Tom Perkins of KPCB, Another Silicon Valley Jerk. Where Have We Gone So Wrong?

This weekend, the media and blogosphere have been ignited with reaction to the open letter to the Wall Street Journal by venture capitalist Tom Perkins, founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and the blowback from Atlantic Magazine writer Jordan Weissmann. The overwhelming reaction has been disbelief and outrage at Perkins comments.

I am so angry and sad to see this article and interview of legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Tom Perkins. It is further evidence to my earlier post on the “Silicon Valley Jerk Conundrum.”  Mr. Perkins and his firm, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, better known in the Valley as KPCB, have spawned some of the best and most famous companies in Silicon Valley. Former Intel colleagues, Jim Lally and John Doerr partnered there. Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems made his mark there, and is now the leading clean tech VC in the Valley. But Mr. Perkin’s public claim in his interview with the Wall Street Journal that there is a “war” on the rich, which is like the Nazi’s extermination of the Jews, is just too much for any decent thinking person.  Where has Silicon Valley gone so terribly wrong as to create a plutocrat like this?  As the writer says, “This is the reductio ad absurdum of a rich-guy’s persecution complex. The Jews were a minority. The rich are a minority. Therefore, criticizing the rich is akin to committing genocide against the Jews.”

Read more: The Silicon Valley Jerk Conundrum

As a Silicon Valley veteran I am deeply ashamed of this man and his thinking.

Venture Capitalist Says “War” on the Rich Is Like Nazi Germany’s

War on the Jews

In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Tom Perkins makes the worst historical analogy you will read for a long, long time.

JORDAN WEISSMANNJAN 25 2014, 12:34 PM ET

Venture capitalist Tom Perkins (Reuters) of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers

Tom Perkins is known is a founder of one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms,  Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He is not, however, a very adept historian.

In a letter to The Wall Street Journal, he suggests that progressives protesting income inequality are today’s equivalent of Nazi’s persecuting Jews.

Regarding your editorial “Censors on Campus” (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.”

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?

Kristallnacht was a rash of anti-Jewish riots that swept Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland in 1938, in which ordinary Germans, with Nazi support, destroyed Jewish shops and burned synagogues. As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes in its online encyclopedia:

As the pogrom spread, units of the SS and Gestapo (Secret State Police), following Heydrich’s instructions, arrested up to 30,000 Jewish males, and transferred most of them from local prisons to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps. Significantly, Kristallnacht marks the first instance in which the Nazi regime incarcerated Jews on a massive scale simply on the basis of their ethnicity.

This is the reductio ad absurdum of a rich-guy’s persecution complex. The Jews were a minority. The rich are a minority. Therefore, criticizing the rich is akin to committing genocide against the Jews. QED.

Vinod Khosla writes a scathing response to 60 Minutes’ ‘Cleantech Crash’ report

Vinod Khosla gives CBS News 60 Minutes another major black eye on their bias and lack of investigative depth, as with the lightweight report on the NSA.  Just consider for a moment the absurdity of 60 Minutes story in the light of recent major strategic initiatives by Cisco Systems, Intel, Qualcomm on clean tech and the “Internet of Things.  Add to that this week’s announcement of Google’s acquisition of Nest, a major energy efficiency company, for $3 Billion.  Khosla’s entire open letter to CBS is shown below.

Vinod Khosla writes a scathing response to 60 Minutes’

‘Cleantech Crash’ report

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has written a 2,000-word open letter to 60 Minutes and CBS in response to their recent “Cleantech Crash” report, which featured lengthy interviews with Khosla and a tour of one of Khosla’s portfolio companies. He asserts that there are numerous errors in the piece, that the journalists who made it were practicing “agenda-driven bastardization of news reporting,” and that the story “grossly misrepresented the state of the sustainable energy industry.”

You can read the entire letter here. He also says in the letter that Khosla Venture’s “cleantech portfolio is profitable.” Here’s my take on the 60 Minutes piece; here’sNRG CEO David Crane’s response; and here’s clean power entrepreneur and investor Jigar Shah’s take.

Open Letter to 60 Minutes and CBS

January 14th, 2014

To: 60 Minutes and CBS

Attn: Lesley Stahl, Jeff Fager, David Rhodes, Leslie Moonves

On January 5, 2014, CBS’ 60 Minutes aired a segment titled, “The Cleantech Crash” that grossly misrepresented the state of the sustainable energy industry.

