“I thought the industry was in for a reckoning, that it was the beginning of the end, that what I had experienced in San Francisco was the final stage of a prelapsarian era, the end of our generational Gold Rush, an unsustainable age of excess.”
The surge in tech startups, and people moving to Silicon Valley to build them, over the past couple of decades really have been a sort of gold rush. A gold rush of the modern generation.
This announcement of the end of the gold rush – a fantastic way to describe the current mood towards Silicon Valley – is from Anna Weiner’s awesome memoir, Uncanny Valley which came out beginning of the year. I mentioned in my last book recommendation I wanted to cover more books I was reading and this is one I recently finished.
Anna’s perspective on the Valley is a refreshingly non-BS take on what is otherwise a lot of hype and hubris. People (would-be founders) talk about the Valley and the entrepreneurs and investors that command it with a certain infallible reverence which is not warranted and can cause much harm, as discussed in Anna’s book. For those of you that have an allergic reaction to sensationalisation, you’ll love reading her views and experiences of being a non-techie entering and growing up in a very techie world.
Many parts the book resonate for me personally, having grown up outside of the Valley looking in (very nearly moving on a couple of occasions). You 100% make sacrifices not being based there and working in Tech and some of her recounts of her interactions with SF-friends vs non-SF based friends is eerily close to my own!
I also like the analogy of a gold rush generally as it’s pretty pertinent these days. Depending on who you ask the Valley is still at the beginning of its continuing assent or at the end.
From where I’m sitting it feels like the gold rush has spread to other parts of the globe and is no longer just centred in one city. Perhaps, we’ve all ‘discovered gold’ in how to systematically build large impact tech businesses in many cultures or perhaps the rise of software is just a blip. Once we all know how to build them outlier success seen in the Valley will dissipate.
Or perhaps we’re about to enter our own, markedly different from the 90s tech of the Valley…I know which one I’m betting on.
