COLUMN: The new Death Valley

From Ron Lin's, "Intellectual Pornography's," Fall '00 From Ron Lin's, "Intellectual Pornography's," Fall '00If Penn's academic structure could be described as a food chain, I have a feeling Wharton MBAs would be sitting smugly on top. Today, I declare Silicon Valley dead, lying lifeless in a limpid lake of its own blood and glory. Wielding the knives are carpet-bagging B-school grads, and the victim is the humble and creative spirit of the Tech Revolution. While every country, city, state and even university in the world is trying to fabricate "the next Silicon Valley" out of thin air, it probably helps to consider where Silicon Valley came from. In 1938, Bill Hewlett and David Packard went to work in a garage in Palo Alto developing the tools and equipment that would evolve into Hewlett-Packard, one of the world's largest producers of computers and electronic measuring devices. And so, with bountiful assistance from Stanford University, Silicon Valley was born. And 60 years later, it is still a work in progress -- an engine of innovation and improvement that has spanned decades, rather than merely years. But handily equipped with the appropriate modern gadgets, such as Palm Pilots and Nokias, the Wharton MBAs prance around campus like the deities they envision themselves to be, fiendishly manufacturing business plans faster than I can manufacture widgets. Over 60 years of innovation are condensed into 25 pages of fine print, seven pages of platitudes and a well-rehearsed speech about the "democratization of the user experience." And so, Silicon Valley dies. Silicon Valley is not the place it used to be; the idea of passion and progress nary go together anymore. The Valley was built around a fundamental principle of purity, the principle that hard work, good ideas and unrelenting passion were at the foundation of every thought and vision. It was capitalism at its finest, the world's only standing meritocracy revolving around the infusing vigor of Stanford University -- a world of engineers and dreamers. In Wharton, the dream is punctuated with a dollar sign and a misguided myth that anything is a good idea. Unfortunately, you can't package dog crap, make a Powerpoint presentation telling me how great your dog crap is, write a 40-page business plan telling me about how profitable dog crap is, and then scurry off and reserve dogcrap.com and expect anything but a heaping, steaming pile of dog crap. While engineers labored for six decades creating a cultural phenomenon, bankers and charlatans from New York steam-rolled into Palo Alto, making it into a bastion of snobbery and elitism in a matter of years. And now, a decade after the World Wide Web began, MBAs are staking their claim in unprecedented numbers -- in fact, over 75 percent of the participants in this year's Wharton Business Plan Competition are Wharton graduate students, and over 60 percent of the ideas are Internet- or supposedly tech-related. It was in the basement of Moore, not the hallowed halls of Wharton, where Eckert and Mauchly created ENIAC, the world's first electronic computer. It was in a runty computer lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that Mosaic, the harbinger to Netscape Navigator, was developed. It was a team of engineers that developed the first integrated circuit at what would become Intel. It was Jeff Bezos and his degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science that launched him into the Internet stratosphere with Amazon.com. The MBAs entered much later, after they mastered the art of literacy. It seems that despite all the hoopla, you will consistently find that the great ideas don't come from the MBAs. The ideas that change the world rarely emanate from the halls of Steinberg-Dietrich. The culture that pervades the Valley -- T-shirts, jeans and a cup of caffeine -- came not from Wall Street but from a few techie weirdos with a passion for tinkering with radios in a garage. Wall Street might declare the Valley in fine form today, but I see a rotting corpse. I see companies selling out to venture capitalists because the system of intrinsic merit has been replaced by a system of intrinsic status -- a system where a board of directors says more about your brain than the ideas inside it. I see a lot of MBAs longing for an IPO -- and blowing a whole lot of hot air. Call me crazy, but if history tells us anything, I have a feeling the "next big idea" won't have a .com after it, and the next big idea won't be in The Harvard Business Review anytime soon. So I have a business plan to pitch, in the spirit of the Wharton Business Plan Competition. I propose implementing an Internet-based turn-key e-commerce engine for facilitating the convergence of an MBA's face to his or her own ass. That's what I call revolutionary. You see, MBAs, you may indeed rule the world, but it is the engineers who change it.