Silicon Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Silicon Quotes from famous persons: Rutger Bregman, George Packer, Jeff Bewkes, Jack Dangermond, Daniel Lyons. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Silicon Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.

1
From Scotland to India, and from Silicon Valley to Keny

From Scotland to India, and from Silicon Valley to Kenya, policymakers all over the world have become interested in basic income as an answer to poverty, unemployment and the bureaucratic behemoth of the modern welfare state.
2
The phrasechange the world’ is tossed around Silicon Valley conversations and business plans as freely as talk of ‘early-stage investing‘ and ‘beta tests.’
3
When I came out of Stanford, I looked at my brilliant classmates, who were going into Wall Street high finance, Silicon Valley, advanced engineering, and I said to myself, ‘Jeff, go into an industry where nobody can add.’
Jeff Bewkes
4
Because we’re in a small town and somewhat isolated from the fast lane of high tech, we’ve been able to grow and concentrate on our work instead of being distracted by the competition and getting caught up in the soap opera of Silicon Valley.
5
My role on ‘Silicon Valley’ was so small that I didn’t have a lot of influence anyway in the show. There are four guys who really write that show and run that show and then six or eight hanging out in a room kicking in a few bits.
6
Silicon Valley is constantly saying that the government is irrelevant and powerless. But that’s because most people there have never seen it get serious.
Dan Farmer
7
I’m coming to Silicon Valley to turn up!
8
There aren’t many sources of money in San Diego, apart from local partnerships and local investors. It’s pretty starkly polarized to Silicon Valley.
9
There are two great fictional TV series about technology and the computer industry that each have now had three seasons. The one everyone knows about is ‘Silicon Valley.’ The lesser-known one is ‘Halt and Catch Fire.’
10
I have a very basic leg. But it has a silicon cover on it. I have a flat foot leg, a high heel leg and then I have a leg which, in the winter, I have to ski in and in the summer I swap it into my roller blades.
11
If we hadn’t put a man on the moon, there wouldn’t be a Silicon Valley today.
12
Hollywood used to control the distribution; now Silicon Valley does.
13
There are lots of people in the Silicon Valley who are interested in working at a fast-moving, dynamic company like Google. Not just my family members.
14
If I had to pick three of my favorite magazines, they would be ‘Fast Company’, ‘Silicon India’, and ‘Smithsonian.’
15
‘Silicon Valley’ is a great show. It might be the best comedy on television. And if the Academy feels I have stood out to the point of deserving an award, I won‘t pawn it.
16
Just the number of people – ‘Silicon Valley”s a relatively small, core cast, whereas ‘The Office‘ was enormous. Also, I feel more of a sense of ownership of ‘Silicon Valley’ because I’ve been there from the get-go.
17
At MIT, in Professor Rodney Brookslab, I was involved in a project, led by Anita Flynn, to build robots using techniques similar to those used in building silicon chips. We got some silicon micro-machined motors to move a bit, but this didn’t lead to an actual product.
18
The roots of Silicon Valley are full of stories of immigrants and minority groups who experienced bigotry and made it anyway. Why should women be any different?
19
It’s almost a cliche that great Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don’t go sit on a beach when they make a lot of money; they get back to work building another company or at least investing in other people’s companies.
20
If you want to invest in early-stage technologies, putting a timeframe on it does behold you to Silicon Valley economics. You’ve got a certain time period where you have to make the money. And you have to invest that money whether you find good companies or not.
21
The most successful company in Silicon Valley is Apple, and they’re the most secretive.
22
Silicon Valley tends to be very myopic – to be focused on one or two things – which has some strengths as well as weaknesses.
23
Seed investing is the status symbol of Silicon Valley. Most people don’t want Ferraris, they want a winning seed investment.
24
All the sharky elements of Hollywood are similar to sharky elements in Silicon Valley. It’s obviously different, but the deals are the same. And you get hot, then you’re not.
