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FORTUNE.COM // JANUARY 2020
T
HE MATRIX EXISTS, it
just doesn’t look
like it did in the
movie,” says Tristan Harris.
What the former Google
design ethicist is convey-
ing is the notion that we
all live, as dystopian as
it may sound, in a mock
reality fabricated by ma-
chines. These machines
constitute “the surveil-
lance-attention economy,”
as Harris calls it, a prod-
uct of the growing cadre of
companies and technolo-
gies that “profit off of rent-
ing access to manipulate
Venture Capital
Will Transcend
the Valley
AS TOLD TO MICHAL LEV-RAM
F
OR THE FIRST
time, in 2019, this
became part of
the conversation between
venture capitalists and startup
founders: Where are you
thinking of being based? Will
you have one headquarters
or two? Are you planning to
be a distributed workforce
from the beginning? The fact
is, those types of decisions
change how you build your
culture and processes from
the get-go. Because of what’s
happening with open source
code and Amazon Web Ser-
vices [the cloud-computing
infrastructure that powers
many startups], more and
more multibillion-dollar tech
companies will be built outside
Silicon Valley. There are some
great areas like Seattle,
Denver, Austin, Washington,
D.C., and San Diego where you
can live comfortably and send
your kids to good schools. And
there are already quite a few
multibillion-dollar tech com-
panies outside Silicon Valley.
I think you will see more
regionally focused VC firms
have success. And more
Silicon Valley VCs will spend
more time on airplanes. I
think Zoom [the videocon-
ferencing company] has
something to do with this
trend too. You can live—and
work—anywhere.
AILEEN LEE is a venture capi-
talist and founder of Cowboy
Ventures. She coined the
term “unicorn.”
TECH AND A.I.
TRISTAN
HARRIS
BIG TECH WON’T REIGN—
IT WILL BE REINED IN
AILEEN LEE
BY ROBERT HACKETT
ILLUSTRATION BY BENEDETTO CRISTOFANI
