‘The need for autonomy at all costs, usually at the expense of long-term relationships. Often brought about by overly high expectations of others.’ (Generation X, D. Coupland 1991)

Innovation requires a lot of alone time… a majority of alone time. Coding and engineering aren’t warm fuzzy group activities. Yes a project has “teams”, but the work is done alone.

Silicon Valley has a critical mass of people who prefer to be alone… and a culture of lonliness and aloneness.

San Francisco is a city of “cool people” who really are just herds of loners who occasionally do things together, like costume parties and burningman. They are the business minds behind Silicon Valley.

The loner cool people (businesspeople), and lonely engineers, together are the engine of technology.

“When looking at the same sky, people in mature industries see clouds where people in immature industries see pie.”

….

“The technology people and the software people are equally Pollyannaish. You can almost assume that the more tenuous the enterprise, the more optimistic the rhetoric is going to be. From what I hear from software people, you’d think that there’s never been a down year in the history of software. Of course, why shouldn’t they be upbeat? With so many competitors in software, you have to sound upbeat. IF you appear to lack confidence, some other sweet-talker will win all the contracts.”

Peter Lynch, One up on Wall Street, 1989

The folly of a few (ok alot) have tarnished the talent and capability of an entire city. I remember the 98-99 startup days in the “alley” and it felt like the “optimism” you described in your article, Om.

One difference I notice between my NYC weeks and my SF weeks is the resilient hubris that is required to believe that failure is on the path to success. In NY, this is not possible as any failure is a Scarlet Letter over there. Tattooed to your head. In NY, I try to counter failure, in SF, I enable success.

I recently wrote a column, Capitalism’s Fundamental Flaw on Forbes. [http://tinyurl.com/ykjd5h9] The problem I see in today’s world is that the NY-style speculative wealth creation has been luring many more kids than our Valley-style value creation.

This needs to change.

As someone who has been around the block, the move into cleantech is part of the whole process of Silicon Valley. I think 1990s (and the Internet) were a big shift that is still continuing though we continue to see marginal stuff dominate attention.

I think the Valley (like rest of the industry) is slowly but surely coming in sync with the mass demands in general, regardless of what the “early buzz” might indicate.

Anyway… on winning and sharing your winnings — that is good aspiration for everyone, everywhere.