I certainly liked the first season, even the second, but I wonder if the last season even had anyone in front of a computer. Or doing anything other than complain about other people.
It seemed to turn 100% drama, no tech. I couldn't get past episode 2 of the last season!
I don’t know about that, that scene where they are sitting in front of their computer working on their portal and someone shows them the first release of Netscape 1.0 with yahoo included as a nav bar item seems pretty significant in my memory.
I think it also reminds me of how the web changed my interaction with my computer. Of course I was in front of it more, but it made it more about other people and sharing information than just me, alone working on my algorithm.
I don’t know about that, that scene where they are sitting in front of their computer working on their portal and someone shows them the first release of Netscape 1.0 with yahoo included as a nav bar item seems pretty significant in my memory
I didn't see this, and according to wikipedia, this was in the second last episode. This makes sense, because (as I indicated) I stopped watching at season 4, second episode.
And I had to fast forward through loads of "he said / she said" drama and people arguing about personal "stuff" to even get to the end of episode 2.
Like I said, first season rocked. 2 and 3 I watched, although 3 was harder to get through. 4 was just a soap opera, and citing the second last episode as 'something tech happened!', doesn't make me feel wrong here.
Anyhow, to each their own. You can tell what I don't like, others may have more tolerance, or even enjoy more drama orientated dialog.
HaCF has an amazing line in it: "Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing." (1)
I still think abut it frequently. It's true. It's a statement about systems - often the utility is what they enable, not thing "thing in itself".
Even deep into software development, this is true. e.. I really appreciate git and github, but I don't need to focus on becoming a "git maestro" , I just need to get by in git, because git for me "isn't the thing", it's just "the thing that gets me to the thing".
Likewise, we can make software for people who are clever, even brilliant in what they do but who don't care abut the details of that software because for them it's not "the thing".
Same here, I think about that line often. It applies to a lot of different scenarios in tech.
The most common one is probably pointless redesigns. Outside of games, users usually aren't pulling up a particular app for the pleasure of using it, they just want to use it to accomplish some other goal with as little trouble as possible.
I use that quote similarly. It's about knowing where you stand, where the value is, and of course not chasing the shiny new thing.... Perhaps Its pragmatic humility. That's how I see it.
> and of course not chasing the shiny new thing...
The thing is that in that scene, Joe (Lee Pace) is being the salesman to Gordon the engineer, and is just starting to grasp that there is a shiny new thing about to be born, that building computers is going to enable something much bigger than just "we'll sell some hardware, and make some money"; that change is coming, it's going to be for a wider audience than just computer enthusiasts; computers would be the way to get there, but are not the thing itself.
Now we call that thing "the internet", "the huge software industry", "being online all the time", "social media" etc, but then they were not sure what it would look like.
He is totally chasing the shiny new thing that the others don't even see yet. Even as they bring it about.
There was a discussion earlier about innovations in tech in the past 10-15 years.
It's tempting to identify the iPhone (and smartphones broadly) and that's not totally wrong. Yes, it replaces a bunch of discrete devices from times past reasonably well for most purposes: telephone, still camera, video camera, iPod/Walkman, voice recorder, GPS, etc.
But that's not really what makes a modern smartphone so transformative. It's doing all those things while being essentially ubiquitous, mostly always connected, open to an amazing ecosystem of apps that take advantage of the hardware capabilities, and with access to an amazing amount of online information.
Modern smartphones are great products for the most part but it's how they function as part of an ecosystem that makes them transformative.
>Now we call that thing "the internet", "the huge software industry", "being online all the time", "social media" etc, but then they were not sure what it would look like.
It seems like very much a comment about the broader ecosystem being a bigger factor than an individual device.
There is more SFBA startup reality in Silicon Valley than there is in a lot of these docudramas about startup flameouts; even The Dropout, which is the best of them, is much worse than Carreyrou's book. Honestly, Silicon Valley has so much verisimilitude that it suffers from it; towards the end, it starts to veer into fan service.
