True. But I think his point was that by not investing in other parts of the country, people are not giving a chance for the ecosystem to develop.
I think local culture plays a big part as well. In most other parts of the country people join big large companies and then spend their entire life being the company man or woman.
If I did that I'd cry just like the other guy said he would if the Bay Area got paved over.
It seems like you're kind of a jack of all trades. This is an awesome skill-set to have while working in a datacenter. Call it IT/dev-ops whatever.
The tech field isn't restricted to just people that code for a living.
I would ignore Norman Matloff. Some 15-20 years ago he wrote a series of articles claiming that H1-Bs, outsourcing etc would kill off the careers of all US programmers. That didn't happen as far as I can tell.
I had a longer response, but I think the short response is that this is just the way the corporate world is.
Things were also different when Silicon Valley companies were smaller and unknown...people seemed to join tech because they liked it, not because it was cool or they wanted to be like Steve Jobs or Zuckerberg or whatever.
Oh, I'm on Gmail already, trust me. But thats because I like the faster interface, search capabilities, being able to check multiple mail accounts, gtalk etc. Yahoo is a great repository for my non-friends and family email (semi-spam).
I guess I've been very lucky that never happened to my Yahoo account.
Hmm..when I read the article the first time I didn't get the impression that he was saying business people should stay away from politics. But I was closely following the 2008 election in CA and assumed that's what he was referring to.
I think business people should definitely be involved in politics. I think everyone should be involved in politics, as a matter of fact. Democracy is a wonderful thing.
But I don't think being successful at business automatically means you're going to be successful in politics as well.
You're saying the goal of government is to "return value" to the people. I'm saying its goal is to "serve" the people. I think we can agree we're saying the same thing.
Here's the thing about your second paragraph:
There is self-confidence, which is an absolute requirement if you want to start/run a business, a political campaign or even a war.
Then there is hubris. Hubris is when you haven't bothered to vote (the most basic civic duty) for 28 years, and then run for Governor of California based on the fact that you've been CEO of a Silicon Valley company. To me this is worse than asking a non-technical manager about writing coding standards.
Its like a non-technical manager TELLING you how to write a coding standard.
This is a superb article. The portion I was really interested in was the one on bootstrapping. Completely agree with Jason Fried about taking on investor funds, maintaining your independence etc.
I've noticed however that the point he makes about self-funding typically applies to consulting companies: bootstrapping these is very different from bootstrapping, say a SaaS..oops I mean a cloud company.
I would love to hear from other folks that were able to bootstrap a software-product company.
@protomyth, re: "why wouldn't we want a.."because the criteria to be successful in business and government are completely different! In business the ONLY goal is to create value for your shareholders.
In government the goal is to serve your people. If you're in government and lose sight of this goal, then you end up like Ben Ali, Mubarak, Gadafi etc :-) All of them created value for their "shareholders", be they foreign oil companies or the domestic businesses that were run by the local oligarchy.
I think local culture plays a big part as well. In most other parts of the country people join big large companies and then spend their entire life being the company man or woman.
If I did that I'd cry just like the other guy said he would if the Bay Area got paved over.