At Khosla Ventures, we are focused on finding real solutions for energy independence, rather than just pontificating. The pontificators at 60 Minutes, with their agenda-driven bastardization of news reporting, failed to do the most elementary fact checking and source qualification, as was the case with your Benghazi reporting. No wonder one major media outlet wrote that you have been “widely criticized for leaving out crucial information about the state of the clean tech sector.” Is this the new CBS standard?

The errors in your story are numerous.

Fact: I have not invested over a billion dollars of my own money into cleantech. It is substantially less, and a simple query to us would have corrected this error. We manage a balanced portfolio, and it has not “crashed” nor is it “dead”. In fact, our returns are significantly above the venture capital average.

Fact: Contrary to your assertion, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Loan Guarantee Program has created 55,000 new cleantech jobs. ^[1]

Fact: The DOE loan program, despite your implications, has a 97% success rate. ^[2] The former program head, Jonathan Silver, expects it to make money, not be a subsidy.

Fact: There is $51 billion remaining in DOE loan money.^[3] The amounts in the CBS report are far from “spent” or allocated. You seem to want to cite big numbers, whether they are true or not!

Fact: A substantial portion of DOE loans is allocated to nuclear energy^[4], not just cleantech segments like biofuels, solar or wind, a fact conveniently left out despite your being aware of it.

Fact: The U.S. spent $502 billion subsidizing fossil fuels in 2011. This is the result of directly lowered prices, tax breaks and failing to properly price carbon’s negative externalities.^[5] You ignored the fact that energy is far from being a level playing field. Many other subsidies are hard to account for like MLP partnerships, accelerated depreciation and below-market royalties that are never categorized as fossil fuel subsidies that disadvantage cleantech.

Fact: According to a senior U.S. Navy official, last year alone, $80 billion of taxpayer money was spent patrolling just the oil sea-lanes in the Arabian Gulf. There are many sea-lanes we patrol. Globally and over time, the U.S. has spent $7 trillion patrolling them.^[6] Such “protection spending” of U.S. taxpayer dollars for the oil industry is a much larger subsidy than any amount spent to support the cleantech industry, a fact CBS chose to overlook despite my statements on camera. This may be the largest U.S. subsidy in history, and it was purposely ignored because it is inconsistent with your agenda. Cleantech subsidies are a miniscule fraction of one-percent of these amounts.

The Department of Energy said it themselves, “Simply put, 60 Minutes is flat wrong on the facts. The clean energy economy in America is real, and we are increasingly competitive in this rapidly expanding global industry. This is a race we can, must and will win.”

There were many opportunities for you to showcase cleantech successes such as the dynamic glass company, View, with whom you met and visited as part of your research. You also had knowledge that View raised $60 million in private funding in early 2013, and weeks before your program aired, View secured an additional $100 million in private funding. These dollars will go toward ramping production efforts in its Mississippi-based manufacturing facility, which will in turn create scores of new American jobs. Sustainable energy is the way forward for this new era of American manufacturing.  Already, the Brookings Institute reports that the clean economy employs over 2.7 million workers despite your implications to the contrary!

You chose to ignore other success stories like energy storage company, Lightsail, which we also shared with you. In fact, you did not even want to visit the solar, engines or agriculture success stories, among others. You chose to ignore these FACTS, because it did not jive with the story you wanted to tell. Is your job reporting all the facts or merely pushing “angles”?

You fundamentally do not understand how innovation works with platitudes like, “for every 10 startups, nine go under”.  At Khosla Ventures, we invest in companies that have high failure probabilities, but the wins far outweigh the losses. I clearly explained that we expect 50-percent of our portfolio companies to make money and today, our overall cleantech portfolio is profitable; however, CBS chose to air sources who have never looked at the details of a quality venture portfolio. In fact, their so-called experts are only expert pontificators who have never produced any biofuels themselves.  One always can find a “source “ to throw mud at anything to get on-air; CBS appears to want the same standards for sourcing as the National Enquirer.

You falsely implied that our companies have received disproportionate taxpayer money, despite my repeatedly telling you otherwise. While these numbers are hard to accurately calculate, to the best of our knowledge, a substantial amount of funding (greater than 90%) for our cleantech portfolio has come from private sources. When our companies have received funding from the DOE, the dollar amounts represent a small fraction of the investment from private dollars. It is naive to believe that we can subsidize energy on a large scale; this kind of thinking would bankrupt any government, and yet CBS seems to imply that all our investments are based substantially on taxpayer money or are dependent on ongoing subsidies, a statement that is simply untrue.

