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Is Silicon Valley Reproducible?
sunil99 asks: "Paul Graham, in his latest essay, looks at the ingredients which make Silicon Valley what it is. From the essay: 'Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it? It wouldn't be surprising if it were hard to reproduce in other countries, because you couldn't reproduce it in most of the US, either. What does it take to make [a Silicon Valley]?'. In his opinion: 'I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds'. He concludes that if a city can attract these people, it can stand a chance of replicating Silicon Valley. What do you think of Paul's opinions? If you would like some changes to the current Silicon Valley, what would those be?" While the people are an important part to the Silicon Valley experience, they are only part of the requirement. What local characteristics must also be present, even if Silicon Valley is to be duplicated on a smaller scale? What draws technology companies to a specific location?
Is Silicon Valley Reproducible?
Depends on how good their DRM is, I guess...
You have to raise the price of housing...
more and more restrictive with patents and all the rest of the current nonsense, they're going to have to find a way to create a new one, because they will have successfully snuffed the life force out of the one we have right now.
Is it fascism yet?
Isn't this like asking if the Italian Renaissance could have happened anywhere except Italy?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Nerds and rich people are not enough. Silicon Valley works because there's a culture of risk taking. Starting a company that fails is considered good expirence in Silicon Valley. In many places, such a failure would make it very difficult to find a job or ever find investors again.
You have to raise the price of housing...
Well, that's going swimmingly....
Tweet, tweet.
I think dreamers spring forth from people with well endowed bank accounts. And Nerds are a kind of natural dreamer without a bank account.
Eclectic birds of a feather flock together.
Sort of like the old feudal courts.. there were the elite and the entertainers.
Now don't carry this analogy too far.. or you'll find yourself comparing SV to a Circus.
I think Bob Crigley exposed this phenomena adequately long ago.
There is a massive influx of cash in this area because it is the seat of the gov't. Granted, it is all tax money, but that is where it flows. I don't know about the possibility of another "tech hub" like Silicon Valley.
gotta say, having grown up watching santa clara county turn into silicon valley, i'd have to say i'd like all the orchards back. the apricots, walnuts, prunes, almonds, apples and all the rest... and the wetlands, too.
the valley is still beautiful with the santa cruz mountains and the hamilton range (and climate, minus the smog), but it was truly spectacular before the mass of sprawl changed things.
of course, the folks living there a century ago would have preferred the almost entirely rural lanscape. but i do miss it.
If you would like some changes to the current Silicon Valley, what would those be?
More women. WAY more.
As an 8 year resident of Silicon Valley, I have observed five major things that set it apart (not in any particular order).
1) Weather. Man, it is great. It may not seem important, but it matters to me a ton.
2) Smart people. The best people like to be with peers, with people who understand and think like them.
3) Borderline idealisitic mentality. Entrepreners fall under this category. Essentially the believe than you can, in fact, change things, make things better, start from nothing and create an empire.
4) Diversity. Silicon Valley is far from a mono-culture. The diversity extends well beyond the tech work force and is a part of every day life.
5) Great Universities. Stanford and Berkeley often spawn many startups that make it big (i.e. HP, SGI, Google)
The reason why this is hard to re-create is more often than not, people have to pack up and leave where they currently live and go (often) to a far away place (I moved from Ohio). It doesn't seem particularly realistic to go to a potential Silicon Valley if you can go to the real thing. Essentially, Silicon Valley as we know it today took 30+ years of the mentioned points to grow and cultivate.
IMO, to start another Silicon Valley, it would probably take 20 years and starts with an excellent university and a touch of diversity. I do think it is possible, in fact, I think it is probable that we will see similar places pop up in the world.
Hookers and blow
It does f*ck many people.. waiting for the results to come in.. :)
You need a culture where experimentation is rewarded and failure is treated as a normal cost of experiments. Compare bankruptcy in the US (oops, try again) to bankruptcy in Japan (your children hounded at school, people looking at you strangely for not committing suicide). Compare the fraction of engineers willing to work for a fly-by-night^Wyoung and innovative startup and get paid with lottery tickets^W^Wstock options in the US versus other countries.
There are very few things in the world like the Valley's venture capital system. Some will say "Good! Give thanks to the Flying Spaghetti Monster for that!", but the good VC firms provide a lot more than money. Professional referrals, blunt advice, and (if honestly done) supplying management teams are just part of it.
Just rich people and nerds? I can't think of a single innovative high-tech center that wasn't anchored on a world-class research university. Thereby hangs another cultural sine qua non, you have to have professors willing to start companies as opposed to growing beards and getting pompous.