25
The global triumph of American technology has been predicated on the implicit separation between the business interests of Silicon Valley and the political interests of Washington.
26
My mission is to grow business in Silicon Alley.
27
There’s no single right place to be an entrepreneur, but certainly there’s something about Silicon Valley.
28
I am an unabashed HBO fan. This is why being on ‘Silicon Valley’ is kind of like a dream.
29
Silicon Valley needs partners. You can’t do edited manufacturing just in the Valley. Why not have the DNA of manufacturing but combine it with the digital world?
30
An open-minded and diverse population that readily shares information, encourages experimentation, accepts failure and dispenses with formality and hierarchy is what makes Silicon Valley the successful hub that it is.
31
At the end of the day, I live in Silicon Valley and L.A., and for selfish reasons, I’d love to have Los Angeles and San Francisco connected with the Hyperloop.
32
As befits Silicon Valley, ‘big data‘ is mostly big hype, but there is one possibility with genuine potential: that it might one day bring loans – and credit histories – to millions of people who currently lack access to them.
33
Historically, people have flocked to Silicon Valley because of the belief that that’s where the latest innovation is happening. It’s a snowball effect.
34
Silicon Valley has been developing as a startup community for over 60-70 years. This notion that you can create something in two or five years is foolish.
35
Minority founders often feel like they are on the outside looking in when it comes to Silicon Valley and tech startups in general.
36
Silicon Valley is actually a prime target for an ICBM missile strike. It occurred to me as I has touring Apple Park that if I was concerned about Americans’ safety and the symbol of America’s future I would think that those is Silicon Valley as the most vulnerable. That’s where you would be attacking the future economy.
37
The thing we should all be looking for are people who want to make a difference. I’m a big believer in the Silicon Valley religion of the power of markets. But I also believe in our obligation to give back, and to give back in the way we do business, to create more value than we capture for ourselves.
38
In the future, ‘the networked’ will sometimes form alliances with the Silicon Valley companies against Congress, but sometimes we are going to want and need to target our campaigns for change at the companies themselves.
39
When I turned 50, I truly felt I was too old to work in Silicon Valley. No one said anything to my face, but when you can be the mother of some of the people you’re interviewing with, that says it all.
40
I’ve probably failed more often than anybody else in Silicon Valley. Those don’t matter. I don’t remember the failures. You remember the big successes.
41
In 2014, Utah cities Salt Lake City and Provo both surpassed Silicon Valley in per-deal venture capital averages. From large, multi-campus companies to promising start-ups, Silicon Slopes offers a promising climate for businesses. The entire tech industry has its eyes on Utah.
42
One of the reasons I think Y Combinator is so powerful is because it creates a new social norm, especially for those who come from outside Silicon Valley.
43
From the outside, there’s a perception Silicon Valley is full of really young, geeky guys. The reality is there are lots of different types of people there.
44
I would still rather be in Silicon Alley. I like the West Coast also, but it’s sort of fragmented. You have companies in downtown San Francisco, companies in Mountain View, and people are driving between them all. It’s kind of nice in New York to just jump in a cab and reach another company so easily.
45
Most competition in Silicon Valley now heads toward there being one monopolistic winner.
46
Nobody ever imagined how quickly the Android mobile-phone platform would take off – not even Andy Rubin, the Silicon Valley engineer who created it.
47
In Delicious‘s case, it’s a great brand that belongs in Silicon Valley.
48
Most of the stress we feel here in Silicon Valley is self-inflicted.
49
In Silicon Valley, there are a lot of startups using computer vision for agriculture or shopping – there are a lot for clothes shopping. At Baidu, for example, if you find a picture of a movie star, we actually use facial recognition to identify that movie star and then tell you things like their age and hobbies.
50
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.
David Ulevitch
51
Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data.
52
Obviously, everything that has been built in Silicon Valley is something that a lot of places are trying to mimic, and rightfully so. There’s been a lot of amazing companies that have come out of there.
53
Silicon Valley is like Wall Street in that it will fill and pursue market opportunities to their logical extremes.