Having done a few startups (only one of which was based in Silicon Valley; incidentally, Arrington was involved in that one, while getting Techcrunch off the ground in his bedroom next to the offices we first started in...), I really wonder how much of the fun of Silicon Valley is lost on people who haven't experienced it. I regularly caught myself thinking I know a guy like X, or "I remember when this happened to us".
Right, that's because they went way out of their way to drag a bunch of startup people in as advisors, and they worked all their stuff into the plot (it helps that there's something innately comedic about startup culture). Watch the credits sometime and look for names you recognize; you'll see them.
The startup advisor I know said they told the writers of an incident that happened to them, but the writers rejected it as being too outlandish and audiences wouldn't believe them.
Silicone Valley is one of my favorite series I've seen. I just finished rewatching the final series since all the AI conversation lately had me thinking about it.
I'll have to check out this Halt and Catch Fire everyone is talking about!
I feel like Spotify’s value is mainly to the big 3 music publishers to gain negotiating power against Apple/Alphabet/Amazon. It has existed since 2006, and still losing money. And lots of it.
Well, that's the typical startup trajectory, isn't it? As long as the revenue goes up year-by-year (which seems to be true for Spotify), investors are happy to subsidize the net losses, then once they have cornered the market, they can get rid of as much costs as possible and raise prices as much as possible.
It's a fucked up system, but it seems most companies go through this.
Unless Spotify obtains copyright for all the popular music in the world people want to listen to, or media or whatever, I do not see how this is a possibility.
Currently, Spotify has to buy from the 3 big music publishers (which limits the amount of expenses it can reduce), and it sells to people who have the option from buying from at least 4 streaming services which are relatively trivial to switch to (which limits the amount of revenue they can earn). The exact opposite of the situation you want your business to be in.
Sure, not all songs are available everywhere, but there is at least some coverage. Apple Music seems to have pretty widespread coverage too (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204411) but I could find at least a few places I visited recently where it wasn't available while Spotify was (Bangladesh and Haiti are two examples)
In any case, looks like Tidal has never earned a profit, but was bought by Block for $300M a couple years ago for unknown reasons. I cannot imagine that worked out for Block shareholders.
It's the question because the fact that Spotify has to buy from the three big labels has a friend - the big three labels have to sell to Spotify. Tidal's lack of success tells us that.
Yeah, I agree, I have no idea why people keep investing in companies that don't turn a profit, or companies that seemingly don't care about being profitable. It doesn't seem like most startups are interested in being sustainable, they're just interested in reaching the next funding stage, and eventually getting a big payout.
I can see the rationale for investing in a company that isn’t profitable but could be, and has just opted to grow instead. Amazon, right? But I don’t see where Spotify’s “profit” switch is.
Amazon would briefly “come up for air” to demonstrate it could earn profit if it wanted. Spotify hasn’t done that and I don’t think they could earn a profit.
Also, Amazon didn’t go 17 years without profit. Is there any company that went that long and then went profitable?
I like Spotify, but do they even have a roadmap to profitability? Are they even projecting profitability any number of years out?
Exactly the same for Spotify, they haven't started squeezing yet which Amazon started doing a long time ago. Spotify reinvests a lot of money in itself still.
HCF was a great show, and one of the only shows that goes as far back as the BBS days before the Web “caught on”. The cast is pretty good. Highly recommend watching.
Soul of a New Machine is one of the best books chronicling product development. (Showstopper about Windows NT is another good one.)
There were a lot of parallel threads in the early 80s that didn't really intersect a lot. You had the PC/BBS world, the ARPANET/Internet, and the minicomputer & mainframe worlds.
I knew a lot of the people in Soul of a New Machine and actually dotted-lined into Tom West for a while. (Later on when Data General was coming out with big Unix servers.)
I don't think I quite made it to the end of HaCF as it's not available (legally) on non-premium subscriptions. I'll have to hunt it down.
I will check Showstopper, thank you for recommendation. It was definitely a fruitful time, a lot of meaningful job was done. I envy you that you could work with those folks.
It was a different time. In general, things happened more slowly. Things were a lot less interconnected and a lot less transparent from the outside. Information was really hard to get. It was a good time. It was also a time that I would probably find incredibly frustrating to get anything done in if I were to suddenly be transported back.
