During the Vivatech trade show, Inria organized a workshop on the topic “Deeptech: Are we ready to scale?”

The discussions were rich, in-depth, and fascinating. I’m obviously biased since I was a co-organizer, but I’ve rarely had such a pleasure discussing the topic. So, I’ll provide a subjective summary, adding my own comments on various topics that are dear to my heart. [They will be in brackets and italics.]

What is Deeptech?

This was the starting point for Théau Peronnin, founder and CEO of Alice & Bob. “Above all, it’s a technology that has two fundamental attributes: the first is it has very deep roots in science. If you can understand this technology straight out of business school, it’s perhaps because it’s not quite deeptech yet. […] Its second attribute is the ability to create companies, players, or products that will have a strategic impact on the economy.”

[During another roundtable, I heard that the term appeared when the internet, B2B/B2C, and SaaS had diluted the technology into the excesses of “pet.com”, but that fundamentally, the high-tech of the 1980s and the deeptech of the 2010s are two sides of the same coin. I would add that if something is patentable, it’s undoubtedly deeptech.]

Théau Peronnin then gave his perspective on the challenges facing the French ecosystem. “I can tell you very simply: in France, we are extremely strong on the initial opportunity, we have incredible talent. We are still tied for first place in the number of Fields medals with the Americans, even though we are five times fewer in number.” […] “And then we have an early-stage venture capital ecosystem that has managed to establish itself in recent years, perhaps even a little too much; we could finally say that it is slightly saturated.” […] “The weaknesses are really in the later stages of a deeptech’s life. We have a subject that is perfectly known but which is far from being cracked, which is that of financing the so-called growth stages, this moment when companies like Alice and Bob will seek to raise capital of several tens of millions of euros, several hundreds of millions of euros to continue this R&D race at the international level.” [This is a subject that will be addressed later and I am not sure that it is the main subject, but the debate undoubtedly exists. See below!] “There are no suitable European players, which creates an anticipation effect across the entire value chain and there is a certain reluctance among funds to really deploy this capital with intensity and audacity in deeptech.” […] “Silicon Valley takes its name from the deeptech of the 70s, 80s, 90s in silicon, which created generations of fortunes of individuals with a very strong appetite for this deeptech and who therefore subsequently directed their capital towards these investment funds which continue to invest in this field. In Europe, there are no such fortunes, they were made elsewhere, they are in other fields and therefore we do not yet have these good products, hence the important role of the State in priming the pump.”

“One last point to introduce the round table on the human factor, which is the relationship to risk-taking. France has a school in any case, a view of studies and the academic world very focused on excellence which is perhaps the downside, or rather the cliché, of saying that we have a certain fear of failure and this is seen in my opinion in certain systems which deserve to be rethought, notably that of the Pacte law for the part-time activity of researchers and there it is a very personal opinion that I wish to share with you which is that of saying that there is no entrepreneurship without risk-taking. You have to get your hands dirty, you have to put your career on the line somewhere, you have to have “skin in the game” as the Anglo-Saxons say and perhaps in this system there is therefore in this part-time activity, a comfort in knowing that you are still well protected within your research organization while trying to enjoy the pleasure of entrepreneurship. In my opinion, we have to go all out and that means being able to come back to the academic world after a startup failure and so perhaps the lever to allow more audacity is to make the academic world more attractive for profiles with hybrid careers that have gone through the world of entrepreneurship. That’s to launch this round table on the theme of the human factor, these men and women who are making the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.”

Deeptech is, above all, about bipeds!

Théau Peronnin returned to the subject of humans through a real problem: “A very difficult issue we have is that of parity, gender diversity, which is horribly difficult to crack because we arrive at the very end of the food chain for training these profiles. Above all, technical profiles, a lot of self-centeredness regarding the fact of going through the Grandes Ecoles with all the sociocultural bias there is in these Grandes Ecoles, and even with international diversity, we must have between 20 and 30 nationalities, 30% of non-French speakers in the team, so this gives you a little demography.”

Xavier Duportet amplifies this human aspect: “We have people who are a little crazy because to get started in deeptech [where] less than 2% of projects reach a mature product on the market […] to get started you have to be a little crazy, you have to be naive too, I think, and you have to think that what is impossible can become possible. There are lots of things we don’t know and so the unknown is part of our daily work.” […] “The most important thing for us is not necessarily experience, it’s above all curiosity and that people are enterprising because in deeptech you can’t just apply the principles, apply the things you’ve already learned, you always have to be ready to face failure almost every day and so you need people who are willing to question themselves and who deep down are truly enterprising people.”