54
I think that’s exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let’s do a startup in our parentsgarage and try to create a business.
55
We talk a lot in Silicon Valley about product pipelines and sales pipelines, but what about talent pipelines? It is, after all, talent – people – who give us products to sell.
56
A lot of the books that have been written about Silicon Valley are really good. Michael Malone’s books are incredible. I think his ‘Infinite Loop’ is the best book that’s been written about Apple.
57
There’s no more silicon in Silicon Valley. It’s all iPhone apps.
58
It’s not a coincidence these two industry areas – Silicon Valley and Hollywood – use the same jargon. They share a common language, the language of the creator, of the entrepreneur.
59
For a long time, I’ve ranted against naming your startup community ‘Silicon Whatever.’ Instead, I believe every startup community already has a name. The Boulder startup community is called Boulder. The L.A. startup community is called L.A. The Washington D.C. startup community is called Washington D.C.
60
When I came to the United States in 2004 to attend university at Stanford, I was instantly inspired by the stories and advice from startup leaders in Silicon Valley and beyond, who had endeavoured to create new opportunities and improve lives around the world.
61
My feeling is that if a human being can coax life to build bonds between silicon and carbon, nature can do it too.
62
So a more sensible thing it seemed to me was to go to Silicon Valley and be pushing on the technology companies to accelerate the use of audio and music in computers.
Thomas Dolby
63
I don’t think it’s any secret that there’s a lack of diversity in Silicon Valley. But that, to me, is actually quite beautiful. It allows me to be fully me because there is no one else to look at and say, ‘Oh, I should be more like that.’
64
The stuff coming out of Silicon Valley is dorky. Like, it’s not very sexy.
65
The truth is, Silicon Valley doesn’t like people who are older, and they’re not that much of a friend of the woman. I certainly was a woman, and I was older.
66
Silicon Valley is a great place for Bitcoin, since everyone understands computers, and there are lots of libertarians running around.
67
If you crave further confirmation that Silicon Valley is a magical place where magical thinking reigns, consider the tale of Roku, the video streaming company that filed to go public Friday, when alert people everywhere were headed out for a long weekend.
68
Silicon Valley’s definition of luxury is a Tesla in every garage.
69
The energy in Silicon Valley is because of the very talented engineers immigrating from around the world, especially Indians and Chinese. They are the best engineers, and Japan doesn’t have enough of them.
70
The convertible note is a useful and common financing structure in Silicon Valley. It’s a form of debt that is really more a type of equity – one where the valuation hasn’t been determined yet.
71
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?’
72
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.
73
New York is the new Silicon Valley.
74
You see this swirl of ideas and interaction of different players. Those interactions are helping to increase the pace of commercial space activity. We are bringing the pace of Silicon Valley to the space program.
75
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.
76
There are a lot of billionaires in Silicon Valley, but in the end, we are all heading to the same place. If given the choice between making a lot of money or finding a way to make people live longer, what do you choose?
77
My first company produced ‘Silicon Alley Reporter‘ magazine, where I held the dual titles of CEO and Editor.
78
We are not generally included in that narrative – people of color – definitely, women of color don’t normally fit that narrative that has been built around the whole image and the whole story of the Silicon Valley.
79
Silicon Valley today is populated mostly by people who would consider themselves winners of the traditional race. This causes the exclusion of the voices that are vital to a round, robust society. It’s beyond gentrification.
80
If you have to be a female in business, Silicon Valley is the best place because it’s a meritocracy. It’s not about who you are, it’s about what you can do.
81
When I first came to the Bay area, I worked in Silicon Valley in the early to mid-’90s, and I think what mattered then was our ability as designers to create a vision around people’s ideas.
82
If you want to go and build a company that exists in Silicon Valley, then you should go and do it there. But if you want to build a company that is Australian, that represents your culture and your being, then you should do it in Sydney.
