Valley of the Gods

Valley of the Gods:  A Silicon Valley Story by Alexandra Wolfe, Simon & Schuster 2016

What would have happened if somebody had offered you a chance to skip college, gave you a fellowship to start your own tech company, or create a new cancer drug, or investigate the possibilities of anti-aging forever drugs?  Would you have taken the chance to live with others of that ilk - t-shirted, geekish, single focus types - in Silicon Valley garages and store fronts?   To some people it would be a hard choice - Eastern establishment values vs. what author Wolfe sees as the Silicon Valley values of entrepreneurism and mucho money.  In fact, if your first start-up had failed, you would have achieved that first rung of success, with bragging rights to the visible proof of failure - being in the game is what counts, and the next one, or the next one.

For some of us, the choice is easy - take a proven, paved path to J.P. Morgan or the Manhattan hedge fund guys.  But for others, like the kids profiled in Valley of the Gods,  the straight and narrow was just too narrow, too small, too limiting, and it led to utter boredom.  Take the Thiel Fellowship, of course, and live your own Silicon Valley history.  

Three upstarts profiled among the twenty students chose to ape Steve Jobs' college drop-out path and at less than 20 years of age, take the 20 Under 20 fellowship.  Along the way Wolfe stepped into the other world of Silicon Valley start-ups and the seemingly peculiar social customs and patterns thriving there.  We've not seen them up front - the communal marriages, for instance, the parties and "club" sessions - but we can take her word for it.  Interesting, colorful, but who really cares?

What matters here is how the US, in particular Silicon Valley, will maintain its global innovation leadership when we know that offshore companies are already at work developing their own innovation campaigns, sometimes driven in fact by the geniuses in that very same Valley arena.  All the energy and brilliance of this newest generation of entrepreneurs is not, unfortunately, protected or immune to global raiding parties.  Think of that when you read the author's description of the more build able tech. 

And that's my concern.  As entertaining as Wolfe's story is, it can't answer our big challenge, how to grow and feed - and house - our own workforce of mill people.  Because we'll always have geniuses, and some of them will be billionaires while many of them won't, but wouldn't it be grand if we could sustain the movement?  And Valley of the Gods leaves us with unanswered questions about the value of education, since 1 out of 10 first year Thiel fellowship holders ended up going back to college, changed, for sure, but still, back to the dorms.. 

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, https://sites.google.com/site/blueheronjournal/, tricia@patriciaemoody.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, pemoody@aol.com 

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