Jean-Michel Dalle: “There are motivated bipeds who come to talk to us about the microbiome, or motivated bipeds who come to talk to us about quantum computers. Anyone who doesn’t see things from that perspective, that is, from the bipeds’ perspective, is missing something. Of course, we’re going to check that the quantum computer project isn’t just anything, that they didn’t invent it on a Sunday morning after the market. But if we don’t look at it through the eyes of the founders, in my opinion, we need to change careers.”

Théau Peronnin: “The real issue is that the researcher’s passion is to understand, but the problem with that is that we reap the rewards of the pleasure of our work very early in the product’s life. I understood what I had to break to bring this machine to market, but unfortunately, we only did 5 or 10% of the work to truly deliver the system.” Behind this, we need to strengthen, produce, distribute, reposition. There is a whole issue: how do we learn to take pleasure not in having understood but in making the other person understand, but even more than that, in making the other person adopt what we have cracked, and that is a muscle to develop which is quite different.

Xavier Duportet: “It’s not a technology, it’s not a science that’s going to change the world or save the world, but a product, and that’s often where it falls short. We still see a lot of researchers who only think about science, only technology, and who can’t make the switch in their minds, saying, ‘How come I’m not selling my science, but I’m making people dream, I’m making these serious people [investors] dream, that I’m going to be able to be that person who will transform science into a product that will generate added value for society, but above all, for investors.'”

Marie Paindavoine: “I was lucky at the beginning to be supported in entrepreneurship by structures from the academic world, first by INRIA and then by the University of Berkeley in the United States, which has an acceleration program, and it’s true that thanks to them, it allowed me to learn how to transform this scientific discourse into an entrepreneurial discourse; and moreover, at the acceleration program at the University of Berkeley, for six months, we just repeat the company pitch and learn how to convince, in fact, because ultimately, and they tell us, ultimately, you’ve done the hardest part, you have great technology, you’ve managed to write a thesis in cryptography, well, you’ve done the hardest part, Marie, now learning marketing will take you two months, but you have to get down to it for two months, and that’s where we need to surround ourselves, to have this ecosystem that allows people to train because, after all, if we’ve managed to do a doctorate, we’re able to continue to train in the profession of entrepreneurship, but we need to find those people who can see not the value of scientific technology as it can be presented today, but a sort of projected value of this technology.”

Xavier Duportet: “On people and the network and the ecosystem, I also had the chance to do a thesis between INRIA and MIT. At first I wanted to be a researcher and when I arrived at MIT, I saw all these people who were starting up, these professors who were becoming entrepreneurs, that’s when I understood I was inspired by this generation of entrepreneurial researchers saying to myself but in fact if we really want to change the world it’s not research it’s entrepreneurship and today in the US, there is Silicon Valley, it was created 20 years ago, 30 years ago as Théau said there is this whole generation now, not grandpas but slightly older people who have succeeded and so in fact there is a “network effect” in the US which is super important, it’s the generation of entrepreneurs who have already succeeded who are there to help and pass on they did it they made mistakes and they really serve as mentors and that’s where we have a pretty interesting opportunity, and in France we can’t want to put the cart before the horse, we have what the BPI has done, all the research institutes, the change that has been underway for 10 years, we are starting to have these companies which are becoming leaders on the international level.”

Matthias Schmitz: “What we have started to do recently is to invest in an entrepreneurial mindset much earlier in the education of our students so we are trying to roll out programs where we bring entrepreneurship into all the faculties. For example, the university of Saarland is investing €1.5M every year with the goal that every single student that we have, whether it is a business student, whether it is a Romanistic student or an engineering student has at least one time during his studies thought whether entrepreneurship can be a career option for himself and by doing that I think we try to solve the problem a little bit earlier, bring the mindset in the heads of the people and not having to have people jump into the too cold water at the moment where they are already at the PhD level.”