83
I think ‘Settlers of Catan’ is such a well-designed board game – it’s the board game of entrepreneurship – that I made a knockoff called ‘Startups of Silicon Valley.’ It’s literally – it’s the same rules but just a different skin set to it.
84
Silicon Valley has been this global engine of innovation and economic growth over the last few decades, but a tidal wave of innovation that has been focused very much in the digital realm.
85
The number of African Americans in Silicon Valley is dismal. It’s not up to one company – it’s up to the entire industry to make sure that we are moving the conversation forward. Sometimes those walls of competition need to come down so we can move the entire industry forward.
86
Venture capital today is clustered in just a few locations – Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, and D.C. It’s far from efficiently distributed and accessible.
87
Like all of us, I don’t think Facebook is 100% evil, but there are aspects of it that move towards evilness. It’s true of all the major Silicon Valley companies, that there are aspects to all of them that move towards evilness, but I don’t believe they’re 100% evil.
88
Unfortunately, in the race to the most douchebaggery, Silicon Valley is fast in gaining on Hollywood. That race is neck and neck.
89
In Silicon Valley, you want things done instantly.
90
The problem is Silicon Valley, which is an amazing ecosystem, also ends up being an amazing bubble, with white guys talking to white guys about white-guy problems. So it’s great, but you kind of miss a lot of things around you.
91
I had this attitude, that Silicon Valley obnoxious attitude, that I know what I’m doing, and the rest was going to be pretty easy.
92
People are still very focused on the startup story: Risk-taking founders, with a bold idea, some capital and a network supportive environment, go out and take the shot on goal. But the problem is, this is no longer the truth about what makes Silicon Valley so special.
93
I’ve been called ‘paranoid,’ ‘schizophrenic,’ ‘the wild child of Silicon Valley.’
94
China just banned ICO fundraising. They did Silicon Valley and the U.S. a favor – now we get first dibs.
95
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.
Dan Rosensweig
96
I wouldn’t put a big trust in what people in Silicon Valley say. They may be good at manipulating ones and zeroes and writing software, but beyond that, their contribution to human progress has been pretty dismal. I’m not impressed.
97
There’s an oft-used shorthand for the technologist’s view of the world. It is assumed that libertarianism dominates Silicon Valley, and that isn’t wholly wrong. High-profile devotees of Ayn Rand can be found there.
98
Silicon Valley,’ I mean, the comedy is amazing, and it’s one of the best-written shows with some of the best talent. I’m really happy to be a part of it.
99
I got lucky because my dad moved us to Silicon Valley before it really was known worldwide as an important tech hub.
100
The problems that you see startups tackling are dramatically different in different cities. Silicon Valley is unlikely to produce the same set of companies as New York or Cleveland because the region has a different set of strengths and defining institutions.
101
The tech industry – and, more specifically, Silicon Valley – continues to stumble forward in earnest about how few women are represented in its top ranks of management and on its boards.
102
The real force of Silicon Valley is the mentality, the spirit. There’s no reason at all that can’t be replicated in Paris.
103
Elon Musk is an incredible leader and entrepreneur. I have known him since 1995 when he first came to Silicon Valley.
104
People tend to pay too little attention to history – the history of Silicon Valley and American business – and think they’re the first people to come across a problem.
105
We are seeing a new wave of young biologists that are attacking old problems with new tools and fresh ideas, leading to new types of bio startups and creating a much-needed engine to drive Silicon Valley into the next century.
106
I called up a bunch of the CEOs of Silicon Valley companies and said, ‘Hey, can I come and see you? And I’d like to learn about what you’re doing.’ And I don’t know, most of them said yes.
107
If China’s expansion into Africa and Russia‘s into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley’s ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business.
108
I moved to San Francisco when I was 20 years old. I couldn’t even drink yet. My friends in college thought I was so stupid for missing out on the four best years of my life. But I was so ready to start living my own life and absorb Silicon Valley culture.
109
In 2016, you no longer have to be in Silicon Valley to launch a successful startup. Colorado is home to many.
