… population was coming online …  with apps — stepping around the nation’s dominant search engine… Baidu CEO Robin Li came up with a fix. He shifted the company’s focus from online to offline services (or O2O), positioning Baidu to be the connective tissue between China’s Internet and its sprawling real-world commerce. Baidu indexed some apps for search, and cut deal with others for retail services as disparate as movie theater seats and massage parlors. Read more: http://recode.net/2015/07/25/chinas-baidu-with-uber-in-tow-takes-search-to-the-offline-world-qa/

Manna or Mammon in Silicon Valley? NY Times
Is Is technological innovation creating a better world, or just making lots of money for a few people? …Many tech luminaries think they are ”doing God’s work.” But are the innovations coming out of the Bay area really creating a new and better world, or just making lots of money for a few people?

Silicon Valley Is a Big Fat Lie  Condé Nast

America’s most vaunted industry has also become its most self-satisfied, Silicon Valley is veering toward fall-of-Rome territory. Which is why it needs to blow up these seven myths about itself before it’s too late … Myth #1: Silicon Valley Is the Universe’s Only True Meritocracy … Myth #2: Silicon Valley Is Bringing Us Closer Together… Myth #3: Younger Is Smarter, Safer, and Inarguably Better… Myth #4: School Is for Suckers, Just Drop Out… Myth #6: San Francisco Is the (Moral, Cultural, Financial) Center of the Universe… Myth #7: Silicon Valley Is Saving the World

Silicon Valley is About Business, Not Change. NYTimes
… we have the tools and ability to build collectively owned messaging and social platforms — but instead, we have Twitter and Facebook, which mediate what users can see from other users and collect personal data to better tailor advertising sales… to reach their true potential, they would need to be uncoupled from the financial system that keeps Silicon Valley churning. Building a new platform is still incredibly resource-intensive, but the venture capital required to fund those projects is distributed with the goal of making more money, not spurring equitable innovation… Technology tools have a tremendous amount to contribute to society, but if all its power remains locked up in a tiny, concentrated (and often rather unimaginative) industry, those social and economic changes, even when positive, will always be primarily in service to private profits for a very few. And that’s hardly innovative.

Technology’s Promise of Social Justice Remains Unfulfilled NY Times
The lack of diversity of voices and the very limited perspective of those who are currently creating tech products have held the tech industry back from true change… The current tech marketplace is a bubble where the same products are created again and again, in service to the same demographic of consumers, while a broader community of both consumers and creators are systematically ignored and left behind. When will tech finally decide there is value in a broader pool of voices?

Plaintiffs accused Apple, Google, Intel Corp and Adobe Systems Inc in the 2011 lawsuit of limiting job mobility and, as a result, keeping a lid on salaries. Companies are offering to pay $415 million that is a pocket change to the companies. If they let the case go to trial, it might corrode their image as forward-thinking, worker-friendly benevolent empires.

Lawyer have a hard choice too. Their share of the settlement is as much as 25 percent. If the case went to trial, the plaintiffs might lose, in which case the lawyers would get nothing for years of work. On the other hand, a jury could award the plaintiffs billions. At one point, lawyers for the plaintiffs said the damages were $3 billion, which would be tripled after a guilty verdict.

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San Jose, capital of Silicon Valley, has a high 91.2% opportunity share, while Atlanta is the lowest in the top 15 with 69. According to the Kaufman Index of Startup Activity 2015 opportunity share measures the percentage of new entrepreneurs not coming out of unemployment during given period of time.

From the another component of Kaufman Index of Startup Activity 2015, Austin, Texas, came out on top in the rate of new entrepreneurs, calculated as the percentage of adults becoming entrepreneurs in a given month.

The Rate of New Entrepreneurs measures the percentage of the adult, non-business-owner population, that starts a business each month. It captures all new business owners … In 2014, an average of 0.31 percent of the adult population, or 310 out of 100,000 adults, created a new business each month. This business-creation rate translates into more than 500,000 adults becoming entrepreneurs in each month during the year. As it can be seen below, during period of time of 1996-2014 about 300 (+/- 30) out of 100,000 adults, created a new business each month.

Dave McClure, of 500 Startups, one of Silicon Valley’s Top Seed Investors, continues: ‘We expect a few exits in 3-7 years, but we place lots of little bets. We filter out the failures and small wins and double-down on stuff that looks like it’s working… I want to invest in a functional product that people are using. We look for functional prototypes and customer development and most importantly, scalability. Can you scale customer acquisition cheaply and measurably? … Don’t write business plans; instead build prototypes & test them with customers… Don’t create five-year revenue projections; create 12-month expense projections…Don’t run out of cash. Check your monthly burn rate, cash in the bank; figure out your remaining runway and try not to get below six months of cash’.

‘Don’t Write Business Plans‘: Advice For Startups … by Amy Guttman. Forbes 7/21/2015

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Robert Metcalfe – Ethernet inventor and 3Com founder, wrote in 1998, when he went back to San Francisco from his Asian tour, that “Silicon Valley is the only place on Earth not trying to figure out how to become Silicon Valley“.

Kilim Choi — Engineer, Entrepreneur and Writer, remembered that about a year ago … “while watching the Silicon Valley TV show, my friend Matt thought that it would be hilarious and educational to create a website like urban dictionary for all the lingos from the show. So we [Kilim Choi, Mathew Hui, and Zeeshan Javed] created one“.

