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LOOMUS Book Picks Grounded in First-Principles Thinking

The Code

By Margaret O'Mara

The Code

硅谷不是奇迹。它是一套系统。

FED $ STANFORD IMMIGRATION VC COUNTER- CULTURE SILICON VALLEY
"
— The Big Idea
硅谷不是奇迹。
它是一套系统。

A reading of The Code
by Margaret O'Mara

— The Architecture

五种工程化要素。

SILICON VALLEY held up by five FED $ Cold War DARPA · NSF 1950s STANFORD Terman's industrial park 1951 IMMIGRATION Hart-Celler 60% foreign-born 1965 VC Kleiner Sequoia 1972 COUNTER- CULTURE Whole Earth 1968 — remove any one and the dome collapses

Federal money. Stanford industry park. Immigration.
Venture capital. Counterculture meritocracy.

斯坦福工业园

—— 一所大学种下硅谷的那一刻

S STANFORD INDUSTRIAL PARK · 1951 70 YEARS LATER…

In 1951, Frederick Terman convinced Stanford to lease 660 acres to high-tech firms only. HP, Lockheed, GE moved in. By 1971 the term 'Silicon Valley' first appeared in print. Every tech cluster on earth has since tried to copy this one move.

— Why founders should read this

你不是自食其力的英雄。
You are downstream of a 70-year-old system.

The garage myth is comforting because it makes you the protagonist. The real story is that you are running on infrastructure — Cold War contracts, Stanford pipelines, immigration policy, VC firms, Whole Earth ethos. None of which you built. Most attempted Silicon Valleys around the world copy two or three of these ingredients and stall. The most important thing a founder can do is understand the system you're in — and notice when the system shifts. It is shifting now.

— Why most clones stall

四个尝试 复刻硅谷。

FOUR ATTEMPTED CLONES · ONE ORIGINAL BOSTON · 128 TOKYO · 80s SHENZHEN · 00s BERLIN · 10s SILICON VLY ↑ original ↑ kept all 5 each clone copies 2 ingredients — only one had all 5 THE RECIPE

硅谷不是一个 地方。
它是一份 配方。

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More from LOOMUS Book Picks

Curated by humans · No algorithm
No. 01
A Brief History of Intelligence
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Five evolutionary breakthroughs from worm to poet — and why LLMs only got the last one.
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No. 02
A Thousand Brains
Jeff Hawkins
150,000 cortical columns. Each one a learner. All voting at once.
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No. 03
The Coming Wave
Mustafa Suleyman
Catastrophe, dystopia, or the narrow path. Pick one — and build it.
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No. 04
Models of the Mind
Grace Lindsay
Every era reads the brain in its newest math. Transformers are the latest, not the last.
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No. 05
The Story of Art
E. H. Gombrich
Schema, match, correct, pass on. A 30,000-year recursive engine — still running.
Read on LOOMUS →
No. 06
The Code
Margaret O'Mara
Three levels of life. We're about to invent the third — and choose between twelve futures.
— You're here
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