You are currently viewing SemiWiki as a guest which gives you limited access to the site. To view blog comments and experience other SemiWiki features you must be a registered member. Registration is fast, simple, and absolutely free so please, join our community today!
These are the economic challenges before us and I know the solutions are in the Silicon Valley Culture and not the Washington DC Culture. The Silicon Valley culture is driven by a sometimes brutal, Darwinian process that is based on ever increasing efficiency in use of time, money and resources more than any sector of any economy in the world. From AI to solar and ultra high tech windmills among other products, no other area of the world economy advances as fast and efficiently as the tech sector. The tremendous success and huge number of failures push everything forward at an ever increasing rate, showing only the strong fast and nimble survive. Success is rewarded and failure is punished with unrelenting speed. To many times governments world wide actually reward and perpetuate failure. The Silicon Valley culture is in its infancy when it comes to solving social and political problems, but is growing fast. It is increasing transparency more every year, while improving education both of which are fundamental to solving the challenges before us. Lowering the costs and increasing the quality of transparency and education/training will enable us to come up with solutions to almost any challenge. Accurate, timely information and a top skill set are fundamental to a successful society. This is where the Silicon Valley culture can and has excelled over all others. It's basically about empowering people to achieve their best. These charts show that these efforts must not only continue, but expand.
Silicon Valley succeeded in the semiconductor business primarily due to the well-known forces of The Learning Curve as applied to manufacturing and the economic principle of economies of scale.
You cannot take The Learning Curve and economies of scale and apply it to all of the challenges in our present day society, because the semiconductor industry doesn't drive our entire economy.
Dan, Silicon valley is not about semiconductors only, social media, search, software of every imaginal type, bio tech, medical and much, much more. Companies rise a fall at a tremendous rate. Advancing everything at an accelerating rate is applied to almost everything in Silicon Valley. Airbnb and Uber are just at the very beginning of their innovation cycle. Uber is now looking into the trucking arena. All fields are accelerating at an ever increasing rate due to the application of technology and new ways of thinking. The number and types of technologies are unmatched any where in the world. I set the physical boundaries of SV from Monterey to Santa Rosa to UC Davis. Even in wine this area is the leader.
I still think that your issues with the Washington D.C. culture cannot be solved by using the free-market thinking and success of the Silicon Valley. By D.C. culture I presume that you are talking about the political process, which in that case cannot be changed by the high-risk and high-reward thinking of Silicon Valley. Politics in D.C. are governed by compromise, lobbyists, big donors, looking good to voters, getting re-elected, and hanging on for political control. None of these political behaviors can be replaced by the entrepreneurial spirit and reward system found in Silicon Valley.
Can you name one successful, Silicon Valley entrepreneur that has entered the political process on a National level or run for even a state-level political office?
President Carter had a degree in Nuclear Engineering, however his Presidency was one of the least effective in recorded history.
The only mention of Silicon Valley and the political process is the occasional famous donor, or when a company like Google lets a candidate visit their offices.
At SemiWiki I think that our best investment is to focus on the Semiconductor industry and leave politics in its own domain.
All businesses can get in over their head with spending. It's an epidemic in Oregon right now where businesses are letting people go before thanksgiving because the numbers aren't there. Not going into specifics but you need to work at it until the business is setup correctly.
Dan, Silicon Valley has already taken some proof of concept actions, the Khan Academy and Facebook among them. The Khan Academy has given us an ideal model for high quality, very low cost education and Facebook has given us more transparency than we have had before. Also Google is a tremendous educational, business tool in search and YouTube has become a very powerful educational tool in many things. Instructables.com is also a powerful tool that I'm sure will develop farther in the future. These all have been built on the foundations of hardware and software out of Silicon Valley and financed by the Silicon Valley financial structure.
