Alex
asked me why the press seems to have found that things are really bad
in Silicon Valley. Venture capitalists are purportedly afraid to invest money and
start-ups are having trouble getting money.
The reality is exactly the opposite. Silicon Valley and Internet San Francisco are both searching desperately for more skilled workers to hire for the $125,000 starting jobs with 60 hours of work required. No one is having trouble getting 2nd and 3rd round funding. The Internet is running at boiling hot levels in a global market and the frothy boom is focused in SF and Silicon Valley.
Press headlines scream 29% drop in Bay Area housing prices while my real estate friends are selling houses to over-bidders every where they look. The reality is that the houses that drove the boom are booming while the side-effect-houses that are in AK47 neighborhoods are still priced above where the market should be.
We are in the 11th month of a press proclaimed recession but the GNP and retail sales are still rising despite oil at prices 4 times the 2004 base and the dollar 30% lower.
I call this the Pelosi syndrome. The syndrome is named after the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
who has been speaker for 18 months and hasn't passed even one of the 20
bills she promised to pass and never got one of her own committees to
hear her promised 'impeach Bush' bill. She promised to end the war by pulling out. Instead we won the war with more troops. During the same time President Bush has
gotten 15 major bills passed in the same 18 month period; two of his bills were on
the Democrats most-hated-bills list (surveillance and expansion of the
middle eastern wars). Pelosi is herself a total failure so she publicly calls the President a 'total failure'.
(Photo is Nancy with her close friend Cindy Sheehan.)
The press is in the same Pelosi syndrome boat. The press and publishing industries are total failures. The press and publishing industries are crashing at a 12% decline rate every year and nearly everyone any journalist knows has been fired. So obviously the world must be crashing too, including the digital Silicon Valley world.
The Pelosi syndrome explains a lot. When you and yours are failing miserably the simple explanation is that the successful important people around you are having a problem. (Sounds like the reasoning of an alcoholic, doesn't it?)