In fact, the former head of the DOE loan program, Jonathan Silver, stated publicly that some of the projects cited as failures by CBS never even got loans in the first place. You also failed to note that while Range Fuels took federal loan money, we strongly opposed their decision to do so. Because these are independent companies, we seldom control these decisions. Repeatedly, your story reinforced the 60 Minutes thesis rather than objectively reporting the facts.

According to Silver, the DOE loan program was actually designed to make a profit in the long term even taking into account the failures, which represent a remarkably small portion of the portfolio (less than three percent). Any loan program, private or public, has both losses and gains. When the investment cycle is complete, Silver expects the government will actually make a profit on the portfolio. Interests are below market (just as in the oil leases that oil companies receive) but the terms are restrictive enough that our portfolio companies, Kior and Stion (our solar company) and others refused the loans even after they were awarded. CBS also failed to distinguish between federal loans that were designed to be profitable (the bulk of the money), research grants (billions spent on private universities and companies in and outside cleantech), work-for-hire (do we list Lockheed Martin, which receives billions of dollars annually in work-for-hire government revenue, as a subsidy?) and other programs.

You misleadingly hyped the “$150 billion” allocated to cleantech without noting that, while it has been allocated, much of it has not been spent. Further, to the best of my knowledge, much of such project spending goes to larger incumbents, not entrepreneurs.

Your naïve reporting also failed to account for the other setbacks we have gone through in the last five years, such as the economic crisis, which, while unrelated to cleantech, has substantially hurt the ability to fund cleantech research or projects. Many projects — be they chemical, oil sands or cleantech — have failed to meet their expectations because of the recent financial crisis.

At scale, new technologies must compete with conventional fossil fuels on both price and performance – in the U.S., as well as in India and China. Energy incumbents have incredible advantages embedded in our tax code, government regulation and public infrastructure; therefore, new competitive efforts must be nourished and encouraged to maintain a more competitive environment and a level playing field. Subsidies should be used to introduce new competition to markets against the embedded advantages granted to incumbents. We must reform America’s energy policy before companies become dependent on the existing subsidy regime. As context, Chinese solar, wind, LED and other companies get substantially larger government loans to compete against U.S. producers, even without technology differentiation. In fact, we risk losing technology to China because there is simply more government support there. U.S manufacturing suffers as a result. The 1950s and 60s saw the moon race. Today, we are in a new race for sustainable energy, but we risk losing because of irresponsible reporting like that of CBS!

Khosla Ventures does not believe in subsidy-dependent markets. Reaching unsubsidized market competitiveness five to seven years after a commercial start is an abiding principle for all of our investments. Subsidies are a crutch: they force innovation into a niche and create dependence on financial incentives that will eventually disappear. I have publicly stated that I am against corn ethanol and wind subsidies, among others, and in favor of reducing solar and biofuel subsidies over time. I also have written about the criteria for good subsidy programs elsewhere. We need to level the playing field in order to create new competition for fossil energy. Currently, there is an unfair advantage for fossil fuels with favorable tax legislation like Master Limited Partnerships, accelerated depreciation and below market royalties, and of course the aforementioned IMF-calculated subsidies as well as free transportation protection services provided by the federal government. It all adds up to massive numbers, much larger than for cleantech, and it has been going on for decades!

New industries are created by entrepreneurs who don’t necessarily have subject matter expertise when they get started, yet they are still responsible for most of the innovation we see in society. Did Google know much about media? Or Amazon about commerce? Tesla about cars? SpaceX about rockets?  EBay about classifieds? Juniper about telecommunications? What did I know about computing when I started Sun Microsystems? We should celebrate these entrepreneurs, not pillory them for fighting entrenched incumbent industries that have political influence and money. And yes, they often fail, but they also create more positive change than incumbents who, in general, are only responsible for incremental improvements. The oil industry has probably spent more money advertising their environmental efforts with the likes of CBS than on real research in green technologies.

