Assignment 1

grading_guidelines_for_written_material xarticle_43

Grading Guidelines for Written Material
Any written material submitted for grading should contain all of the following elements:
Match the requested style requirements defined by the instructor.

 

         Have a clear, plausible thesis or focused point stated in the introduction.

         Evidence which is both necessary and sufficient to defend the focused point. Avoid wandering from the focused point.

         As required, in longer pieces, a conclusion which reinforces the thesis or focused point, gives its significance, and places it in a wider context.

         Correct spelling, grammar, and mechanics

         Factual accuracy.

         Thoughtful analysis (the use of relevant tools to examine material) and interpretation throughout.

         Originality; personal discovery of new ideas (concepts).

Technology December 22, 2011, 4:15 PM EST

It’s Always Sunny in Silicon Valley

The Valley’s techies live in a bubble of prosperity. Optimism has its
advantages, but some worry the region may lose touch with the rest of
the world

By Brad Stone

Every so often, the best parties come to represent moments in time. Think of Truman Capote’s

Black and White Ball in 1966, the celeb-studded Liberty Island launch of Tina Brown’s ill-fated

Talk magazine in 1999, and private equity maven Stephen A. Schwarzman’s 60th birthday bash in

2007, which featured Rod Stewart. Sean Parker’s bacchanal for the streaming music service

Spotify on Sept. 22 in San Francisco may well join the ranks of these epic affairs.

The Facebook billionaire—portrayed by Justin Timberlake as a swaggering lush in The Social

Network—turned an abandoned warehouse in the city’s Potrero District into a couch-filled pleasure

palace. Waiters served piles of lobster, sushi, and roast pig, while journalists each were presented

their own $300 bottles of DeLeón Tequila. As Mark Zuckerberg, Apple (AAPL) designer Jony Ive,

author Danielle Steel, and other guests mingled, acts including Snoop Dogg, Jane’s Addiction,

and the Killers—flown in on private jets—performed for the well-lubricated crowd. “All the

recording artists here might not have shown up if they knew I was a nerd,” said an exuberant

Parker from the stage.

In Silicon Valley, all the Sturm und Drang of 2011 seemed as relevant as the Cricket World Cup.

High unemployment? Crippling debt? Not in Silicon Valley, where the fog burns off by noon and

it’s an article of faith that talented, hard-working techies can change the world and reap

unimaginable wealth in the process. “We live in a bubble, and I don’t mean a tech bubble or a

valuation bubble. I mean a bubble as in our own little world,” says Google (GOOG) Chairman Eric

Schmidt. “And what a world it is: Companies can’t hire people fast enough. Young people can

work hard and make a fortune. Homes hold their value. Occupy Wall Street isn’t really something

that comes up in daily discussion, because their issues are not our daily reality.”

It was never clearer than in 2011 that Silicon Valley exists in an alternate reality—a bubble of

prosperity. Restaurants are booked, freeways are packed, and companies are flush with cash. The

prosperity bubble isn’t just a state of mind: Times are as good as they’ve been in recent memory.

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The region gets 40 percent of the country’s venture capital haul, up from 31 percent a decade

ago, according to the National Venture Capital Assn. And the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

recently reported that growth of the area’s job market led the nation, jumping 3.2 percent, triple

the national rate. Even real estate, a cesspool of despair in the rest of the country, is humming

along. It’s next to impossible to get a table on a weekend night at the Rosewood in Menlo Park, a

watering hole for Sand Hill Road’s technology financiers where the olive-oil-poached steelhead

goes for $36. The closest we got to “Occupy: Cupertino” was the line outside Apple stores in

October for the iPhone 4S.

