Photo illustration by 731
Sam
Altman sits behind his desk with his knees pulled up to his chest,
eating dried apricots. He’s 29, but even the most laissez-faire
bartender would card him. His hand is forever grabbing his hair while he
thinks, making it stick up in Einsteinian tufts. He says his main
interest is indeed physics, though when he got to Stanford University he
majored in computer science because “I already knew a lot about
physics.” His T-shirt reads “make something people want,” the slogan of Y
Combinator, the accelerator he runs. In exchange for 7 percent equity,
it hands out $120,000 and three months of Wi-Fi, coffee, parking, and
free advice to brand-new startups. Airbnb and Dropbox are a couple of
its successes. Asked why people think Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs
are
such jerks, Altman finishes an apricot, twists some hair between his
fingers, and says, “It’s not helped by the large number of arrogant
f---s in Silicon Valley.”
David Brandon Geeting for Bloomberg BusinessweekBehind this week’s coverLately there’s been a backlash against the arrogant f---s. Over the past 18 months or so, liberal-on-liberal violence has broken out as demonstrators rallying against the gentrification of San Francisco slashed the tires, broke the windows, and, in one instance, purposely barfed on the private buses Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO) use to transport employees from the city to their offices 40 miles south in Mountain View and Sunnyvale. In a January letter to the Wall Street Journal, 82-year-old Silicon Valley billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins likened these attacks on the 1 Percent to Nazi persecution of the Jews, which, like most Nazi comparisons, did not elevate the conversation. At least two people have been attacked in San Francisco for being Glassholes, which is to say, wearing Google’s much-mocked eyewear with a built-in camera. When Mary Elizabeth Phillips, a 98-year-old who has been living in San Francisco since 1937, faced eviction, protesters swarmed the real estate firm that bought her apartment building, blaming tech money (and landlord avarice) for her circumstance.
San Francisco had an unemployment rate of 10.1 percent in January 2010, before Mayor Ed Lee offered incentives to tech businesses to stay in the city; now it’s at 4.4 percent and driving companies to Oakland, where the rate has gone from 17.6 percent to 8.9 percent, and is far, far lower for baristas. These aren’t problems most of the world would object to, but even positive disruption causes negative “externalities,” as a Palo Altan might put it. In April protesters put it another way, organizing outside the San Francisco home of a 37-year-old Google Ventures partner, putting up fliers with smiley faces that read:
Kevin Rose is a parasite. … The start-up he funds bring the swarms of entrepreneurs that have ravaged the landscapes of San Francisco and Oakland. … We are the ones who serve them coffee, deliver them food, suck their c---s, watch their kids, and mop their floors.Mike Judge, a former engineer who created the TV series Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill and the movies Office Space and Idiocracy, made HBO’s sitcom Silicon Valley, which skewers the wholly superior attitude of engineers. “Up until recently the Occupy Wall Street people didn’t seem mad at Steve Jobs or much of the tech world at all. Even though that’s the .001 Percenters,” he says. Occupy Silicon Valley has begun.
Most of these protests are about the cost of housing and income inequality. They’re also about whether the U.S. has invested too much of its resources in twentysomething coders who make smartphone apps, and whether it’s given these guys too much trust with e-mails, Web searches, and personal photos. Facebook (FB) took a hit last month when it revealed that it had conducted a psychological experiment on unwitting users; all the big tech companies are getting slammed for giving info to the federal government (despite the fact that many refused and were court-ordered to do so). Google’s optics couldn’t be much worse: the giant, dark-windowed buses; the cooperation with the National Security Agency; Big Brother cars with rotating cameras soaking up “street views” for Google Earth; buying Boston Dynamics, which makes military robots that can’t help but evoke Hollywood cautionary tales; the “don’t be evil” slogan that inevitably raises the question whether they are, in fact, doing evil.
Given the applause at a hacker conference for a “Titstare” app, which allowed dudes to share photos of themselves staring at cleavage, and Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel’s sexist leaked e-mails (from when he was at a fraternity at Stanford), it also seems like the avenging nerds might treat women worse than jocks. In short, people are wondering if these strivers who keep assuring us that they’re changing the world are actually complete douchebags.
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