If the Techtopus wage theft suit proves anything, it’s that the philosophy that built the Valley is no more
In 2008, everyday folks learned that the top Wall Street banks were simply too big for the government to let them fail. In the Valley there was an overwhelming sense of smugness about our lack of protectionism.
Here the young eat the old.
We’d never ask for a government bail out.
Everyone is subject to disruption.
Indeed what’s defined Silicon Valley – and the reason it surpassed Boston as the world’s leading innovation and startup hub decades ago – was an almost Eastern philosophy of the constant recirculation of money and talent. Like atoms washing in and out of the body, or a flow of energy that would be described in a California Yoga class, the idea was that this flow of talent and capital was all that mattered – not any one job, or any one company, or even any one technical wave. It was the big living breathing organism of the ecosystem.
The Valley eschewed strictures of the East Coast – Robert Noyce hated unions and so he made his employees at Intel partners in the business. And unlike the East Coast, non-competes were frowned upon. As the Valley grew, so too grew this idea that even a founder wouldn’t be in his job forever, and the system was what mattered. If someone wanted to leave you to start a company or join one, you had to let them and trust it would all work out.
But something has happened to this zen, free-market utopia: It worked so well that it spawned handfuls upon handfuls of companies that got truly massive, with huge multiples in their stock prices, and mind-boggling amounts of cash. These companies exerted enormous control over their markets, and they’d seen the decline of once-great tech companies that weren’t careful.
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