TFA probably simplifies somewhat; I don't think there will be a "new Silicon Valley", but I could imagine something on a smaller scale happening..
One big investor, say Google, throws a humping load of cash at the area nearby to MIT, say. A few more companies aggregate around the same area, and a certain critical mass is reached. The area starts to gain a reputation and stands out (in the way that Silicon Valley does now). Momentum increases, interest and investment in the area become sustained.
Could happen..
In Bangalore.
kind of.
Market pressure. Somebody has to want to buy your products.
I would say no, since most geeks are single with little hope of polluting the gene pool.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
This is a huge question in economic geography (the economics of regions), and as grad student in economic geography, maybe I can at a bit.
Short answer is no. Long answer is yes with a but. Silicon Valley is the product of several interacting factors. The first is the presence of Stanford, which produces a great deal of spin off research, that locates near by so that people form Stanford can keep on interacting with the community. In a recent survey of biotech firms (in Seattle, not the Valley, but the example is still good for an example) over 75% of business owners said that continuing access to university resources was a large component of their locational decision. Stanford is important for another reason, it has a unique culture that encourages sharing of knowledge between people and firms. One of the reasons why Route 128 in Boston performs historically worse than the Valley is that its graduates are, generally, less likely to share information freely. This sharing creates what today is called "communities of learning," which allow all firms in a region to grow much faster.
The Stanford culture has created a unique culture, one that doesn't punish failure. Hell, you're expected to fail there at least a few times. No one gives money to someone who hasn't crashed at least 2 previous ventures. Its also created a pool of labor unrivalled anywhere else for what the Valley does best - software design, networking and chip design. People who are good at these locate there to be close to other people with the same interests, created a labor pool that attracts new firms looking for talented people.
This culture can't be recreated at the drop of a hat. It takes time. Sure, you can set up office space for chip designers, offer tax incentives to get firms to locate there, and sponsor high-tech grad programs at local universities, but it won't create a new Valley. It will create something else. Maybe better, most of the times worse. If anyone is interested, I expand on the subjects, but you're better off reading works by Melecki, Florida and Gertler.
Sleep is for the weak!
EOM
His basic premise about nerds and rich people sounds about right. His meandering definition of a nerd attractive city is a off the mark and plain wrong with regards to San Francisco. San Francisco was not considered part of Silicon Valley until recently. Silicon Valley was typically considered to be 32 miles south of San Francisco, from Palo Alto in the north to the environs of San Jose in the south. Sprawling, faceless San Jose is definitely not a "nerd town" per his description and the neighboring towns are plain suburbia.
Most of the startups you can think of - Google, Yahoo, HP, Apple, Cisco, etc. were started in that southern area. Much fewer were started farther north or in San Francisco proper.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
As a general principle, what was a possibility for previous generations is a possibility for us, too. Whether it's likely or not is another question.
I think the article overemphasises economic factors at the expense of the cultural and historical. Silicon Valley is history, and history is a lot more complicated than that.
I'm not an expert on the mechanics of Silicon Valley, but isn't Irvine essentially trying to achieve a Silicon Valley status? They give very ncie incentives for Tech firms, and UC Irvine partners up with many companies for R&D. I do believe it's a road towards Silicon valley.
Not to mention the Northen Renaissance so it is not really a good argument. Rather an argument that creative centers can be recreated and do indeed move
Help fight continental drift.
Sometimes referred to as the "Silicon Hills".
Besides, half the people from the Valley already moved here after they figured out houses cost 1/3 as much and there are no earthquakes.
There were a variety of factors that could stop such development. For example, what stopped Research Triangle Park is Southern attitudes toward failure. The financial infrastructure there is dominated by Old South money and attitudes. If you start a company, and go under, you are done--you've disgraced yourself and shamed your family. You are a failure, and the banks won't finance you for a second chance.
In Silicon Valley, on the other hand, having a few failed companies under your belt isn't bad--people expect startups to fail, and you move on, more experienced, get more financing, and maybe the next one will work out better. Sometimes it does, and another great company is born.
I don't recall the details, but I think they came up with something like a dozen factors like that, and any one missing made it unlikely that a region would duplicate Silicon Valley's success, and they looked at maybe a dozen candidates, and pointed out which of the factors were missing.
If you could get the right ten thousand people to move from Silicon Valley to Buffalo, Buffalo would become Silicon Valley.
So, in other words, no you could not be reproduced.
(I think there is still snow on the ground in Buffalo)
barack to the future?
> A lot of nerd tastes they share with the creative class in general. For example, they like well-preserved old neighborhoods instead of cookie-cutter suburbs...
