Startup Castle, about which I wrote earlier this month, is barely out of the gate, and the unvarnished reality is already starting to leak out. Regardez vous:
You can look are more specifics here. Suffice it to say, I have chosen to remain here in Palo Alto with my family.
It’s easy to become intellectually intimidated where I live. Yesterday, I was at Philz Coffee, which was crowded, as always. I don’t make a habit of reading other people’s laptops, but as I was looking for a place to sit down (a task at which I failed), I noticed the contents of several screens. They were populated with dense computer code, complex mathematical formulas, and other stuff that I don’t have sufficient grey matter to comprehend. I felt quite diminished.
Having been involved with high-tech since 1979, and having lived in Palo Alto since 1984, I have some acquaintance with the psyche of the Silicon Valley. It has long been a very imitative place, in spite of its frequent self-praise with respect to innovation and “outside the box” thinking (the phrase itself being quite cliche and, itself, very inside-the-box).
My little town of Palo Alto has only one daily paper: the Palo Alto Daily Post. It’s free, and it’s a bit of an obsession of mine. I normally can’t stand local papers (I stopped my subscription to the San Jose Mercury News and the SF Chronicle in 1990), but the Post is special (and the free price helps). As you might guess, literally about 60% of the space these days is real estate ads.
Well, with 73 short positions on, constituting a seven figure portfolio, and ending the day virtually unchanged, I am hardly inspired to wax poetic about the “market” right now. I’ll leave you with this curiosity, however: while taking one of my dogs on a long walk to Whole Foods this afternoon, I passed this brand new sign, recently erected by the good people of the municipality of Palo Alto:
