Another extremely critical post on Silicon Valley

Having grown up extremely middle class (lower middle class if we’re using Silicon Valley definitions of ‘middle class’), living here in the city is pretty sweet. Yes, life is expensive, but I get to do nice things and eat nice food and make memories, etc. etc. That said, my idea of ‘doing nice things’ means taking an uber to go out to eat, going to a bar, and ubering back. That is very splurge-y for me, and quite different from my muni, Subway (like, Sandwich Artist context), and PBR routine.

What kind of blows my mind sometimes is how much money I could spend if I just wanted to. Don’t want to walk a block and do your own laundry like a, well, human being? There are at least 4 mobile/web startups that will make the entire process cost you under ten taps of your finger. Don’t want to have to go to your favorite 5-star restaurant to experience the 5-star meal to which you are accustomed? No worries! Tired of the high price of bottle service at elite clubs in soma? Problem solved! Tired of getting laid by non-startup-founders? Remind your dick to say ‘thank you’ now that your romantic pipeline has been cleared of all the non-entrepreneurial, burger-flipping plebes.

Welcome to Silicon Valley, where life’s pesky “first world problems” are solved diligently by our world’s most promising “entrepreneurs”. I personally can’t wait for an app that talks to my uber driver when I’m hungover and not in the mood. Like, I feel bad for staying quiet because I do really appreciate how hard he is working after immigrating from like Africa and stuff but sometimes I’m just not feeling it. Ya know?

Guys. *firm forehand slap* What the fuck are we doing anymore. There is SO MUCH TALENT and SO MUCH MONEY in a 50 mile radius of here, and we are working on companies that make ordering bottle service easier. Uber’s most recent feature, Corner Store, delivers shit from the corner store. Yes, the store that is on the corner of either your block, the block one further down, or, brutally, the one just one after. A 17 billion dollar company is making sure we don’t have to walk to get condoms and listerine.

Enter the rich shaming paragraph. I live in deeeep mission, where the English don’t get spoke too often. Needless to say, salaries aren’t as high as on the streets of SoMa, Marina, etc. What is quite interesting is that I can almost assure you that the only way life has really changed around those parts is that there are more white people around, and shit is more expensive. Which is to say that people are still doing their own laundry and taking the bus. Because they don’t have money to shit out of their iPhones.

Let’s zoom out. Apart from the ability to be as lazy, anti-social, or web-addicted as we (people who can afford to shit money out of our phones) choose, how have our own lives gotten better as a result of Silicon Valley innovation? I’ll admit lots of startups have improved and simplified the way that I live life, consume content, etc. to a certain extent, but my inner devil’s advocate would say there wasn’t a huge problem there to begin with. Is my mobile phone and/or web experience the most possibly ideal experience it could be? I guess not. I also, though, still sit in traffic, can’t find parking, and get pit stains at bars. Help please!

And yes, I’m kind of fucking you here… Well… I’m not really actually.

I think the term ‘bubble’ is a less accurate way to describe consumer-facing Silicon Valley as a set of dominoes. Think about all the young well-paid tech employees who work for companies whose target market is young well-paid tech employees. As long as salaries stay super high, VC remains sold on [consumer] tech, and net neutrality remains sacred (and, for the record, I will take off my hater hat and say I am a die hard proponent of that last point), all will be ok. At least for the time being.

But if all of a sudden money becomes tight, the bottle service begins to seem superfluous, the walk to the laundromat seems more reasonable, lots of these startups will find business hard to come by. They lay off some of their well-paid techie workers, who also likely were early adopters of other experimental startups with equally niche markets. Which means even more of the guys who were getting their toothpaste delivered would start walking to the corner store, maybe.

I think there are lots of scenarios in which the influx of capital for some of the more trivial yet fundable startups could dry up quite quickly. From what it looks like, there doesn’t seem to be too much of a contingency plan in place as to where the talent will go if this happens. And not to say that highly technically skilled employees won’t always be in demand, but there is a growing less-technical workforce attached to these companies (marketing, people ops, etc) that may be in for a rude awakening once “Head Recruiter at FounderDating” isn’t a 6 figure job.

It would be cool if talent started pouring into industries with much more inelastic demand curves. For the record, I am implying that demand elasticity and whiteness of problem solved are somewhat equivalent in this context. Which, irrespective of being true or even a smart thing to say, is fun to postulate.

My rant having concluded, I’ll leave you (below) with the informational video for a startup named “Manservant“. Don’t know how the world endured the suffering which existed before this company was founded. Enjoy!

— James

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