People Are Silicon Valley’s Best-Kept Secret
Visionary venture-capitalist John Doerr reveals that it’s humans, not robots, who will drive success
By Sebastian Mallaby
Outside Silicon Valley, commentators obsess about robots, artificial intelligence, big data. Inside Silicon Valley, paradoxically, the tech tribe’s preoccupations often lie elsewhere: less with code than with people. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg wrote two of the hottest books to come out of the Valley in the past half-decade — one is about women’s professional confidence and the other about coping with bereavement. The late Steve Jobs of Apple is the subject of endless fascination in Silicon Valley, not because he invented stuff but because his quirky New Age perfectionism somehow led him to greatness. Now John Doerr, the Valley’s most famous venture capitalist, has come out with a book that underscores this paradox. To anyone who fears that technology advances at the expense of humanity, it is salutary reading.
“Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs” distills four decades of Silicon Valley experience, from Doerr’s early years at the semiconductor pioneer Intel to his spectacular bets on long-shot start-ups such as Amazon and Google. But the focus that Doerr chooses is revealing…
