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Not satisfied with the generic category of “early adopters” that describes the influential bloggers in Silicon Valley, Jeremiah has developed new water-borne terminology to further segmentize this group.

Enter the epicenter, pebble, swimmer, surfer, boater, with-the-fleet...

In short, a trend initiator (founder) is the epicenter and the subsequent characters simply reflect the difference in “content” consumption frequencies of the other early adopters.

If you know the founder personally who showed u his invention in secret, congrats ‘cos you are a pebble.

If you twitter, you are a swimmer.

Bloggers are surfers.

If you read it from Facebook, you are a poor boater..

If you read it from a mainstream outlet like New York Times, you are a fleeter.

If you are not listed here, I empathize with you. You are not the only victim of the information tsunami that swamps all of us.

What am I? I am thousand miles away from Silicon Valley in Singapore and definitely fall in the surfer-and-beyond outer ring of influence. I am only the pebble when epicenters happen in Singapore. But since many startups I have seen hardly moves any gears in Silicon Valley or beyond this island, I cause mere ripples.

End of meaningless rant after a rusty blogging hiatus.

Presumptious me suggested MDA was wrong even before they officially launched their new $500M fund at the IDM Jamboree. Fearful I will end up with mud on my face, I bravely went for the event but nothing I saw made me change my mind. The event is ripe for an “Extreme Makeover” series featuring event launches of govt initatives.

My friend Justin has a terrific, blow-by-blow, review of the event here.. Great for those of you who did not go. Like he said, government agencies seem to love keywords. Short of plastering Web 3.0 over the entire auditorium, they relied on new catchphrases invented by their own staff (?), such as the initiatives of “i.Rock”, “i.Jam”, FutureScape”, “Flagship2B”. I think I came away feeling more stupid after the event because I don’t understand these terms at all. That gnawing buzz in my head told me it might be due to the painful need to read the wordy, mambo-jumbo description that came with those buzzwords. Like what many people including myself think of those hip-hop wannabes in PAP, I will say the same thing to MDA — Don’t act cool. Thats poserish.

For many of the online community that wondered whether the words Web 3.0 was coined by SGEntrepreneurs, the answer came from the event MC of the panel discussion called “Interactive Markets and Trends”. He held up Seraja.com as an example of a startup with a business model that he introduces as a Web3.0 startup. Now, I heard this myself, along with almost a hundred other people in this panel discussion. Someone might have the video, if we want to do some digital forensics study of this. Read the rest of this entry »

Because Yahoo has officially become Pepsi.

And we might be looking at an internet industry with only 2 giants, if you believe MSN and Yahoo might merge under a Microsoft takeover.

Whats the deal with so many acquisitions, one might ask? There has been more than an avalanche of deals made in the past 12 months in the internet industry as Google, Yahoo, MSN, along with lumbering media dinosaurs behind eating their dust, jostled to make their way into college dorms (ok, not quite) for pizza-fueled, beer-guzzling young entrepreneurs with the Next Big Thing. The doomsday believers and closet Nostradamus groupies among us are even mentioning the feared “B” word - Bubble.

But Yahoo has really been the loser in this round, as their one-time protege in web search, Google has swiftly taken over Yahoo’s dominance as the first major search giant and gone on to corner the search and online advertising markets. The number of victories keep piling up for Google since their IPO in July 2004; Quarterly Revenue, Market cap on Wall Street, Market Share for Search, AOL, MySpace, Youtube… Its making Terry Semel and his merrymen in Sunnyvale wonder if they are losing their mojo in deal-making.

The latest rumor has it that Yahoo is now thinking of revisiting an old battle won by Google over AOL and mulling a buyout of that unit. Click here for CNN Money article.

In other news, Google may have truly grown too big for its size and exhausted Earth’s resource for intelligent people. Not too long ago in Feb 2006, they were still pretty anal about their GPA qualifications. Click here for Valleywag article. They have relaxed their GPA requirements for new hires, albeit only for sales positions. Click here for article from John Battelle.

This is a classic story of a hot young thing that skyrocketed to fame, got blinded by the dazzling lights of scrutiny and thudded back to Earth to peter out of sight with a whimper.