Marie Paindavoine on being a female entrepreneur: “do you want the version we hear in France or the United States? both! So we don’t hear the same thing in France and in the United States. In France, I was immediately asked if I intended to partner with “un” CEO, emphasizing the “un”. I was already asked after my presentation, well, anyway, I’m not going to do them all actually because it’s of no interest, but there is indeed a halo of suspicion, let’s put it like that. In the United States, then I’m not saying that they are better than in France because I arrived at the University of Berkeley, at the University of Berkeley accelerator, 2,000 applications, 30 start-ups selected, 2 women CEOs, so they are not much better. On the other hand, once we reach this level of selection, when I say I’m starting a business with children, people tend to congratulate me on the level of energy it requires instead of asking me how I’m going to arrange childcare and if my husband agrees with me starting a business with my children, something I’ve already been asked in France.

I’ll stop here and do a new post about the second roundtable!

Excellent issue of FUTU&R, the magazine by Usbek & Rica, which main feature is entitled Silicon Valley, Chronicle of a Collapse. It’s not a good time to be a fan of the region these days. If you follow my blog, you’ve seen my struggles to understand what’s going on there. This issue contributes to this, and you’ll discover dubious characters like Curtis Yarvin, Balaji Srinivasan, Palmer Lucky, in addition to the famous Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and even Larry Ellison. The issue is a bit biased, but that’s the name of the game, since the magazine “imagines how the Tech Eldorado could collapse.”

The magazine had the good idea to add the informed opinion of Olivier Alexandre, often mentioned on this blog, notably as the author of La Tech. I scanned the contributions in low resolution and I hope the magazine will forgive me for this breach of copyright. I obviously encourage you to buy a copy!

I will just comment on what Olivier Alexandre says and I will end this post by discussing a related subject through a fairly recent scientific article, The Role of Universities in Shaping the Evolution of Silicon Valley’s Ecosystem of Innovation (pdf)

“Are we witnessing the collapse of Silicon Valley? What is certain is that it is at a crossroads. Historically, tech has thought of itself as a solutions industry, except that its solutions are now our problems. […] It is clear that we no longer hear dissenting voices. There have always been debates in the Valley, but the tech supremacist fringe, to which Trump supporters like Peter Thiel and David Sacks belong, was a minority, drowned in the mass. […] Steve Jobs and software entrepreneurs have been made stars and the history of Silicon Valley has been reduced to the success of a hippie counterculture, when it is above all a story of transistors, microprocessors, and engineers with perfectly standardized lives.”

Indeed, the region was a republic of engineers, with back-and-forths between fierce competition in a global world and deregulation and occasional isolationism allowing monopolies. In the 1980s, the threat was Japan, and the semiconductor industry had appealed to the Federal State for its survival (after having benefited from the flow of public money at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s.) I recently spoke of my difficulty in finding dissenting voices too.

“In 2022, the situation changed and Big Tech started laying off employees. Since then, they’ve been cutting 5% of their payroll every year.”

On this point, I slightly disagree with the observation. In 2009 and 2013, for example, Google also reduced its workforce by 5%. I had heard that Cisco was shedding 5% of its “lowest-performing” workforce each year. The region was so dynamic that it was rarely discussed. Working conditions have always been “harsh and demanding.” A world of engineers, no doubt. It brought us computers and smartphones, the internet, and therefore opportunities to behave differently. It also contributed to creating immense biases because, without a doubt, the use of science and technology is never completely neutral.

“The question being asked of the world is the link between new technologies, innovation, and progress, which are three very different notions. Historically, innovations that have had a lasting impact are few: watches, eyeglasses, jeans… However, today, Silicon Valley mostly creates very ephemeral innovations.”

Tom Kleiner went further, mentioning the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, and finally the transistor as innovations that changed civilization. This is undoubtedly close to reality.

And Olivier Alexandre adds a beautiful question: “The products offered are essentially based on the promise of saving us time. But what do we lose when we save time?”

And he concludes (provisionally): “Dubai is one of the rare places that has managed to make the future sexy, an optimistic vision of the future: rain without clouds, islands without land, snow without mountains. But above all, technological progress without democracy. All this in a vulnerable area where the questions of resources, food, and housing have always arisen. In a way, Europe embodies the opposite: democracy, sometimes at the cost of technological progress.”

This isn’t the first time that the future of Silicon Valley has looked bleak. For example, you can find AnnaLee Saxenian’s predictions in a post titled Is Silicon Valley crazy (again)?: “In 1979, I was a graduate student at Berkeley and I was one of the first scholars to study Silicon Valley. I culminated my master’s program by writing a thesis in which I confidently predicted that Silicon Valley would stop growing. I argued that housing and labor were too expensive and the roads were too congested, and while corporate headquarters and research might remain, I was convinced that the region had reached its physical limits and that innovation and job growth would occur elsewhere during the 1980s. As it turns out I was wrong.”

