Kristina Crane gets to watch her grandson’s little league baseball games. On its own that’s a nice thought, but it’s a miracle in consideration of the fact that Crane lives in Falls Church, VA, and Harrison Crane lives in Mountain Brook, AL.
Crane has the GameChanger app installed on her iPhone. Recently Harrison hit a home run.
Stop and think about what amazing progress this represents. As recently as the 1990s, 900-976-1313 was the number sports crazed fans called to get score updates. Over 50 million called in 1981 alone. These were college and professional games.
Yet in 2026, Crane can watch her grandson play baseball. Dick’s Sporting Good’s is the provider of this miracle, but readers know where it really comes from: Silicon Valley. The enormous wealth creation out there is an effect of stupendous advances achieved by the remarkable minds who populate the locale.
What's taking place in Northern California recalls Barack Obama and his famous “you didn’t build that” quip. Obama was vilified for it, and quickly walked it back.
In last week’s column, Peggy Noonan wrote what’s true, that Obama’s comment was taken out of context. What Obama really meant was that individual achievements are invariably an effect of tens, hundreds, and thousands of people dividing up work on the path to amazing commercial leaps. Work divided is the most powerful force in economics.
In other words, Obama was right and by extension so is Noonan. No one does it alone. At least for now. More on that in a bit.
Still, Noonan unfortunately went off track in her defense of Obama. It was seemingly rooted in her odd disdain for Silicon Valley. Maybe a latent populist streak too.
As Noonan went on to write, “Every billionaire who invented something in the garage traveled on roads the lowest-salaried taxpayers contributed to. They paid for the schools that taught that Silicon Valley work force. Taxpayers gave the tech titans an economic and political system that allowed their flourishing.” Ok, but if Obama didn’t mean what he said, then Noonan surely didn’t mean what she wrote.
The reality is that all Americans are incredibly fortunate to live in a nation with an economic and political system that enables wondrous flourishing. Same with our amazing system of roads, one that technologists pay for too. Just the same, there aren’t enough nines next to 99.99 to credibly put a number on how few Americans create miracles for the world with the opportunities afforded them.
What about the schooling that Noonan contends taught the Silicon Valley work force? See above.
After that, Noonan would do well to recognize that what Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and countless others did was decidedly not taught in the classroom. Not even close. How to be instructed on how to create what doesn't exist? With the names mentioned Noonan sees the wealth after the achievement, but glosses over the endless failures, sleepless nights, and ridicule that came before the wealth.
While no one does it alone, the shabby, well-off-of-Main Street offices (or Denny’s booths) in which present-day Silicon Valley billionaires long ago hatched their ideas were the figurative and literal definition of empty. That’s why they’re billonaires today. They believed deeply in something that most dismissed, including the greatest business minds. These people deserve their due. And free of all qualifications.
As for going it alone, in Noonan and Obama’s lifetimes the first one-man “unicorn” will almost certainly reveal itself. Another Silicon Valley miracle, and a reminder of what an opportunity-filled life awaits young Harrison Crane.
