adallom, multiples of 24x for Series A, 7x for Series B, and approximately 2x for Series C.
– For wiz.io, multiples of 475x for Seed, 73x for Series A, 20x for Series B, 5x, 3x, and 2.7x for Series C, D, and E.

All of this is arguable, but not uninteresting, and there’s a bit of a lottery aspect to it. Don’t get me wrong. Success is rare, never guaranteed. I remember a startup that was offered a $300 million acquisition. The founders and/or investors declined, thinking they were worth more. In the end, the acquisition price was $10 million.

About the ambition and uncertainty, it is also worth reading Shardul Shah (Index) on LinkedIn (Index Ventures just cemented its place as one of the all-time VC greats). Here are some quotes : “I don’t know why we’re talking about averages — none of us are in the business of mean reversion.” […] “I’m not seeking average returns. I’m not seeking good deals—I’m looking for outliers.” […] “I don’t seek comfort. You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. We’re in the business of taking risk. I’m not a value investor, right? I believe in the power law.” […] “The hardest thing is identifying if you’re delusional or if you have conviction. Sometimes it can feel like a thin line.”

Finally I extract the lessons from Assaf Rappaport:
1. The team is more important than the idea. A startup is built not around an idea, which is going to change anyway, but around a team. The really good VC funds invest in talent, and not in products, ideas or business plans. And also: Don’t drag your feet when it comes to meeting with the best funds. Don’t leave them till the end.
2. One who listens to problems will find ideas. When you meet with customers, you’re not coming to convince them; rather, you’re there to learn from them. If you’re the one who spoke for more than a quarter of the meeting, it wasn’t a good conversation. Customers have problems that you didn’t even know existed, and the way to discover them is with question marks, not exclamation marks.
And also: You need some luck.
3. ‘No’ is the correct answer to determine whether the investor is serious. No matter what kind of offer you get – investment or acquisition – there’s only one response: ‘I really appreciate your offer, but no thanks.’ This kind of answer never deterred a determined investor or company – and if they’re not determined, they won’t invest in any case. And also: You need to prepare a media plan, both internal and external; when things leak, you’ll have only enough time to hit the Send button.
4. The exit is just the beginning of the hard work. On the day after being merged into a giant corporation, don’t sit back and wait until the options mature. Instead, adopt the commando approach: We’re part of a big army, but we belong to an elite unit.
5. Don’t be afraid of activism. In every company, a moment comes when you have to give the conservative corporate people a kick, and then go ahead and act. To be the best workplace and to recruit the best workers, you need to be brave and take a stand, engaging in social activism that gives rise to tremendous team spirit.
6. Take a deep breath and don’t exhale too soon. You shouldn’t be blinded by big money, instead, use it to quickly acquire paying customers, turn down acquisition offers of hundreds of millions of dollars, and grow the company rapidly so it will become a unicorn.
7. Today, it’s possible to overtake everyone with a computer and Zoom

Once again, risk-taking and limitless ambition.

References :
[1] : 7 lessons from reaching a $1.7 billion valuation in just one year https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3904610,00.html
[2] : WIZ, Esprit, es-tu là? Comment les fondateurs de Wiz refont des miracles après le succès d’Adallom https://trivialfinance.substack.com/p/wiz-esprit-es-tu-la

Two great recent startup stories (not in Silicon Valley, but both acquired by Google) – part 1 : DeepMind

Leave a reply

I probably have to admit a bias in favor of startups led by tech founders. It is what I have been advocating for decades now. So when I read about stories going that way, I am more than happy. Recently I was mentioned by friends a documentary movie entitled The Thinking Game.

I do not know why I had not looked at DeepMind before all the more it is pretty easy to get information about British companies and this is a British startup. So you read me, I built its cap. table when it was acquired by Google in 2014 for about

What I read in the table:
– 3 or 4 main cofounders, but Demis Hassibis had the biigest initial stake (80%),
– investors took high risk as the company did not have that much but talent initially, (and no revenue until acquisition ?)
– the main or at least most famous investors were Peter Thiel and Elon Musk,
– the company did not raise that much money : 2M£ in Feb. 2011, £15M in Dec. 2011 / Feb. 2012, finally £25M in 2013 before the £400M acquisition by Google in Jan. 2014.

That’s it for the basic facts. More importantly, the lessons in the article my friends sent to me are:
– First, DeepMind combines crystal-clear strategic clarity with never-ending tactical flexibility. What comes across in the film is the company’s extraordinary willingness to experiment wildly and fail persistently.
– Second, DeepMind’s mission has helped it recruit some remarkable scientific talent, critical to its success. In a discussion after the movie, Hassabis explained that he had always resisted investor pressure to move to Silicon Valley and had been determined to remain in London. “The UK has always been very strong in science and innovation and has a rich history in computing,” he said. “We are trying to carry on in that tradition.” Hassabis reckoned that there was a lot of under-utilised academic talent in Europe, and elsewhere, that could be attracted to London. So it has proved.
– Third, what was essential for DeepMind’s success was its ability to scale rapidly. Back in 2010, few VCs were prepared to go anywhere near a startup with such extravagant ambitions and no business plan. Much of its initial capital came from US investors, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. The company also felt compelled to sell out to Google in 2014 to give it the capital, data and computing firepower necessary to stay at the leading-edge of AI. (The extra resources were essential for recruiting and retaining top talent, too).

