Following the post-COVID stimulus hangover in 2022, the bull market has continued to run. One of the key factors was the Federal Reserve’s decision to
A New Year’s Toast to the Silicon Valley Entrepreneur
Published Date : January 26, 2024
The literary fox has long been portrayed as the most clever, hungry, and transformational character among his anthropomorphic brethren. First appearing in the stories of Aesop over 2,500 years ago, foxes were either tricksters, flattering a crow’s beautiful singing voice to run away with the cheese that fell from the bird’s mouth; or masters of spin, most famously concluding that he never really wanted those unreachable grapes anyway—forever adding the term ‘sour grapes’ to our lexicon. The fox’s reputation didn’t fare much better in the Middle Ages as Reynard, Chaucer, and Machiavelli all helped perpetuate this anti-establishment stereotype across Europe.
Ultimately, vulpine imagery began to evolve more positively. By the 20th century, the fox had become the protector of the common man, as exemplified by the Robinhood-like protagonist Zorro, whose name is Spanish for ‘fox’. More recently, the fox has even been played as the heroic renegade, such as George Clooney’s character in the movie, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, outwitting the establishment and reinventing himself (‘pivoting’ in Silicon Valley parlance) as the story and environment around him change; and in the lyrics of Taylor Swift’s “I Know Places” as the sought-after foxes outsmart their tenacious hunters.
All of which is an apt metaphor for the entrepreneurial instincts and qualities that we constantly celebrate here in Silicon Valley. Much as the caricature of the fox has evolved over time, so has our perception and appreciation of the value and the importance of those who disrupt, transform, and build the world around us.
Just consider what is likely to happen over the next decade: a billion more people will be connected worldwide to the internet; solar and other clean energy technologies will reach ‘grid parity’ with the cost of fossil fuels; immunotherapy and gene-editing will significantly impact our ‘health span’ and end some of our most debilitating diseases; healthy human life may extend regularly to the 100-year mark; autonomous self-driving vehicles and drones will change city landscapes and our productivity; artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics will evolve and impact our lives as well as our global competitiveness; the shared economy of cars, homes, and services will optimize our resource consumption; and space exploration will accelerate dramatically with the private commercialization of that industry. In the aggregate, one realizes that today’s Silicon Valley innovators rival the era of Einstein, Edison, Wright, and Ford in channeling their ‘inner fox’ to bring a better future forward for everyone.
While the current negative political and geopolitical news of the day may obscure these incredible ongoing developments, it is important to recognize and remember that we are living in a time of truly exponential change. So, as we start this New Year in an uncertain and troubled world, and we gear up for all the known complexities of the year ahead, we wanted to take the opportunity to acknowledge that the world around us is actually on a more positive path than the headlines of the moment may allow us to fully appreciate. Humanity now has the ability and ambition to reach for those proverbial ‘sour grapes’ and turn them into champagne. And that is a not-too-distant future reality that is certainly worth celebrating.
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