Silicon Valley was the best in my opinion... Having worked for a startup in the 90s, it nailed the pain points perfectly, as well as the passive aggressive management styles and office culture underlying the entire industry. Mike Judge is a unique cultural comedy documentarian of the highest order, I like most of the stuff he does like Office Space and Idiocracy as well.
I guess I meant all the other suggestions documented failures or at least 'falls'. Spotify may not make money but it is still running and hasn't suffered a fall to the same extent as the other real life examples.
The Profit* is pretty interesting. It's like the shows where Gordon Ramsay goes into failing restaurants and tries to turn them around, except here the show's host tries to fix all kinds of local businesses. It's not about tech startups per se, but you still see a lot of common issues through the lens of local businesses: founder disputes, poor unit economics, bad marketing, etc. It's a little cheesy, but pretty good overall!
Although it is a bit overly dramatic (which might explain why it's a hit) I've always enjoyed the Bar Rescue series where Jon Taffer tries to fix broken bar businesses. The early episodes got more into the math of what works but Taffer screaming at owners was more popular so you see much less of that in later seasons.
I know a guy that goes in and rescues bars in exchange for a percentage of the increase in value as they're later sold. He swears that the core of what Taffer does is exactly how he operates.
"The Aviator" [1] about Howard Hughes? Love to also talk about real startups movies without failure as a main theme. For example, "The Social Network" (includes Winklevoss and Eduardo Saverin "failures"). We have other non-fictional ones such as "The Founder" [2] about McDonalds. Classic: "Pirates of Silicon Valley". Ford v Ferrari (amazing if you have not seen it) [3].
And what about "Citizen Kane" [4]? The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg's biography. Have not watched entirely the last ones about Steve Jobs, I don't think they captured the real character and complex personality.
Bigger lists tagged startup in IMDB [5] and company [6]. Most of them are based on fiction.
This needs to be made. I am often contemplating writing down my startup story which almost killed me (ambulances with sirens, multiple times) and then failed. I really think people should document the actual stories.
Also kitchen nightmares/hotel hell for companies. It would be a hit, but without the woke American additions; just go full Ramsey UK style.
> Also kitchen nightmares/hotel hell for companies. It would be a hit, but without the woke American additions; just go full Ramsey UK style.
That's a great idea, would love that. What founder with experience has a good enough style/personality for this to work? Jobs sounds like he would be perfect for this, he loved berating people. But who could do the job today? Most founders today are too vanilla for it be interesting, at least their public persona.
I think it has to be somebody British. Somehow a British accent is associated with a particular sort of nitpicky but fundamentalist right perfectionism, and also non-threatening enough that it isn’t too awkward to watch harsh criticism occur.
Like imagine if The Weakest Link lady had had a midwestern accent or something, it wouldn’t have become a thing.
Do you think he’s so stupid that he would rant about that? It’s like having him critique spending $200 million on a massive solar project. That could buy a lot of restaurants, but do we need more restaurants?
I had a company that went from nothing to marketleader and then back to nothing; the stress made me end up in hospital several times, the last time impacted my health enough to retire at 32. It was 10 years journey so I easily can write a book about it.
One of the funny/sad consequences of watching Silicon Valley, is that a lot of my friends (in my African country where only 4% has electricity) think that the startup need to expand no matter what, even if it has no viable business model, you can run a "budgetivore" business for many years like Linkedin/Amazon and in the end you will find a business model.
So imagine. Instead of building good and sound startups that can be champions in the country/region, they waste the meager resources available in the country on fake startups/crypto-scams.
That's not what your African friends think, that's literally a very huge part of the startup ecosystem anywhere.
I have worked in few startup incubators, and most of the companies I've seen are merely interested in getting a good evaluation and getting bought from someone else.
The amount of startups I've seen with the interest of actually making any "profit" is very low.
I think this is also a reflection of several changes in how stock markets have changed in the last decade where the name of the game hasn't been anymore about making a successful product that makes money and possibly pays dividends but the chase for endless and endless growth of stock price.
