The New Silicon Valley

My first exposure to Silicon Valley was through my younger brother Jay. In high school, he had taken a summer off to intern at a YC startup called Fountain.

Compared to New Jersey where we grew up, Silicon Valley felt like a magical place with endless possibilities. People working on such cool and ambitious things! Uber and Airbnb were in its early innings. Facebook and Pinterest were connecting the world with all their cool swag and culture. Hackathons were kinda cool where huge ideas like GitHub could be created.

There was this implicit notion that whatever you were building should matter, especially from the perspective of trying to create positive progress in society. People cared about the mission and the why behind what you were doing. Or at least they seemed to. One could call it naive idealism, but at least it felt energizing.

Fast forward 10 years to today, Silicon Valley has changed. It feels vastly more mercenary and soulless.

Some major themes:

1. ARR-maxing#

Whereas before mission seemingly mattered, ARR has become the new north star for companies and the new status symbol of Silicon Valley. ARR is the new mission.

There is no inherent problem about this. But it’s led to a lot of people working on things in construction or trucking, or things that they basically have zero reason to care about if it weren’t for the financial rewards.

In 2015, top employees worked at places like:

  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Uber
  • Airbnb

Now, apart from the AI labs (which are doing indisputably cool work), the most talented people work at:

  • Customer support companies
  • ERP companies
  • HR/payroll companies
  • Data labeling companies

I don’t think this shift can be explained as simply as B2B has proven to be a better investment over time. I’m just surprised that the most inspiring place to work at in SV looks more like optimizing CX support using agents.

2. Labor substitution#

There is a strange glorification of opportunities to capture margin from replacing human jobs. I understand why this is a big financial opportunity. But the pure lack of regard for the negative impact on livelihoods that these companies will bring about feels strange to me. It’s a dialogue and fear that feels ever present outside of the valley, but for some reason, it feels like an inconvenient truth that everyone here avoids talking about.

For an agentic backoffice automation company, the vision for the company towards market dominance is having all its customers fire every backoffice person. While I understand how this is an exciting vision for the CFOs of the customers, how is this a vision that is good for the average person?

There is something that feels dystopian about a bunch of twenty-something year olds excitingly running around to start companies to unemploy non-technical people in a time when 50%+ of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

I do miss a previous version of Silicon Valley that felt more connected to the rest of the world — one where ambitious people would ponder about how technology can empower people rather than replace them, one where societal impact mattered over purely optimizing a top-line number, and one where we had more missionaries than mercenaries.