This post really shows how much luck/privilege it takes to have a chance at success. Stanford, intern at LinkedIn, being able to just "drop by" in Palo Alto. "Silicon Valley is about People" and it takes a lot of money to get access to those people. The fall of Silicon Valley will be when anyone with the right idea and the ability to build it is able to get funding to actually build it.
I was an employee of LinkedIn at the time that Dylan was an intern. His talent and drive were really something special. He wasn’t content to just do the project he was given. He was making demos and presenting at company all hands. I remember him participating in a bunch of culture stuff. Yes, knowing the right people matters but Dylan put in the work that made them pay attention. I’ve never since seen an intern like him.
I think the OP's has nothing to do with Dylan. Yes, he is incredibly impressive, but you're blinded by something if you think that ability and drive is unique.
It’s pretty unique in bigger companies and SV. IMHO, those people tend to go to smaller companies where they can have an outsized impact, or start their own business. For them, money isn’t even on their radar.
I think this is a pretty cynical viewpoint. You are right, he had privileges, but millions of other kids have them as well. For instance, he worked hard to impress at LinkedIn to get that meeting.
I love when someone extremely smart and dedicated succeeds. Much better than a VC thought leader that happened to luck into the right startup and is now dispensing money and advice with abandon. That is luck and privilege.
I think you've misunderstood the point of the post you are replying to.
Pointing out the rare advantages Dylan had in founding Figma doesn't take away any of his accomplishment. Privileged people accomplish things and overcome things and do good stuff.
The point is to highlight that the privilege is load bearing - that a good idea and an amazing drive is not enough and that you often need to seem nice and likable to wealthy people in order to get that idea off the ground.
It's not that Dylan should have had to work harder, but that millions of other driven people's ideas die for lack of exposure.
"you often need to seem nice and likable to wealthy people" is a very important point.
Part of it is ... sort of generically true in any chosen power structure in the world (easier for powerful people to do things for you if they like you, in theory). But because so much of this dealmaking and the like, and the completely capricious nature of VC funding in particular, means that if you're wanting to fundraise your job ends up being "be friends with the people with money".
And because it's so informal and based on friendships, each generation of money is... well, it's replicating culture from the previous generation. At least in more formal power structures there are exams or something to stop it from _just_ being about hiring people you like talking to.
The silver lining is I bet there's a huge untapped market in helping fund people in environments that don't require you to listen to a VC talk about how BTC is about taking power away from oppressive governments or whatever.
I bet there are loads of people who are interested in funding, in seriousness, and not necessarily looking for more drinking partners.
What I think of is privilege is the family you were born into and opportunities available at the school district you went to. Millions of people have those privileges, but only a few create a ground breaking company.
Once he graduated from high school, the way he differentiated, including being friendly to future VC’s was his own doing and drive.
> Once he graduated from high school, the way he differentiated, including being friendly to future VC’s was his own doing and drive.
I think this only makes sense if you believe that "being friendly to future VC's" is entirely independent from "the family you were born into" - to which I would add social class and family connections. Given my experience with friendships and professional relationships I think you would have an advantage in getting to meet a VC and then making a good impression if you had experience interacting with people like them.
None of this is to say that it's impossible to make it without those advantages, but they do exist.
Stanford doesn't admit millions. There is no capacity for millions in Silicon Valley, there isn't the parking or public transport or apartments or offices or emergency rooms, nothing NOTHING anywhere close to that. Palo Alto is a very sleepy town, tallest building is 7 stories, then everything else is 4 or less. Not millions. By no means.
I enjoy the people I meet living in Palo Alto but yes, it’s very sleepy. Couple bars downtown and that’s it, really. In Europe it’d be classed as a small town.
I grew up in Palo Alto. My point was that millions of people had his privilege growing up (myself included) and only a select few make it into Stanford (or Brown in his case) (myself not included!).
Saying someone is privileged because they graduated from Stanford highly discounts a person’s agency in their life.
Ok, I did. Figma is absolutely valuable as evidenced by its customer base.
