Silicon Valley is an extraordinary area, admired, feared, stylized into a hopeful promise, a cipher for entrepreneurs who mercilessly celebrate their successes and accept defeats as a natural alternative. The former microenterprises, which have grown to become global corporations and have their headquarters there, have long had an impeccable reputation, they continue to inspire hundreds of millions of customers around the globe, who use active services such as the search engine Google or the social network Facebook.
And they also inspire entrepreneurs in other countries to set themselves big goals. Reid Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn’s career network, once said, „Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a place.“ That’s what the vast majority saw – including the positive tone. But that has changed, downright dramatic. Today the public mood is quite different.
Jeff Bezos noticed that now impressively. When the CEO of the Amazon Internet corporation opened a competition of cities around a new head office of his company just over a year ago, it looked like a brilliant marketing move at first. Local politicians courted him and devised all sorts of gimmicks to attract Amazon. New York lit up the Empire State Building in orange, the color of the arrow from the Amazon logo, and Governor Andrew Cuomo joked that he would change his first name to „Amazon“ if that was to make the difference in favor of the cosmopolitan city.
