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"Competitive strategy is not an end in itself" | page 1, 2
Yeah, sure. It's a big secret! We all -- we all sit with our backs to the wall and look out windows, you know, so that we don't get surprised by what's coming. No, typically, you'll find people that you've worked with before -- in either other companies or in the V.C. world. And you'll kind of re-institute those relationships. It's funny. It's not something that kind of starts when you leave business school and lasts for a lifetime. I do have friends that I've kept in touch with ever since business school. But it's more like we all left business school, we kind of went through some formative years in our career, and now we're in leadership positions in various organizations -- and now we reunite. There's a level of credibility there. We understand each other. We know what a guy was like 10 years ago. We assume that he's still as smart and as trustworthy and all those things. I've renewed relationships with people from my class of '86 that I didn't see between then and now except at reunions. Will Silicon Valley ever be supplanted by the next tech hot spot? What would make that happen? It's likely that [what pushes technology companies to other places] will be a failure of the Silicon Valley infrastructure, rather than the success of some other location. In the five years since the Internet took off you can just see the Bay Area infrastructure almost being brought to its knees in terms of traffic and housing prices and being able to get young employees at a reasonable wage. I just see it getting more difficult every year. Almost by the week you can see traffic get worse and infrastructure begin to crumble. It used to be that San Francisco was just a little ways away from San Jose. Now it can be two and a half hours away from San Jose. The Internet substitutes for good physical infrastructure to some degree. But I don't think we're there yet. I don't think we've really built the tools to make remote productivity a very good thing. It's now a tolerable thing, but it will get there. The infrastructure is basically at its knees at this point. I have a 13-mile commute and it can take me an hour to an hour and 20 minutes on a bad day -- with no accidents. I mean just a bad day. People used to talk 10 years ago about flextime and shifting work hours. Well, people are just doing it by showing up late. The day starts at 11 for some people because of their commute and it ends at 8, instead of starting at 8 and ending at 5. There's sort of this grass-roots time shifting going on everywhere. Are you talking mostly about programmers? It's not just engineers anymore. Five years ago I would have said, "Yeah, software guys -- they just like to work 'till 2 in the morning." How many times have we gotten asked in the last two years, "Are you going to open an office in San Francisco?" Well, you know, seven years ago or eight years ago it would have been no big deal to commute down or up to the city. Now it's like [San Francisco residents] don't want to come work for you unless you have an office in the city. Or conversely, if they're [Silicon Valley] engineers, they don't want to drive up to the city. I know you have a ranch in Montana. Is that a kind of release from the pressures of Silicon Valley? A release from work? I get there about five or six times a year, probably 40 days a year. Those 40 days in Montana are kind of working at half pace. Almost every day I'm in Montana the Federal Express guy'll be coming by and he'll drop me off some stuff to do and I'll do a few calls in the morning and stuff like that. And then by mid-afternoon I grab my fly rod and go out to the river and catch some fish or go up to the park and see some geysers, some animals, or, or whatever. It's really a time for me when the pace of my work changes. It doesn't ever really go away.
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