To Pixar and Beyond
by
Lawrence Levy
“A hundred years!” I exclaimed. “Isn’t that a little beyond our scope?” “It’s a big task,” Rinpoche said calmly. “What else are you doing?” Hillary, Pam, Christina, and I looked at each other. Was he serious? Who in their right mind takes on a hundred-year project? Four years or bust was my Silicon Valley mindset. “How do we do it?” I asked Rinpoche. “Except for you, none of us has any qualifications.” “Think of me like a miner who has retrieved the gold in those Tibetan mountains,” he said. “Each of you is in the New World. We have to build a bridge that links one to the other. Together we can do it.”
Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World
by
Parmy Olson
Altman’s answer to that question was no, and while that might have been a depressing realization at first, he flipped it to see it as something to capitalize on. If humans weren’t so special, that meant they could be replicated by computers, even improved on. Maybe he could do that. In many ways, Altman was building off a Silicon Valley mindset that saw life itself as an engineering conundrum. You could solve all manner of big problems by using the same steps you took to optimize an app. Partly this came from the way engineers were trained to approach technical problems systematically and logically, an approach that was deeply ingrained through their education and taught in software development.
Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments
by
Andrew Henderson
Published 8 Apr 2018
Are they pursuing the life that they want or are they just investing in the latest trends in order to look like they have got it all together? Rather than chasing after big investments, why not let the life you want come to you? Why go all-in at dramatically higher risk when you can enjoy the same lifestyle benefits without the Silicon Valley mindset? In that way, the Nomad Capitalist lifestyle is the anti-Silicon Valley. I take minimal risks, yet enjoy many of the perks. I hire affordable, yet highly skilled and teachable employees at a tiny fraction of the price of Bay Area help. I pay almost zero tax without hiring an army of accountants.
Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire
by
Hans Gremeil
and
William Sposato
Published 15 Dec 2021
And that was despite the fact that Toyota was selling nearly eleven million vehicles a year—and Tesla just 367,500, less than 5 percent of Toyota’s total. Electric natives disrupted the establishment with new ways of developing and manufacturing cars. Traditional automakers roll out redesigned vehicles at a leisurely pace of every four to seven years. The newcomers, by contrast, brought a Silicon Valley mindset for much faster product cycles. New smartphones, after all, are released almost every year. Some auto entrants could go from blank slate to prototype in as little as two years, thanks to the help of cloud computing. And with over-the-air updates, the software in their cars could be updated instantaneously.
The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by
Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022
The outsider experts, facing months-long delays or abrupt policy changes, largely quit in frustration. It was unclear whether Dorsey’s experiment in reimagining Twitter had fallen through because his attention drifted, because increasingly rebellious investors pressured Twitter to boost growth instead, or because the solutions proved unpalatable to a company still locked in the Silicon Valley mindset. Accounts from Twitter employees suggest it was likely a combination of all three. At YouTube, meanwhile, it was otherwise business as usual. The platform’s systems continued engineering high-engagement fringe communities. That year, Asheley Landrum, a cognitive psychologist, discovered one in Denver, at a conference for people who believed Earth was flat.
The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
by
Brian Dear
Published 14 Jun 2017
Just like in high school and throughout his undergraduate years, he was able to sail through the politics and pressures of academic life through a combination of luck, magic, salesmanship, and chutzpah—he was the son of a car dealer, after all—and a mission-focus bullheadedness that made others stand back and wonder, How does he do it? “Publish or perish” would not be the Donald Bitzer Way. With him, the mantra became “PLATO or perish.” His approach fit more with the present-day Silicon Valley mind-set of build something, anything, get it up and running, and show it to other people as soon as possible. Silicon Valley calls it demo or die. Stop yakking and build the damn thing and prove it does what you say it is supposed to do. Compared to Bitzer’s bemused but detached view of the long history of PLATO, Alpert decades later seemed bitter about the story’s inaccuracies and could get downright cranky about the details of who did what, when, and why.
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by
Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023
Sargent, “6 Bizarre Lies Hollywood Tells When They Base a Movie on You,” Cracked.com, December 6, 2015, https://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2058-my-life-was-made-into-blockbuster-movie-5-lame-realities.html. x José Calderón beat Murphy’s season record with a 98.1 percent season in 2008/’09, while the career record is now held by Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors. Curry not only works for Silicon Valley capitalists but has come to represent the Silicon Valley mindset, the way Tiger Woods once did. See Erik Malinowski, Betaball: How Silicon Valley and Science Built One of the Greatest Basketball Teams in History (Atria Books, 2017). Chapter 5.3 Blister in the Sun The PayPal Mafia and the Facebook Keiretsu—Immiseration 2.0—Google Bus—Roko’s Basilisk—Living in the Thielverse It’s difficult to narrativize the latest phase of Silicon Valley history.