Social Capital in Silicon Valley

Social Fog of War is a counterintuitive concept: in order for status- and social capital- driven social systems to work optimally, they must be opaque. The illegibility and opacity of intra-group status was doing something really important – it created space where everyone could belong.

Social capital is distributed differently than conventional power.

The Silicon Valley tech ecosystem is a world of pattern matching amidst uncertainty. We pattern match ideas, we pattern match companies, but most of all we pattern match people.

Building startups outside of an established tech ecosystem is hard: there’s so much inertia and friction you have to fight that without existing momentum to draw from. You face a prohibitively steep climb out the gate.

Social capital, as he presents it, is a form of wealth that can compound and throw off real dividends when it’s cultivated, or wither and die when it’s drawn down or neglected. Having access to social capital is a privilege. In the business world, social capital is earned over decades, and doled out carefully by those who have it: you can’t just gi... See more