Tag: Silicon Valley

DotCom Bubble – 25 Years Since Peak

The dotcom era was a wild ride. When the NASDAQ peaked on March 10, 2000, it was double its value of a year before. Historically, it takes seven years for a market to double in value on average. So to say the dotcom era was overheated is an understatement.

And it’s a misnomer to call it a boom. In a boom, someone’s actually making money. Amazon didn’t have a profitable quarter until Q4 of 2001, and it was a modest profit of $5 million. It didn’t have a profitable year until 2003. Google was more promising, as it was turning profits before its IPO.

But Google was the exception. A company didn’t have to be profitable for its stock to boom. Netscape was the poster child for this. It created a necessary product, but Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable. Andreessen is only rich today because he and Clark managed to convince AOL to pay $10 billion for the company before they could finish running it into the ground. Transmeta was another example of a company with interesting technology but no profits. Competing with Intel wasn’t any easier during the dotcom bubble than it was in the years right before it.

The stereotypical dotcom business model went something like this: Find something nobody’s selling on the Internet. Register a domain name. Start selling that product on the Internet. Then wait for profits to happen like magic. And without a solid business plan that included things like logistics, those profits rarely happened and typically weren’t sustainable when they did. Just like in any other business. But since this was the Internet, it was going to be different this time, somehow.

When the dotcom bubble burst
Dave Farquhar

Theranos – Believe or Else

The resignations infuriated Elizabeth and Sunny. The following day, they summoned the staff for an all-hands meeting in the cafeteria. Copies of The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho’s famous novel about an Andalusian shepherd boy who finds his destiny by going on a journey to Egypt, had been placed on every chair. Still visibly angry, Elizabeth told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave. Sunny put it more bluntly: anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company should “get the fuck out.”

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
John Carreyrou

Lack of Housing and Overcrowding in Silicon Valley

From the early outbreaks to the economic destruction that has come after, the coronavirus pandemic has mapped itself onto America’s longstanding affordable housing problem and the gaping inequality that underlies it. To offset rising rents in a nation where one in four tenant households spend more than half of their pretax income on shelter, a multitude of low-wage service workers have piled into ever more crowded homes

San Francisco, there is a rough economic split. Cities and neighborhoods to the east, places like East Palo Alto, North Fair Oaks and the Belle Haven section of Menlo Park, are more overcrowded and have a larger share of low-income and Black and Latino residents, many of whom have been disproportionately affected by the virus. Towns and neighborhoods to the west, places like Hillsborough and Palo Alto, are whiter and rich.

This geography is as fundamental to how the place operates as the invention of the microchip. Every day, throngs of clerks, landscapers and elder-care workers wake up on the eastern parts and travel to homes on the western parts or to the corporate campuses of tech companies to do subcontracting work. And every night, they return to overcrowded homes.

12 People in a 3-Bedroom House, Then the Virus Entered the Equation
Overcrowding, not density, has defined many coronavirus hot spots. Service workers’ quarters skirting Silicon Valley are no exception.
Conor Dougherty
NYTIMES

Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

The workers who voted to unionize earn wages that start at around $35,000 a year, according to a source familiar with the matter. And they say they don’t receive all the same benefits such as retirement plans that are standard for full-time Google employees. Their move to organize represents a symbolic pushback against the status quo of growing economic inequality in Silicon Valley, where all but the top 10 percent of income earners have seen their wages decline from 1997 to 2017.

 

Shirin Ghaffary, vox