Silicon Valley and Tinsel Town

I tend to refrain from negative posts because I generally do not find them very interesting, but I do need to get something off my chest.

When I was a VC, I had to interact quite a bit with Silicon Valley (VCs, bankers and entrepreneurs alike), whether as a source of ideas, news, deals, money, you name it.  I of course travelled there quite a few times and loved the weather, the geography and the sense of it being the center of my beloved industry, IT.

Something always bothered me though: as an avowed European player, I always felt quite a bit of haughtiness on the part of the SV people I met.  It was not xenophobia, people in Silicon Valley are *very* open to people from outside the US.  It went deeper than that: if you weren’t part of the Valley scene, you were a bit player and could not understand things as well as people who lived and worked somewhere between SF and San Jose (Jim, Andy, yes, I am talking about you).

I worked out of the Boston office of a large VC fund for a while and it was the same, the difference being that the East Coast VCs actually felt they were better than SV, themselves.

I think this arrogance is exploding on the blog scene, and I think the worst offender is the celebrated Marc Andreessen.  His blog is interesting and Marc is indisputably an industry luminary but sometimes he just goes on and explain how Tinsel Town should be rebuilt on the Silicon Valley image, thus showing to the rest of the world how Silicon Valley has become Hollywood: the same insularity, the same belief they have cracked the code and are the Masters of the Universe whose model can be used to solve all of the World’s problems.  Doesn’t that also remind you of Wall Street in the 80s?

If you want to have a feel where this might lead (beyond the groupthink), read Indecent Exposure : A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street.