Often not to say always the same lessons about risk taking and ambition…

PS: I have not watched the movie yet, so I may amend this post in the near future.

50 years of Technology Transfer at Stanford University

Leave a reply

Back to my favorite topic, that is Silicon Valley, after a few digressions. I just rediscovered a 2022 paper entitled Systematic analysis of 50 years of Stanford University technology transfer and commercialization. The full paper is available here. As a side comment, this has been motivated by recent articles about Technology Transfer in France and more specifically the study entitled “Étude sur la performance des SATT vis-à-vis d’une sélection d’OTT” (Study on the performance of SATTs vs. a selection of TTOs). Unfortunately, the study does not seem to be public and I could only read comments about it.

I have published a lot about Stanford University. The search engine gives the following here. So I will not go into much detail but just extract what I found interesting not to say surprising. Here it is:

– this is about money, but not only about money.

“The total net income of the inventions for all years considered is $581M, and the average net income is $0.13 M. Overall, most inventions have a negative net income, and only 20% of inventions in this dataset have produced positive net income.” Further in the paper “The invention licensing via OTLs represents only one facet of the transfer of technology from university to industry, though it is an important facet. [And] we primarily focus on net income as the outcome metric because it is straightforward to quantify and is a key metric of OTL’s own assessment. However, it is important to note that licensing income does not completely capture impact, and pursuing licensing income is not the ultimate goal of the Stanford OTL.”


Overview of the Stanford inventions data : Number of inventions by year that Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing marketed. The color of the stacked bar chart indicates whether the cumulative net income (until June 31, 2021) is positive.

– the most profitable inventions are predominantly licensed by inventors’ own startups.

“Around 20% of the inventions were licensed by the inventor’s own startups, which we refer to as “self-licensing.” Overall, the self-licensing rate increases over time. The interesting peak of the self-licensing rate in 1995–1999 might be related to the dot-com bubble. We also found that inventions with high net income are predominantly self-licensing inventions. For example, all inventions that have generated more than $10 M net income are self-licensed, and the self-licensing rate for the inventions with $1–$10 M net income is 59%. In contrast, the self-licensing rate for inventions with less than $10 K net income is 16%. This finding is consistent with previous research showing that startups with direct connections to the university tend to be more successful than otherwise similar startups.” There is a more general side comment here : “Shane et al. found that new ventures with founders having direct and indirect relationships with venture investors are most likely to receive venture funding.”


Self-licensing (inventions licensed by the inventor’s own startups)
(A) The fraction of inventions licensed by inventor startups over time.
(B) The fraction of inventions in each net income group that the inventors license. The sample sizes for each net income category are: <$10 K: 3,776 inventions; $10–$100 K: 465 inventions; $100 K–$1 M: 212 inventions; $1–$10 M: 56 inventions; ≥$10 M: 5 inventions.

– inventions have involved larger teams over time. There is also an interesting side comment : “Smaller teams have tended to disrupt science and technology with new ideas and opportunities, whereas larger teams have tended to develop existing ones.”

“In addition, we found that the inventions from teams of only first-time inventors have a higher net income than other inventions. This highlights the importance of being open to first-time inventors.” This is correlated with my analysis of serial entrepreneurs, I had found they have a tendency to do worse over time.. See Serial entrepreneurs: are they better?

I will briefly conclude that this is a very interesting new study of Stanford’s contribution to innovation, which confirms well-known things and adds much less known ones. A must-read for experts and “food for thought” for the others!

Tech giants : nothing changes but their names !

Leave a reply

I love data and I love analyzing them at the micro (cap tables) and macro level (revenues, income, employees). But I am surprised to discover that I had not posted about this since 2021:
– Tesla, Google and Facebook do not suffer from the crisis showed the grwoth of these giants as of February 2021,
– The largest technology companies in Europe and the USA in 2020 compared about 30 American and 15 European public firms as of January 2021.

What I have updated below does not see much change, except may be Google is Alphabet and Facebook is Meta. Tesla has not changed its name but Twitter is X! So with not much comment, here are first the largest technology companies in Europe and the USA in 2024 :


The conclusion is similar, US companies are about 10 times bigger in market cap. and sales, 5 times in employees number. I even fear the gap is bigger. I also love the following three charts which illustrate similarites in firm growth.



Maybe all this is not that good and has contributed to the planet destruction with being aware of it. Maybe innovation is not solving much and destroying a lot. These are just numbers as food for thought.

Beyond Silicon Valley Ideology

Leave a reply

In my previous post, I mentioned this anthology of articles compiled by Loup Cellard and Guillaume Heuguet. Consisting of six articles (5 of which are translated) and a long introduction by the authors, it is a most interesting dive into what this region represents from a historical and political point of view.

