🚀 Letter from Silicon Valley

Technology hasn't felt this exciting since the mid 1990s (maybe longer.)

I’ve just come back from Silicon Valley, where I’ve been in the last week.

I have been going to the Bay Area for more than 25 years. I reckon I’ve clocked between 65 and 70 trips there, with thousands of conversations, around $20m of investments, and some good friends made.

In that quarter of a century, I’ve built an understanding of the Valley ecosystem: how it depends on key technology platforms to give it momentum, from semiconductors to PCs and then the Internet and beyond. I’ve personally witnessed the leap from Internet to social, mobile, and cloud. I’ve also understood the importance of a network of players: from academia to investors, to large firms and small, and of course, the founders themselves. It is a heterogeneity that gives the Valley the qualities of the crowded bazaar, fertile with the exchange of ideas.

Twenty-five years are long enough to make some friends and build relationships. So over the course of the week, I connected with some old and new friends. They included Vinod Khosla, one of the most successful venture capitalists in history; LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman (who is, like Vinod, a backer of OpenAI), Dario Amodei from Anthropic, the AI firm, and Niall Ferguson. I also had several conversations with other technologists (who had built software I guarantee you have used), economists (one Nobel Laureate amongst them), genome builders, climate founders, and others.

Vinod Khosla and Azeem Azhar. Photograph: Frederic Casella

I reckon that I had around 25 hours of conversations that week in the 27th anniversary of visiting the Bay Area. I’ve distilled them down to four key takeaways which I'll share in this letter.

Let’s go!

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