There are companies out there that literally have the stock of their price in the hall of their offices, imagine that and not customer satisfaction/retention/profits or anything else being the biggest indicator of a company's success.
It's a sad reality.
I myself am interested in creating a new business in the tech world, one that makes honest good money but is not seeking a 100M/1B valuation and I feel such a unicorn.
The era of Free Money couldn’t end fast enough. We’re likely in for some hard times, but it wasn’t sustainable, and we had a 10 year period with almost zero innovation.
I hope it works out, because seriously the last decade plus shouldn’t have gone down the way it did.
Incredible opportunity costs, considering e.g. Google could probably go through Twitter like, 80-90% cuts and still stay functioning. Keeping the most capable people in golden handcuffs for a decade is quite a tragedy. On the other hand they still worked on many open source projects so it could have probably been worse
I just don’t know who exactly to blame for that. It seems to be a competition between gov spending, “quantitative easing” (brrrrrrrrrt), and the Fed’s insistence that near zero percent rates forever would work. It seems to me that all of those cause the other though.
> I have worked in few startup incubators, and most of the companies I've seen are merely interested in getting a good evaluation and getting bought from someone else.
Startup incubators seem like they would be biased towards those looking for an easy pre-paved path. I participated for one in university and less than half of that cohort was interested in ever making money or getting traction at all, including myself.
We were there to polish our resumes for job hunting upon graduation.
My team didn't make a single sales call or engage with a single customer. The program managers brought us an extremely large potential government contract (15 million) and we turned them down as it was after the program ended and we were planning to be job hunting.
Its a world out of balance. Problems fester if there is no money in solving them, which seems to be the case for vast parts of our experience. Yet talented and eager people are unemployed, or their efforts are thrown away in endless churn.
Its a systemic failure of the organizational networks and legal structures that should bring people together, with the right incentives, to develop lasting solutions. People dont need billions to get incentivised. There is nothing wrong with building a small company that fits a niche. The unicorn mania is deeply sick.
There is so much knowledge nowadays, so much talent - before we even get to augmented powes using tech - that the situation will start bordering on the insane.
The challenge is that financial-economic systems are so tightly tied to power that they cant evolve. What is clearly needed in many parts of the world, and definitely in silicon valley, is to dismantle the adulation of super-sized entities, ultra rich etc. and encourage a strong middle class and SME enterprize. This was always the backbone of stable and prospering societies.
no startup can compete against an america company backed by endless cheap money. Not that founders dont want to turn a profit its just a cruel game and its the way its until cheap money ends in USA(it never happens bcz no gov wants recession on their watch).
It's still substantially cheaper for Stanford graduates with friends on Sand Hill who can mumble the words "crypto LLM" than even the most ambitious Burundian with a great idea.
Debatable. The latest Cleveland Fed nowcasts have inflation forecast to dip just under 5% starting this month, while the federal funds rate is 5-5.25%. So in real terms, that’d be the first time it’s positive, and it’s still a very very low number.
If we get that recession, we could see those rates reverse and end up negative again before too long.
> One of the funny/sad consequences of watching Silicon Valley, is that a lot of my friends (in my African country where only 4% has electricity) think that the startup need to expand no matter what, even if it has no viable business model, you can run a "budgetivore" business for many years like Linkedin/Amazon and in the end you will find a business model.
> So imagine. Instead of building good and sound startups that can be champions in the country/region, they waste the meager resources available in the country on fake startups/crypto-scams.
So is the problem here just that your country has fewer resources?
There are plenty of rich people in developed countries who could be champions of the country/region but waste the resource available on sociopathic business models which are absolutely as predatory as crypto scams, all while dodging taxes, drawing on corporate welfare, and creating lower-paying jobs that displace higher-paying jobs.
Nobody likes a crypto scammer, but I'd argue that the average large-scale landlord in the US does far more damage.
The "problem" is we really are in an technology revolution similar to the industrial revolution 200-300 years ago. For every 100 tech startup businesses that don't generate a penny of profit and are propped up by hyper valuations and stock prices, there are companies like Facebook and Google and Apple that absolutely print money in profits.