So here is what I noted:

– the authors restrain the influence of the counterculture in the origins of Silicon Valley. “The economic power and the culture of technical innovation of the region far precede the hippie movement.” [page 18] then “government contracts or the existence of a surplus of capital should probably be given as much importance as utopian imaginaries” [page 19].

– The authors go further regarding the ideological inclinations of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. I have already expressed a certain skepticism on the subject but the debate remains interesting. The authors mention another book on this subject that I am not familiar with, Une histoire politique de la Silicon Valley (A Political History of Silicon Valley) by Fabien Benoit. I do not believe that the following statement is correct: “Stanford University, which specializes in hard sciences, has the particularity of not claiming intellectual property rights on patents developed within its walls.” [Page 19] The subject is well-known (see here) and I am surprised by such a statement. Mariana Mazzucato is also called to the rescue of the arguments and if I have also expressed strong nuances there, one can hardly doubt the influence of Fred Terman, HP and MIT well before the emergence of the counterculture.

– In the same introduction, Bill Gates’ open letter to the Hobbyists of the Homebrew Computer Club is mentioned.

This introduction by the authors is fascinating and we have once again the confirmation of the complexity of the genesis of the region where hippies like Wozniak and engineers like Noyce often collaborated with the greatest respect. (See again this article for the curious, The tinkerings of Robert Noyce)

– The articles about design are surprising given how fashionable the subject has been (and had so far left me circumspect and silent). Fred Turner’s chapter Such Old Promises is an interesting analysis of the links between prototyping and Protestant puritanism! Ruha Benjamin’s article, translated as Le design est complice (Design is an Accomplice) goes much further. I take away the following strong statements: “Design Thinking is Bullh*t” and the author “urges practitioners to avoid jargon and trendy buzzwords and to engage more in self-criticism: what are the theoretical and practical effects of using the language of design to describe all our hopes, dreams, critiques and visions of change? What is gained and by whom in the process of associating such heterogeneous things under the rubric of design? […] I think one of the reasons it reigns is that it has managed to fold everything and anything under its agile wings”.

– The authors are very critical of some of the region’s personalities that they associate with the ancient world. Charlie Tyson’s Reactionaries invest (Les réactionnaires investissent) is an interesting analysis of Peter Thiel who would like to present himself as an intellectual. And the conclusion is: “The man himself remains a mystery […] who offers us the spectacle of a brilliant mind housed in a deformed personality, a man who has transformed his armchair philosophy into an imposed vision of the world”. The following chapter, Capital risks nothing (Le Capital ne risque rien( by Fabien Foureault is a fairly correct description of the history of venture capital. The only criticism I would make is that the transition from American roots to the history of the activity in France somewhat forgets the risks taken by the pioneers in the 60s and 70s. The criticism of venture capital remains well argued as follows: on three major criteria, VC is criticized:
+ a dysfunctional character that prevents stability through boom and burst cycles
+ a lack of social utility by moving towards short-term profitability that forgets the fundamental issues (climate, affordable health)
+ an unprofitable activity, at best with a low return of 8% in the long term. I discovered a researcher, Ludovic Phalippou, very critical of Private Equity in general which lack of transparency leads to undoubtedly very overestimated performances. I encourage you to read How Ludovic Phalippou Became the Bête Noire of Private Equity. The post-sciptum will undoubtedly make smile fans and connoisseurs of French venture capital…

– What can I say about the last two chapters? They are simply fascinating. First of all, Optimization Replaces Progress by Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell. I had the intuition that optimization, a subject that is dear to me since it was at the heart of my doctoral thesis, was reaching the limits of progress. We no longer seek the best, but to be smart, intelligent, whether it be the city, mobility, education or war. The best being inaccessible, we simply seek to do better, and often while minimizing resources and costs… and to be resilient, which the authors describe as the ability not to be robust in a stable system, but to survive and win in an uncertain and unbalanced system. Disruption is not far away. The chapter’s conclusion may seem scary: “Instead of seeking utopian answers to our questions about the future, we focus on quantitative and algorithmic methods and logistics: how to move things from point A to point B, rather than asking where they should end up (or whether they should even be there)” [page 129].

– The last chapter is called Apocalypse Replaces Utopia by Dave Karpf. It is about long-termism. “The moral value of human life today is no different from that of potential post-humans who might come into existence in the distant future. From this premise, they come to fantastical and counterintuitive conclusions. They claim that economic growth, technological progress, and the prevention of existential risks, i.e. risks that could wipe out humanity (asteroid strikes, deadly super viruses, hostile artificial intelligence, etc.) matter most to humanity. Improving the situation of humanity today by addressing systemic inequalities, curing cancer, and preventing malaria are lesser initiatives. Today’s humans are merely the precursors of a post-human future scattered across space.” The promoters of such ideas are known and the author speaks of the Californian Ideology. I would like to think that they are only in the heads of a few deformed minds. The author concludes: “We should therefore recognize long-termism as a pernicious movement of thought. It is a philosophy that says we should not concern ourselves with the fate, dignity or injustices suffered by people living today, because these people do not matter more than those who will live millennia from now. […] It is a recipe that too easily excuses cruelty, suffering and social harm.

