Eric Schmidt: evaluation

Transcript context

…Silicon Valley has had a phenomenally successful team-building culture, and you see this in the productivity of the successful companies. Other people allege there is excessive ideological conformity within some of the largest tech companies. Is the success of team building and the ideological conformity two sides of the same coin, and if you have one, you get the other? Or do you think there’s not excessive ideological conformity? Or is ideological conformity a separate problem that can just be peeled off and solve it on its own, without breaking down the team-building culture? Do you see what I’m asking? I do. I think it’s important to remember that the tech culture is not mainstream culture. Tech people are always shocked that the rest of the country doesn’t vote with them. The average tech person, as a gross generalization, is socially liberal and fiscally conservative. If you look at the quadrants of combinations, that percentage is the smallest percentage of the demographic of the United States. It’s not the largest. If you spend all day in tech, you assume that everyone else is like you, and I suspect this is true in the other gatherings, as well. There’s this sort of selection bias where you select your friends, and you all agree with the same thing. So I think there is a uniformity in some values along the lines that I just described, with some reasonable variation among them. I don’t believe that that is necessarily a bad thing because, ultimately, teams have to work together. They have to have a common belief, and they produce amazing outcomes. The major tech companies have done very well, of course, but if we imagine some world in the future where some tech companies are at or near insolvency, and if we think maybe they have a fiduciary responsibility to sell off the information they hold on people, is that a regulatory problem we will need to address? Obviously, a successful tech company is not going to do that. They would wreck their franchise.…

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