That in turn covers the outlay by venture money. All those companies that burn money in fire pits are essentially subsidized by the staggering amount of money that some new companies only recently formed in the past 20 years are printing.
Spray and pray and see what sticks for investors will work in this type of rapid revolutionary environment.
All the companies that have stellar net incomes and profit margins are more than 20 years old, except Meta which is about to turn 20 in a couple years.
The crop that came after that (Uber/Airbnb/Snap/etc) do not show the same, except maybe Bytedance, but their numbers are not public.
That might be a side effect of destroying competition and vc exit strategy through acquisition.
YouTube, instagram, Slack, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, etc. all second generation software that companies that were acquired by bigger companies as exits, or to squelch competition.
What if we have exited that tech revolution era already? I don’t recall a lot of successful tech innovation or revolution in the last decade but I recall a lot of scams.
Agreed that AI is transformative. That this for kids they grew up with the internet is their epoch moment that those of us they saw the internet come already had.
However… I don’t think it counts exactly. When you look at the trillions that have been dumped into basically “ take the best and brightest in the world, and then get them to increase advertising performance by 1% a year” and the money effort and time put into AI, thst the big players were caught completely off guard by AI, it’s more of a mistake than an organic technology evolution.
Other than AI, what seriously happened in the last decade? Where in terms of user product has tech innovated?
It's just "boring plumbing" but software server infrastructure (containers, Kubernetes, and everything cloud-native associated) has basically competely changed in the last 10 years.
Presumably. OpenAI was trying to convince the world that GPT1.0 was a danger to society. They tried the same scare/hype tactic again after that for literally every version they released.
I would argue that the mobile communications device called the "iPhone" is one of the most significant technology innovations developed in the past 100 years.
Love it, hate it, whatever, but it completely revolutionized what is practically access to "everything". You will be hard pressed to find an American consumer, from the richest guy to homeless people on the street that don't have a mobile communications device on their person with a touch screen and instant access to the collective works of the world.
The iPhone by itself as a stand alone business would be larger than Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and McDonalds among other revolutionary businesses.
No. But ubiquity and smartphones being just part of the fabric of everyday life comes pretty close to squeezing into the last decade. I didn't have one until probably 2011 (iPhone 3GS) and I'm not really a technology laggard.
From the perspective of today, the dot-com era wasn't really that different from before from the perspective of consumers. OK, e-commerce was gearing up but it's not like we didn't have mail order catalogs before. Many of us had feature phones but didn't use them a lot; you were mostly still tethered to a desktop of maybe laptop. Online information could still be pretty sparse for many things. Not really any streaming entertainment. Etc.
It's not just the iPhone/smartphone. If you showed me just the device in 2005, I'd probably have been "OK. Cool. But how well does it work without a keyboard?" And, in fact, I had a Treo in 2006 and didn't buy an iPhone until around 2010 or so. What was really game changing was the whole app ecosystem and universality of mobile. And that wasn't really in place until maybe close to ten years ago.
LLMs/generative AI could be game changing although I'm somewhere on the fence between this year's hype and this will change everything. Autonomous driving could be pretty radical as well but it would have to be pretty general purpose and that doesn't seem close to reality.
LG Prada predates iPhone and the form factor we have in phones is almost an inevitable outcome. The iPhone was a great execution and ahead of it's time, if you think it is the reason we have smartphones then you couldn't be more wrong.
So… every main character except Thomas Middleditch?
I think this show exemplified the power of a good ensemble. Any one of the characters would have been annoying by themselves, but put them next to each other and it’s hilarious
If you liked him in SV, you should definitely check out Mrs. Davis (I can't even begin to describe the plot because it's fairly schizophrenic), where he plays an Australian version of Russ who dedicates his energy to combating an omniscient and omnipresent AI. He's a treasure.
I can actually see a humbled TJ Miller taking a SV spinoff job to relaunch his career, at some point. A prequel would be challenging though, because of aging.
TJ Miller's problem is not that he needs to be 'humbled', his problem is that he has a reduced ability to control judgement and inhibition[0] due to having had a large part of his frontal lobe removed[1]. He is probably not going to get 'better' behavior wise.