So this is a fascinating little book, which does not describe Silicon Valley, but through its roots and wings, some of its most astonishing excesses. And as I said in my previous post, this does not necessarily represent the majority, but at least a minority, perhaps tiny but undoubtedly very and too visible.

PS: for those who are not interested in long analyses, here is a rather funny video

Politics and Silicon Valley

Leave a reply

This post is motivated by an article by Olivier Alexandre for La Tribune. This CNRS sociologist, whom I have already mentioned here because I appreciate his analyses of Silicon Valley, summarizes an interview on his LinkedIn page entitled The tragedy is that Silicon Valley has come to push reactionary programs, La tragédie est que la Silicon Valley en vient à pousser des programmes réactionnaires.

I wanted to react on LinkedIn but this site limits the length of comments. Here is what I would have liked to write: There might be a book to write about the left and tech, particularly in Silicon Valley. If Silicon Valley has always been a progressive region, at least in the north close to San Francisco and Berkeley, I don’t remember meeting many “left-wing people” at Stanford or in tech companies. Not to mention that being left-wing in the United States probably doesn’t have quite the same meaning as in Europe. The individualist, even anarchist component (I prefer not to talk about libertarians who I’m not sure represent a large number of people) remains very strong among Republicans and Democrats who always seem a little wary of central power, a central power whose attraction remains a very French particularity on the contrary. There was indeed the dinner offered by Obama at the White House with the tech elite, www.startup-book.com/2011/03/28/the-whos-who-of-silicon-valley/ and it is anecdotally quite amusing to see in the donations to the parties (see for example here www.opensecrets.org/industries/contrib?cycle=2024&ind=F2500) that the two major historical funds of American venture capital lean differently, Sequoia towards the Republicans and Kleiner Perkins towards the Democrats, even in 2024.

It is not surprising that entrepreneurs are rather right-wing, it seems quite universal to me. Looking back at the early days of Silicon Valley, it seems that the big semiconductor entrepreneurs like Robert Noyce were mostly moderate Republicans who mostly tried to influence Washington to protect their industry from Japanese competition. More recently, Kleiner Perkins had recruited Colin Powell as a partner (www.nytimes.com/2005/07/13/business/colin-powell-joins-venture-capital-firm.html), who was not known for being a very left-wing politician. Finally, I have never really seen the founders of Apple or Google take a position on any political issue, but I have noted how all these companies from Intel to Google were “scared to death” of seeing unions set up shop in their company. Politics seems rather absent. Perhaps Fred Turner could inform us on the subject and write the book I am talking about if it does not already exist?

And a blog post allows to go further, so I continue. I talk about politics from time to time, as the #politics tag indicates, but probably not enough. I have rightly or wrongly stayed away from activism and taking positions, just like a lot of people in the world of technology and Silicon Valley, I will come back to that. But again, you can browse the articles linked to the previous tag. I have also just ordered the book entitled Au delà de l’idéologie de la Silicon Valley (Beyond Silicon Valley Ideology) after reading the one in Esprit magazine a few years ago.

What more can I say? I found another site that doesn’t give the amounts of people’s donations to political campaigns, but a profile of tech personalities, including their political leanings. It’s quite interesting. It has profiles of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, the two founders of Google, John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins) and Michael Moritz (Sequoia). All four lean toward the center-left or left of center, but in a rather discreet way.

More recently, a long analysis of the region showed that it is rather progressive and Democrat, except on one point, that of regulation: The vast majority of tech entrepreneurs are Democrats — but a different kind of Democratt.

I really liked Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance. I knew he was a Republican, but I thought he was a moderate and anti-Trump. What a disappointment, not to say what a sad character. So bravo to Jennifer Aniston for her recent review: Jennifer Aniston criticizes JD Vance for ‘childless cat ladies’ remarks: ‘I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children’. There are also the (too?) well-known positions of Peter Thiel or Elon Musk, but again, I don’t know if they represent a majority opinion in tech. Do we know that well that Jeff Skoll, founder of eBay, has become a producer of particularly interesting, not to say brilliant, movies?

Politics should belong as much to those who speak and act quietly as to those who speak so loudly that we end up believing they represent the opinion of the majority…

The Chaos of the Internet : SBF, JKS and more

Leave a reply

Sometimes I see striking coincidences in things which have apparently no link. It helps me in writing (useless?) posts… here the chaos of the Internet became apparent again in a trial against a startup founder, in literature and in street art, three topics which are dear to me.