There’s many success stories lately of Web2.0 companies making successful exits. MySpace and Youtube come immediately to mind at the forefront of these cool, sexy startups that rode on the wave of “youth-phoria” and their new-found social lives on the web. The founders of Youtube and MySpace may have become the new “rock stars” of the Internet Age, but for every rock star, there’s hundreds of has-beens..

Flashback 2002.

Friendster was touted as the coolest shit we had ever seen. A website that allowed internet users to create web profiles, connect with their old and new friends. The social networking industry was born and heralded as the Next Big Thing in the hype-fueled days of 2002. The mags were going gaga over it, from the notable Time, Forbes to chick reads like Cosmopolitan and Entertainment Weekly. Even Playboy was into them. Its founder, Jonathan Abrams, was THE STAR, showing up at events, with “strikingly beautiful women on each arm”, as NYT reports here.

And Friendster had powerful investors that read like the Hall of Fame of Silicon Valley. John Doerr, Ram Shriram, Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) , Tom Koogle (chief executive of Yahoo through the second half of the 1990’s). It was an All-Star Team. No one could touch them. Google tried buying them in 2003 for $30M but was rebuffed. Friendster thought it could be much bigger, maybe something bigger than what Google is today. They wanted to do everything:

We had a new clothing line come out last week. We’re talking about a reality TV show. I thought it’d be a cool Web site, but the whole cultural thing has been amazing. — Jonathan Abrams speaking on MArch 16, 2004 at the SXSW conference.

Besides, those behind Friendster were so convinced that they were destined to be the next big thing that they instead fixated on the actions of their presumed peers — at least that is Mr. Siegelman’s recollection. “I remember going to these board meetings and feeling disgusted,” he said. “Half of every board meeting was taken up by a discussion of what Google’s going to do, or Yahoo.”…

…The performance problems would come up, but the board devoted most of its time to talking about potential competitors and new features, such as the possibility of adding Internet phone services, or so-called voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, to the site. Source: New York Times

But today, we know what happened, Friendster is literally the jaded cheerleader who never got laid after attending all the frat parties and courted by all the football jocks. It lies listlessly in 14th position in a ranking of all social networking websites, hundreds of time smaller in membership size behind MySpace. Its website still sucks, where MySpace has bands, TV celebrities and cool people hanging out, a $900M advertising deal with Google, Friendster has to make do with lame shit like this on its front page:

Do you want to be a fan of Cornetto ice cream?

So why did Friendster fail? I strongly think it is due to the absolute loss of control of the founders over the company’s direction and strategy. The “too many cooks in the kitchen” analogy came straight to mind. Secondly, the “experienced” investors dun get social networking. They focused too much on the money and not enough on the idea. Social netowrking is a real fuzzy concept that requires a lot of chemistry between the founders and its users. THink Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg who was not even 21 when he started it, MySpace’s young music-loving founders, Youtube’s Chad, Jawed and Steve who digged videos. Can you imagine the 50-something board members understanding this?

The number of mistakes made at Friendster are many:

1. Founder Jonathan Abrams was replaced as CEO in April 2o04.
2. Board members who had great resumes but did not understand the product. The legendary John Doerr was deemed to have “little feel for the product”, and taken off the board by his fellow KPCB partner Siegelman.
3. A rotating-door CEO policy

The board replaced Mr. Abrams with one of its own, Mr. Koogle, the former chief executive of Yahoo. But Mr. Koogle served only three months, a temporary caretaker who showed up at the office only sporadically, former Friendster employees said. The board next chose a television industry executive, Scott M. Sassa, to replace Mr. Koogle. That selection might have made sense if the company had been in position to start cutting big advertising deals. But it was not, given that its Web site was not up to speed. Mr. Sassa left after less than a year, which was nearly twice the tenure of his successor, Taek Kwan, who left at the end of 2005, six months after he started.

I truly believe Friendster is a good lesson for social networking entrepreneurs trying to create the next MySpace. Its way too easy to think any kid can code a website in his room and ask 100 friends to spread the word and them to spread to another 2 virally by themselves and hope for it to scale the Hitwise/ Alexa ranking s subsequently. Yes, myYearbook.com, founded by a 16-year old student, is ranked higher than Friendster currently.

But if you think you can be MySpace, what makes you think you won’t become Friendster instead?

If you like this, this article here.

Meet Jawed Karim, all of 27 years old, who ditched Youtube to study his masters at Stanford. A decision that stumped his Stanford professors too.