It’s tempting to view this latest Golden Age with skepticism, a boom as fleeting and disappointing

as the one in the late 1990s, before the dot-com crash. But the strengths underlying the Valley’s

optimism appear more solid this time around. Google, Facebook, and Twitter each have hundreds

of millions of users around the world and, at least in the first two cases, solid revenues. Valley

companies that went public this year, such as LinkedIn (LNKD) and Pandora Media (P), have

actual profits, and Zynga’s (ZNGA) initial public offering on Dec. 16—though shares fell slightly in

early trading—was the exclamation mark at the end of a thunderous sentence. The offering added

yet another Valley billionaire to the regional club: founder Mark Pincus, whose net worth now

hovers around $1.3 billion. Even blue chips such as Cisco (CSCO) and Intel (INTC), punished by

the stock market for missing big market shifts, are notching record revenue. Doomsday isn’t a

pending threat here, it’s office art: Photos of mushroom clouds adorn the lobby of fast-rising

venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. (Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg Businessweek,

is an investor in Andreessen Horowitz.)

Turbulence in the rest of the world may actually be helping Silicon Valley, as wealthy Russians

and Chinese send their kids to school here and compete to park their riches in the region’s most

promising startups. “There’s always the sense that the storms are happening in other people’s

worlds,” says Paul Saffo, a futurist and veteran Valley watcher. “Nobody stops buying

smartphones just because they are having an insurrection.”

The downside of the prosperity bubble is that Silicon Valley could be falling out of touch with the

rest of the world. That danger was well illustrated this year by a startup called Color Labs, which

was lavishly funded with $41 million from investors such as Sequoia Capital and Bain Capital even

before it even had a product with actual users. That’s enough to fund research into the next wave

of clean energy or advanced artificial intelligence. Instead, in March the company released an

iPhone application that let users share photos with strangers in close proximity. Upon its

introduction, the app met with a wave of scorn—in part because hardly anyone wants to do that, in

part because people are fatigued with the Valley’s relentless social networking gimmicks.

Yet an outfit like Color Labs can whiff badly and live to fight another day. The company did not

even appear particularly humbled. Among the biggest signs of change at Color over the ensuing

eight months were the rotating decorations in the part of its Palo Alto office visible from the

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sidewalk. At first, patches of AstroTurf lined the floor, creating faux gardens where employees

could sit, drink coffee, and ponder. Then the room morphed into a yoga studio where barefoot

instructors limbered up dozens of employees at a time. Now it seems to be evolving into a

communal work space. The startup hasn’t been completely lax. It introduced an app that lets

users broadcast iPhone videos live to their Facebook friends. “Companies like Color are being

given a second, third, or fourth shot at the game because it’s a big game,” says Bill Nguyen,

Color’s chief executive officer. “The prizes are pretty darn huge. There are fundamental changes

happening in information because of Facebook and mobile devices.”

Some in Silicon Valley are alarmed by what they see as the reluctance of the technology

establishment to take on big problems. Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, two prominent entrepreneurs

who created PayPal (EBAY), have in the past year started retailing the notion that serious

innovation has stagnated and that talented technologists should be doing meaningful, even epic,

engineering, the way an earlier generation went to the moon. Their book on the topic, The

Blueprint, will be out in March. Roger McNamee, a longtime venture capitalist and managing

director at private equity firm Elevation Partners, also wonders if Silicon Valley techies have grown

insular. “Too many startups make products for people like them, which is predictable but not

interesting,” he says.

Still, the Valley’s overwhelming bias toward optimism remains one of its greatest assets. John

Seely Brown, former director of the famed Xerox PARC R&D lab, believes we are undergoing what

he calls a “Cambrian moment” of technology change that is making it exponentially easier to build

companies, rent supercomputers, and get access to sophisticated scientific tools. With those tools

at the disposal of entrepreneurs and researchers, he says, the future is blindingly bright. “So it’s

stunning to see how cynical everybody else is,” he says. “They are looking at the world through a

rearview mirror, trying to preserve the past as opposed to seizing the moment and moving forward

with greater imagination.”

Perhaps Silicon Valley has earned those private rock concerts and $300 bottles of tequila. It’s the

one place where progress marches forward even amid the utter dysfunction and gridlock of

governments in California and Washington, D.C. The challenge for techies in this exceptional,

sometimes magical environment will be to eschew narcissism and to peer outside the prosperity

bubble and understand with humility how they can help. “If you can’t empathize with others,” John

Seely Brown says, “it’s very hard to solve their problems.”

Stone is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek.

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