The trial against a startup founder is that of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). Of course there has been tons of papers about it including one of my favorite references, The New Yorker:
– Sept. 2023 : The Parent Trap. Inside Sam Bankman-Fried’s family bubble.
– Nov. 2023 : Will Sam Bankman-Fried’s Guilty Verdict Change Anything?
as well as CNN in March 2024 : Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in federal prison

And of course this follows the scandals of Elisabeth Holmes or of Adam Neumann. There were other stories, even if less famous, like Cadence vs. Avant! or Stanford vs. Cisco (more here). Technology including the Internet has brought debatable things including crooks and I believe it is just an enlarged illustration of human nature, but it does not excuse anything…

Literature brings me back to my current fascination Jón Kalman Stefánsson (JKS). In my latest reading I found the following (that I translated thanks to the usual tools):

Sex is the most popular content on the Internet, yet very few people admit to watching pornography.
Ah, damn the Internet! If I remember correctly, you are a poet – have people like you managed to describe the phenomenon, are there poems that succeed in capturing this monstrosity, this divinity? I think I could benefit from this kind of poetry. My little Gunna says that only poems allow us to identify what constitutes the human essence.
[…]
In any case, you put your finger on the problem just now. The Internet. Do You Know What It Is Gunna asked me a long time ago, back when the world was just beginning to get a glimpse of what this web was. No, I said, I have no idea. The Internet is chaos, she said. Ah, ah, disorder, you are probably right. No, it’s not disorder, she corrected before quoting an old Greek book she was reading at the time. She spends her time reading and she always tries to make me benefit from it, as if it serves any purpose. In any case, this book explains that it was at the dawn of time that Chaos was born, and this Chaos was a kind of god or character. I forgot the details.
[…]
What Gunna wanted to emphasize about the Internet was that there was something mythological about it, it was both emptiness and the beginning of everything. Which was later verified. Is not it ? The Net is a bit like a new sky above our heads – and there are new underground worlds there too.
[…]
I was talking about the Net, this new sky, these new underground worlds. This is a radical change. So radical that, for the first time, man does not need to die to know what hell is since hell has reached us and is invading digital reality. The devil knows how to exploit technology. It seems that his domain has excellent connectivity.
Dante wouldn’t have minded that.

By accident, I discovered that one of the street artist I like, Infinipi has another name, Kaotica and he chose that name when, as a computer scientist, he entered the world of the Internet. For French readers, you can listen (soon) to his podcast here. Street art is not very far from Technology. Invader got inspiration from video games and then created one of most innovative Internet applications I have seen in the last ten years

Chaos, it is…

Tech – When Silicon Valley Changes the World (final part)

Leave a reply

I advertise this book to my friends and colleagues. This is definitely the book I wish I had written. Everything is said, as we sometimes say! You will find previous articles here and there.

The workers of Silicon Valley

Chapter 6 is dedicated to developers, coders. Historian Alfred Chandler has shed light on how the centralization of information and decision-making by top and head managers, located at the top of separate divisions, constituted a comparative advantage for the leading companies that emerged in the 19th century in the fields of transport, energy and communications. Managers prevail as intermediaries between producers-suppliers and customers-demanders. They embody and concentrate power for functional reasons, because they allow the coherent, hierarchical and vertical circulation of information and decision-making within companies.
Through the writings and conclusions of F. Brooks ([in The Mythical Man-Month] shows an inverse pattern. According to him, to give free rein to the iteration process necessary for software production, the work must be coordinated horizontally, to favor support for the continuity of software development. He pleads in favor of small teams gathered around a central worker, whom he compares to a “chief surgeon” placed, no longer upstream and overhanging as in the large companies analyzed by A. Chandler, but at the heart of the action.
This mode of organization aims to adapt to the type of product that is the software and its characteristics in terms of production. Developers project themselves into a job without knowing the outcome, the time required, or the final properties of the production process. Software design thus necessarily proceeds via projections. If the developers can rely on scenarios, visions, schemes, diagrams, these do not allow a lasting and stable coordination unlike scripts in the cinema or scores in the field of music. This dimension explains the role assigned to managers in Silicon Valley companies. It is not a question of circulating information between managers at the top of different divisions to control the work of subordinates but of ensuring the coherence and coordination of the team within the framework of a project. […] If the developers cannot rely on downstream continuity supports, they mobilize a series of tools upstream of the production process [Pages 316-18].

Start a business

Founding a business is a more radical choice. […] This entrepreneurial move to action turns out to be paradoxical if we consider the treatment that developers are given within Silicon Valley companies and the low chances of leading a company to success, i.e., according to the criteria of investors, a sale or an IPO. For those who work for the big names in tech, leaving to start your own company means giving up, for an unknown period of tim,e a high salary, bonuses, health insurance, free catering and transport services, maternity and paternity leave, child care systems, etc., all for a greater amount of work. From this point of view, the creation of a business does not meet the criteria of rational choice within a professional group that is nevertheless attached to objectivity, reason and logic.
While many cite Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture to justify this shift, they also point to the desire to retain control of the value possibly generated by their work. Indeed, the creation of a business proves for the developers not the surest means of enrichment but the one which represents the greatest potential [Page 335].

Burning man, an inverted carnival

When I started reading the last part of his book, I wondered why Olivier Alexandre devoted so many pages to this very special event that is the Burning Man festival. The chapter devoted to it therefore deserves careful reading, starting with a note on page 529: “The habitus is a set of enduring dispositions which consists of categories of appreciation and judgment and engenders social practices adjusted to social positions. Acquired during the early education and the first social experiences, it also reflects the trajectory and later experiences: the habitus results from a progressive integration of social habits. This explains why, placed in similar conditions, the agents have the same vision of the world, the same idea of what can be done and what cannnot be done, the same criteria for choosing their hobbies and their friends, the same clothing or aesthetic tastes” [Anne-Catherine Wagner in Les 100 mots de la sociologie].

