Interview Resources

Q&A with Rochelle Kopp & Steven Ganz

• • • Why has Silicon Valley spawned a language all its own?

    Steven:  People create new words in Silicon Valley because there is a culture here that allows and even encourages people to try doing things differently, and you need to have words to describe what you are doing. People in Silicon Valley believe that they are creating a whole new way of doing business. So they create new terms

    • Who creates the new words in Silicon Valley?

    Rochelle: Sometimes new words are created on purpose, by consultants trying to be thought leaders, or companies that want to corner the market on the next big thing by naming it and grabbing the URL. Also there are a lot of smart, witty people here who say clever things that stick and that become part of the language.

    • How do the words used in Silicon Valley reflect the culture here?

    Steven: In Silicon Valley there’s a healthy dose of iconoclasm combined with idealism. That’s why people here want to “hack”, “disrupt”, and “break shit”. They want to surpass what’s been done before and create something far better. The casualness of the language also reflects the California environment, and the youth-centered culture here. The terms “fail fast” and “fail forward” reflect the risk-taking tendencies in Silicon Valley.

    • What terms do you think people need to learn first when they start doing business in Silicon Valley?

    Rochelle: If someone is trying to get a startup funded, they should definitely learn all the terms in our “Funding” section and know the difference between  a seed round and a down round. For the general person just moving here, as a start they need to know why a startup is not just another small business (that one tripped me up when I first got here).

    • Why do you think that so many people outside of Silicon Valley find the words used there so irritating?

    Steven: I don’t think anyone likes feeling left out, and a lot of Silicon Valley jargon feels like a kind of code or inside joke. It’s a feeling of, “What makes you so special that you can’t just talk like everyone else?” Also, the general irritation that many people have with the disruption and gentrification that result from the Valley’s innovation and the perceived arrogance of the Valley’s “tech bros” tends to spill over into their feelings about the way people talk here.

    • Why did you write this book in Japanese first?

    Rochelle: As part of my work as a consultant helping Japanese do business in the U.S., I write a lot of books in Japanese (28 so far). A friend in the Japanese publishing industry suggested that Japanese businesspeople coming to Silicon Valley could use a book that explained the unique vocabulary here.  I already gave a lot of those kinds of explanations as part of my consulting work. Then when we started doing the research for the book, we realized that no such book existed in English. So we thought, we need to publish this in English too!