chaotic_primate

It will sound horribly pompous, but I wrote it to document what I think is an exceptional time in human history. All of human knowledge lives inside a slim device in our pockets, and our social world is now mediated by algorithms and no longer limited by geography. People will look back at our present the way we look at the invention of the printing press, or the Industrial Revolution. It seemed to me nobody was documenting that reality. So I decided to. Also, there's so much misinformation about the Valley, I thought it was time to lift the veil of well-manicured bullshit that tech PR and media layer on top of what's often an ugly reality.

What I found most interesting was in reconstructing past events, how fallible human memory can be. I of course had old emails, messages, FB events, etc. to rely on, but I had remembered events in order A, B, C (for example), and it turned out it was B, A, and C never happened. I'll never trust eyewitness testimony again. Our pasts are really mostly fictional.

I think the biggest lie about the Valley is the presumption of a meritocracy. What's not captured in the glossy mags and engineered public images of people and companies is the influence of happenstance (the most successful products were at least semi-accidental), as well as personal connections (lots of companies saved via self-interested VCs and friendly favors).

When the opportunity cost of staying there, in terms of missed opportunities, surpasses the financial and career value of being a Facebook employee. I suspect that crossover point happens sooner than most people think, but wariness of risk means they opt for the status quo.

Yes. It's there to dupe investors, Wall Street equity analysts, and potential new hires.

The weird thing, every long-time insider knows it's a lie. Everyone. Nothing in CM is particularly novel or daring...in fact, it's all completely ordinary insider knowledge. Just nobody has the self-destructive nerve to publish it or say it publicly.