East Palo Alto was literally the murder capital of the United States in the early 1990s. Now it is home to Facebook and has some of the most rapidly-accelerating real estate prices anywhere, plus a lot of commercial development. Although, I have to say, they might want to rethink this attempt at signage. It’s got everything but Uber Alles playing in the background.
Nearly five years ago, I wrote a post called Color and the Mania in this Valley (you might want to re-read it; I think it’s pretty good). In it I mentioned how, many years earlier, a company opened up adjacent to my start-up, Prophet:
Next door to us was a startup called DoDots. They appeared out of the blue and had $20,000,000 dropped into their laps for a product which – as far as I could tell – was absolutely useless. It needled me that someone could dream up an idea – – and, in my mind, a really lame idea – – and, without a single dollar of revenue, let alone profit, get a check for twenty million dollars to pursue their “dream.” I admit I was a little jealous at not having that kind of cash at my disposal, particularly since I had worked hard on a legitimate enterprise for years.
From time to time, I will hear someone on the news cautioning participants in a conversation that they are saying things in support of “class warfare.” Inevitably, that shuts the conversation even quicker than calling someone a racist (or trotting out some stomach-churning childishness like references to ‘the N word”) . Apparently any notion that doesn’t glorify socioeconomic stratification in our society is denigrated as “class warfare”, and all parties go scurrying for cover.
With all the grousing and grumbling I do here, I thought I’d change my tone and write up a genuinely positive, optimistic post. This has to do with an element of what I think will be a tectonic shift over the next twenty years: transportation.
As dull as that sounds, I think the changes that take place in how we get people (or cargo) from point “A” to point “B” are going to be more profound that Amazon, Facebook, and the iPhone put together. My insight, if you want to be generous enough to call it that, is spawned from a couple of (as is typical for me – – negative) observations I make on a periodic basis.