> "expert medical analyses and reports regarding the defendant’s prior brain surgery and its continued neurological impacts ... cast doubt upon the requisite legal element of intent to commit the charged offense.” [2]
> Miller had undergone brain surgery several years ago after having a hemorrhage and multiple seizures. He said “a golf ball-sized” piece of his frontal lobe was removed.[1]
[0] Conjecture based on knowledge of neuropsychology
Aviato is a prequel to the HBO hit TV show, Silicon Valley. The story follows the journey of a young entrepreneur, named Nelson "Nate" Chatwin, who wants to make a name for himself in the world of tech. He dreams of building a company that will disrupt the airline industry and make air travel more accessible to everyone.
The story is set in the late 1990s, when the internet was still in its early stages and startups were popping up all over Silicon Valley. Nate is working as a software engineer at a startup, but he is restless and wants to do something more. One day, while sitting in a coffee shop, he overhears a conversation between two pilots about the challenges of booking flights. That's when he has a Eureka moment and comes up with the idea for Aviato - an online platform that connects travelers with affordable flights.
Nate starts working on Aviato in his spare time, but he soon realizes that he needs more help to bring his vision to life. He recruits a group of talented engineers and business-minded individuals to join his team. Together, they work tirelessly to build the Aviato platform from scratch. They encounter numerous challenges along the way, from funding issues to technical glitches, but they never lose sight of their goal.
As Aviato gains popularity and investors start pouring in, the team faces new challenges. Nate struggles to balance his work and personal life, as his marriage falls apart due to his obsession with the company. The team also faces pressure from rival startups and industry giants, who are threatened by Aviato's disruptive business model.
Throughout the series, we see the rise of Aviato and how it becomes one of the most successful startups in Silicon Valley. We also see the personal and professional sacrifices that Nate and his team make along the way. The series ends with Aviato's launch and its early success, setting the stage for the events that unfold in the original Silicon Valley series.
Overall, Aviato is a compelling story about the power of innovation, the challenges of entrepreneurship, and the human cost of building a successful startup. It's a must-watch for fans of Silicon Valley and anyone interested in the tech industry.
It looks like a garden-variety middle school student's five paragraph MLA formatted essay and the concluding paragraph contains the word "overall". I wish we could ban this type of GPT garbage.
Jungle Town is a docuseries about a charismatic eco-evangelicist/property developer who charges interns $5000 to help build his sustainable village in the Panama jungle.
The interesting thing about the doco is that the film maker seems to get converted midway. At the start the founder is portrayed as a obvious charlatan but by the end he is presented in a much more favorable light.
For anyone who wants to see how crazy it can get, there's a documentary called Riot On! from 2004 that follows a company that "needed to grow" because of hot money - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427783/
On „General Magic“, recently read „Build“ by Tony Fadell. I can recommend that for people interested in building startups. Will also give a bit more background on General Magic
"The reason you should care about the story of General Magic is because it involves something fundamental, and that is, failure is not the end, failure is actually the beginning."
Nothing in American culture today is mythologized more than the startup. It represents the acme of all our ambitions, hopes, and trust in the future. In the United States, people don't expect the government to bring them a better world, they expect companies to do that, and the younger, hotter, and cooler those who create the company, the better.
Maybe this is a regional thing, especially in SV driven by the VC hype. In general I find America very focused on small business rather than startups. Our economy is really built on small business and the more we forget that the worse things get.
> Nothing in American culture today is mythologized more than the startup.
I think sports teams and accomplishments still take this competition by a long shot. There are way more movies, books, time spent mythologizing teams and individuals doing sporting things.
For a show on Startups but failure of its CEO but not the company, Superpumped is a great watch. It documents the rise of Uber and the fall of Travis Kalanic. It's based off the book of the same name, although I can't vouch for either's veracity outside of what made headlines.
The other day, I was watching the movie, Mr. Jones. It occurred to me then that Vanessa Kirby would be the best person (by appearance, at least) to play Elizabeth Holmes. But I see that ship has sailed.