110
I think governments will increasingly be tempted to rely on Silicon Valley to solve problems like obesity or climate change because Silicon Valley runs the information infrastructure through which we consume information.
111
I think there is this very nice, if at times dangerous, untethered optimism that exists in Silicon Valley.
112
I’m a massive believer in brands. Silicon Valley has tried to reprogram everybody to think brands aren’t valuable. Or theirs are, but yours aren’t.
Tim Armstrong
113
I consider everybody who takes themselves seriously to be a little bit off. And Silicon Valley seems to be the most effusive about how important their contributions are to society.
114
For Israel to retain its amazing position as the largest concentration of high tech after Silicon Valley, we need more engineers and mathematicians. We have too many lawyers.
115
I grew up in the Silicon Valley when it was a bunch of apricot groves, and now it’s this center of incredible activity. So I have this sense of what technology has done for this region, and I want to spread it to the world.
Timothy C. Draper
116
I remember going out to raise my Series A and ending up with multiple term sheets when I had gone to Silicon Valley probably four times at that point and coming back with nothing.
117
As a community, Silicon Valley must adopt principles that reflect our abhorrence toward sexual harassment – and it is these principles that must guide our collective behavior.
118
There’s a reason why Silicon Valley is the worldwide innovation center, or why this is the startup valley, because I truly believe startup companies like mine are pushing the economy forward.
119
I’ve always played some version of a nerdy guy or something like that. I mean, one of my story lines on ‘Silicon Valley’ is that I am very bad with women!
120
By the time I was a senior in high school, I knew I wanted to move to Silicon Valley and learn more about computers and the Internet. I just fell in love with technology and the potential of everything the Internet had to offer.
121
My sense is that we’re ready for another industrial revolution in this country. The great minds and innovators of Silicon Valley would come through China and say, The pipeline is full of ideas – there’s personalized medicine, biotechnology, new forms to power ourselves, clean energy, etc., etc.
122
The decision to join Stripe and run ‘Increment‘ was a pretty easy one for me: It was an opportunity to be impactful, to collect and share best practices from the most effective engineering teams in the world. ‘Increment’ is a step toward flattening the distance between the Silicon Valley elite and developers everywhere.
Susan Fowler
123
I would say Silicon Valley and New York have inflated salaries.
124
I think that Silicon Valley and technology can play a huge role in redefining what community looks like and how people come together and what authentic relationships look like, but that is not only their burden.
125
I’ve spoken to people in Silicon Valley, and many times they have said to me, ‘X storyline, or that thing that happened in your show – pretty much verbatim has happened to me.’ And it’s either identical or similar enough to be scary.
126
For all the billions of dollars created here, Silicon Valley is remarkably stingy when it comes to giving.
127
If the Ivy League was the breeding ground for the elites of the American Century, Stanford is the farm system for Silicon Valley.
Ken Auletta
128
Why don’t we face up to the fact that many of us in Silicon Valley are living lives that involve telling ourselves a lot of lies.
129
I had better cellular coverage on a ship in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea than I have in many parts of Silicon Valley.
Roger McNamee
130
One of the issues we face here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley is a sense that the people all around us are as conversant in startup and tech culture as we are. But we need to remember, and remind ourselves repeatedly, that we’re a small minority in a larger population.
131
Some people in Silicon Valley are as bad as the ‘Koch Brothers‘, you know? Don’t be mistaken. For every some of those, though, you get people who come up with something like ‘Leafly’, which does what ‘Yelp’ has done, but in a much more specific way, and it’s important because it’s the dawn of this new era.
132
For me, seed investing isn’t just a good return area but a big part of how we network in Silicon Valley. A lot of our best deals have come from being active in the seed stage.
133
I don’t think you can look at my history and say they love me to death in Silicon Valley.
134
More than stock prices or product launches, Silicon Valley’s legacy will be defined by whether tech leaders step up to contribute to the larger American experiment.
