The Day Hollywood Ate Silicon Valley
The two great cities Los Angeles and San Francisco have always loomed large through my life. In the mid 90's I was fortunate enough to be accepted into two amazing institutions, UCLA and Berkeley. Berkeley then as now had the slight edge in prestige any way you looked at it. UCLA on the other hand had almost the same caliber of programs (some you can argue were superior), a far more pleasant atmosphere, prettier well everything including the campus, and to me personally, it felt a lot more welcoming and exciting. I chose UCLA, and was able to get to know LA for a time. I think the best part of LA.
During my time at UCLA I stuck around for a few of the summers to work and learn. I had a job at the “Computer Operations” department at the UCLA student store which was actually a pretty big business. Yes, there literally was a department that handled all the computers because most people did not operate them. Desktop computing was well underway but only locally. Most people did not connect to anything and email wasn’t even widely in use yet. They had several dozen restaurants to manage, the book stores, and a number of other retail points around the campus. All these retail points were wired through the campus to the mainframe. They connected dumb green screen terminals to a centrally managed McDonnell-Douglas mainframe (yes that aircraft company made computers) that had a few hundred 8086 16-bit Intel processors wired together. The student store business ran on this machine, from payroll, to point of sale, to accounting. Later it was super exciting when they got their first unix system, a rack of HPs.
During those summers I marveled at the literal sea of people flooding into the empty campus housing from around the US and the world. They flocked to LA to test their luck at Hollywood. The ultimate dream of glamour for a kid right out of high school or college back then was to become an actor, or reporter, or a writer. I met some of the most interesting and optimistic people in the world during those summers. Many believed that in the space of 12 weeks they were going to become the next Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts. Many more were more realistic and were finding work as extras or waiters and waitresses while getting head shots, searching for an agent, and joining acting schools for the long haul of following their passion. Despite the obvious naiveté that many of these people showed, you were always impressed by their spirit. The dedication they gave to an art. The sheer level of heart that determined their life path. Most of these people after a few months or years lost their starry eyes. It’s sad to consider, but the opportunities that reality offered were different from what they had hoped and dreamed to do. The ones that were in Hollywood to move acting or story telling forward I admire. If I have any concern about the Hollywood crowd it was that a good portion of them had a primary purpose of pursuing their own ego and personal glamour. More power to them, but useless for everyone else around them.
In 1998 when I finished up @UCLA the choice for me was again clear, Silicon Valley for enterprise software. I was going where great things were happening at an unbelievable pace. Bustling by any other measure LA started to feel sleepy in comparison. The land of fantasy, of Disney, and Hollywood, where dreams and stories are made real, ironically, felt grounded by reality. If you were ambitious, creative, and wanted to change the world, everyone by then knew, you simply went to the Bay. Not to mention if you were working in tech that was almost the only place where the jobs were. If you wanted to create media, be a star, a writer, a columnist, a media personality, pursue personal glamour, LA was still the spot or working for a media company in NY.
Despite all the increasing noise, working in Silicon Valley in 1999 was a heads down affair for most everyone, you were part of a team. It was about getting products out, creating new things, innovating, and selling your product. As an engineer, consultant, marketer, sales person your credibility was your resume and your professional reputation through your real connections. Blogging was just in its infant stage and most people were not investing time into it. The culture of LA and at media companies in NY was about promoting the self, creating your media personality, your glamorous profile. The culture in SV was still about heads down expertise, building product, and personal connections. It felt good. It was tangible and meaningful. You focused on making great product. The team was paramount. And you were a member of that team.
By 1999 the sheer insanity of the companies being formed in SV(Webvan, Pets.com, Commerce One, Boo.com, to infinity…), the heights of wealth being generated on paper, the noise being generated by all this in the media made you wonder if the Silicon Valley reality had not eclipsed the block buster stories in the movies that LA could generate at the time. Sometimes reality is more incredible than film. Though I must admit 1999 was a fantastic year for movies (Star Wars Episode 1, The Matrix, Toy Story 2, Notting Hill, …). I would argue that SV and the dot com boom for a brief flash had eclipsed Hollywood in terms of global mind share, press coverage, and in its ability to create the fantastic. In 1999, all sorts of people flocked to SV to get rich. All the MBA folks were heading there, typically late to any trend. The greed was heavy in SV, but the vanity had not yet caught up with the people of Hollywood.
LA in 1999 still owned content, the media, the fame, but even then you could walk away feeling it was becoming increasingly irrelevant. LA still owned most of the kids who wanted to pursue a glamorous career. Silicon Valley it felt owned the future, and the technologists. How the two universes would collide was an unsettled story.