It is from this remarkable point of view that the term “connection” finds multiple uses in Burning Man: connecting with others, reconnecting with oneself, connecting with the festival, connecting the different stages of one’s life (or according to Steve Jobs’ formula “connect the dots”) or take MDMA or LSD to better “feel the connection” (with other people, the environment, etc.), etc. This mode of engagement, which is based on immediacy and interaction, ultimately leads to bringing into play habits, stabilized and incorporated representations, including in terms of self-representation. This bringing into play of habitus proceeds from a series of tests [Pages 361-62].

As seen above, Silicon Valley is characterized by a significant turnover of workers. Their high geographic mobility poses uncertainty about the sustainability of relations. The idea that a departure almost overnight is within the realm of possibility remains deeply rooted in people’s minds. Especially since Silicon Valley has had one of the highest divorce rates in the country since the 1980s and expatriates rarely see their families. For these various reasons, the Burning Man represents for certain participants a “family” of substitution. In 2008, 67% of participants were in contact with Burners outside the festival [Page 380].

For the participants, the festival tends in different ways to enchant a world that they contribute the rest of the year to disenchant through the production of digital tools, measuring instruments, calculation methods and a rationalist approach. Art is not considered an object but a support for interaction. As a component of an environment, it allows the development of skills before, during and after the festival. The latter confronts the Burners with a series of tests whose learning and experiences are reinvested during the rest of the year, within the framework of projects. In this, the Burning Man is not a simple party, a festival or a laboratory, but a device that makes possible the interconnection between individuals, repertoires of skills and communities of practice. It leads to the construction of an ethos oriented towards change. [Page 382]

Silicon Valley, a political project?

Olivier Alexandre ends his book with what the region represents from a political point of view. A place of experimentation par excellence, this region is also at the origin or development of movements such as libertarianism, transhumanism and long-termism, whose influences and relationships are shown in the following figure (see page 361 and original source dated 2013 on Julia Galef’s blog). They are themselves mixtures or synthesis of anarchism, liberalism and isolationism [Page 387]. Their political vision would be characterized by a lack of empathy as well as a willingness to go beyond the boundaries of mind and body [Page 388].

Once again, Olivier Alexandre gives a subtle description of the region: one can legitimately wonder about the novelty, the coherence of this constellation within a region which has a majority of pragmatist progressives, pro-government libertarians, liberals voting mostly Democrats, who (like Elon Musk) favor the investor state while demanding tax cuts [Page 394]. And adding in note 12, page 501: Libertarians are only a minority in Northern California. The Libertarian Party had 2,600 registered voters out of 468,000 voters in the city of San Francisco in the early 2010s.

I can’t resist adding here some additional references for my own archives:
– The vast majority of tech entrepreneurs are Democrats — but a different kind of Democrat. A big new survey tells us a lot about Silicon Valley’s politics by Dylan Matthews, Sep 6, 2017
– Techno-feudalism by Cédric Durand. See a review by Jérémy Lucas on Dygest (in French).
– Mouvement syndical et critique écologique des industries numériques dans la Silicon Valley (Labor movement and ecological criticism of the digital industries in Silicon Valley) by Christophe Lécuyer dans Réseaux 2022/1 (N° 231), pages 41 à 70
– Some articles with the #politics tag on this blog, including the recent work of Anthony Galluzzo who participated with Olivier Alexandre in programs on France Culture.

The impact on the region is known and is not new even if it has increased. The attractiveness of the region has left too many people behind and the observation already existed in … 1979. See for example Silicon Valley, more of the same that I published in the early days of this blog. The following extract deserves to be copied here again: “In 1979, I was a graduate student at Berkeley and I was one of the first scholars to study Silicon Valley. I culminated my master’s program by writing a thesis in which I confidently predicted that Silicon Valley would stop growing. I argued that housing and labor were too expensive and the roads were too congested, and while corporate headquarters and research might remain, I was convinced that the region had reached its physical limits and that innovation and job growth would occur elsewhere during the 1980s. As it turns out I was wrong” by AnnaLee Saxenian.

“I don’t necessarily blame the workers. […] By and large the real people in the tech industry don’t seek to do harm. In fact, they seek to do good, at least in the way they see it, especially the elders, the OPs [the Old Programmers]. But they are just one small piece in a larger system that is sinister. One of the things that I try to explain to people I work with about this industry is that one of the best parts of it is working with very smart people on projects you devote yourselves totally. When you work like that, there is something that happens… that makes you forget everything else. It’s like in a war… it causes people to develop a psychology where they become myopic to what surrounds them. That’s passionate work, and it’s wonderful. But if you go nearsighted, you can’t see anything outside your field of vision because you’re immersed in it. As a result, they are not against the right to housing, or more social justice. It’s just that it’s not part of their consciousness, they don’t feel like they have the ability to care or think about it, because they’re so focused on the task in front of them. When we started this organization, I had the good fortune to have a few experiences that opened my eyes to the corrupting influence of money. So we don’t do high-priced galas, I don’t go to wealthy family foundations, corporations or anything else to raise funds [Page 438, Brian Basinger, July 2016].