Say what?!? Has he even *BEEN* in the Silicon Valley? It's ALL cookie cutter suburban sprawl... of course, it's all very expensive Italian-inspired designed suburban sprawl... The only old preserved houses are palo alto (old ladies) or berkeley (old hippies).
In short, Silicon Valley has everything good about all the other technical centers, but little of the bad. You dont have the weather issues, the traffic issues (at least not as bad as in Seattle/Redmond/Bellevue, and you dont have a population afraid to display conspicuous wealth and success in their purchases and activities.
In the Valley, there is a general assumption that with luck, education and a work ethic, it is possible to get rich relatively quick. In Seattle and other areas, if you dont work for some place like Microsoft (of late 80s-to late 90s) it is assumed that fast wealth is beyond your reach by a large part of the populi.
In the Valley, money and work = competition and lifestyle.
perhaps say, India , or China or some other place in the world , where Tech is still new and exciting and growing and a very high rate.
Austin, Texas, is known as the Silicon Hills because it has reproduced Silicon Valley, albeit on a smaller scale.
It also has a major research university (University of Texas), which might be a key component. It also has a good supply of risk takers, and plenty of money.
But, it also has a few things that Silicon Valley lacks. Namely, it has a better cultural scene for folks. I don't mean the high-class snobby rich folks that fit in well in California. I mean young folks, the kind that like to live someplace that is the live-music capital of the world, with two world-class music festivals, a world-class movie festival, site of the flagship whole foods, the state's only public nude beach, and plenty more to keep you busy every week.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
The world is flat now - I can sit in a room and watch an HDTV picture of people anywhere in the world, with sound, from my office, wherever that is. Doesn't that make place irrelevant? When does physical presence cease to matter?
If you would like some changes to the current Silicon Valley, what would those be?
1. I would double the size of the East Palo Alto IKEA. Nay, triple it. I simply do not spend enough time lost in their bazillion cubic meter zipcode.
2. I would move Google and MS closer together. I know they're in mortar range, but think of the small arms possibilities!
3. I would clone Ridge Winery and place one every five miles rimming the valley. Every three to be safe.
4. All "boat track"-style sushi joints would linked by a secret underground canal system. By the time the hamachi gets around to me at Yo-yo, it feels like it's travelled forty miles anyway; let's make it formal.
5. [serious] Jazz club. [/serious] Whoa, where'd that shit come from?
6. I'd raise the speed limit on I280 from 120mph to maybe 140mph. Might as well keep up with the flow.
7. I'd raise the speed limit on 101 from 25mph to 30 or so. Honestly, who drives this piece of shit?
8. I'd make the application of "My other box is your Linux box" bumper stickers to an automobile a federal offense. No, seriously. We're *all* savvy here mate, get over it.
9. I'd give myself veto rights over anything Benchmark funds. They don't have to listen, but I'd like to be on record.
I could go on, but sooner or later the state-subsidized vino is going to kick in, and then I'll start getting unrealistic.
M
trustedworlds.net - gaming, security, and the gunk that lives in between
Silicon Valley North
I don't know if there is anywhere in India that can match Silicon Valley -- yet, but I can tell you that it is inevitable short of some sort of collapse in Indian technology output. Does it diminish what they've accomplished in SV? Nah. Everybody should get their shot.
OK, they got nerds and rich VCs. But did they win any Superbowls? We won it five times. GO STEELERS
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Part of the reason Silicon Valley was able to do what it did, is because non-compete clauses are unforceable there, so employees were free to move between companies at will. It worked pretty good.
What?
As someone who grew up in the Silicon Valley and went to school there, it sounds like Paul Graham hasn't really spent much time there. He describes a lot of new upcoming tech areas like Portland or Seattle or Boston or wherever... but those are SO NOT SILLICON VALLEY. Heck, even San Francisco isn't Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley is suburban sprawl, and all housing in the past few decades is cookie cutter developments. It's also impossible to survive without a car, and a "short" trip is 30 minutes away, with some freeway in-between. It sounds like he's only visited San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Berkeley, rather than the rest of Silicon Valley. Try San Jose, Santa Clara, or Cupertino, or Milpitas and you'll realise that Sillicon Valley is nothing like Paul Graham describes.
There already is a smaller scale version of Silicon Valley roughly centered on Boston, Massachusetts. The partial circle defined by Route 128 (and to a lesser extent the larger one surrounding it defined by Route 495) has most of the required properties already. Heck, it even has the same elevated levels of Asperger's Syndrome that Silicon Valley has.
