Silicon Valley

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A Tough Weekend

After three decades of being part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem — as a reporter, writer, entrepreneur, and investor — I thought I had seen it all. The boom-bust cycles, stock market manias, startup insanity, attack on America itself, and the most significant financial calamity in nearly a century — living through history prepares you for every eventuality. Your own struggle with mortality prepares you for the unpredictability of everything. You embrace the impermanence and become one with it. And despite all that, you experience what Silicon Valley has experienced this weekend — a sense of helplessness, a feeling of dread, and, more importantly, a sadness about the fragility of our community.

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Photo by Ussama Azam on Unsplash

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that “tech layoffs” have been on my mind, and I wrote a column for The Spectator to explain “the why of these layoffs.” An unprecedented boom in Silicon Valley that started with the once-in-a-generation convergence of three mega trends: mobile, social, and cloud computing, has peaked. It started in 2010, and it has been bananas around here for the past decade or so. The FAANG+Microsoft companies saw their revenues go from $196 billion to over $1.5 Trillion. Let that sink in. Booming stocks helped create an environment of excess like never before. 

The companies got into the business of what Paul Kedrosky calls “people hoarding.” The pandemic and the resulting growth revved up the hiring machine even more. The over-hiring of talent has led to wage inflation, which had a ripple effect across the entire technology ecosystem. Technology insiders are happy to tell non-tech companies to use data and automation as tools to plan their future. It is easier to preach than practice. 

Why does Google need close to 200,000 employees? Or does Microsoft need 225,000 people? Salesforce, till recently, had about 73,500 employees. Profitable as these companies have been, it is also clear that they have become sloppy and bloated. I don’t want to undermine the misfortunes of those losing jobs. A lot of the blame is on the leaders of these companies, who were asleep at the wheel. The reality is that when it comes to business, companies have to appease their investors. And right now, those investors want to see companies be more efficient, especially now that growth is becoming normal. 

If you are looking for one, the silver lining is that we will soon be in a new cycle, and a new set of hype trends will converge and create opportunities. And they might not emerge in 2023 or 2024, but they surely will. By then, the industry would have put these job cuts in the rearview mirror.

Read the full piece on The Spectator website!

February 2, 2023. San Francisco

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This week, Tim O’Reilly provided much-needed perspective in his essay “The End of Silicon Valley As We Know It.” If you can overlook the clickbait title, this essay is among the most valuable things you can read to understand our present and think about our future. While there has been much hoopla about folks leaving Silicon Valley, new distributed work philosophies, and other daily headlines, these are primarily distractions from a deeper, more profound change afoot in what we call Silicon Valley.

The Algorithmic Accountability Index: Ellery Roberts Biddle and Jie Zhang have created an accountability index for the algorithmic economy. They looked for companies’ answers to some fundamental questions about algorithms: How do you build and train them? What do they do? What standards guide these processes? An essential piece. 

How the race for autonomous cars started: We might be on the brink of the future where we all zoom around in self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles. It is easy to forget that, 16 years ago, autonomous driving was a chaotic dream. In his new book, Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car, Alex Davies chronicles what brought us to this moment. Wired magazine recently ran an excerpt, and you should check it out.

Did Tech prevent the World from a bigger meltdown?: While we have read many articles about technology becoming a dominant force in our lives during the pandemic, this article in Foreign Policy asks (and answers) the question from a different angle. I liked the nuanced argument, and that is why I recommend it for your weekend reading.

The cassette tape creator is dead: In time, what was a disruptive technology becomes a part of our life that we don’t even notice. One hundred billion units later, cassette tape is one of those technologies. It kicked off the ability to personalize the curation of music. You can draw a straight line between those tapes and Spotify playlists. Lou Ottens, the engineer who created the cassette tape, died recently. Ottens also helped create the compact disc, which ultimately killed the cassette tape. His obituary is a reminder that only very few are fortunate enough to create technology that touches everyone’s lives.

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Best of the 2010s: Some of my favorite pieces from the last ten years

At the end of 2009, I launched a personal blog. It was hosted on ommalik.com, then omis.me, and eventually finding home at this final domain, Om.co. It has been my homestead on the web for almost a decade and has survived the vagaries of the modern Internet. Social networks may have taken some of the … Continue reading Best of the 2010s: Some of my favorite pieces from the last ten years

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Chris Michel & Our Need for Constant Reinvention

Last night, the Long Now folks hosted a talk with my dear friend Chris Michel, a photographer who has immense empathy and appreciation for nature. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that he has been the single most positive influence on my photography. He is my visual sensei. And while I had seen many of his photos over the years, I was moved by his visual diaries from the edge of the planet — whether it was the poles, north, and south, or the edge of our atmosphere.  Continue reading “Chris Michel & Our Need for Constant Reinvention”
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Elad Gil on startup advice & his book, High Growth Handbook

About ten days ago I caught up with Elad Gil, a Silicon Valley veteran who has written a new book, High Growth Handbook. Even halfway through the book, and I can already tell this is a book that is a valuable asset for those who are running fast-growing companies. It is equally helpful for those of us who aspire to grow fast. Elad has written one of the best books for the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial ecosystem. Continue reading “Elad Gil on startup advice & his book, High Growth Handbook”
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Chickens have come to roost in Silicon Valley

…in the Bay Area — where the nation’s preeminent local food movement overlaps with the nation’s tech elite — egg-laying chickens are now a trendy, eco-conscious humblebrag on par with driving a Tesla.

When reading this article, I was once again reminded that Silicon Valley denizens go over the top in their obsessiveness and turn normal, mundane and sometimes boring aspects of things into an A-B test. It is not just chickens. It is everything – from sous vide, flipping pizzas to make sourdough bread.

What starts out as a way to relax eventually turns into a growth hack, a way to improve efficiencies and obviously talk about it on the social media. This mindset is pervasive. This is who we/they are.  There isn’t an off-switch and basically, despite best efforts to relax, there are hardly who know how to relax. The obsessiveness in many ways is what which makes Silicon Valley people successful in their day job.

Do you really think we could have had cars-on-demand if someone wasn’t obsessed with hacking “taxi industry” and “limousines” because they had to wait for a cab too long in Paris?

Read article on The Washington Post