German journalist Christoph Keese spent half a year staying in Silicon Valley, looking for recipes for success and ideas that start the largest modern corporations - Facebook, Google, and Amazon...
In this text, I have singled out the best messages about the web, work, developers, and the future...
About WEB
"Everything that can be digitized, will be digitized"
"One study says that if the Internet were a country, it would overtake all other countries in the world in terms of economic power in four years."
The web is already twenty-five years old, but Germans have yet to develop their love for this "territory".
ABOUT WORK
"Creativity does not require much space. One kitchen table. Small office. Three or four collaborators who come up with something together. A sheet with notes".
"All the companies I visited emphasized density. Proximity, they believe, is as important as the absence of excessively strict rules".
"Personal presence is an obligation, Valley cultivates an external cult of closeness".
"Whoever wants to achieve something, must be present".
"You don't trust someone you don't know, you don't do any business with him".
"Here, even talented teenagers have the opportunity to meet manganates, while in Germany they wouldn't have any chance to meet the boss of Siemens".
"Bosses have direct access to beginners and vice versa".
"Hierarchy only stands in the way of innovation".
"Loyalty is one of the success factors. Constantly looking for the best employees is very dangerous".
ABOUT PROGRAMMERS
"Programmers must provide information to each other over a short distance, otherwise there will be no progress".
"The meal is free. It pays off for investors: going to a restaurant is unnecessary, the conversation about work is not interrupted, and the team spirit is strengthened".
"Whoever wants to change society will become a programmer. It is no coincidence that Apple was created at the same time as the Green Party (Green Party in Germany). Palo Alto gave birth to one Steve Jobs, and Frankfurt to Joschka Fischer. Both were radicals. Fischer threw stones at the police and Jobs broke the monopoly of Microsoft and IBN".
"Compared to hard programming in the company, listening to a lecture is easy".
"Doing what is not easy. The bigger the challenge, the better. What seems impossible brings the greatest profit".
"Everything in life is solving problems".
"In the beginning, IT people don't care if they will become rich. Such neglect of wealth leads to wealth is probably the irony of history".
ABOUT STARTUPS
"Every thought will be better if you express it to someone. It will be more precise, sharper, and smarter".
"Startups are acquired by nothing else but by finding a business model".
"A month or three, it's like an eternity in the Valley".
"The biggest risk when opening a company is to create something that already exists".
"Managers in classic companies think in analogies. Everything they do or don't do is derived from the previous one. With such thinking, they move companies away from innovation"..
"Only six weeks is enough for most startup companies from idea to first product".
"We don't know what is important. Only the user knows that".
ABOUT COMMUNICATION
"Palo Alto no longer has landlines".
ABOUT THE FUTURE