![]() Of course, that “like” sign might not make everyone happy. New Facebook employee Nicole Voulgaropoulos and her mom, Sheryl Green-Voulgaropoulos, pose in front of Facebook’s thumbs-up sign in Menlo Park as Mel Voulgaropoulos, her father, photographs them. Facebook doesn’t offer tours, nor do most tech companies. I point visitors to the Facebook thumbs-up “like” sign, next to the company’s expanding headquarters. Dazzling at the center are the waters of San Francisco Bay, indifferent to the roar of the traffic clogging the roads or the latest breakthrough from Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX. There’s no Hollywood-like sign in the hills announcing Tech Town! With low mountain ranges to the east and west, Silicon Valley is a horseshoe-shaped flatland of offices and neighborhoods. “Where is Silicon Valley?” out-of-towners ask me when they visit. “I think we have a responsibility to all those places that are being impacted.” Everyone has a dream But those transitions can definitely be hard,” she says. “The reality of Silicon Valley is on the right side of history-whether we like it or not, the world has changed. “We are surrounded by people who are dreaming big,” says Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of 23andMe, the personal-genomics and biotechnology firm. Technology rules the future, but there’s also a grudging acknowledgment that sometimes in the pursuit of making things better and more efficient, you may be hurting people along the way. And around the world in places such as Bolivia, mining the lithium needed to power the devices Silicon Valley invents is raising concerns about exploitation and the environment. Even some workers with six-figure incomes have trouble affording housing. ![]() Silicon Valley knows it is being held accountable for everything: the demographics of its workforce, the industries upended and the pain caused by technology, the hate spread faster because of its social networks, and even the effects of innovation on people here. Responsibility and empathy are the new buzzwords. But recently there’s been a sobering-up of sorts. Silicon Valley’s optimism and the pragmatic dreamers who keep it going have long fascinated me. The entrepreneurs pitching on this Demo Day paint a picture of lives made better by artificial intelligence, augmented reality, robots, drones, and sensors everywhere. Silicon Valley is a place that is always “fleeing into the future,” says Paul Saffo, a longtime Silicon Valley observer. His firm helps entrepreneurs develop their ideas. “Your job is to figure out which one it is,” he says. On average there’s a future billion-dollar company in every group, Michael Seibel, CEO and partner at Y Combinator, tells the Silicon Valley investors. A laundry-detergent subscription service aimed at men. Radar sensors on bedroom ceilings in nursing homes. Turns out, there are countless ways to do that. Over the next two days, entrepreneurs from 132 start-ups pitch well-rehearsed two-minute spiels about how they are going to change the world. The boisterous crowd files quickly into the auditorium and becomes quiet. A bell chimes, and it begins to feel like church. “How’s my investment going?” one shouts to another across the room. A sea of mostly men gathers in the lobby of the Computer History Museum, some giving each other quick hugs. Teslas jockey for one of 12 electric-vehicle charging stations in the parking lot. This story appears in the February 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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