Silicon Valley Blues

Silicon Valley Blues: This should be the best of times in Silicon Valley. There’s a gusher of venture capital, IPOs are back again, Facebook versus Google versus Apple makes for great competition, and valuations are sky high. And yet there is unrest because some fear that, for all these achievements, Silicon Valley has become a hollow place. The problem, I think, is money. There’s so much of it right now that Silicon Valley has inevitably attracted a fair amount of grifters, recent business school grads looking to flip a lame startup, too many people starting companies that aren’t really companies, too many business model ripoffs, and too many overfunded and overhyped efforts like Color. The debates over The Bubble are more debates over the state of Silicon Valley, the world’s innovation hub. While Google and Facebook vie to be the place where people waste more time, world economies continue to shrink, the environment continues to worsen, etc. There is a valid question whether Silicon Valley has its priorities straight with its Groupon clones, social media dashboards and the like, as noted well by Hermione Way.