Then the crash happened. Wave after wave of a vicious cycle erased over 5 trillion dollars from the pockets of just about everyone. The boom was exciting, the bust felt terrifying. There was no end in sight, for years. Unless you were passionate about technology you left the bay or found work doing something else after the bust. It wasn’t the place for fame and certainly no longer the place to get rich. At this time, most technologists, though uncertain about the tech economy, were more than happy to see the greed first crowd depart into the sunset in a never ending caravan of moving vans headed East to offer us fine home refinancing and mortgage products or whatever other get rich quick products and services they fell into.
Moving through the 2000's the Silicon Valley vs. LA stories were written by the bucket. Mostly arguing that with technology eating media, hollywood was at threat, that it would be overtaken. With the advent of blogging, mp3's, Napster, magazines and newspapers moving online, YouTube, Netflix, the iPod and iTunes it had become undeniable that SV was the new emperor of media. No longer did people even flock to LA to create media. They made it online. They made it from anywhere. Even the movie industry it seemed had left Hollywood. Creating movies at ILM and Pixar in the bay, with digital production houses around the world, and filming them at cheaper sets in Eastern Europe, or Canada. Hollywood was left empty. Overtaken and defeated.
The new boom in Silicon Valley stepped up in 2011, ironically, given a tremendous boost one could argue by “The Social Network” movie that year chronicling the Facebook story. By 2010 even movies were more SV than Hollywood. The youth interest that followed reached a fevered pitch by the following year. With Y Combinator and others setting fuel to the fire. A high octane mixture of modernized easier to use web technologies, cheaper digital infrastructure, new mobile smart phones with app business potential, youth underemployment, an ethos being preached of youth creativity and youth superiority by younger founders and investors led to a super sized flood of global youth heading to SV to pursue their passions and dreams of creating apps and media companies. Yes, a company now was no longer this dingy factory or store or global supply chain connected capital intensive business, it was an app. A piece of code mixed with media, photos, videos, and files all on your laptop and phone. And investors wanted to invest in young people. Experience disliked. Imagination, creativity, radiating optimism, and boundless energy was the new formula of success. Be like Mark they said and we will invest.
Fast forward to 2015 and now we have a flood of those radiant optimistic kids right out of high school or college going to Silicon Valley, not LA. The bright dreamers with crazy naiveté, the ones leaving home from around the world to go West, the ones with passion that you can only be impressed by are now in San Francisco or Oakland. The ones who want glamour, wealth, and fame gave up LA for the bay. They never even knew to consider LA. Who wants to be Tom Cruise when you can be Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. Huddling into empty Berkeley summer apartments hoping that within 3 months they will become the next billion dollar celebrity techno star. Hunting at hackathons and online for the next killer photo app media idea or whatever is trendy today business. Dreaming that the agent of Y Combinator will accept them into its talent pool for the next batch of media companies. Taking head shots with iPhones to look cool on the new hot blogging platform or social network. Creating profiles of glamour to attract attention, followers, users, and vc investors. In 2015, you fake it till you make it.
Today, even the most hard core successful engineers in the valley at least understand media and Hollywood culture and how to make it work for them. They studied the showman qualities of Steve Jobs, a man who balanced the two worlds. Elon Musk lives in LA, is married to an actress, and understands and embraces Hollywood celebrity culture. He wears velvet jackets to give hollywood style press conferences to announce his latest invention. His media announcements are more akin to early hollywood legend Howard Hughes than what we knew as the traditional SV. Adam Neumann founder of WeWork operates in a similar fashion, also with a celebrity actress wife, he is more familiar with the magic of Hollywood and the NY media world than the traditional engineering culture of SV. WeWork knows how to throw an amazing party, how to make all its new young SV stars feel loved and special in offices modeled after movie sets. To be a success in SV today, you need to also know how to create a Hollywood-esque magical media presence. Alex Blumberg the reporter and story teller from NPR radio is the new face of Silicon Valley with his “StartUp” podcast and media company. The examples are endless. I have a lot of respect for this new breed of star entrepreneur, the one who has product expertise and a savvy media presence, especially those who are working to advance our world.
I do think SV today has a healthy and ever increasing dose of those who are more about the show and building personal glamour than producing anything of lasting value or meaning for others. This is the dark side of attracting all that Hollywood glamour seeking talent. Talent that is supported by a system of rewards that encourages Hollywood values over the traditional SV ethos. Personal fame and wealth over technical advancement for mankind.
The lesson is clear, if you want to make it in the new SV you need to have a bit of Hollywood in you. You need to have a flair for attracting attention, be able to cut through the substantial noise, attract a social following, create a community of fans, to essentially be a star. Let’s hope the next generation of entrepreneurs will balance those needs with the traditional SV ethos of producing meaningful and lasting work that advances our civilization and brings people forward in a positive way. They understand that being in the spotlight is part of success, but it’s not why you are there.
So it’s true, Silicon Valley companies beat Hollywood at the media industry and vanquished LA. And now Hollywood culture and dynamics have eaten Silicon Valley. Let’s hope the cultural balance tilts back to SV’s traditional ethos of advancing our world for everyones benefit. Who’s eating the world now?
