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In 2020, the investor Paul Graham wrote an essay titled "How to Think for Yourself." One lesson: "If you're surrounded by conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas you can express, and that in turn will constrain which ideas you have. But if you surround yourself with independent-mi…

As the economist Tom Nicholas has pointed out, the American institution of venture capital (VC) emerged out of the attempt to ensure the persistence of capital amid economic windfalls connected to easily depleted natural resources, a monetary message in a bottle passed from one boom to the next. In…

Silicon Valley dominates by converting power into other forms of power and by obscuring the obvious continuities between these forms. What neither Moore's law nor blitzscaling truly possess is a theory of dominance: How does dominance arise, and how does its mechanism manifest itself in reality? Ku…

Together, these two incubators-the university and the research parks next door-have launched multiple generations of entrepreneurs. Surprisingly often, those generations have been understood as, and indeed presented themselves as, nouveau riche. In some cases, they were indeed that, biographically …

The money of John Arrillaga Sr., whose name is immortalized in the names of these buildings, is also Silicon Valley money. However, Arrillaga didn't found any start-ups, though he sometimes accepted their shares as rent. Instead, together with Richard Peery, another real estate developer, Arrillaga…