New York Times has a good article on this. What amazed me was his love for academia and teaching as opposed to the more common opposite route. Sergey and Larry of Google are notable examples.

Mr. Karim said he might keep a hand in entrepreneurship, and he dreams of having an impact on the way people use the Internet — something he has already done. Philanthropy may have some appeal, down the road. But mostly he just wants to be a professor. He said he simply hopes to follow in the footsteps of other Stanford academics who struck it rich in Silicon Valley and went back to teaching.

“There’s a few billionaires in that building,” he said, standing in front of the William Gates Computer Science Building. But his chosen path will not preclude another stint at a start-up. “If I see another opportunity like YouTube, I can always do that,” he said.

Its useful to note Jawed was already a millionaire prior to Youtube’s founding. Thanks to his time at Paypal, along with Chad and Steve, before it was bought by eBay.

An excerpt on the early path of Youtube’s founding:

Mr. Karim met Mr. Hurley and Mr. Chen when all three of them worked at PayPal. After the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion, netting Mr. Karim a few million dollars, they often talked about starting another company.

By early 2005, all three had left PayPal. They would often meet late at night for brainstorming sessions at Max’s Opera Café, near Stanford, Mr. Karim said. Sometimes they met at Mr. Hurley’s place in Menlo Park or Mr. Karim’s apartment on Sand Hill Road, down the street from Sequoia Capital, the venture firm that would become YouTube’s financial backer.

Mr. Karim said he pitched the idea of a video-sharing Web site to the group. But he made it clear that contributions from Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley were essential in turning his raw idea into what eventually became YouTube.

More on Artis Capital Management here, the San Francisco hedge fund that also invested in Youtube.

Following the mega deal of the week, TimeWarner CEO Dick Parsons had this to say:

“The YouTube deal demonstrates the power of user-generated content today. “The question is,” Parsons said, “where is it going and how do you make a business out of it? Is it going to take over edited or professional content? No. I don’t think its going to overrun TV or movies.”

Parsons went on to note that for a “traditional” media company, like Time Warner, “This would be a tough acquisition to justify at this price, But for Google, it’s in their sweet spot. They are our partner on AOL Video, we know their vision. They’re trying to acquire anything that generates traffic—they monetize Internet traffic. None of the other media companies could have been in that ballpark.””

From the advertising industry, Organic Inc’s CEO Mark Kingdon:

“…thought the online video-sharing startup would have made more sense as a Yahoo Inc. property.

Google is strong as a “link and list business,” Kingdon said Wednesday during a conference call organized by UBS. Yahoo, on the other hand, is expert at organizing content into channels — and that is exactly what the fledgling YouTube site needs right now…

…Web companies haven’t figured out how to make video advertising appealing to them, he said. Yahoo’s structured display advertising allows companies to create big brand splashes on its content pages. In the same way, Google, YouTube and others hoping to make money in the video space need to come up with a new way for advertisers to reach video viewers, Kingdon said.

And 30-second commercials tacked on to a video aren’t going to cut it. “People today are walking TiVos,” Kingdon said, referring to the digital video recorders that makes it easy for viewers to skip advertising spots. “If they see something that looks like an ad, they mentally look beyond it.”

And a post-takeover Eric Schmidt had to play shrink to hyperventilating media bigwigs from NewsCorp, Viacom, CBS among others, fearful of a “Youtube-on-steroids” competing with their expensive media content (article here):

“Eric Schmidt is barnstorming New York this week to assure traditional media companies that the internet search company’s $1.65bn (£889m) acquisition of YouTube, the video start-up, will not turn it into a content competitor.

The Google chief stressed… that the YouTube purchase was intended to increase Google’s ability to distribute advertising and video on the internet. “We are not in the content business and partnerships really show the application of our advertising network to the content and media abilities of our partners. We want those partners to put their media content into this emergent [system].”

The driving force behind the decision to buy YouTube was Google’s belief that video is “one of the most important new media types on the internet”, he said.”

So there you have it, a round-up of the CEO view of the Google Youtube deal.

Related Article here.

I wrote the following in response to a friend’s email, since I don’t have much time to really sit down and blog these days but felt the need to share my views on this deal. This post will be some off-the cuff thoughts as i wanted to bounce some ideas off here. Pardon the factual errors but I really want to get a feel of what some of you guys might be thinking out there..

