Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: or How Silicon Valley Got Its Groove Back November 9, 2006

A talk by David Weekly at PenLUG.

To some, the bubble in Silicon Valley feels a little bit like a terrifying repeat of the dot-communism of the late 90's. But in reality the Valley is more closely mirroring its roots of the 70's with more garage hackery and late-night codeathons than blowout parties and IPOs. The tools for building useful products have become so cheap and easy that people are running services for hundreds of thousands of users as hobbies. Lower costs mean less capital requirements; a boon for smaller investors and a bane for VCs. Steep Sarbanes-Oxley requirements and a skittish public market have dried up IPOs for early liquidity events and the relatively small number of large acquirers mean that most of the "easy exit" money is gone. At the same time, increasing customer sophistication and the proliferation of payment solutions make it easier than ever to drive revenues from customers and build a real business. These trends represent steps towards a healthy and sustainable ecosystem of hackery in Silicon Valley, leveraging college students, Open Source, and low-cost hosting to blitz the Internet with an astounding array of low-cost, high-impact ideas.

David Weekly is the founder and CEO of PBwiki, the world's largest wiki host, with over 120,000 groups on board. He graduated as a President Scholar from Stanford in 2000 with a BS in Computer Science and has worked for such institutions as Harvard Physics, MIT Lincoln Labs, Stanford Graphics, atWeb, Legato, and There.com. David wrote the first layman's level description of MP3 in early 1997, reverse engineered the Napster protocol in an evening, and was a finalist in the ACM International Programming Competition. David lives in a Hillsborough mansion with five others and throws periodic all-night hackathons called SuperHappyDevHouse? there. He is also the Executive Director of the non-profit Online Policy Group, which provides free, donation-supported colocation services to other non-profits.

Free Stuff & Discounts

We will be having a door prize drawing to give away free stuff at the meeting, such as books and T-shirts. Plus all PenLUG members can receive a 30% off discount code from O'Reilly!

Free books are supplied by O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall, and/or Apress (while supplies last). If you win one, please add your book reviews to our LinuxBookReviews page.

If your company would like to contribute free or discount stuff to give out at PenLUG meetings, please mail [email protected] to let us know.

Official Website: http://www.penlug.org/twiki/bin/view/Home/MeetingAgenda20061109