This said, it is impressive in a mild sense. While convenience / access (the pitch's main take away) is a huge factor in the macro-state creativity - if these affordances are not paired with meaning, a sense of taste, or purpose - then one quickly ends up with 'animate all the things' level thinking (the micro-state of today). For some, this means a great income and massive economic mobility - not something to sneeze at. However, designing everything to be the same, from securing reproductive care to hailing a car, sterilizes the lives lived through software.
>Figma is absolutely valuable as evidenced by its customer base.
See how quickly Quark lost the most loyal and hegemonic user base to Adobe InDesign just over Adobe choosing to use the TeX paragraph formatter. Gone in eight quarters. Figma doesn't have itself embedded in national scale print plant with degree level of user education and per seat licensing including the multiple necessary third party adaptations at >$10k per seat.
I drove Uber in Menlo Park/Atherton/Palo Alto while I was undergoing some treatments at the VA in Palo Alto and it is indeed a rarified atmosphere. It's not all peaches and cream however. People talked to me about the teen suicides due to the immense pressure to achieve status and academically perform at the highest levels.
The Silicon Valley Suicides: Why are so many kids with bright prospects killing themselves in Palo Alto?
Suburban middle class parents, especially immigrants (and even more immigrants from Asia) tend to look on GreatSchools and pick Mission San José / Monta Vista / Gunn, and our crazy pressure on their kids.
It means people from there tend to have quite high achieving in life, at a pretty high mental health cost that follows them for life. It’s an open secret if you ask folks who graduated from there.
Of course, people with a bit more connections / more money just send their kids to private school instead.
The funny thing about many of those 'top schools'. You're actually worse off as top universities cap the number of students from a given high-school. Worse yet, most the kids are doing after school tutoring to boost their scores, making it an arm race.
I'd argue that a well motivated student would do better by being in a slightly worse school
The most important aspect of a top school is that a student is around classmates with high drive (maybe family influenced) to succeed. This does not just create competition, most importantly, you get the signaling that it is ok and expected to study hard, to do your homework, to say no to playing so that you can finish your assigned homework.
Now if you have a top student in a lagging school, most likely the classmates will drag them down. In my school good students were physically bullied by the “cool” guys.
I think that classes need to be divided based on the performance of the students, that will be assessed on regular intervals. Let the good students go as fast as they need to, focus for the lagging students to get at least the basics right. There is no reason to pretend that we are teaching advanced calculus to lagging students, when they cannot even do simple arithmetic operations.
This is incorrect. You need to attend a school admissions counselors are familiar with. They often can’t evaluate grades, academic advisors, or recommendation letters from schools they don’t repeatedly place students from, and therefore have a harder time making a case for high performing students from unknown schools.
I once talked to an admissions counselor for a “selective” university who could name the challenging coursework and reliable recommendation letter writers at all the best high schools in the region she covered.
Yes, and the mental health aspects can result in continuing challenges. A family friend had three kids go through HS in PA and not only did none of the kids end up in a particularly great school, two of the three kids didn't finish on time due to unspecified/emotional issues.
When we were house-hunting we took it as a consolation that we couldn't afford to live in Palo Alto!
Grades are only but one aspect of going to a "top school", the networking associated with it cannot be underlooked. It is likely that the students will create connections with others that may benefit them in the future, the same could be said about the parents too.
Are you sure there is a cap? There were a huge number of Stanford and Cal accepts my year and literally nobody talked of caps.
I do agree that talent could be drowned out at a school like Gunn, whereas you might stand out more at a less prestigious school.
I find it astounding that people still talk in terms of "talent". What else, do we still think America is a meritocracy? By and large, people.perform exactly as their socioeconomic status would predict. "talent" is a myth.
If you think the US is a perfect meritocracy you’re a fool. If you don’t think it’s a great deal closer to it than an enormous majority of past and present societies you’re a bigger fool. The same is true of the entire OECD and many countries outside it to greater and lesser degrees.
Elite colleges have required suicidal amounts of pressure to be admitted, for decades. I went through that, just that I got in. Typically with serious Attention Deficit Disorder and no treatment, there's no way to get into the top 6 schools.