Your so-called “experts” pontificate about the hard problem of energy; we heard similar things about the difficulty of telecommunications with trillions invested in infrastructure. Then, the Internet came along, despite the indifference of every major telecommunications carrier, and upended the industry. Looking back through history, we can easily find common shortsighted attitudes when evaluating new technologies. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, it was dismissed out-of-hand by the incumbent telegram service, Western Union. “The idea is idiotic on the face of it…. we do not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a distance of several miles.”  Venture capitalist, Ben Horowitz, describes this naysaying attitude in an article titled, “Can-Do vs. Can’t-Do Culture”. As he so aptly points out about the naysayers, “They focused on what the technology could not do at the time rather than what it could do and might be able to do in the future.” This cynicism is exactly what CBS has proliferated in its unbalanced and unfair coverage of the cleantech industry. Today, the stakes are higher than ever as the world’s population increases and resources are limited. Our can-do attitude must overcome the naysayers.

To get to the energy-independent future we need, we must continue to try and sometimes fail, but the consequence for not trying is guaranteed failure. We will keep accepting intelligent and selective failure. Even oil prospecting has a greater than 55-percent failure rate, and yet we still do it. In the venture industry, we make risky bets all the time because that’s what it takes to innovate.

The future will run on energy. At Khosla Ventures, we are focused on making big bets to ensure a sustainable future even if some of them fail. It is unfortunate that stories like yours employ Benghazi-style reporting standards that overshadow the truth. I will continue to try and make the future happen and, when it does, hopefully someone else will do a better job reporting it.

As Robert F. Kennedy said, “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

— Vinod Khosla

Gigaom

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has written a 2,000-word open letter to 60 Minutes and CBS in response to their recent “Cleantech Crash” report, which featured lengthy interviews with Khosla and a tour of one of Khosla’s portfolio companies. He asserts that there are numerous errors in the piece, that the journalists who made it were practicing “agenda-driven bastardization of news reporting,” and that the story “grossly misrepresented the state of the sustainable energy industry.”

You can read the entire letter here. He also says in the letter that Khosla Venture’s “cleantech portfolio is profitable.” Here’s my take on the 60 Minutes piece; here’s NRG CEO David Crane’s response; and here’s clean power entrepreneur and investor Jigar Shah’s take.

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Big Idea Entrepreneur: Andrew Chung of Khosla Ventures

Andrew Chung of Khosla Ventures is a VC trying to change how we recharge (via Pando Daily)

http://youtu.be/14rLwrGqIAs

By Ondi Timoner On September 21, 2013

In the tech world, no one gets a bad rap like the venture capitalist. Often derided as opportunists and gold diggers who take advantage of passionate and eager startups with unfavorable valuations, some entrepreneurs see VCs as a necessary evil to scale their disruptive idea to a national or global stage. Sometimes, though, these VCs are the greatest allies and closest advisors to the founders. They are often the unsung heroes who fuel and guide innovation.

Still, with the cost of starting and operating a company dropping precipitously, where do Venture Capitalists fit in, if at all?  How can they bring value to an up-and-coming business? As every aspect of our lives — and how we do business — changes from the impact of technology and the Internet, so must financing all of these disruptive dreams.

This brings me to Andrew Chung of Khosla Ventures. He’s both an artist and entrepreneur, who breaks the mold of the stereotypical shark investor while financing groundbreaking technology that affects how we re-charge: intellectually, monetarily and literally (as in how we will power our lives).

Chung began his entrepreneurial education when he was five years old working in his family’s Chinese restaurant, where he learned the value of hard work, customer service, and perseverance. Not only did he attain ground-level experience in a small business, one customer, a local scientist from Princeton University, saw the boy’s potential and visited every weekend to teach Andrew advanced math and physics. He mastered Geometry at age 6, Calculus at 10, and Relativity by 12. It wasn’t long before Harvard came calling.

By 19, Chung had started his own company and built some of the first Flash-based websites for local business around campus. Not longer after, he co-founded a startup called Uberworks, an e-commerce platform and successfully steered it to a successful acquisition by a public company. Soon, Chung was drawn into the world of investing through stints at Bain Capital and worked in the arenas of energy, healthcare, and software.

During this time, his commitment to a career in business was challenged by the other great love of his life: Music. A talented vocalist, Chung won Chinese “American Idol” and was a finalist in Hong Kong’s version of “American Idol,” upon which he was offered a major record deal. Flipping the familiar narrative, he chose entrepreneurship over art, because he says he could make a bigger difference in the world.

Now a partner at Khosla Ventures, Chung’s goal is to disrupt traditional industries, revolutionize humanity and in his words “invent the future.” To do this, Chung has access to a $350 million seed fund to allow new companies and scientists to explore and experiment and help them grow their reach. He also has access to a main fund of $1 billion to help those companies scale to full maturity.