The Question:

“Some seem to think it’s brilliant for google to buy them out in order to escalate themselves as a media gateway. While other’s think that google’s bringing the bubble back by throwing money on eyeballs and nothing else.

Is it a smart move? Or have they really lost it this time?”

My response:

i think its a wise move at this time. Strategy-wise, its both a defensive and an offensive move at the same time. It fends off the vultures from Yahoo, Microsoft, NewsCorp, AOL Time Warner, who will have otherwise unassailable community bases from their Yahoo groups, IM, MySpace and AOl communities, if they bought Youtube instead.

Community
Hence, buying community is one strategic move Google made, raising its user base to parity level with the other players. Remember, so far they only have “searchers”, not community members, and I dun count Orkut or Gmail users which are insignificant.

I consider this a defensive move, its the last chance to buy a community, other than an expensive buyout of AOL. And Facebook is just a social network, no real technology capabilities like Youtube.

Now for offensive,

Revenue driver diversification

Google is getting shit from Wall Street on its one-trick pony act of relying only on text-based ads. In the realm of advertising, it is king in text while the whole world knows “Video” and “rich media” ads are the next big thing due to the importance of the interactivity factor when reaching out to consumers. Google needs to develop that capability and it is, by signing deals with MySpace and Viacom’s MTV division to distribute their video-based ads on its search engine and affiliated sites. However, all these are only biting away at the huge video pie as the current Google “real estate” is limited to its search pages and its affiliated sites. Hardly a lot of prime video inventory for advertisers to choose from. Crucially, the bulk of their current users are on their search results pages which is video-free and I think its wise to stay that way to avoid looking like Yahoo.

So yes, I think buying the largest video distribution website in Youtube acquires them massive advertising inventory with accompanying users who are used to perusing video content (and wun find them obtrusive to the user experience). This move is both offensive and defensive at the same time. Offensive as they enhance their stranglehold on video ad distribution by having Youtube to complement their Viacom and Myspace deals,. Defensive cos they prevent some other company from buying Youtube and threatening their domineering status. In a way, it has become a two-horse race now between Myspace and Youtube for serving video content. Hence a 2 horse race between News Corp and Google. Google wins by preventing a third player from storming the party and limits competition with a “former old media warhorse” in NewsCorp, forcing the latter to compete on technology which is Google’s strong suit.

But the price? Thats a separate issue. I see numbers floated around of $32 worth of per-user acquisition costs which is decent compared with the $580 million buyout of Internmix Media (includes Myspace) which had close to 30 25M users that time and works out to approx $100 $23 per user. Again, my numbers might be wrong bbut shld be in the ballpark, a fact check is needed but read these numbers somewhere from techcrunch probably and am using them here for illustrative purposes. Based on this, Youtube has 72M unique visitors per month working out to $1650M/$72M= $23/user. For the NewsCorp-Intermix deal, based on this article, the user-acquisition cost is about $580M/ 23M= $25. That is if, you believe into using user-acq costs as a rough valuation model..

To add on, I think a lot of the media attention has been on legal liabilities centering around the copyright infringement issues. That might be why pple are not buying much google stock as they are fearful the courts will wipe out any revenue advantages such a deal will bring.

And that is true, alot of home-made content is amateurish save for a few really good ones made by the next Spielberg… I use Youtube to watch Jon stewart, family guy and some really cool viral ads. But i also use it, for eg today, to watch some amateur clips on North Korea taken by tourists and journalists when they visited in an earlier time Kim Jong Il was less crazy.

Alot of this has to come down to deal-making by the Google folks, which is why I believe the deals signed with the TV networks on the day before they announced the deal was orchestrated to prevent any free-falling of the stock. Its too bloody coincidental to not be. In the long run, they really have to fight with NewsCorp and its Fox network while gaining allies with with cable channels,. CBS, NBC. We forgot someone important here too which has been really pushing the frontiers in opening up Old Media and that is Apple and its new affiliate Disney Networks with ABC.

I am guessing, really a wild guess here, that Google is relying on the advertising model to roll out media and videop content over the web while Apple is advocating you download the clip and pay. Google will prefer to stream it over their vast fiber optic capabilities and give content away for free over Youtube, by allowing ad placement where as Apple is a direct download, pay-per-clip model that allows ownership of the content. The competitive dynamic in terms of content delivery and revenue model is interesting and I like to see more discussion on this.