No matter how otherwise intelligent, too many points lost to disorganization. Like can't start essays until last minute, forget the test that was coming up, 0% on some homeworks, very little sleep because of the procrastination that was a direct consequence of that condition, huge late penalties, when you need 90% averages for semester grades for all courses, an 89% is an F in that setting. Like then you gotta pull off miracles to make the grade back up. And for that you have to be desperate. That was the hard part, SAT was easy and fun, extracurriculars were competitive but cool, also fun, hard part was the GPA. Crazy standards.
It's a process with many satisfied quiet survivors and a smaller number of very visible tragic deaths.
Sure your point is a good one in general, but you're combining multiple profiles to create this narrative. Dylan didn't go to Stanford, he went to Brown University. Being an intern, you usually don't have a car, and it's not as easy to get from Sunnyvale (LinkedIn headquarters) to Palo Alto as the story sounds, especially pre-UberX. So the "dropping in" is not like they were living in the same city.
LinkedIn HQ was in MV for quite a while, no? IIRC they were on land owned by Google.
And getting between MV and PA has always been pretty easy via Caltrain, and the various corporate shuttles that connect it to destinations.
The one bit that didn't resonate for me, as a local, was the reference to "City Center in Palo Alto". I've lived here for a long time and never heard a reference to "City Center".
There's "downtown"/"University Ave.", "Cal Ave.", and "midtown" (though there's not much there). Has anyone else ever heard of "City Center"? Were they literally just walking around City Hall or something?
"[In 1885] Leland Stanford and Jane Lathrop had in mind to establish a town across El Camino Real to support the needs of Stanford University, including student housing, shopping, and recreation, but no liquor. The Stanfords asked the leaders of Menlo Park and Mayfield to close their saloons, but were answered 'No.'"
"With Stanford University's support, saloon days faded and Palo Alto grew to the size of Mayfield. On July 2, 1925, Palo Alto voters approved the annexation of Mayfield. The two communities were officially consolidated on July 6, 1925."
Ah i remember basically living out of the Sheraton in downtown Palo Alto for the better part of a year thanks to not accepting a permanent move to the bay area. It all seemed so weird at the time.
The sense i got of the place was one who's grandeur had passed. The furniture and the houses there seemed so dated, walking around the neighborhoods exposed all the cracked concrete on the sidewalks and the graffitis under the tunnel leading up University.
Take a short walk and you're in the great lawn at Stanford, such a shame how a beautiful city like that is not treated as it should be. I had far better experiences of public infrastructure during trips to poorer countries. The airport felt ignored, the caltrains felt dated and inefficient on the inside, i don't know. . . it just felt like everyone was waiting for a nuke to level the place and rebuild better than making it better right now.
Palo Alto is famously anti-development. Far ahead in the digital world but stuck in the 20th century physically. And Stanford has so much open land for nothing but nature. I mean come on…
FWIW, Caltrain is being electrified and there are people fighting for more development and density.
This doesn’t resonate with me at all about Palo Alto. From Sheraton, it is an easy walk to University Ave, and you are greeted by the cult coffee shop Verve which is at the very end of the strip. You also have Evvia one block away, numerous other restaurants, West Elm, RH, Real Real, a giant Apple store, the Nobu hotel, a huge Blue Bottle Coffee, Indian classic Rooh. So not sure what you were looking at. I also find Caltrain to be quite nice - clean modern stations with clean quiet ride.
You walk under the tunnel or through the Sheraton parking lot and across the stanford shuttle stop . . . compare that to say, downtown Austin or Houston and you see what i mean. After 9pm, those streets are desolate with the sole diner/creamery showing signs of life.
I travel internationally for work and when my return trips land in SFO occasionally, it feels like i've travelled back in time to an alternate timeline where the US lost the war or something.
My impression of Palo Alto as a single person was that it was beautiful, but quiet. It seemed to be oriented around family life, and families are generally not out and about after 9pm.