Khosla Ventures was an early investor in Jack Dorsey’s Square, which developed a way for mobile devices to accept payments, allowing anyone to operate as a small business and challenging the chokehold of the old guard. Another democratizing platform Chung is helping to fuel is Wattpad, a social reading platform that enables writers to upload their work and get real-time feedback. Wattpad is like Youtube, but with user-generated writing. It has millions of users, and the platform boasts teenager writers with fan bases multiple sizes larger than some NY Times best-selling authors. Chung sees this as the first step to toppling the publishing industry. 

One early investment of Chung’s that I’m most excited about involves the liquid battery, a potential game-changer in the fight to preserve life in the face of global warming. It stores and deploys renewable energy sources like wind and solar generated electricity across the grid as needed. That power outage in the South Bay that knocked out electricity in more than 115,000 homes earlier this week (which has happened a hundred times over the last five years) or the extended blackout after Hurricane Sandy in New York City could be a thing of the past if AMBRI’s liquid battery became part of our nation’s energy plan.

Instead of building more power plants to keep up with worldwide consumption and the increasing costs of updating aging infrastructure, the liquid battery could contribute towards a cleaner and more sustainable future.  

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The Task One iPhone Case: A Case Study of Mobile Market Excess?

The Task One iPhone Case with Swiss Army Knife Features

Tonight I was channel surfing and stumbled on the Task One iPhone Case in a TV News feature story from an outfit called Task Labs.. Their website is up but not complete. It still has the Latin text of an incomplete webpage template, but you can buy it online if you wish.

Read more:  http://thetasklab.com/

I want to emphasize that I wish to be completely fair here.  I am a dedicated Swiss Army Knife aficionado and a dedicated smart mobile user. I have a simple version of a Swiss Army Knife with a corkscrew in my pocket as I write this. A corkscrew is one of my mandatory survival tools (smile).  I have followed the Wall Street Journal coverage of the merger of the two Swiss companies that produce the knives.  It is a great story and a great product.    I have the full Boy Scout version in my tool drawer.  The Task Labs people should also remember the tried and true publicity adage, “Any PR is good PR.”

But I also have to admit that it took me a minute to realize that the TV story was not a Saturday Night Live parody skit, with Dan Akroyd trying get me to call and give him my credit card number.  The Task One iPhone Case is a real product, though its website does not appear to be “ready for prime time.”  Nor does the product concept appear to be ready for prime time, IMHO.   I am certain that some of my readers will see this, and rush out to buy one, but other more discriminating consumers are more likely to start asking a lot of hard marketing questions about this new innovation.  To me this product is an extreme example of everything that is wrong with innovation.  Said another way, “Is that all there is?”  Another great existential phrase many of us are now using says “Hey, it is what it is!”

The market positioning of this product according to the TV person, was simple.  What do you do when you take your iPhone out into the woods with you on a hike, then realize that you have no cellular signal, no nothing. The Task One iPhone case is their answer.  Let me know your opinion on the Task One iPhone Case.

I could probably go on for hours compiling a longer list of issues with this product, but here goes:

1. Kiss Your Phone Goodbye Going Through Airport Security:  This one seems obvious.  I cannot count the number of Swiss Army Knives i have personally lost at airport security.  Then think about the number of Swiss Army Knives they have confiscated.

2.  “Small” idea. The inspiration for this product is nothing new. It is simply trying to kludge together two things that work perfectly well on their own.  So the real question is why bring your phone into the bush, when you need to leave the phone home, and bring your Swiss Army Knife? I know that some people will adamantly say that you should bring your mobile phone with you for GPS, etc. Perhaps, but no mobile phone GPS system was designed for use in the bush. Take your phone with you on a long hike, and try to use your GPS and you will see what I mean.   Nor is a useful pocket knife designed to look like a phone. The Task One is a marginally useful appendage to a mobile phone, that will not fit comfortably in the palm as a knife does.  It encourages a sense of complacency in the bush, when serious backcountry experts would probably laugh.  Or is it for use to impress your friends, out on a Friday night at the local pub?  The accessories appear to include all kinds of cool extra stuff, like a battery charger (Huh?).  So as long we are brainstorming this product, it needs a compass.  A mirror would be good.  Remember all of the movies where the guy lost in the woods uses a mirror to signal rescuers? Any other suggestions?