Apple-Disney, NewsCorp-MySpace and now Google-Youtube. Who’s gonna try to crash this party next?

Related post: Business 2.0, Techcrunch, SGEntrepreneurs

Update from Venturebeat: Artis Capital Management, a hedge fund in San Francisco was also an investor in YouTube, something previously undisclosed. Artis co-invested in YouTube with Sequoia Capital in the startup’s $8 million Series B this spring, according to PE Week. In two rounds of funding, YouTube raised $11.5 million.

“I feel lucky!”, says Michael Moritz hypothetically, after his success in the recent Google deal.. Is he the “Warren Buffett” of the VC world?

I have one huge question mark lingering in my head: with all the talk about Gootube over the news wires and blogosphere, (including a few kinda sour and scornful posts from Mark “You-all-are-moronic” Cuban), where does that leave the rest of the Internet giants such as EBay, Amazon, FIM, Microsoft and especially Yahoo? Are we going to see a knee jerk reaction from these folks?

Stay tuned…

I just spent the past 50 mins of my life listening to this ETL video-cast of Google’s Marissa Mayer where she was sharing her lessons on innovation from her past 7 years of working experiences there.

During these 50 minutes, i wrote down stuff, thinking of recapping the lessons by blogging and thinking as i write.

And I spent the next 10 thinking what to actually blog about.

I wasn’t going to just do a point-by-point summary of what she said. Thats not blogging, thats called reporting, (like how secretaries take down notes mindlessly during meetings)

So my key takeaway wasn’t thinking about her lessons in the context of innovation, but of culture. Specifically, building a conducive culture in any organization.

Its a no-brainer that we spend about 50 years of our life working. For educated people with access to key information troves such as the internet like yourself, we are the educated strata of society who have the choice to decide what life, or rather working life, we want to have for a significant portion of our lives. Our companies become our “families” for a good part of the day and as we are emotional creatures since we are humans, we tend to bring the same emotions we have from our work back to our homes and the rest of our non-working lives. Which also means its very important to work in a positive work environment because it extends naturally to your ENTIRE life. Its not just the job function you are performing, not just the money you are in for, but its a lifestyle you choose when you choose to work in one particular company.

Which is why I think Google is great. The same theories that they learnt and applied to innovation or from their own product development extends beyond their applications in the workplace and can be used for personal enrichment too. I will highlight some useful ones.

SHARING –The Good Type

Marissa talks about the case, based on an analogy from Tom Kelley’s book Art of Innovation, of a hypothetical employee telling all his colleagues this great idea he/ she has for the main purpose of taking personal credit. This sounds great, pple are sharing ideas in the organization but the lesson is there is good and bad sharing. While sharing ideas are very important in any organization, a company should emphasise the message that:

• no one shld get territorial over ideas because it doesn’t matter who thought of them in the first place
• cultivate the culture that no one and nobody has any control over ideas and are free to conceptualize, daydream and contribute
• focus on what the idea and how it can add value to their daily way of doing things

EXPERIMENTING — Because Innovation is not instant perfection

• When you build something, can you really learn quickly about yourself, learn quickly from your users such that you can iterate more efficiently the next time?
• Every time you make a mistake, you iterate out of it. Make more mistakes but make sure you learn and get smarter every time.

Google encourages failure. Because hope springs eternal when an organization has dreamers that act on their dreams and constantly try to make them realities. Nobody succeeds by doing the same thing all the time. You got to be different, which means you have to innovate, and when the correct approach towards innovation is adopted and this becomes something synoymous with the Google culture, pple join the company believing they can do the same experimenting and thats when the founder’s habits and beliefs become immortalized as the culture of the company.

Data is A-Political

TO eradicate office politics, take a very quantitative process towards decision-making and even suggestions. Numbers dun lie, and using them to back up statements creates a meritocracy that is not based on relationships but your ability to use number-crunching abilities to support your thought process.

The QnA session took up half the 50 mins. I love Socratic dialogue style of learning by discussing, not preaching. Thats why E27 events are great!

This guy asked what was one of the toughest questions for Marissa:

Q: What are some personal characteristics that made you successful?

