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Balaji Srinivasan at Startup School 2013

Y Combinator · 182.3K views · 2013-10-25 · 16:30

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Overview

Balaji Srinivasan's Startup School 2013 talk on Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit, arguing for building alternatives outside existing institutions. It is the primary source for a much-retold and much-distorted idea.

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HN commenters link it as the original talk so people can judge it directly instead of through press retellings.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2013–2020

Topics

Startups & entrepreneurshipFuturism & technology and society
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balaji srinivasanstartup schoolexittechnology and politics

What people said

digitalwaveride · 2014-12 · Recommendation

There are companies like teleport [LINK] that try to visualise this potential with data. Also recommend this YCombinator startup school talk by Balaji Srinivasan on this topic: Silicon Valleys Ultimate Exit [VIDEO]

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blueyes · 2020-07 · Criticism

How does this post address network effects in the age of aggregation? Who has sufficient incentive to tie all those disparate blogs and newsletters together? Balaji likes to talk about exit plans. See this speech at YC startup school: [VIDEO] In general, they strike me as deeply unrealistic.

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internaut · 2016-11 · Reference

Appreciate your analysis defgeneric, though we probably don't see eye to eye. In my view what you're calling Thiel's anti-political phrases are important. I know you see them as the spread of virus-capitalism, but I think without that kind of frontier building the world would be a much more boring place. I take it you're familiar with Patri Friedman's thesis. What did you think then of Balaji Srinivasan's Exit Ycombinator talk? [VIDEO] I know presently the anti-Trumpists are getting a lot of airtime with their talk of secession, but to be honest there is something much deeper beyond the current election fallout which is worth looking at. From a right perspective I have been wondering for a long time whether Silicon Valley's interests are ultimately orthogonal to Washington but appear to be similar in the present because they're competing for the same thing. This is a strand of Rene Girard's philosophy, which Thiel is a big fan of (he knew Rene at Stanford I think), many of his ideas revolve around ideas of mimesis and scapegoating. Interestingly; he had a Girardian rationale for investing in Facebook. Never say reading philosophy doesn't pay off! I would love to have a photo of his library. John Strange is very wrong about Thiel's activities being random. I was asked to write essay on Medium which I called "Peter and the Wolfe", which was an attempt to explain the deeper undercurrents around some of his recent decisions. The main content of it was written before Trump got int

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Sources

Video by Y Combinator, played through YouTube.

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