Silicon Valley Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

The natives of Silicon Valley learned long ago that when you share your knowledge with someone else, one plus one usually equals three. You both learn each other's ideas, and you come up with new ones.

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.

The entire world is now a rival to Silicon Valley. No country, state, region, nor city has a lock on innovation in technology anymore.

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.

Silicon Valley tends to believe in the individual who creates a small group and does something big.

The more angels we have in Silicon Valley, the better. We are funding innovation. We are funding the next Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

I think that's actually what's missing from government, for the most part. We've got a lot of policy people, but we have no technologists, even though technology is such a big part of our lives. It's just amazing, because even these big Silicon Valley companies, the masters of the universe or whatever, haven't engaged with Washington until recently. They're still playing catch-up.

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.

Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high

The pressure to perform is relentless in today's workplace - regardless of where you work. We are all being asked to do more with less. I think what we could borrow from the culture of Silicon Valley is "eat your own dog food ." That is an expression used by tech types to mean using what you make or sell.

The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers. They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans, if they worked hard with other creative, smart people, could solve most of humankind's problems. I believe that very much.

Taiwan's development in the past 20 years in high tech is almost 100 percent related to Silicon Valley.

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

Running a successful, growing company in Silicon Valley can create an ironic sort of depression and delusion. The better you're doing, the higher the stakes, and higher expectations for you to win. Maybe that's why people say it's so hard. But that doesn't make it hard. That just makes it distracting.

It’s not about having a Silicon Valley attitude—it’s about having an entrepreneurial attitude.  It’s about partnering with other organizations in and around your area.  It’s about thinking big with entrepreneurs that sit next to you in your coworking space.  It’s about collaborating with tech gurus, social media wizards and community leaders at cool business events.  It’s the people that make a community an entrepreneurial one—not the location—and it’s up to you to contribute.

Where you live matters: there’s only one MIT. And there's only one Hollywood and only one Silicon Valley. This isn't a coincidence: for whatever you're doing, there's usually only one place where the top people go. You should go there. Don’t settle for anywhere else. Meeting my heroes and learning from them gave me a huge advantage. Your heroes are part of your circle too - follow them.

Women had been on the verge of taking over the world-the Western world, anyway. Then some sexist pig in Silicon Valley invented the cell phone and women took a sidetrack on which all four billion of them would soon be happily talking to each other twenty-four hours a day, getting nothing else done, and Men Would Be Back.

In the ideology of the new Silicon Valley, work was for the owned. Play was for the owners. There was a fundamental capitalism at work: While they abhorred the idea of being a wage slave, the young men of Silicon Valley were not trying to tear down the capitalist system. They were trying to become its new masters.

It is sort of a bit of a caricature of capitalism, that it's always this zero-sum game where you have winners and losers. Silicon Valley, the technology industry at its best, creates a situation where everybody can be a winner.

I should like to express our profound gratitude to the Americans of Indian origin. The way they have conducted themselves, the way they have worked hard to carve out a niche for themselves in the Silicon Valley, I think this has also given America a new idea about what India is capable of.

When I grew up, I simply didn't have mentors that said, "Science is important. Science helps you build a country. Science makes a country powerful." And that's such a simple thought, but when you think about what's powered Taiwan and Korea and Silicon Valley and Cambridge.

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.

Silicon Valley, "the largest legal creation of wealth in history," was built largely by unprofessional amateurs using math, sand, and the institutions of freedom. The Soviet Union had the greatest mathematicians on earth, and plenty of sand, but without the institutions of freedom their brilliant mathematicians were not empowered to create those devices that are changing the world.

If the Ivy League was the breeding ground for the elites of the American Century, Stanford is the farm system for Silicon Valley.

Memory is knowledge; character is the box of values and habits in which our knowledge knocks around. People with a lot of knowledge thrown together in a box that encourages social intercourse and experimentation tend to come up with good ideas, which are the engine of change. Think of Silicon Valley in California, or Oxbridge in the United Kingdom.

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.

Introverts listen better, they assess risks more carefully, they can be wiser managers. It's not for nothing that the Silicon Valley billionaires are so often the retiring types.

Distribution may not matter in fictional worlds, but it matters in most. 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 this happen, and it's harder than it looks.

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

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.

In physics, one of the most exciting areas is in nanotech. With computers exhausting the power of silicon, Silicon Valley could become a Rust Belt, unless we can find replacements, such as quantum computers and molecular computers. To be a leader in any field, one has to have a great imagination. Sure, we have to know the basics and fundamentals. But beyond that, we have to let our imagination soar.

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

The new buzz word in Silicon Valley is "integration". Work-life "balance" is very 2.0. All these women share ways in which they integrate their family life and work. Facebook's head of Global Solutions, Carolyn Everson, for example, takes her children along on her business trips once a quarter. They meet her clients, visit new places and get a better understanding of what mom does when she isn't at home with them.

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.

Half of Silicon Valley's got a little bit of autism.

Apple does all of its research and development in America. It has all these brilliant people sitting in Silicon Valley. But until recently, Apple made nothing in America. Zero. And the jobs that were accessible to a good, well-trained worker that knew how to do welding or assembly, none of those jobs had stayed in America. We don't have the workforce.

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?'

If you think about companies that were built in Silicon Valley, a lot of them early on were chip companies. And now the companies that are there, like Apple, are much more successful than any of the chip companies were.

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.

The institutions that we've built up over the years to protect our individual privacy rights from the government don't apply to the private sector. The Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to corporations. The Freedom of Information Act doesn't apply to Silicon Valley. And you can't impeach Google if it breaks its 'Don't be evil' campaign pledge.

...Silicon Valley's success comes from the way its companies build alliances with their employees.

More and more major industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. 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.

There was a transition going on - Baghdad being the intellectual capital of the world where major advances were made in agriculture and mathematics and engineering and medicine and astronomy, and then that all sort of collapsed. And I was trying to understand how such a intellectually fertile environment can lose its compass bearing. Because I think about the creative centers today - countries, or even regions. Will Silicon Valley always be as innovative? Will the United States be innovative, or will we become complacent?

The zero-sum world [the movie The Social Network] portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it's a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood.

He’s totally different from the typical jock. He has no ego. That’s unique for someone with such accolades. His strength comes from a higher power. You can’t explain Steve Largent by computer – he doesn’t belong on an NFL field. You put his size and speed in an IBM computer up in Silicon Valley, it would chew up his data card and laugh.

Here in Silicon Valley, I have taken part in hundreds of conversations trying to convince people to dive in and become entrepreneurs. All too often, innovators with good, safe, jobs are unwilling to put their family's access to health care at risk by walking away from company-backed medical insurance.