1. Palo Alto. Spanish for “tall tree.” English for “overly priced land.”

2. Apportunity, e.g., when a mobile app has the capability to improve or perform a commonly desired action.

3. My Code is Compiling is an excuse engineers use to do whatever the hell they want in the workplace.

6. Technical Founder is 4.0 student from MIT [and usually] is a lone wolf who thinks business people are completely useless. You’re a social media manager? Get the fuck out of here. His code is perfectly architected, clean and commented in all the right places. His startups fail because he doesn’t think writing CSS is worth his time and his sites look like shit as a result.

7. DINK, Duel Income, No Kids – A co-worker who is married to another tech who makes as much as you do. They don’t have any kids and spend their time buying things on Amazon Prime, paying for movies on Apple TV, drinking wine from an online wine delivery club, and drive their BMWs to spin class, yoga, and to drop their dogs off at doggie-daycare. E.g., must be nice to have a partner that makes as much as you do. You DINKs have it all.”

8. Hockey Stick Growth. We are wildly overoptimistic about our future growth prospects. E.g., our growth rate may look linear (some would say flat), that’s how most of a hockey stick looks.

9. Brogrammer, when you mix your typical engineer with your typical frat boy. The official heuristic to identify a brogrammer in your organization is when you can’t tell whether the suspect is part of your engineering team or your sales team.

10. Democratization. Our product allows the general public to do something more easily than they could before, regardless of whether that involves democracy in any sense of the word.

11. Vanity Metrics is useless data that looks good but does not necessarily correlate real success.

12. Nomophobia is  irrational and all-consuming fear of being out of cell phone contact. Coined by British researchers. An abbreviation of no-mobile-phone-phobia. E.g., I left my phone at home this morning and I feel like I’ve lost a limb. I’m suffering from severe nomophobia.

13. Dave Ratio, [in context of popular discussions concerning the] gender parity at a startup … metric, is to compare the number of men named dave, to the number of women.

14. Bus Factor is the number of people that need to be hit by a bus before their project is dead. E.g., “Our engineers work in teams of 10 for the higher bus factor”.

15. Server Down Saturday, is a Saturday night where a video game’s server crashes and one has to go out and socialize with people in person. E.g., we had a server down saturday this past weekend, so I went to Julia’s party. It was the first time I had talked to a girl in real life in months.

16. Reverse Communism When money is taken from venture capitalists and other wealthy types, and given to coders. Profitability is a vague thing that will happen sometime in the distant future (maybe).  E.g.,  In 1991 communism was defeated, only four years later, the spectre of Reverse Communism haunted the SF bay area from 1995 until the spring of 2001.

21. Soylent Diet, refers to the diet of busy [so called serial] entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Instead of eating like normal human beings, these entrepreneurs drink Soylent, a powered meal replacement, because it is more efficient than chewing and using knife and fork.

24. Pivot. We failed. Now, we’re starting over, possibly with something completely different. E.g., we started out by building a SoLoMo network for hermits. We’ve now pivoted to becoming the Uber of door-to-door encyclopedia sales.

25. Level-up.  To incrementally improve something, like an application feature or personal abilities. E.g., we need to level-up the user registration process before we go live. You need to level-up your people skills.

26. Vaporware is a piece of nothing. Generally used to describe something that is inexistent. “The snake oil of tech“.

27. Tech Stars.  An incubator people apply to when getting rejected from YC. They aren’t definitively worst it just always happens to be your second choice every time.

47. Two Comma Club. A club for millionaires. Russ Hannemann from the show joins the club after losing lots of money, resulting in him selling a car that opens vertically and horizontally.

Source: CB Insights; data analyzed by Funding Your Tech Startup
Read more: The Tech Industry Is In Denial, But The Bubble Is About To Burst.

See also: Silicon Valley: “Bubble” or “No-bubble” – that is …

“The lack of gender and racial diversity within the tech industry is a problem …” – CNN Money, June 19, 2015

–Silicon Valley’s plan to be more diverse, CNN

See also: Silicon Valley of India” is Located in California

Over the past few years, we’ve seen two apparent crosscurrents in the startup waters. One is the tech explosion in Silicon Valley … The other trend is an overall decline in entrepreneurship across the U.S.—revealed by statistics and felt in places like Atlanta, Kansas City, Missouri, and smaller towns… Look at the money going into companies. Venture capital firms in 2014 pumped more than $32 billion into startups based in the stretch from San Francisco to San Jose, according to the National Venture Capital Association. That’s twice as much as all of the venture capital put into companies in all of the rest of the U.S. … New York and Boston are neck and neck at No. 2, at about $4 billion each. After that, the drop-off is steep. Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/2015/06/19/startup-shutdown-how-silicon-valley-killing-entrepreneurship-us-340769.html

As tech groups shy away from IPOs, the wealth created goes only to those with the right access … Silicon Valley is in the midst of another investment boom, and it is unlike any that has gone before. The tech bubble at the end of the 1990s spilled out on to Wall Street as new companies with no record queued up to do initial public offerings. This time, with valuations once again soaring, the party is raging behind closed doors… The surge of private investment has also raised questions about how well equity markets function on such a large scale without the high levels of disclosure and other checks and balances seen in the public markets… — and whether the investment game is only for privileged insiders with the right connections or the strongest investment clout. Read more: “Silicon Valley: Inside the winners’ circle” By Richard Waters and Stephen Foley.

Read more: The 18 coolest women in Silicon Valley by Tanza Loudenback, Business Insider.