Quotes About Silicon Valley

#1. We who work in technology have nurtured an especially rare gift: the opportunity to effect change at an unprecedented scale and rate. Technology, community, and capitalism combine to make Silicon Valley the potential epicenter of vast positive change.

Justin Rosenstein

#2. An open-minded and diverse population that readily shares information, encourages experimentation, accepts failure and dispenses with formality and hierarchy is what makes Silicon Valley the successful hub that it is.

Vivek Wadhwa

#3. Never was a man's love of risk so beautifully amplified by his environment as Clark's was in Silicon Valley.

Michael Lewis

#4. Silicon Valley's success is built on the carcasses of its failures. In the Valley, failure is fertilizer. Like all fertilizer, though, it must be used wisely by a skilled farmer, otherwise it is useless and smells bad. As

Eric Weiner

#5. You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool for improvement.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#6. The real force of Silicon Valley is the mentality, the spirit. There's no reason at all that can't be replicated in Paris.

Xavier Niel

#7. At the core of Silicon Valley is a passion for 'yes.'

Steven Levy

#8. Silicon Valley builds its bridges on abundance. Abundant bits of information floating out there, writing great programs to process it, then giving people a lot of useful tools to use it.

Robert Kyncl

#9. The global triumph of American technology has been predicated on the implicit separation between the business interests of Silicon Valley and the political interests of Washington.

Evgeny Morozov

#10. Steve Jobs was an iconic entrepreneur and businessman whose impact on technology was felt beyond Silicon Valley. He will be remembered for the innovation he brought to market and the inspiration he brought to the world.

Meg Whitman

#11. The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it's harder than it looks.

Peter Thiel

#12. Some article called me the most feared man in Silicon Valley. Good Lord! Why? My teenage boys got a kick out of it: 'Dad, how could this be true? You're not even the most feared person in this house.'

Nathan Myhrvold

#13. There was a point in the late '90s where all the graduating M.B.A.'s wanted to start companies in Silicon Valley, and for the most part they were not actually qualified to do it.

Marc Andreesen

#14. One of the nice things about living in Silicon Valley is that I end up at all these conferences and things, and I get to listen in on the zeitgeist.

Rick Smolan

#15. The next Google or Facebook will come from somewhere other than Silicon Valley.

Niklas Zennstrom

#16. Despite all the talk of radical Islam and CHristian fundamentalism, the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Islamic State or the Bible Belt, but Silicon Valley.

Yuval Noah Harari

#17. Free is really, you know, the gift of Silicon Valley to the world. It's an economic force, it's a technical force. It's a deflationary force, if not handled right. It is abundance, as opposed to scarcity.

Chris Anderson

#18. Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure - the law firms, the real estate, all that - that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.

Elon Musk

#19. There are three pillars, regardless of your work culture, whether you're in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street: how you look, how you speak, and how you behave. It's all three things, and nailing them makes you a contender.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett

#20. When I came to the United States in 2004 to attend university at Stanford, I was instantly inspired by the stories and advice from startup leaders in Silicon Valley and beyond, who had endeavoured to create new opportunities and improve lives around the world.

Mike Krieger

#21. Our government is just way too interested in mucking around in Silicon Valley by creating and enforcing rules based on little or no understanding of the consequences.

Michael Arrington

#22. I moved to San Francisco when I was 20 years old. I couldn't even drink yet. My friends in college thought I was so stupid for missing out on the four best years of my life. But I was so ready to start living my own life and absorb Silicon Valley culture.

Brit Morin

#23. The real secret of Silicon Valley is that it's really all about the people

Reid Hoffman

#24. What did you think would happen? We in Silicon Valley undermined copyright to make commerce become more about services instead of content: more about our code instead of their files.

Jaron Lanier

#25. Even Silicon Valley investors have put well over a $1 billion in new energy technologies.

Daniel Yergin

#26. The hardware and the software will come from Silicon Valley. But the watch case, the dial, the design, the idea, the crown, that part of the watch will, of course, be Swiss.

