Last week, I wrote a post titled, What Can an Overhyped Silicon Valley Juice Company Tell Us About the U.S. Economy. Here’s how I ended the piece:
Finally, and perhaps most concerning, look at a couple of the entities that helped fund Juciero to the tune of $120 million: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Alphabet Inc. (the parent company of Google). These are large, sophisticated players and they bought into this thing. From what I can tell, they were mesmerized by the fact the machine looked like and iPhone, connects to the internet, and was headquartered in San Francisco. Either that, or they knew the whole thing was a marketing scheme designed to trick morons into spending an enormous sum of money for the right to buy expensive juice packets that could probably be emptied just fine using a $20 machine.
Neither of the above conclusions is comforting. Either high-profile VCs were tricked by this ridiculous product, or they willingly went along with a what appears to be a sleazy scheme. Unfortunately, the bottom-line here seems to be that Silicon Valley is rapidly running out of ideas. That, or perhaps something far more perverse and systemic might be going on.
Tomorrow’s post will attempt to address the above question, but for now it’s safe to say that this Juicero episode bodes very poorly for the one area of the U.S. that had heretofore been one of the last remaining hubs of innovation.
If this is the state of Silicon Valley, the American economy is in even worse shape than I thought.
Today’s post should be seen as the promised followup to the piece above, and will focus on the related question increasingly pondered by a wide variety of people as relates to America’s modern day technology platform monopolies, specifically: Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Matt Stoller is a policy thinker currently focused on the concepts of monopoly and competition, something which he believes is an under appreciated factor in the current sluggish, rent-seeking orientated U.S. economy. I share many of his concerns and find his work extremely useful and timely.
In that regard, I want to highlight some excerpts from a recent post he wrote on the topic, titled, The Evidence is Piling Up — Silicon Valley is Being Destroyed.
From Business Insider:
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