May 19, 2017
"Until you live in Silicon Valley, you don’t realize how many dumb rich people there are."
The last line of "The Mad King of Juice: Inside the Dysfunctional Origins of Juicero" at Gizmodo.
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18 comments:
Nothing new that some owners aren't competent at running their companies. It's probably best to think about that before you invest in them or go to work for them.
Whenever I hear the term "Silicon Valley" I always think of the 741 Op-Amp.
"In 1968, three years after he emigrated from Scotland to take a job with Fairchild Semiconductor, David Fullagar designed the first compensated operational amplifier."
After graduate school I went to work for a bunch of small high tech startups in the late 1970s through early 1980s. None made it. And I have better stories than that article to tell.
"Silicon Valley" I always think of the 741 Op-Amp."
The confusion comes from thinking of Silicon Valley as the place that made transistors and then integrated circuit chips useful, inexpensive, and ubiquitous. It seems a long journey from inventing the high-performance semiconductor devices that increasingly define our world, and inventing ... Juicero. Although both endeavors get filed under the label 'Silicon Valley' they somehow don't seem equally significant, do they?
Then again, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” is attributed to H.L. Mencken. So, perhaps now that Moore's Law seems to be drawing to a close, Silicon Valley has graduated from Moore's Law to Mencken's Law.
So what's the problem with Juicero, anyway? Yes, the machine and the juice it produces are both far too expensive for the quality of the beverage produced, but it is convenient, and aren't these things just as true for Keurig single-serve?
Work as a practicing lawyer for 30 years.
Or you can just look at who donates to the Sierra Club, Emily's List, the Tides Foundation, Move-On and the Clintons. Lot's of stupid rich people live outside Silicon Valley too, but mostly along the coasts.
You get a sense watching Silicon Valley.
A sizable percentage of the rich are not what you would consider genius entrepreneurs or crack businessmen. There are the semi-crazy (or fully crazy) who, thanks to the joys of capitalism, took crazy risks that paid off. There are also those that are really good at what they do but are otherwise barely functional, capable of running a business but otherwise a mess. Of course there are those that are rich because they hit the genetic lottery and ended up with high cheekbones or a great singing voice or the God given talent to hit a baseball. And there are those that are rich because of political connections.
Never confuse self-made rich with anything other than wealth. Competence, morality, intelligence, and sanity are optional.
“On the surface [Juicero is] very much a vegan, healthy lifestyle kind of culture. That’s what they wanted to portray the culture as. That’s what they advertised the culture as,” a former operations employee said, audibly frustrated. “In reality, it was very much like a dictatorship.”
These sound like the same thing to me . . . I mean, let's cut straight to Godwin's law right now. Hitler was a vegetarian. If he lived today, he is exactly the kind of self-righteous supercilious kook who would be vegan. No one should be surprised when a vegan enterprise turns out to be a dictatorship.
The cover photo is great. A king beheaded? And empty tie and suit?
If I ever needed convincing (which I didn't) about the large number of stupid rich people, the number of rich people--from the Hollywood Left to the Park Avenue Pinkos--who financed leftism and underwritten statist Democratic candidates would have done the job.
"Big Business doesn't want the State to leave it alone. It wants a state it can control."--Albert Jay Nock
"Always attack the rich. Everyone will support you--the rich first of all."--Ellsworth Toohey
They have an intelligence that is valuable in a niche market. Not stupid, specialized.
Twenty years ago a friend used to say that the stupidest phone conversations he overheard in L.A.'s car washes belonged to the people with the most expensive cars.
For a previous example, the Segway. Even Steve Jobs drank that KoolAid.
This is my M-F life as a business immigration paralegal: doing various visas to bring in professionals for yet another startup (with products of dubious value) with a fat Silicon Valley Bank account - led by idealistic, full of themselves CEOs. Gag. I see SVB account statements in my nightmares, alongside the "our app will save the world" crap I had to read on the company's website.
Peter, coffee drinkers are such junkies they'll pay absurd prices to conveniently get their morning fox. I don't think juice is as addictive.
ALP, I had to laugh. I've done communications for SV companies for decades and can confirm. I've been able to avoid the worst, but even the best can have insufferable CEOs. I've even written some of the BS you had to read!
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Liberals with Asperger's. SV in a nutshell.
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