Jean-Claude Biver

#27. This question came from Elon Musk near the very end of a long dinner we shared at a high-end seafood restaurant in Silicon Valley. I'd gotten to the restaurant first

Ashlee Vance

#28. The realization is dawning that government doesn't work. In Silicon Valley, they already get this. And they are bright enough to be asking what we can do to solve problems.

Rand Paul

#29. Mozilla has one foot in the Valley, Silicon Valley product technology, and partly one foot in the social enterprise space.

Mitchell Baker

#30. We work crazy hours in Silicon Valley; my wife says we're all kind of diseased in some way. We're totally obsessive compulsive - when we see an idea, we're like, 'let me in, it's so much fun.'

Tony Fadell

#31. Of course the Silicon Valley is unique and Berlin is not yet comparable. But of all the different cities that are building a startup infrastructure, Berlin is the one with the most similar energy.

Mark Zuckerberg

#32. Obviously there are positives to working in the epicenter of innovation. But there are also disadvantages. There is a groupthink mentality that goes on. Being based outside of Silicon Valley, you're not as subject to it.

Peter Barris

#33. I think there are four or five interesting pockets where a lot of cool technology companies are getting started. Chicago is one of them. New York is certainly another. Silicon Valley really dominates. And you're seeing some stuff out of Boston and Seattle and down South.

Eric Lefkofsky

#34. Running a real business is exacting, daunting, repetitive work. Even in Silicon Valley.

Ben Stein

#35. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.

Marc Andreessen

#36. For all the billions of dollars created here, Silicon Valley is remarkably stingy when it comes to giving.

Sarah Lacy

#37. If you look at where the tried and true of Silicon Valley VC's are investing, it's in people who understand what it takes, who've been through it and have a network of people they can tap and resources to pull together.

Tony Fadell

#38. I had better cellular coverage on a ship in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea than I have in many parts of Silicon Valley.

Roger McNamee

#39. I've actually found the image of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of money-grubbing tech people to be pretty false, but maybe that's because the people I hang out with are all really engineers.

Linus Torvalds

#40. For Silicon Valley and its idols, innovation is the new selfishness.

Evgeny Morozov

#41. If you want to build a great company, get the hell out of Silicon Valley.

Bill Gates

#42. For investors, the thesis is a Silicon Valley adage: Get millions of people to use the service first, and eventually it will find a way to make money.

Anonymous

#43. Autism's a very big spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, Einstein would probably be labeled autistic, Steve Jobs, half of Silicon Valley, you know, Van Gogh. And at the other end of the spectrum, you got much more severe handicaps where they never learn to speak.

Temple Grandin

#44. In this sense, the world of tomorrow will be more like the Silicon Valley of today: constant change and chaos.

Reid Hoffman

#45. The paradigm of social media is one that Silicon Valley would like to extend to society at large: a technocracy of benevolent, but total, surveillance. In this kind of society, profits flow to platform owners, not those writing tweets and sharing YouTube videos.

Jacob Silverman

#46. Venture capital today is clustered in just a few locations - Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, and D.C. It's far from efficiently distributed and accessible.

Jose Ferreira

#47. The most successful company in Silicon Valley is Apple, and they're the most secretive.

Carol Bartz

#48. Think of everything in Seattle - Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks. Then you go down to Silicon Valley - Intel, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter. What does New York produce?

Nicolas Berggruen

#49. It's almost a cliche that great Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don't go sit on a beach when they make a lot of money; they get back to work building another company or at least investing in other people's companies.

Sarah Lacy

#50. Because we're in a small town and somewhat isolated from the fast lane of high tech, we've been able to grow and concentrate on our work instead of being distracted by the competition and getting caught up in the soap opera of Silicon Valley.

Jack Dangermond

#51. Windell Oskay is the co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, a Silicon Valley company that has designed and produced specialized electronics and robotics kits since 2007.