There’s no doubt the region is at a new crossroads! But I’m not finished yet, see below.

I promised above to talk about a scientific article dating from 2020. I found its conclusion interesting even if overall the content well-known. So I copy paste :

Silicon Valley—a Metaphor in search of a Structure?

Silicon Valley is a metaphor for a region that lacks a viable governmental structure. It is at the stage of New York, before its 1989 consolidation into a unified city. With the notable exception of the ecology of the Bay, a downside has emerged, a public-private imbalance revealing gaps in housing and transportation Spread across multitudinous counties, towns and cities, Silicon Valley lacks sufficient governance capabilities to address the negative consequences of its overweening success.
An additional imbalance in academic capacities is, in part, a consequence of a more than half century old master plan strictly segmenting the public academic sphere that has limited individual institutional advancement. This gap has been partly redressed by establishment of branch campuses by universities in other parts of the country, like Carnegie Mellon and the Wharton School that ironically treat the region as an under-developed area, at least in its academic capabilities. Moreover, state government funding for public universities
has declined drastically, from providing 40% of Berkeley’s budget in the 1980’s to 14% percent at present. This gap is being redressed by a massive fund-raising campaign that expects to raise 6 billion dollars and increase the universities tenure track positions in coming years.
Re-balancing the Triple Helix will also require increased interaction among the spheres, a phenomenon that has declined in recent decades, placing the long-term innovation and carrying-capacity of the region at risk. The innovative and sustainable economic development of Silicon Valley not only depends on the presence of strong universities, but on how they interact and overlap roles with the other agents of the Triple Helix model, looking for mutually strategic objectives and identifying cross-cutting issues which none of them can adequately deal individually. Interactions between university, industry and government in a highly dynamic and volatile environment, represent a unique opportunity to recover from economic downturn, create new jobs, and promote a prolific, inclusive and economically sustainable development of regions in the long run.

In recent weeks or months, I have been discovering with amazement or embarrassment that many people in Silicon Valley have apparently turned their backs to support Trump’s policies in the United States. It’s quite impressive, even if it’s not as impressive as we think. I already addressed the topic in July 2024, at a time when I believed Kamala Harris would be elected president. It was titled Politics and Silicon Valley. And I indeed discovered that former Democrat “sympathizers” were turning to Republicans such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, or Marc Andreessen. Worse, it seems that even Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google) or Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) were going in the same direction. After all, in Europe, we are never shocked that a boss is right-wing and the least favored are left-wing. Again, you can reread my post on the subject. In reality, Silicon Valley is so Democrat in its voting that it was perhaps difficult to position oneself otherwise, and today, people position themselves more openly. Votes are also evolving as illustrated here.

So I asked myself the question: who is opposing Trump today in tech and Silicon Valley?

I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were figures like Bill Gates and Michael Moritz:

– Bill Gates is a moderate and not active politically. But I quote him from Bill Gates says he’s surprised about his fellow billionaires’ rightward political shift: ‘I always thought of Silicon Valley as being left of center’ : “The fact that now there is a significant right-of-center group is a surprise to me.” while “incredible things happened because of sharing information on the internet,” social media has had major downfalls. “You see ills that I have to say I did not predict,” While Gates is by no means an open Trump supporter, he said he’d do his best to work with the president. “I will engage this administration just like I did the first Trump administration as best I can,” Gates told the NYT.

– Michael Moritz is less well known, but given that he funded Google, Yahoo!, PayPal, Apple, Cisco, and YouTube, we can appreciate what he has to say in Trump’s tech backers are ‘making a big mistake,’ Trump’s tech financiers and supporters were “making the same mistake as all powerful people who back authoritarians.” He wrote that wealthy financiers believe “they will be able to control Trump,” or else are committing “another cardinal error: deluding themselves that he will not do what he says or promises.” “That has not been the modus operandi of authoritarians over the centuries,”

Paul Graham, whom I respect, wrote an article on wokeness that deserves careful reading, but it’s not really an opposition to Trump; rather, it seeks to explain a movement. Please read The Origins of Wokeness. For example I’m not going to claim Trump’s second victory in 2024 was a referendum on wokeness; I think he won, as presidential candidates always do, because he was more charismatic; but voters’ disgust with wokeness must have helped. And “Trump and wokeness are cousins”.

