If you do business in Asia and were wondering what a Trump presidency would mean for technology, Quartz’s Michael J. Coren has written a revealing article about the power play between Trump and Silicon Valley, and the meeting that both parties had after Trump won, to discuss tax reforms, jobs and investment.
Coren wrote, “Trump’s election shattered Silicon Valley’s dominant view of politics as irrelevant or, at best, an obstacle to avoid on the way to global domination.”
Bill Gurley, an investor at Benchmark Capital was also quoted as having earlier said that one of the reasons Silicon Valley is so successful is that it is so far from Washington DC, 2849 miles to be exact. “Technology is one where federal decisions do not have that much absolute impact on day-to-day life here.”
That couldn’t be further from the truth for the dozen tech leaders who went up Trump Tower on 14th December, 2016.
Noticeably missing from the table were Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Uber’s Travis Kalanick, Airbnb Brian Chesky as well as Salesforce and Slack.
Despite Trump’s tweet-criticisms sending Boeing’s and Lockheed Martin’s shares down a few percent for a day or two, Coren views defying the POTUS as the founder or investor of a private company, as “…tough, but survivable.”
The more immediate pressing matter on the plates of CEOs in Silicon Valley now, is not just to keep the stock prices rising, but also to maintain their companies as places where talented tech practitioners want to work.
Just last week, two pledges have already arisen from a few tech companies in the Valley, one to not cooperate or aid in “mass deportations” of people targeted by the US government, and the other to “unconditionally” resist the erosion of civil liberties.
IT BYTES BACK! says: Besides immigration, cybersecurity, surveillance, anti-monopoly review and net neutrality will become hot button topics in the new Trump administration. With these issues in mind, what is the impact that U.S. federal decisions will have on day-to-day life here, 8083 miles away in Asia?
