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Emily Chang
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[...] Rabois believes PayPal is a "perfect validation of merit" and of Silicon Valley as a meritocracy. "None of us had any connection to anyone important in Silicon Valley," he told me. "We went from complete misfits to the establishment in five years. We were literally nobodies.[...]" The early PayPal team would go on to found some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley, including Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Yelp. Thiel funded and joined the board of Facebook. Establishment achieved.
this guy literally knows nothing about anything
Obviously, Thiel didn't consider himself one of those doomed lemmings. But how does one find other nonlemmings? Just look for unusual behavior. In his book, Thiel notes with pride that "of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school." In our interview, he told me, "There is something that's always quite extreme about the personalities that go into starting a company ... Having some extreme personalities, I think, is a somewhat good thing."
my god
But we didn't have a term for "meritocracy" until the twentieth century, when the British sociologist and politician Michael Young wrote a book in 1958 warning of how dangerous the world's relatively new method of establishing status might be. In his novel The Rise of the Meritocracy, Young portrayed a dystopian Britain in which status based on birth and lineage was replaced by status based on education and achievement. Young wasn't advocating for a return to the old system, but he did see grave dangers in the new embrace of meritocracy, eerily predicting that in this new world, status would still be accessible only to a select few: those who had access to elite education. As a result, meritocracy would produce a new social stratification and a sense of moral exceptionalism.
Though Young's book was meant as a cautionary satire, the idea of meritocracy took off, all negative connotations forgotten, as the term for a new equality of opportunity [...]
That's when Young penned an op-ed for the Guardian in which he confessed he was "sadly disappointed" by his book's effect. "It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit," he wrote. "It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room it in it for others ... If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get. They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the benefitciares of neptosim. The newcomesr can actually believe they have morality on their side. As a result, general inequality has been becoming more grievous with every year that passes."
so good
Sexist behavior often comes from the top, and in Holmes's telling that was the case at Cooliris, where the young CEO, Soujanya Bhumkar, gave the entire staff copies of the Kama Sutra [...] Bhumkar would often joke, "Thank God we don't have an HR team," [...]
this quote, word for word
[...] because most venture capitalists are men, they are likely to be more passionate about ideas that appeal to, well, men. When Lake was raising her seed round, she noticed that a fair number of little league coaching apps were getting funded. "I'm like, how big of a business is that? Seriously, a T-ball league? But your target audience is these VCs who manage their son's T-ball league," Lake says. [...]
amazing
[...] Binary Capital said the allegations were "false" and that while The Information had "found a few examples which show that Justin has in the past occasionally dated or flirted with women he met in a professional capacity, let's be clear: there is no evidence that Justin did anything illegal and there is no evidence that any of his investing decisions were affected by his social interests."
on Justin Caldbeck. note the immediate need to bring up legality
When a dancer wearing a gleaming-white bra and underwear approaches our table [...] tells me she is a teacher at a public middle school in Berkeley, doing summer day shifts at the club to help pay bills. She says she has met patrons from all of the brand-name tech companies nearby, specifically mentioning Uber, Dropbox, Twitter and Airbnb. "Salresforce is big here," she says. "Yelp employees call this place Conference Room G."
the Gold Club in SoMa, near Yelp and LinkedIn
The Silicon Valley tropes around who becomes successful [...] young, single guys hacking all night, night after night, in a race to achieve their billion-dollar dreams. No families, no wives, no relationships, no real anything except the Product and the Dream. [...] Those young men have achieved great things - witness Facebook, Google, Apple. But just because those companies were successful doesn't mean the model isn't fundamentally flawed or that success can't be achieved in other ways. As in any industry or institution, tech's habits and norms were created by those who were there first. And those habits are hard to change, especially when the companies are bringing in billions upon billions of dollars. It stands to reason that if more types of people were given a shot, the tech industry might boast even more success stories.
i like the reasoning here, though i dont really like the implication that success = multi-billion-dollar valuations
Let's imagine a world where women hold half the jobs in Silicon Valley. Where half of entrepreneurs, executives, venture capitalists, board members, and employees - including engineers - are women.
[...] "I think there would be two enormous differences," the longtime tech investor Roger McNamee told me. "I think Silicon Valley would be wildly more profitable. I think there would be a significant reduction in the number of absolute failures. And so I think success would go up dramatically."
i dont think this is possible without broader societal changes, and even then, im not sure how desirable it would be (depends on the kind of broader societal changes i guess). esp if the goal is for SV to become more "profitable"
Pick up a flower--a beautiful, living, fresh rose. It smells wonderful. It reveals a lovely rhythm in the swirl of its petals, a rich yet dazzling color, a soft velvety texture. It moves and delights us.
The problem with the rose is that it dies. Its petals fall; it shrivels up; it turns brown and returns to the earth.
One solution to this problem is to ignore the real rose and substitute a plastic one, one that never dies (and never lives). But is a plastic rose what we want? No, of course not. We want the real rose. We want the one that dies. We want it because it dies, because it's fleeting, because it fades. It's this very quality that makes it precious. This is what we want, what each of us is: a living thing that dies.
akin to only being able to appreciate happiness because of the possibility of pain and tragedy. connect to neil gaiman's take (in american gods) on going to the casinos to lose. sligthtly different approach but it hints at the same idea: that you need the contrast, that you need the bad to appreciate the good