A:

• Passion to work
• Her Decision Process: Compile a list of the best decisions you have made and try to find out what is common between them. Especially when some decisions are really different from each other.
• Work with people smarter than you are so you learn.
• Challenge yourself by doing things that you are really not ready to do. Because you acquire new skill sets.You know your boundaries and you expand them.

Just a parting note, she had a really amusing gigglish laughter that is almost self-deprecating at times, endearing her to the crowd. 6 months away from Silicon Valley have almost made me forgot how much personality and charisma top executives like Marissa Mayer have compared to the many dour figures we have in Singapore where speakers seldom break out of their self-imposed shells once they step onto that stage to make a public presentation. Personalities like Marissa Mayer are icons and rallying points of a company culture.

They inspire. And thats another important hallmark of a good company culture.

Thanks to SGEntrepreneurs for cross-listing this too!

Not Steve Jobs which we all know but the other Apple Computers Founder — Steve Wozniak, affectionately known as Woz.

Here's excerpts from his upcoming book, "iWoz" due for release in November 2006:

1. Woz is now, and always has been, an Apple employee.
2. In the sixth grade Woz scammed gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon with a certificate from the school’s ham radio club. The certificate was made with crayons just before the ceremony, and Woz was the only “member” of the club.
3. The Apple IPO made the most millionaires in one single day in history up to that point in time.
4. Woz and Jobs worked as Alice in Wonderland characters at shopping mall in San Jose.
5. Woz didn’t return to the University of Colorado after his first year because he ran up too much computer timesharing costs.
6. Woz tried to call the Pope by impersonating Dr. Henry Kissinger. He almost got through except that the Vatican called the real Dr. Kissinger to verify the call.
7. Woz and Jobs got robbed of a blue box at gunpoint in Sunnyvale.
8. The statement that convinced Woz to leave HP to start Apple (uttered by Allen Baum) was, “You can be an engineer and become a manager and get rich, or you can be an engineer and stay an engineer and get rich.”
9. Woz lost approximately $12 million in each of the two US Festivals that he put on.
10. Woz taught computer technology to elementary school students for ten years.

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki's great post here.
As I read Guy's blog, several things jumped out at me reading it as a Singaporean citizen. We all know the following statements to hold a lot of truth.

In the context of why Silicon Valley succeeded and why others couldn't,

Absence of multi-national companies—especially the finance industry. If your companies have to compete with conglomerates or banks like Goldman, Sachs throwing money at people, it’s going to be hard to get anyone for a startup. Pity the startups in New York, London, and Singapore. Come to think of it, how many tech success stories have come from these cities? There is intense competition for employees in Silicon Valley too, but we’re using the same currency: the upside of equity, not high starting salaries…

Yeap, very true. We have a lot of pple applying to banks because in Singapore, that appears to be the MO to a prosperous life. I have blogged about this before in my earlier article, its sad that many fresh graduates, especially those in the technical disciplines strived the hardest for a career in finance and banking. We have no innovation in the high tech sector when our best and brightest engineering minds opt for banks over engineering companies. Where A*Star pumps millions into training dozens of PhDs in overseas colleges, we forgot the thousands in NUS and NTU and the polys every who see engineering as a dead-end education in Singapore and cast eyes of envy towards the business schools. We should be pumping millions instead into changing the mindsets of local engineers, especially engineering undergraduates to not just be involved in procedural, process-oriented, maintenance-related engineering tasks and be engineering drones but product innovators, creative, disruptive engineering breakthrough work. I am not an engineer, but I have observed enough enginners in Silicon Valley and Singaproe and it doesn't take an engineer mind or a genius to observe and hypothesize why Singaporean engineers lack the passion and drive in their engineering education.

The answer does not lie in the next papragraph, but it gives us a direction towards which many NOC returnees like myself should aspire for after our stints in the entrepreneurial hubs of SV and Route 128.

The goal is to infect them with the disease called entrepreneurship and show them that there can be more to life than “a job;” that two guys/gals in a garage can change the world; and that a lot of money = millions of dollars. Sure, some people will never return—like me. But those who do return come back with a much broader perspective on what life and a career can be. Maybe they will build another Silicon Valley because they’ve seen it done before. Here’s a dirty little secret: Silicon Valley is more a state of mind than a physical location, and you can’t alter a state of mind by staying at home.