The vulnerable side of Silicon Valley is advertising
Indeed, the engineers and the engineering culture of the Valley have always had a certain distaste for advertising, and for advertising salesmen (the kind of people who usually end up running media companies)—too messy, too intrusive, and, worst of all, too dumb… Media companies, on the other hand, are different, and the VCs know it. Get typecast as a media company—a mere seller of advertising—and you get a media company valuation. Which makes it a great irony that advertising is the only way the Silicon Valley platform companies have ended up making their money. Chip Bayers at AdWeek shows the