Steve Blank is rather silent but I discovered that in 2020, that he resigned from a Department of Defense advisory board, protesting the Trump administration’s decision to oust most of his fellow board members and replace some of them with political loyalists with no defense or business experience. See here.

Who else? I’ve searched a bit in vain. My “heroes” are rather silent, but they always have been, so what can I conclude? Hopefully, some will wake up and dare to oppose them, whatever the cost…

PS: I found a little more, for example, Larry Page: “I intend to tell the president that we are with him and that we will help him in any way we can. If you can reform the tax code, reduce regulations and negotiate better trade agreements, the US technology industry will be stronger and more competitive than ever3, he would be quoted as saying by Andoidsis.

Roger McNamme is another investor: Well, everything about Trump seems like a payback, right? All these executives are giving a million dollars each. These are rounding spreads. This is money they find between the cushions of their living room couch. But, you know, this is essentially a precautionary payment. And in Musk’s case, the investment he made in Trump, which was a quarter of a billion dollars, or the investment he made in Twitter, which was about $44 billion, has paid off, obviously, many, many times over. I think Trump and Musk will eventually part ways. I don’t know Trump at all, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would support someone who competes on the same level as Musk. But we’ll see how it goes. See here.

And of course, yes, there is Reid Hoffman, the founder of Linkedin, “one of the tech bosses most fiercely opposed to Donald Trump and Elon Musk“. See here or there or again là.

PS2: April 15, 2025. On the day Harvard University rejects Donald Trump’s requests, I just read a few marvelous pages from the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Here they are:

