The whole industry is caught in this loop now. You need the fear to justify the funding. You need the funding to build the thing. The thing then justifies more fear. Try telling the story in plain, simple language. $850 billion is going to shrink faster than George Costanza’s prospects when coming out of an icy cold pool.

Source: Eat Your Words

Om hits on some of my own concerns about the current crop of companies that are entering the market. The frenzy of the “entrepreneur grind set” is one of the reasons I had to leave Silicon Valley.

The counter culture nerds were increasingly being replaced by people with $ signs in their eyes. The valley was being overrun by vacuous hucksters inflating their titles and failing upwards to take over control of what always starts as a virtuous mission.

I am also deeply aware of the irony as I sit in comfort and type on Silicon Valley funded and provided services and my own (tiny) fortune made on these companies.

Look I am no angel (ha!) here. However, the one sense I do have is that I know to detect “greed” and I have a weird aversion to it. I also detect “selfishness” quite easily and run away from it. After my years in the valley and valley associated companies, this is the part that really hits me. Om touches upon it but doesn’t dwell on it:

Still, being part of the system, I understand the impulse to really hype up things. You need the world to get excited. Excited not, extinct, for god sake. Say what the thing does. Describe what it changes. Let people draw their own conclusions about the stakes. Sadly, that is too normal a stance, too practical. The language of hyperbole is not for the regulars, but it is for those with bags of money.

There was a narrative that Google landed on Adwords - the best business on the Internet and probably the world - to fund their other efforts. The optimist in me continues to believe this because Adwords hadn’t proven itself to be the world changer that it turned out to be at the time.

However, it can also be said that once the money started pumping, Google’s focus on consumer experience dropped, the purity of the mission sullied and the joy inside the company reduced. It started attracting the hucksters - trust me - I met many of them.

This is present across every industry. I mean, AT&T is the birthed Bell Labs. Inventions from Bell Labs shaped the technology industry: the transistor, UNIX, C and C++, Information theory, Early AI etc. Yet, look at AT&T now.

This is not a zing on capitalism. I think that receiving commercial success for innovation is a good thing. However, there’s a difference when the motivation is money versus innovation. Is money the means to an end or is it the end? I worry that especially with the AI companies, money is increasingly the end and not the means.