To hear Y Combinator President Sam Altman tell it, the future of innovation is at stake because free speech is dead in San Francisco.
Altman has been known to float what some might call crazy ideas: universal basic income, giving all American adults a share of the GDP.
But his latest idea strikes a different tone, one with a certain oppressed-silent-majority ring to it.
“It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics,” he wrote in a blog post this week.
In that post, he said he felt freer to speak his mind in China: “I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco.” He also said he is “now seeing many of the smartest people I know move elsewhere” because they feel stifled in the Bay Area.
He then went on to say something that is sounding more familiar these days, and is easy for someone in his shoes — rich, male, white, powerful — to say: “Political correctness often comes from a good place—I think we should all be willing to make accommodations to treat others well. But too often it ends up being used as a club for something orthogonal to protecting actual victims.”
And that, aspiring entrepreneurs, is how the president of one of Silicon Valley’s most respected tech incubators — which has helped the rise of Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe and more than a thousand other companies — feels.
Think of it as the perfect cherry on top of Silicon Valley’s year of culture wars, from Peter Thiel’s support of President Trump to James Damore’s famous Google memo to all the sexual harassment scandals.
Read the full story at SiliconBeat.
