Silicon Valley Quotes

“In America, the glass is neither full nor empty. It is buy one, get one free.”
― Ali Sheikh, Closure of the Helpdesk — A Geek Tragedy

“In an era of fake news, and the filter bubble, [Gen Z is] also more likely to be able to push through the noise. . . Not only are they able to consume more information than any group before, they have also become accustomed to cutting through it. They are perhaps the most brand-critical, bullshit-repellent, questioning group around and will call out any behavior they dislike on social media. (Little wonder brands are quaking in their boots.)”
― Lucie Greene

“And what these winners wanted was for the world to be changed in ways that had their buy-in—think charter schools over more equal public school funding, or poverty-reducing tech companies over antitrust regulation of tech companies. The entrepreneurs were willing to participate in making the world better if you pursued that goal in a way that exonerated and celebrated and depended on them.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“My own psychic burden was that I could command a six-figure salary, yet I did not know how to do anything. Whatever I learned to do in my late twenties, I learned from online tutorials: how to remove mold from a windowsill; slow-cook fish; straighten a cowlick; self-administer a breast exam. Whenever I wrenched a piece of self-assembly furniture into place, or reinforced a loose button, I experienced an unfamiliar and antiquated type of satisfaction. I went so far as to buy a sewing machine, like I was looking for ways to shame myself.a”
― Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

“The problem with most smart people is that they are too dumb to distinguish necessity from luxury, that's why despite having the resources to deal with real problems that cause misery to humanity, they keep wasting those resources on pompous dreams. And you can have first-hand experience with such stupidity if you visit any CES event. Whether it is smart toilet or smart underwear, there is no end to intellectual, wealthy and pompous stupidity. Silicon Valley is no longer the valley of innovators who solve problems, it has turned into the valley of resourceful stupidity. They are a bunch of people wasting resources on creating products that do nothing more than fuel the predominant neurosis of consumerism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Constitution of The United Peoples of Earth

“He was certifiably insane, an Ayn Rander who fancied himself an Übermensch and “the Singularity’s chosen avatar,”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migration, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

“It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside — as the startup culture sees it — while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“I wanted to believe that as generations turned over, those coming into economic and political power would build a different, better, more expansive world, and not just for people like themselves.”
― Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

“Purpose driven technology will continue to flourish, whereas profit driven technology will either perish or destroy the world.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Insan: When The World is Family

“In November 2011, San Francisco magazine ran a story on female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and illustrated it by superimposing the featured women's heads onto male bodies. The only body type they could imagine for successful entrepreneurship was wearing a tie or a hoodie. Our culture needs to find a robust image of female success that is first, not male, and second, not a white woman on the phone, holding a crying baby.”
― Sheryl Sandberg

“more than just a corporate thriller, its about the lifestyle and culture of Silicon Valley”
― Patrick Krejcik, Sand Hill Road

“Bunch of people go out to the Valley, create something new. Us out here in the world go hmm, that's interesting, and start using it. Meanwhile the Valley guys are convinced they're the second coming of Christ and start overhyping and doing all sorts of things that aren't even useful anymore. The tech press clap and clap until it's time to write the obituary.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“Many investment managers believe that the secret to riches is to implement an extremely complex ML algorithm. They are setting themselves up for a disappointment. If it was as easy as coding a state-of-the-art classifier, most people in Silicon Valley would be billionaires.”
― Marcos Lopez de Prado, Advances in Financial Machine Learning

“״ילד לא צריך בכלל מסיבה גדולה עד גיל ארבע,״ פוסקת רוית.
״מה, בארץ עושים רק עם הסבתות, הדודים...״
״אבל זו הבעיה, אין פה סבתות,״ היא מחווה את דעתה.
״איי,״ מלכה מסכימה, ״זאת בדיוק הבעיה. אין פה סבתות.״”
― Maya Arad, המורה לעברית

“And they came to be included in a culture and community that placed the computer science engineer at the highest level of social status.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“Innovation is the combination of different ideas and contribution of the different minds.”
― #MMahendra001

“Silicon Valley is no longer the valley of innovators who solve problems, it has turned into the valley of resourceful stupidity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Constitution of The United Peoples of Earth

“When asked how far China lags behind Silicon Valley in artificial intelligence research, some Chinese entrepreneurs jokingly answer ‘sixteen hours’ — the time difference between California and Beijing.”
― Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

“A social network everyone said they hated but no one could stop logging in to went public at a valuation of one-hundred-odd billion dollars, its grinning founder ringing the opening bell over video chat, a death knell for affordable rent in San Francisco.”
― Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

“Two hundred million people signed on to a microblogging platform that helped them feel close to celebrities and other strangers they’d loathe in real life. Artificial intelligence and virtual reality were coming into vogue, again. Self-driving cars were considered inevitable. Everything was moving to mobile. Everything was up in the cloud. The cloud was an unmarked data center in the middle of Texas or Cork or Bavaria, but nobody cared. Everyone trusted it anyway.”
― Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

“Google runs the world, Facebook runs the life, Apple provides the best tools for people to use these things. And Twitter begins revolutions, sparks real change.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Algorithm without humanity is digital barbarism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society

“When an inscrutable technology becomes an invisible technology, we would be wise to be concerned. At that point, the technology's assumptions and intentions have infiltrated our own desires and actions. We no longer know whether the software is aiding us or controlling us. We're behind the wheel, but we can't be sure who's driving.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“If it takes $300bn to end world hunger,
and 7 trillion to fund the next AI wonder,
how many people have to starve to death,
to feed the appetite of the cyberworld?”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“Se è corretta la mia ipotesi che il capitale cloud sta prevalendo sul capitale terrestre, risucchiando sempre più rendita cloud dalla catena del valore globale, allora l'Europa è in grossi guai. Perché non è la Cina. Non ha una sola azienda Big Tech che possa competere con quelle della Silicon Valley e i suoi sistemi finanziari sono in tutto e per tutto dipendenti da Wall Street.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Tecnofeudalesimo: Cosa ha ucciso il capitalismo

“In entrepreneurial finance, the asymmetry between what needs to be backed and what actually gets financed—often driven by purely speculative expectations—is truly remarkable.
Case in point: CB Insights has been doing an admirable job publishing its "mortality reports," analyzing why some of the most promising and heavily vetted startups fail. And for years, the number one reason for failure among VC-backed startups has remained the same:
There was no market need.”
― Victoria Silchenko, Raise and Rise: Funding Sources for Your Startup in the Era of Digital Transformation & Blockchain

“The clarity of Aravind Srinivas's vision for AI-accelerated knowledge discovery is magnetizing talent and driving Perplexity's rapid execution”
― Daniel Vincent Kramer