Mark Frauenfelder

#52. What I learned from my years in Silicon Valley is that design can have a primary role in how a business is shaped, how a company can be design-driven. In my experience of large industry in Europe, that knowledge has been lost.

Yves Behar

#53. Here was a guy who had taken much of the Silicon Valley ethic behind moving quickly and running organizations free of bureaucratic hierarchies and applied it to improving big, fantastic machines and chasing things that had the potential to be real breakthroughs we'd been missing.

Ashlee Vance

#54. Silicon Valley is not a perfect meritocracy, but it is open to all who are highly motivated. For example, there is a dearth of women, Hispanics, and African Americans in Silicon Valley.

Deborah Perry Piscione

#55. But many of these Silicon Valley entrepreneurs hard at work creating our technological future pay precious little attention to the public policy, legal, ethical, and security risks that their creations pose to the rest of society.

Marc Goodman

#56. Silicon Valley is 130 miles from Sacramento, but it might as well be a million miles away given how it operates.

Meg Whitman

#57. The culture around here is much less cutthroat than it is in, say, Silicon Valley, or even within the non-profit culture in D.C..

Ethan Zuckerman

#58. Israel is the second Silicon Valley, and it is therefore the only other place we have chosen to expand our activities.

Michael Moritz

#59. First we need to rethink the terms and recognize that we've imported this language from the technocratic class, from Silicon Valley, that talks about openness and transparency.

Astra Taylor

#60. My advice is never let a publicist call you a 'visionary.' I've hung out with the visionaries at the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. I've been a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. I wouldn't touch 'visionary' with a 10-foot pole.

Robert Metcalfe

#61. What I like about South Florida is there's a good quality of life here; the cost of living is much lower than Silicon Valley.

Rony Abovitz

#62. They all agree, Italy is not what it used to be. What is? All my adult life I've heard how Silicon Valley used to be all orchards, how Atlanta used to be genteel, how publishing used to be run by gentlemen, how houses used to cost what a car costs now. All true, but what can you do but live now?

Frances Mayes

#63. The Kindle is the most successful electronic book-reading tablet so far, but that's not saying much; Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of e-book reader projects.

David Pogue

#64. Hollywood is in the perception business where you create layers to create mystery. In Silicon Valley it's about taking away the layers to get to the substance.

MC Hammer

#65. The director of the FBI has been visiting Silicon Valley companies asking them to build back doors so that it can spy on what is being said online. The Department of Commerce is going after piracy. At home, the American government wants anything but Internet freedom.

Evgeny Morozov

#66. The amounts of money in Silicon Valley are staggering.

Alec Berg

#67. I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business.

Walter Isaacson

#68. I wonder if those in Silicon Valley who shave stones to their essence and put them in machines of memory perhaps already know somehow that stones have always managed information.

Dick Russell

#69. When it's too easy to get money, then you get a lot of noise mixed in with the real innovation and entrepreneurship. Tough times bring out the best parts of Silicon Valley.

Sergey Brin

#70. Some people have blithely dismissed growth in markets like China and India, saying Silicon Valley will always be the hub for tech: that everyone will come to us. Wake up: Because the numbers are showing money and talent is increasingly going elsewhere.

Sarah Lacy

#71. He didn't buy U.S. Treasury bonds, or stock in companies outside of Silicon Valley, or for that matter stock in anything outside the outrageously volatile Internet sector.

Michael Lewis

#72. Don't let a lack of big company names on your resume get you down, but also, don't let it feed a Silicon Valley ego. Oftentimes, the best candidates come from startups or smaller companies. It shows they are open to risk and can keep up with the long hours and occasional harsh demands.

Brit Morin

#73. Founders often had to step aside to let corporate "grown-ups" raise their babies - that was just how Silicon Valley worked.

Gina Keating

#74. In Delicious's case, it's a great brand that belongs in Silicon Valley.