3. Price. The price is $99. I can buy a comparable Swiss Army Knife for $30. Are you prepared to pay $99 for an iPhone case? Not sure about the price of the accessories.

4. The Market. The market may seem big, but wait a minute.  Most smart mobile phones have different form factors, even the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5.  So Task One and Task Labs must address a fragmented market with multiple products.  This is starting to sound very complicated and expensive.  Can I get one for my Samsung Nexus? No.

5. Marketing.  I think that this company, like so many of these giddy mobile market companies, is so full of itself that it hasn’t thought through the distribution issues, including a half finished website.

The very fact that when I first saw the TV story, I assumed that it was a spoof,  is a warning signal.

The knee jerk joke of “There’s an app for that!” isn’t really that funny. Many experienced Silicon Valley veterans have complained loudly about the current malaise of misplaced infatuation with mobile apps, as the apparent end all and be all of Silicon Valley. Vinod Khosla, Marc Andreeson, Max Marmer and a laundry list of others have asked rhetorically how Silicon Valley could have lost its way so badly? Silicon Valley was founded on Big Ideas.

I published “Silicon Valley’s Misguided Love Affair With An App For Everything, ” and “App Development Boom’s Depressing Underbelly” after reading a New York Times story on the topic.

Read more: http://mayo615.com/2013/03/04/silicon-valleys-misguided-love-affair-with-an-app-for-everything/

Read more: http://mayo615.com/2012/11/18/app-development-booms-depressing-underbelly-what-ever-happened-to-big-ideas/

Silicon Valley’s Misguided Love Affair With An “App” For Everything

The knee jerk joke of “There’s an app for that!” isn’t really that funny.

As an experienced Silicon Valley veteran, I am very familiar with many of its leading companies, luminaries and eccentric personalities.  Having spent most of my career in the midst of it, I believe that I am entitled to offer the following  criticism.   It is also not unique coming from me.

Many experienced Silicon Valley veterans have complained loudly about the current malaise of misplaced infatuation with mobile apps, as the apparent end all and be all of Silicon Valley. Vinod Khosla, Marc Andreeson, Max Marmer and a laundry list of others have asked rhetorically how Silicon Valley could have lost its way so badly? Silicon Valley was founded on Big Ideas.

It seems that our local tech community is living in a time warp, or at least is dramatically behind the curve in understanding how public opinion and the investment climate has changed for this fantasy world.  One might see this dilemma as predictable, as our local tech community is so far from the center of the tech universe, and therefore seriously behind and out of step.  A severe reckoning is nigh.

On November 18th of last year I wrote a post mirroring a NY Times article, “App Development’s Depressing Underbelly,”  about the depressing reality of those devoted to mobile and Web application development, losing their entire life savings and living like paupers. These people drank the proverbial Koolaid of the app development rainbow, and found out that it was a Ponzi scheme.

Read more: http://mayo615.com/2012/11/18/app-development-booms-depressing-underbelly-what-ever-happened-to-big-ideas/

The same question keeps being raised, over and over again, “Where are the BIG IDEAS that are going to make big impacts?”.  So far there doesn’t seem to be much of an answer.

Yet again this morning, the New York Times published another well-considered opinion piece on this topic, by Evgeny Morozov,  the author of “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.”

I was personally attracted to Mr. Morozov’s article, because of his reference to Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism. Mr. Morozov’s point is that Sartre epitomized the human angst of having to make decisions.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

Silicon Valley has recently seemed to say that “there is an app for that too!”   NOT!

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/the-perils-of-perfection.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

Jumpstarting Canadian Venture Capital: Is Harper the Man To Do It?

We are waiting to see how Harper‘s $400M very modest gesture to Canadian innovation will be invested, by whom, and how. We have had so many years stealing from Canada’s future, that one could easily claim that it is a moral travesty, depriving Canada of its future.   The obvious problem is that Harper is not Vinod Khosla. Harper is a closet climate change denier.  Harper’s vision is parochial and anti-democratic. While we have such a fragmented provincial political focus, we can only expect Harper to boost Alberta tar sands at the expense of the Canadian national economy and innovation.

This Techvibes article suggests that they may follow the Israeli government model, but the author is Israeli, has been there, done that, so she has some interesting insights.

http://www.techvibes.com/blog/jumpstarting-venture-capital-in-canada-is-it-possible-2012-10-18?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=linkedin