There came a day when Herr Settembrini directly confronted his pupil, and so betrayed his own pedagogic uneasiness. “But in God’s name, my good engineer, he is just a stupid old man. What do you see in him? Can he do anything for you? It is beyond all reason. It would be clear enough — though not necessarily praiseworthy—if you were simply taking him into the bargain, if in seeking out his company you were seeking out that of his current sweetheart. But it is impossible not to notice that you pay almost more attention to him than to her. I implore you, help me understand this.”
Hans Castorp laughed. “By all means,” he said. “Agreed! The fact is, as we know—permit me to say—fine!” And he tried to ape Peeperkorn’s cultured gestures as well. “Yes, yes,” he said, and laughed again. “You find that stupid, Herr Settembrini, and certainly it is vague, which in your eyes is worse than stupid. Ah, stupidity. There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst. Hello! Why, I think I’ve just coined a phrase, a bon mot. How do you like it?”
“Very much. I cannot wait for your first collection of aphorisms. Perhaps there is still time, however, to ask you to take into account certain observations we have occasionally made concerning the misanthropic nature of paradoxes.”
“It shall be done, Herr Settembrini. Absolutely—shall be done. No, in this bon mot of mine, you do not see me in hot pursuit of paradoxes. I was merely trying to point out the great difficulty one has in defining ‘stupidity’ and ‘cleverness.’ It is so hard to keep them separate, they are so intertwined. I know very well how you hate any sort of mystical guazzabuglio and are a man who believes in values and judgments—value judgments—and I quite agree with you. But the issue of ‘stupidity’ and ‘cleverness’ is at times a complete mystery, and it must be permissible to concern oneself with mysteries, always presuming it is an honest attempt to get to the bottom of them, if possible. Let me ask you this question: Can you deny that he has us all in his pocket? I’m putting it crudely, and yet, as nearly as I can tell, you cannot deny it. He puts us in his pocket, and somehow or other he has the right to make fun of us all. But why? And how? And where does it come from? It is certainly not a matter of his cleverness. One can hardly speak of cleverness in this case, I admit. He is much more a man of fuzziness and feelings, feelings are his cup of tea, so to speak—if you’ll forgive me the colloquial phrase. What I am saying is this: it is not by way of cleverness that he puts us in his pocket, not through intellectual prowess. You wouldn’t stand for that. And it really is out of the question. But surely it is not physical prowess, either! It cannot be because of his broad captain’s shoulders, or any raw brute force, or because he could lay any one of us flat with his fist—it would never occur to him that he could, and if it did, why, a few civilized words would calm him down. And so it’s not physical, either. And yet the physical dimension does play a role, without a doubt—not in the sense of brute strength, but in another, more mystical sense—the moment anything physical plays a role, things always get mystical. And the physical merges into the intellectual, and vice versa, and cannot be differentiated, and stupidity and cleverness cannot be differentiated. But the effect is there, the dynamic effect, and we find ourselves stuck in his pocket. And for that we have only one word at hand, and that word is ‘personality.’ We use the word in another, perfectly reasonable sense, too: we are all personalities—moral and legal and all those other sorts of personalities. But that is not what I mean. I’m talking about a mystery that extends beyond stupidity and cleverness, and that is what we need to concern ourselves with—partly to get to the bottom of it, if possible, and partly, to the extent that it is not possible, to edify ourselves. And if you are for values, then, in the end, personality is a positive value, too, I should think—a more positive value than stupidity or cleverness, positive in the highest degree, absolutely positive, like life itself—in short, a value for life and in that sense suitable for our earnest consideration. And that’s how I thought I should respond to what you said about stupidity.”
Herr Settembrini let silence reign. Then he said, “You deny that you are in hot pursuit of paradoxes. By now you should know that I have an equal dislike of seeing you in hot pursuit of mysteries. By turning personality into an enigma, you run the danger of idol-worship. You are venerating a mask. You see something mystical where there is only mystification, one of those hollow counterfeits with which the demon of corporeal physiognomy enjoys taunting us on occasion. You have never spent any time in theatrical circles, have you? So you do not know those thespian faces that can embody the features of a Julius Caesar, a Goethe, and a Beethoven all in one, but whose owners, the moment they open their mouths, prove to be the most miserable ninnies under the sun.”
“Fine, a freak of nature,” Hans Castorp said. “And yet not just a freak, not just something to taunt us. For people to be actors, they must have talent, and talent is something that goes beyond stupidity and cleverness, it is itself a value for life. Mynheer Peeperkorn has talent, too, no matter what you may say, and he uses it to put us in his pocket. Set Herr Naphta in the corner of a room and have him deliver a lecture on Gregory the Great and the City of God, something well worth listening to — and in the other corner have Peeperkorn stand there with his strange mouth and a brow raised in great creases and say nothing except, ‘By all means! Permit me to say—settled!’ And you will see people gather around Peeperkorn, down to the last man, and Naphta will be left sitting there alone with his cleverness and his City of God, although he can express himself so clearly that it makes your blood and spit run cold, to use one of Behrens’s phrases.”
“You should be ashamed of yourself, worshiping success like that,” Herr Settembrini chided him. “Mundus vult decipi. I do not demand that people flock around Herr Naphta. He is a dreadful obstructionist. But I would be inclined to stand at his side in the imaginary scene you have just painted with such reprehensible relish. Go ahead and despise distinctions, precision, logic, the coherence of the human word. Go ahead and despise it in favor of some sort of hocus-pocus of insinuation and emotional charlatanry—and the Devil will definitely have you in his—”

In my previous post, I mentioned this anthology of articles compiled by Loup Cellard and Guillaume Heuguet. Consisting of six articles (5 of which are translated) and a long introduction by the authors, it is a most interesting dive into what this region represents from a historical and political point of view.

So here is what I noted:

– the authors restrain the influence of the counterculture in the origins of Silicon Valley. “The economic power and the culture of technical innovation of the region far precede the hippie movement.” [page 18] then “government contracts or the existence of a surplus of capital should probably be given as much importance as utopian imaginaries” [page 19].

– The authors go further regarding the ideological inclinations of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. I have already expressed a certain skepticism on the subject but the debate remains interesting. The authors mention another book on this subject that I am not familiar with, Une histoire politique de la Silicon Valley (A Political History of Silicon Valley) by Fabien Benoit. I do not believe that the following statement is correct: “Stanford University, which specializes in hard sciences, has the particularity of not claiming intellectual property rights on patents developed within its walls.” [Page 19] The subject is well-known (see here) and I am surprised by such a statement. Mariana Mazzucato is also called to the rescue of the arguments and if I have also expressed strong nuances there, one can hardly doubt the influence of Fred Terman, HP and MIT well before the emergence of the counterculture.

– In the same introduction, Bill Gates’ open letter to the Hobbyists of the Homebrew Computer Club is mentioned.