Things like Stanford, a culture that doesn't slam failing and encourages you to try again, and loads of available cash contribute a lot to making Silicon Valley a success.
But don't forget the very good quality of life in the Bay Area, and especially the South Bay / Peninsula. The climate is very good. It's pretty. There's a lot to do, culturally and outdoors. People want to live here. That helps in several ways:
Plopping a top research university and cash into Detroit won't necessarily duplicate SV there. Once people become slightly successful, they'll move away. That sets you back.
That being said, astronomical housing prices are probably dampening this argument a bit, but not much. We're all still here; just grumbling more about the prices.
The thing that made silicon valley was neither money nor nerds. In fact, when it started out it didn't have much of either. The thing that really made silicon valley was Non Proprietary Technology. That is what made it. That is All that made it. The rest followed naturally.
The regulatory environment in California (back then), the free market economy (back then), and engineers that were willing to walk out the door and not put up with the corporate overloards that got greedy and tried to fence off the technology they developed from the rest of the world. All combined to create a technology meca free from proprietary controll.
The truth is that any geography and any nation that is willing to embrace liberty, and throw off the proprietary crap attitude will have what it takes to succede. Chances are that they won't though, because when most of them look at thechnology they look at the means (tech and money) as the end in itself, when the end in itself is really liberty and independence from controll, be it political, financial, or technological.
And I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that the geeks down around Stanford and early SV were wearing ruts in the freeways up to SF and Berkeley when they wanted some action.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Where else are there 3 major airports within 50 miles of each other with a Bay between them?
There's 3 major airports within about 15 miles of each other around New York City. There's the Hudson River and multiple bays throughout the New York Area.
Sure, the weather is great. My take on it is that during the Great Depression people headed West. Those with the greatest energy, the greatest optimism and the most desperation made it across the desert all the way to Silicon Valley. They are the essential ingredient that actually helped create those Universities. So first, you need a great depression, then add sunlight.
There are other places which are trying to make a name for themselves in biology, nanotechnology and I'm sure plenty of other fields.
The best example I can think of is San Diego and bio research. You've got more than enough rich people, plenty of smart people and whole lot of institutes, businesses and academic centers. The locals are into it and to top it off, you've also got an insane housing market, but lots of room to build. That's not to say San Diego is the Silicon Valley of biology, but it's not hard to imagine it becoming such a place in 10 or 20 years.
At this point, you can't reproduce Silicon Valley, what's done is done. It's not absurd to imagine what went on there going on elsewhere though.
Far more earth shaking inventions have come from Northern New Jersey. I'm still waiting for Silicon Valley to catch up. eg. Light Bulb, Transistor, Golf Tee.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Having lived/worked in both, Austin seems to have some of the pieces. Throw in a bit of rich wildcatter oilman mentallity, and you're almost there. Sadly, The difference seems to be in the colleges. In the SF Bay area, you have Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Clara U., SJ State, Hayward state, SF state, and if you stretch a bit UC Davis and Sonoma state. Round this out with a first rate community college system, and it's a nerd factory. In Austin, UT is a good anchor, but it almost stands alone. St. Edwards, San Marcos state, and ACC don't fill the gaps anywhere near like the second/third string colleges in the SF Bay.
Oh... and the weather in Austin is just terrible. Riding your bike on loop 360 is just tortures the eyes and the body. Anyone that told you that Austin has a lake kind of like lake Shasta 20 minutes from downtown is just lying to you. Trust me... Y'all would just hate it.
Well, 12% of the economy of Canada's capital (Ottawa) is based on the High Tech Sector. Maybe this is why they call it Silicon Valley North?
Keep in mind that about half of the jobs here are government ones, too, so you could say that the 12% figure is artificially low, too.
Dell just added a thousand jobs to their call centre here because of all the highly qualified tech people who lost their jobs after the tech bubble burst.
You know...
Just sayin'.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
The San Jose air port is a product of silicon valley. You are mixing cause and effect.
1:
For a SUCCESFUL example, I'd point to Kista (near Stockholm), Sweden,
with a very high density of neat, high-tech companies & start-ups -
complete with a nice red Swedish farm house (possibly a 'dagis' - or
child-care facility - at one of the entrances).
2:
For an expensive DISASTER, try South Australia's defunct Multi-Function Polis (MFP).
After closures of the likes of Motorola, etc. it's now home of a call-centre, golf-
course and a residential development, known as "Mawson Lakes."
This week, a TV ad was offering "house+land" packages at Mawson Lakes for Au$ 200,000,
after a nearby man-made "bird sanctuary" became an undesirable mosquito breeding pond.