135
I have a feeling that life as a billionaire in Silicon Valley is very different than the life that you or I would lead. Unless you’re a billionaire; I don’t know your financial situation.
Alec Berg
136
Current ethos in Silicon Valley is that if you build a website that people keep coming back to and is changing the lives of millions, you can eventually make money.
Daphne Koller
137
In the universe of possibilities that exist for life, we’ve shown that it is a very easy possibility for life as we know it to include silicon in organic molecules. And once you can do it somewhere in the universe, it’s probably being done.
138
Silicon Valley isn’t the only game in town. Tech is increasingly decentralized. Around the world, new tech centers with younger companies are able to embrace a different approach to talent: recruit locally, identify homegrown prospects and, in a phrase, bring them along for the ride.
139
The power in Washington, D.C., is centered on the status quooutdated systems, models, and programs built for a previous century. With more silicon and less concrete, we can open up those models to return power and independence to every man, woman, and child.
140
One of the great things about moving to Silicon Valley is that you’re surrounded by all these people who’ve done it before. This place is an assembly line that takes a couple of twenty-somethings and walks you through everything you need to learn.
141
The world’s better off the more Silicon Valleys there are and the more scaled companies there are.
142
Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit-driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich.
143
Windell Oskay is the co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, a Silicon Valley company that has designed and produced specialized electronics and robotics kits since 2007.
144
I basically apply with my teams the lean startup principles I used in the private sector – go into Silicon Valley mode, work at startup speed, and attack, doing things in short amounts of time with extremely limited resources.
145
Even Silicon Valley investors have put well over a $1 billion in new energy technologies.
146
Google has been amazing at acqui-hiring, buying small companies for the engineers. I think in the competitive market of Silicon Valley, it’s really a good way to do it. Big acquisitions often don’t work out.
147
If every sector of business and society will be driven by software – how does that get enabled? By highly-paid computer scientists funded by risk capital in Silicon Valley? Or by lots of engineers who can build it themselves?
148
But I try to play everything very authentically, even if it is an accented immigrant, Jian Yang, that I play on ‘Silicon Valley.’
149
Car technology needs to advance, and the best place for that to happen in is Silicon Valley.
150
Unfortunately, a lot of Silicon Valley venture capitalists are disconnected from African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color.
151
Growing up in Silicon Valley, during my time at Morgan Stanley and as a member of Stanford’s Board, I’ve had the opportunity to experience firsthand how tech companies can help people in their daily lives.
152
What I Iove about Y Combinator is that it is a level playing field. If you get in, you immediately become a Silicon Valley insider.
153
What I found in Silicon Valley is an industry that’s sort of been kept a very far remove from Washington and had an attitude of ‘Just let us do our thing and make the miracles that people love around the world and leave us alone.’
154
I’ve little in common with the scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I’m a New Yorker.
155
There is no greater country on Earth for entrepreneurship than America. In every category, from the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, where I live, to University R&D labs, to countless Main Street small business owners, Americans are taking risks, embracing new ideas and – most importantly – creating jobs.
156
It’s often lost in most Silicon Valley startups, the importance of storytelling when most people are thinking about they assemble their team and the critical functions that the team needs to be successful. Storytelling is normally not on the list.
157
Some in Europe take a plane, fly to Silicon Valley, visit and look and come back and say we need to do the same thing. Well you can copy others… but if you always copy others, you never get ahead.
158
In Silicon Valley, where I worked at companies like Facebook and Twitter for the earlier part of this decade, Cuba was generally regarded, when it was regarded at all, as a technological curiosity.
159
Silicon Valley tends to fall in love with the new new thing.
160
You have to live in Silicon Valley and hear the horror stories. You go and hang out at the cafes, and you meet entrepreneur after entrepreneur who’s struggling, basically – who’s had a visa problem who wants to start a company, but they can’t start companies.
161
There is a huge amount of wealth that’s generated here in Silicon Valley.
John Morgridge