Silicon Valley Saints
High-tech christian executives in California are bringing biblical values back into a mecca of Mammon.
Tony Carnes | posted 8/06/2001 12:00AM
A field of shattered dreams lies south of San Francisco along Highway 101 down to San Jose. Newly emptied office buildings in Silicon Valley are a visible sign that hard times have hit the multibillion-dollar technology industry. While the legendary founders of Silicon Valley are retired millionaires, some in the next generation of high-tech heroes are losing big time. Billions of dollars in stock-market equity have disappeared as investors have sold off stock in publicly traded firms. The tech-heavy Nasdaq market has lost over half its value in the last 18 months.
But even as the downward spiral of the high-tech industry persists, a potent spiritual transformation is unfolding. Is God at work through a new alliance of Christian executives in Silicon Valley? Their faith-centered approach to wealth and power is revealing that the "next new new thing" may be the timelessness of Jesus Christ.
As workaholic executives burn out, this growing network of faith-focused business leaders is determined to save Silicon Valley's soul. The executives' aim of bringing biblical values back into the marketplace has the potential to change the high-tech corporations that are changing the world of work.
These executives have turned to Os Guinness, the evangelical author, sociologist, and consultant, as a key resource. In an interview with Christianity Today, Guinness said Christian business leaders in Silicon Valley have an "extraordinary opportunity" to deploy their business enterprises in ways that embrace a Christian worldview. "Silicon Valley will have a longer lasting and more global impact than the 1960s," says Guinness, who has observed California's Bay Area for 30 years. For Guinness, the firms of Silicon Valley are at the forefront of a "second Industrial Revolution" in which information technology will transform how people live and work.
During a recent tour of Silicon Valley firms, Christianity Today spoke with several of the most prominent Christians there about their high-tech, high-finance world, and how faith influences their work.
Michael Yang, 39, as much as any other individual Christian executive, represents the promise and plight of an Internet capitalist. Yang, who emigrated from South Korea in 1976 at age 14, graduated from the University of California- Berkeley with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. After working at Xerox, Samsung, and other firms, Yang in 1998 founded MySimon.com, the spectacularly successful Web site for comparison shoppers. Yang sold MySimon.com last year to another Internet firm for $700 million.
Soon after, Yang launched an online auto shopping site called Dreamlot.com. But with fierce competition, the site never took off and was closed in less than a year, proving that no one has a foolproof strategy for business success and that early career success can be difficult to repeat. His latest effort is NetGeo.com, an Internet company that provides technology services to business Web sites.
As paper wealth from a declining stock market has evaporated, some Christian business leaders are reevaluating their achievements and career direction. Before the dot-com bust of 2000 and the power short-circuits of 2001, not many executives took time to consider where they were going strategically or considered their spiritual needs. Everyone wanted "to jump into the river of riches to a field of dreams," says Tal Brooke, Berkeley-based author of Virtual Gods and president of the Spiritual Counterfeits Project. Indeed, the Valley is home to an estimated 250,000 millionaires out of 2.5 million inhabitants.
August 6 2001, Vol. 45, No. 10
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