People looking for nightlife tended to gravitate towards San Francisco.
It's not even "Nightlife". It's weird, any sort of social gatherings past 9pm just didn't seem to exist (Except for the creamery/diner, some pockets of isolated restaurants). I would expect a college town to have some life, kids out and about after a late game etc. . .not the case, and i was there for a while.
Palo Alto isn't a college town, even though it looks like one at first. Palm Drive is long and it feels even longer, and after hours people generally stay on their respective sides of the moat.
As far as feeling suppressed, $4,000/mo rents for small apartments will generally do that to a place.
You're not alone in disliking the place. I did a three-year postdoc at Stanford, and after my first year I moved to SF because it was clear that's where all the social life was.
When was this? Palo Alto felt a little bit like what you describe around 2011-2012 after the economy crashed and Facebook had moved from its numerous downtown offices to their campus. The place has really recovered though.
"Around University Avenue" is the only reasonable deduction. Calling the other ones center would be too weird, and yes, if you take a stroll there, you could overhear a lot of such types of conversations.
I was pitching an Open Source developer tools startup around here at this time. VCs laughed in my face since there's no business model in OSS or in developer tools.
Looks like there's a bunch of OSS companies doing well now, with their business model being getting paid for a hosted version of their software. Posthog is a good example.
This was around that time. That's my point. In the valley companies like ours got funding for OSS and developer tools at that time (Xamarin, Github, etc.). But in other places it took 5+ years for the dime to drop...
How does it demonstrate that? Dylan had funding by the time this conversation occurred. He didn't need the authors money. The article doesn't describe how it is that Dylan acquired his initial funding.
Also important to note that the author was nowhere near as high profile or rich when this occurred as he is today. This interaction happened when Wealthfront was just beginning.
Sure, someone with an early idea (with seed fund, but that’s not the only funding round is it), is only chatting with a vc guy for just fun. Even continuing a premise, I would like to chat with some VCs for fun too, can I get an appointment? I promise im just as smart and insightful.
He doesn't explicitly state this in the piece, but it was pretty easy to infer from the things he does say. He has the connection to Nash precisely because he impressed him when he was interning at LinkedIn, before Nash became a VC, and before he founded WealthFront.
This is not a story of privileged connections in the slightest.
> This post really shows how much luck/privilege it takes to have a chance at success.
You're defining "success" as making billions of dollars, right?
In any case, if that's someone's definition of success and they make it, wonderful. It's great for them that they had luck and privilege. The greatest thing anyone can do for children and even yourself is to maximize "privilege".
I suggest you also talk to people with a more diverse outlook on life too though, I think it will be even more eye-opening. Take a random walk in a rural farming community, a small town, an average city or suburb, etc. You will find many people who have found success and happiness and are content because their idea of success is to raise and provide for a family, or own a home, or run their modest small business, or whatever.
Rockefeller still had some privileges that allowed him to navigate the world easier while carrying his ambition with him—being male and Caucasian—and that’s not to speak of the people that he collaborated with along the way.
I’m not interested in discussing race or gender politics here, but it’s worth pointing that out since your comment comes off as completely dismissive of systemic advantages, environmental factors, and personal networks that all contribute to success, as if to say that any personal success is the product of a single factor alone: grit.
No, not alone, but no one but those guys would have done what they did. There were many other barefoot boys tending to horses but it was Genghis who got up there and took over half the world. It wasn't the other kids, it was him. And later on it wasn't his generals, but he who oversaw the conquests. They all could have raised armies instead, but, it was actually him with the vision and singular aim.
Same with Jobs and Masayoshi, other people also knew the people they knew, but only they did do what they ended up doing.
So those are facts, but what is the point that you’re getting at? Are you making the case that their successes were inherent in them, or that their motivations were shaped by some experience unique to them, or were they just destined to be such by history?
I mean, can you measure that or draw a direct causation? I’m also just contesting how much is inherent to an individual, and whether it is any worth bringing up that point against the idea that external factors have a significant impact to success, which is already nuanced enough not to say that external factors are the sole indicators?