It is difficult to finish reading such a book and to review it. I can only encourage one last time to read it. I will limit myself to a few additional quotes: “The painful paradox of modern technology is that it has been so successful, but it has also failed miserably. We live in this paradox that challenges the very meaning of being modern” [Page 455, by Lee Bailey in The Enchantments of Technology].

This book is a description of an ultra-competitive but enchanted world, Balzacian in that the grandeur of ambitions meets the fragility of solutions. The analysis will serve those wishing to “change the world” as well as their critics determined to think of new models [Page 456].

Many thanks to Olivier Alexandre.

Tech – When Silicon Valley Changes the World (part 2)

Leave a reply

I’ve already written all the good things I thought of La Tech – Quand la Silicon Valley refait le Monde (Tech – When Silicon Valley Remakes the World) (see my previous post). Here is more.

Olivier Alexandre explains in his introduction that he conducted 147 in-depth interviews. His work is full of testimonies that often say more than, at least as , statistical analyses (the two complement each other wonderfully). Especially since in the second part of the book, the author describes essential but intangible ingredients of Silicon Valley: confidence, luck, social attitudes, for example. So I continue with a few excerpts.

“Google came to us in different ways and everyone will have a different story of how it happened. My version is the following: I started interviewing all the people who had a PhD at Stanford and who continued to work there in the engineering departments. It was about fifty people. They are the best and the brightest. And I asked each of them: Who is the best with the best idea? And almost all of them answered: the two guys who worked on Google. And what’s interesting about this story is that this way of doing things is exactly the same as Google’s algorithm.” [Page 195]

“In 2000, I had the vision of Facebook… But because we didn’t meet the right person, it didn’t work. I tried my luck until the end. It’s the investor’s assistant, who says to you: Sorry, he can’t see you. The guys who succeed, there is timing, perseverance, but also luck.” [Page 210]

“There is no concept of caste here, if you come up with a good idea, you will be able to meet guys, raise funds and sit at the table; I’m a living proof of that: we didn’t know anyone. We did not raise 20 million, ok; but we were given a chance; we screwed up, but that’s our problem. Afterwards, if the question is whether Silicon Valley is a utopia: it is not one, obviously. There are old families, networks of alumni, diasporas, new wealthy people, who help their friends and help each other; of course. But there is still this idea: we do not know you, but we will give you a chance.” [Page 211]

And funnier still, or more tragic: “Here everything is organized in communities… We are the first to suffer from being French abroad. It’s never easy to create a startup, even harder when you’re not at home. We all suffer from this. Because the codes are different. And you need to understand them and you’re not sure you understand them on your own. And it’s useful to meet someone who says to you: You’re not crazy, I’m having exactly the same problem and I think that… And that takes a lot of time. It took me four years. The French are arrogant when they arrive. They are so much that they think they are going to become Americans. It’s: Yes, I don’t want to see French people. So they go to the Americans. But without having the codes… I compare them to Barbapapa [A funny French alien family]. They are intelligent, they know how to adapt, but we still recognize them. On the other hand, he, the Barbapapa, he is persuaded to be a car when everyone knows that he is a Barbabapa. It doesn’t work at all. Me, for four years, it took me that long to first understand that you shouldn’t try to imitate them, and then that I wouldn’t be able to change them. […] Except that the French, he already blends into the decor, that physically, he looks like them, so he will blend into the thing, with an added bonus: subtlety. Which is actually exotic. The French entrepreneurs, the executives of the CAC40 who come here, I tell them: You are Senegalese in boubou who come from your village in the bush. Do you give a damn about guys from the Middle East who come to business meetings in traditional attire? But you are the same. You come in a tie… Have you seen people in a tie here? So you have to accept and tell yourself: I’m a Senegalese who just arrived in Paris, I’m black and I have a shitty accent, I don’t dress like them, and I can’t go back to the village, because otherwise I am the shame of the village, while everyone believes in me. They are the same: they are the light of France; when you realize that, that you are a projected dream in fact, how do you do when you are that guy? Well you reboot. Everything I did before doesn’t count. So it’s not an Italian renaissance. No way. It’s a rebirth, meaning that everything I’ve done doesn’t count. All the people I met no longer count and I have to build a new project and a new identity.” [Pages 208-210]

What is great and pretty amazing with this long excerpt is that Silicon Valley has not changed between the late 80s and 2016 when Olivier Alexandre conducted most of his interviews. The culture is absolultely the same ! (See the Post-Scriptum at the end of the article).

Pages 217 to 234 on the entrepreneurial experience are perhaps the most extraordinary that I have read since the beginning of the book. They should be quoted in full, so all to your readers! It is about roller coasters, the virtues of simplicity and sincerity, and energy capital. The illusion of meritocracy is another topic that brings complexity to the whole picture. With, at the end of the passage, “Gradually the articulation between the individual and the collective tends to be reversed: entrepreneurs become the imprint of their environment rather than impacting it. The company is the main vehicle of their dialectic.”

