another view -- Dan Gillmor: Quattrone clique disgraced Silicon Valley

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Dan Gillmor <dgillmor () sjmercury com>
Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2003 07:01:42 -0800
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Re: [IP] another view -- Dan Gillmor: Quattrone clique disgraced
Silicon Valley

With mutual admiration for Jonathan Weber, a reply to his note:

I never said that engineers' only motive is to make life better. But I
vehemently disagreee that there's no difference between the crowd that
captured the valley in the late 90s and the people like Hewlett and Packard.

And I don't solely blame Quattrone and his acolytes. I said he personified
the excesses, and that the villains -- the people who may have poisoned
investors' trust for a generation -- are all the insiders who profited so
sleazily at the expense of others.

Indeed I got an indirect benefit from the bubble, a higher profile and
better pay. I wonder how that's comparable to the sleazy insider dealings
we're discussing.

But I'll plead a distinct "not guilty" to pumping up the bubble. As far as I
can tell in a quick archive search, the first column I wrote questioning the
market was early 1997 -- probably too early -- and I stuck with that theme
until the end.

Dan
 
> But how could Frank Quattrone and his friends have disgraced Silicon
> Valley? They *are* Silicon Valley. Dan seems to have adopted the
> common technologists conceit that there are two Silicon Valleys, one
> composed of greedy capitalists who are only out for a buck and the
> other composed of altruistic engineers who only want to change the
> world for the better. In truth, such a split has never existed.
> Individuals may have a wide range of motivations, but certainly the
> collective culture of what we know as Silicon Valley has always been
> informed as much by money and capitalism as by technological
> excellence. The tech bubble did not happen because a few bad apples
> "disgraced" everyone else. It happened because capitalism as
> currently structured in this country (and enthusiastically supported
> by Silicon Valley) combined with technological optimism (also heavily
> promoted by Silicon Valley) created a landscape where it could
> happen. There are very few innocents in this story - I bet even Dan
> enjoyed a hefty pay hike when the bubble was in full swing - and
> while it's satisfying to blame Quattrone and his clique, it's also
> disingenuous. Given the chance, I'm sure the overwhelming majority of
> Silicon Valleyites would have acted no differently then did the
> friends of Frank.
>
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