Silicon Valley Reprompted

"Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" — Steve Jobs, 1983

"Software is eating the world." — Marc Andreessen, 2011

"Competition is for losers." — Peter Thiel, 2014

Three sentences. Three decades. One frame: the exponential versus the ordinary.

The frame worked. It held the coordination together from the microprocessor to the smartphone to the AI datacenter. Without it, no Moore's Law. Without Moore's Law, no phone in your pocket, no global logistics, no medical imaging, no AI.

So where's the catch?

The world hasn't changed much. The competition has intensified. And amount of sugared water consumed is more than ever.

The progress was real, but narrower than promised. Peter Thiel has been the clearest voice on this: we were supposed to get flying cars; we got 140 characters. Median millennial wages barely beat their boomer parents'. Air travel is slower today than it was in 1971. Energy, housing, medicine, transportation, the physical speed at which human beings move through the world — roughly flat for half a century. The curves bent almost entirely inside the screen, and barely at all outside of it.

What happened to the future?

There are many complex ways to analyze this. A big part of the story is constrained real estate supply in tech hubs. Another is existential risk avoidance through regulation and doomsday narratives.

However, let us look at this even simpler: lets' look at the words we used.

For a second, imagine a world where memes referenced in the beginning are simultaneously true.

Is it not a world where losers compete for sugared water while software displaces them?

Now, is this the future you'd be compelled to build and bring your friend and family into?

Silicon Valley Reprompted

What if we reframe each meme slightly:

• The world is munching software and can't get enough of it
• Competition is for learners, monopolies – for winners.
• Do you want to improve how we live and love, or keep selling sugared water?

Now that sounds different.

Does this produce an energy force to go and build a 100x brighter future? It does for me.