A permanent evolution in search of talents

In Silicon Valley, companies are therefore characterized by a Proteus syndrome, due to a pressure of constant evolution. […] The belief of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, managers and investors is that change is not only desirable but also “inevitable”. This horizon of expectation leads to making routines, these devices of predictability at the base of the efficiency of bureaucracies and large companies, objects of rejection. […] This dialectic of desired and organized change poses a series of problems within organizations: remaining effective despite instability, maintaining consistency despite changes.
[…] In the sector of new technologies, companies, whatever their size, seek to be innovative. However, innovation presupposes differentiated development phases. The first stages of a project are characterized by phases of trial and error, through tight and close exchanges with users; the usage value remains undetermined. This phase is based on the involvement of enthusiasts, at the crossroads of amateurism, research and the business world, in chiaroscuro spaces, on the border between public space and private space. The cliques formed on this occasion have a number of occurrences in the history of Silicon Valley: amateurs (“hobbyists”) in the field of broadcasting, hackers from MIT fiddling on the sly with DEC and IBM computers, participants of the Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s, Nolan Bushnell programming his first game “Computer Space” in his daughter’s bedroom before founding Atari, the dormitory brogrammers behind Facebook, etc. After several years, a product with stable properties emerges. A second phase then begins.
The growth in the number of users and the addition of new functions require the involvement of workers with a high level of technical skills. However, developing a solution, increasing its capacities and the number of its applications, solving the problems that arise, are all objectives that require hiring. The profiles sought are designated in Silicon Valley according to a common metonymic name in the fields of creation, “talents”. […] This second phase is decisive in that it suggests a shift in financial terms. The organization is then ready to engage in a third phase, which brings it closer to traditional sectors: an operating technology, a structured and clearly identified market, with means of production, the counterpart of which is a slowed down innovation dynamic. Indeed, once a commercial niche has been invested and marked out, the teams tend towards the systematization of processes and the organization is characterized by effects of bureaucratization. These “slow” development companies (referred to as “slow moving organizations” in Silicon Valley) are often powerful but discredited because the learning effects are limited. To maintain a dynamic of innovation, large companies commonly resort to a so-called external growth strategy, by hiring or buying companies in order to integrate their innovations or their teams. The recent history of large companies illustrates the consistency of this strategy: Apple made 100 acquisitions between 1976 and 2020, Microsoft 225 in forty-five years of existence, Amazon 88 in twenty-five years, Facebook 82 in fifteen years, Google 236 in twenty years, an average of one acquisition per week. During these three phases, the destiny of organizations rests largely on the human factor. [Pages 242-5]

Company cultures

Faced with these constant challenges, it seems that Silicon Valley has developed a rather unique culture. Sincerity and simplicity are mentioned again with the famous pitch: “In presentations, there is a lot of waste, a lot of people don’t know what they are talking about and it is obvious right away. The speech is incoherent and they do not know how to express what they are doing precisely. And that is the first sign that they are going to screw up. They don’t know how to explain in a concise paragraph what they are doing. It is not just a problem of intellectual coherence. Oral and written communication is one of the fundamental skills of a successful entrepreneur. An entrepreneur must be able to raise funds. If he is not able to express clearly, concisely, what he does, why it is interesting and how it is new, he will not succeed” [Page 272].

Clearly establishing a mission makes it possible to stay on course whatever the circumstances and for the long term, by providing motivation to overcome difficulties, put suffering into perspective and make choices [Page 270]. Could this be an explanation to the quasi-absence of workers’ unions?

However, every company is different, even within the same sector. The openness and flow of information at Google, networking at Facebook, competition at Uber, design at Apple, etc. […] In the 2010s, Lyft made a name for itself by promoting a culture of openness and inclusion, in contrast to Uber [Page 268].

With some risk: “Company culture is our own spiel in Silicon Valley. […] But it’s still bullshit in the sense that it quickly becomes artificial if it’s not embodied. The thing is carried by the founder and it works as long as he is there, he is the one who embodies it, who carries it. […] But the day he leaves, values become boxes in an evaluation grid” [Page 283].

Post-Scriptum: personal notes related to the second part of the book.
– Olivier Alexandre gives very interesting statistics, especially on pages 170-72. I mention my own data on startups from Stanford or other startups that have prepared an IPO on this recent post. On the age of the founders – 45 years old -, the number of founders – 75% are more than 3 – or on the serial entrepreneurs – 60% are, I have built similar data sets.
– For those interested in the topic of startup acquisitions (M&A), here are two blog links: Cisco’s A&D and Google in the Plex. An additional link show that even public companies are often acquired.
– But as I said before, statistics are one thing. The description by a multitude of cases is another and the two complement each other perfectly, I believe. I remembered a trip to Silicon Valley in 2006. The report we made is confidential because of the non-anonymized testimonies. But I extract the non-secret part:

06-05-Trip in the Silicon Valley-FILTERED