"You can have the best technology in the world, but if you don't have a community who wants to use it and who are excited about it, then it has no purpose"
About this Quote
Tech culture loves to pretend that innovation is a force of nature: build the thing, and history will obediently bend around it. Chris Hughes punctures that fantasy with a deceptively simple reminder: technology is only as real as the people willing to make it part of their lives. Coming from a Facebook co-founder, the line reads less like an abstract principle and more like a quiet confession about what actually scaled the modern internet: not superior code alone, but social buy-in, status incentives, and the contagious feeling that you are joining something already alive.
The intent is pragmatic, almost investor-pitch practical: don’t fetishize features; cultivate users. But the subtext is sharper. “Best technology” is treated as insufficient, even irrelevant, without a “community” that is “excited.” That word choice matters. Excitement is emotional labor performed by users for the platform, a renewable resource that can’t be manufactured in a lab but can be engineered through design, network effects, and narrative. In that sense, Hughes is naming the hidden engine of Silicon Valley: community isn’t the beneficiary of tech; it’s the product-tech fit itself.
Contextually, this is an ethos born from the post-2000s platform era, when companies stopped selling tools and started building ecosystems. The line also gestures at the graveyard of technically elegant failures: apps no one talks about, protocols no one adopts, “disruptions” that never become habits. Purpose, here, isn’t moral purpose. It’s utility validated by participation. The verdict is social, not technical.
The intent is pragmatic, almost investor-pitch practical: don’t fetishize features; cultivate users. But the subtext is sharper. “Best technology” is treated as insufficient, even irrelevant, without a “community” that is “excited.” That word choice matters. Excitement is emotional labor performed by users for the platform, a renewable resource that can’t be manufactured in a lab but can be engineered through design, network effects, and narrative. In that sense, Hughes is naming the hidden engine of Silicon Valley: community isn’t the beneficiary of tech; it’s the product-tech fit itself.
Contextually, this is an ethos born from the post-2000s platform era, when companies stopped selling tools and started building ecosystems. The line also gestures at the graveyard of technically elegant failures: apps no one talks about, protocols no one adopts, “disruptions” that never become habits. Purpose, here, isn’t moral purpose. It’s utility validated by participation. The verdict is social, not technical.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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