This introduction by the authors is fascinating and we have once again the confirmation of the complexity of the genesis of the region where hippies like Wozniak and engineers like Noyce often collaborated with the greatest respect. (See again this article for the curious, The tinkerings of Robert Noyce)

– The articles about design are surprising given how fashionable the subject has been (and had so far left me circumspect and silent). Fred Turner’s chapter Such Old Promises is an interesting analysis of the links between prototyping and Protestant puritanism! Ruha Benjamin’s article, translated as Le design est complice (Design is an Accomplice) goes much further. I take away the following strong statements: “Design Thinking is Bullh*t” and the author “urges practitioners to avoid jargon and trendy buzzwords and to engage more in self-criticism: what are the theoretical and practical effects of using the language of design to describe all our hopes, dreams, critiques and visions of change? What is gained and by whom in the process of associating such heterogeneous things under the rubric of design? […] I think one of the reasons it reigns is that it has managed to fold everything and anything under its agile wings”.

– The authors are very critical of some of the region’s personalities that they associate with the ancient world. Charlie Tyson’s Reactionaries invest (Les réactionnaires investissent) is an interesting analysis of Peter Thiel who would like to present himself as an intellectual. And the conclusion is: “The man himself remains a mystery […] who offers us the spectacle of a brilliant mind housed in a deformed personality, a man who has transformed his armchair philosophy into an imposed vision of the world”. The following chapter, Capital risks nothing (Le Capital ne risque rien( by Fabien Foureault is a fairly correct description of the history of venture capital. The only criticism I would make is that the transition from American roots to the history of the activity in France somewhat forgets the risks taken by the pioneers in the 60s and 70s. The criticism of venture capital remains well argued as follows: on three major criteria, VC is criticized:
+ a dysfunctional character that prevents stability through boom and burst cycles
+ a lack of social utility by moving towards short-term profitability that forgets the fundamental issues (climate, affordable health)
+ an unprofitable activity, at best with a low return of 8% in the long term. I discovered a researcher, Ludovic Phalippou, very critical of Private Equity in general which lack of transparency leads to undoubtedly very overestimated performances. I encourage you to read How Ludovic Phalippou Became the Bête Noire of Private Equity. The post-sciptum will undoubtedly make smile fans and connoisseurs of French venture capital…

– What can I say about the last two chapters? They are simply fascinating. First of all, Optimization Replaces Progress by Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell. I had the intuition that optimization, a subject that is dear to me since it was at the heart of my doctoral thesis, was reaching the limits of progress. We no longer seek the best, but to be smart, intelligent, whether it be the city, mobility, education or war. The best being inaccessible, we simply seek to do better, and often while minimizing resources and costs… and to be resilient, which the authors describe as the ability not to be robust in a stable system, but to survive and win in an uncertain and unbalanced system. Disruption is not far away. The chapter’s conclusion may seem scary: “Instead of seeking utopian answers to our questions about the future, we focus on quantitative and algorithmic methods and logistics: how to move things from point A to point B, rather than asking where they should end up (or whether they should even be there)” [page 129].

– The last chapter is called Apocalypse Replaces Utopia by Dave Karpf. It is about long-termism. “The moral value of human life today is no different from that of potential post-humans who might come into existence in the distant future. From this premise, they come to fantastical and counterintuitive conclusions. They claim that economic growth, technological progress, and the prevention of existential risks, i.e. risks that could wipe out humanity (asteroid strikes, deadly super viruses, hostile artificial intelligence, etc.) matter most to humanity. Improving the situation of humanity today by addressing systemic inequalities, curing cancer, and preventing malaria are lesser initiatives. Today’s humans are merely the precursors of a post-human future scattered across space.” The promoters of such ideas are known and the author speaks of the Californian Ideology. I would like to think that they are only in the heads of a few deformed minds. The author concludes: “We should therefore recognize long-termism as a pernicious movement of thought. It is a philosophy that says we should not concern ourselves with the fate, dignity or injustices suffered by people living today, because these people do not matter more than those who will live millennia from now. […] It is a recipe that too easily excuses cruelty, suffering and social harm.

So this is a fascinating little book, which does not describe Silicon Valley, but through its roots and wings, some of its most astonishing excesses. And as I said in my previous post, this does not necessarily represent the majority, but at least a minority, perhaps tiny but undoubtedly very and too visible.

PS: for those who are not interested in long analyses, here is a rather funny video