Garry Tan

Everywhere else, it's like tall poppy syndrome.

Don't try to do this.

Who are you to even believe that you could do this?

What do you think makes Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley?

It's earnest nerds just making a thing that people want.

How did the nerds end up there in the first place?

I guess you could argue that it was basically all the semiconductor people.

Basically, it was post-World War II.

A lot of research and development happened.

Hewlett-Packard started out of Stanford Labs.

There's just sort of this long, percolating...

thing where you had the smartest people in the world collect in a particular place to do a particular thing.

Is there a government aspect of it or no?

Oh, definitely.

I mean, the internet was all defense research.

The internet exists because DARPA gave a grant to experiment with communication systems that are more resilient than telephone if there's nuclear war.

So if you needed that, then you needed something like TCP IP, which is one of the basic protocols that runs the internet today.

And so that's why you had these Unix mainframes at every university.

And then they would make these links that were not, you know, normal, pick up the phone and call them or fax machine and things like that.

It was literally, what would you have to design?