Chad Hurley

#75. In most parts of the world, starting a company that goes bust is dubbed a 'failure.' In Silicon Valley, we call this 'gaining experience.' We are willing to take the risks that are inherent for innovation.

Sebastian Thrun

#76. Silicon Valley's involvement with Washington dates from one event, which was John Scully - who was the CEO of Apple - had dinner with President Clinton and Vice President Gore in 1993. And we're all going, like, 'What's going on? Why would we have dinner with the president?'

Eric Schmidt

#77. I was in Bangalore, India, the Silicon Valley of India, when I realized that the world was flat.

Thomas Friedman

#78. Engineers created the wealth. And during the 1990s Silicon Valley had created a fantastic amount of new wealth.

Michael Lewis

#79. Something new will always be the source of growth in Silicon Valley.

Steve Jurvetson

#80. My relationship with Silicon Valley and the tech community historically has been really good. Many of these folks are my friends.

Barack Obama

#81. Ethan and I drove around Silicon Valley today looking at various company parking lots to see whose workers are working on a Sunday. He says that's the surest way to tell which company to invest in. If the techies aren't grinding, the stock ain't climbing.

Douglas Coupland

#82. These big Silicon Valley companies that are popping up are projecting growth skyrocketing in a few years. So they need a space they can grow into. Not so much in New York. Super conservative, super small.

James Pearse Connelly

#83. Hollywood used to control the distribution; now Silicon Valley does.

Dana Brunetti

#84. Marissa Mayer, who became one of Silicon Valley's most famous working mothers not long after she took over as Yahoo's CEO in 2012, says that burnout isn't caused by working too hard, but by resentment at having to give up what really matters to you.

Eric Schmidt

#85. If China's expansion into Africa and Russia's into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley's ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business.

Evgeny Morozov

#86. In the future, 'the networked' will sometimes form alliances with the Silicon Valley companies against Congress, but sometimes we are going to want and need to target our campaigns for change at the companies themselves.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#87. There is no fear in Silicon Valley right now,

Bill Gurley

#88. The future economic success of Silicon Valley will be contingent on whether we have a good quality of life. World-class workers will only want to come to a world-class living environment.

Carl Guardino

#89. I'm a massive believer in brands. Silicon Valley has tried to reprogram everybody to think brands aren't valuable. Or theirs are, but yours aren't.

Tim Armstrong

#90. If there was ever a time that Silicon Valley believed it could revive the long-deferred dream of reinventing money, this was it. A virtual currency that rose above national borders fitted right in with an industry that saw itself destined to change the face of everyday life.

Nathaniel Popper

#91. South Florida's international connections mean there's a different kind of innovation here. We're able to intersect with a lot of brilliant people who are not associated with Silicon Valley.

Rony Abovitz

#92. We don't celebrate failure in Silicon Valley. We celebrate learning

Reid Hoffman

#93. In Silicon Valley, if you spend a lot of time thinking about the obstacles, you'll talk yourself out of everything, because the more you look at it, the less logical something sounds, since no one has done it yet.

Dan Rosensweig

#94. ...a more open and honest appraisal of the true nature of Silicon Valley and its opportunities as well as the many problems.

David Welch

#95. 'Silicon Valley' has come to mean the Bay Area, not just down the Peninsula.

Mitch Kapor

#96. I've spent a good part of my life in Silicon Valley, California, and I really like that place.

Richard Li

#97. Everyone knows that Silicon Valley is chock full of fabulous people who 'do good while doing well.'

Ron Gutman

#98. You might call me a tech intermediary. I know how to talk to the people in Silicon Valley and then take that information and explain it to everyone else.

Marc Ostrofsky

#99. Silicon Valley is the best place to start a tech company in so many ways.

Niklas Zennstrom

#100. The Internet is the great equalizer.The technology which emanated from the Silicon Valley of California has more potential to ameliorate social inequality than any development in the history of the world, including the industrial revolution.

Benazir Bhutto