Flat, uninteresting topography make this land - in an area that's subjected to an reg-
ular "pong" (strong odor, from a [nearby] unidentified source) - much less desirable.
Encumbrance/requirements to include costly remote climate control & monitoring systems
can add up to $20,000 to the construction costs of the house (so, read the fine-print,
ie, if you consider any of the above house+land packages there).
At least, it's a short commute to UniSA (Levels Campus), DSTO & a RAAF Base...
Those are funny ones.
I've lived here for 3 years and visited for much longer.
The Bay Area has one of the most stubbornly backward, if not the most stubbornly backward, communications infrastructures in a major US metropolitan area. Ask someone about the "A/B" cable system. I don't know if DSL is available here everywhere or not now but there were large areas where it wasn't a couple years ago. Cellphone coverage? Sucks.
Transportation? Rush hour commutes are awful again (they were light during the dot bomb era). Mass transit? SF has "mass transit." San Jose has "mass transit." Ostensibly the East Bay has "mass transit." All the mass transit "connects." So here are some projects for you:
1) Get from somewhere in San Jose to San Francisco International Airport using mass transit ($80 cab ride from the Sikh Mafia)
2) Get from somewhere in San Francisco to San Jose International Airport using mass transit ($100+ cab ride)
3) Go from SF to some city served by Caltrain
4) Go from San Mateo (for example) to Pleasanton
Answers:
1) Take bus or walk to SJ VTA light rail. (~30 min.) Take VTA to end of line at Mountain View. (~45 min.) Take Caltrain to Millbrae. (~30 min.) Take BART to airport BART terminal. (~10 min.) Take AirBART to airport. (~10 min.) Add in about an hour of waiting. Presto! 3 hours to go 45 miles! Alternatively, take something-or-other to Santa Clara Caltrain, thence to Millbrae.
2) Take busses/MUNI rail/MUNI trolley/whatever to either Caltrain or BART station. (Up to 60 min.) Take BART to Millbrae to change to Caltrain if necessary. (Another 20 min.) Take Caltrain to Santa Clara station (45 min.) Take shuttle to airport. (20 min.) Add a little under an hour of waiting, and presto! Another 3+ hour trip to go 50 miles!
3) BART connects to Caltrain at Millbrae (which is 15 miles S of SF) and is not particularly close to it anywhere else. The mindbogglingly slow N-line MUNI rail goes to the SF Caltrain station. Not much else does. So how to get to BART? That's a toughie. Hope you live downtown or in the Mission. Otherwise get out the transit map. PS It's complicated.
4) San Mateo is a 35 minute drive across the San Mateo bridge and 580 to Pleasanton. However, the Transbay bus does not get you from San Mateo to Pleasanton. Instead, you must take (if you're insane, because no one would actually do this) Caltrain to Millbrae, change to BART, and take BART *ALL THE WAY* through SF, the transbay tunnel, Oakland, San Leandro, etc., to Pleasanton. Good Lord - that would take (*figuring*) 2 hours? 2-1/2? Even better, at rush hour the train that would take you from San Mateo to Millbrae runs only every hour or so because of the express/baby bullet trains.
By way of comparison: NYC has the subway and affordable cabs - with flat rates to the airports. You can go anywhere you want in NYC on the subway and maybe a cab. You will get reamed on a cab ride here, and you can't go where you want on the mass transit....
What's wrong with Cricket?
You never catch me alive
Silicon Valley got its start because William Shockley started Shockley Transistor with people he brought from Bell Labs. They left, and started their own companies, from which other people left to start their companies, and so on, and so on.
When Shockley was looking for where to start his company it came down to Pasadena vs Palo Alto, both of which he had lived in as a child. An administrator at Stanford recognized the importance of encouraging new companies and leased Shockley space that Stanford owned. If Cal Tech had made a better offer, Si Valley might have been in Pasadena...
...that the "real" Silicon Valley is all but completely dead and gone.
Yes, it takes rich people and nerds. But it takes rich people who know business and are willing to take an honest shot at building a real one, and it takes nerds who are passionate about their work, as opposed to hacks who'll take a job at whatever place is burning the most VC dough. Silicon Valley has vitually NONE of those people left.
The question I've been asking myself is not can there be another silicon valley, but where will it be? Austin Texas has a lot of the right ingredients, and so does Hong Kong and a few isolated movements in Europe.... but Menlo Park? Not a chance. It's all a bunch of powerpoint shows pitching "virtual this" and "outsource that" for as far as the eye can see up Sand Hill Road.
The thing that made silicon valley was neither money nor nerds. In fact, when it started out it didn't have much of either. The thing that really made silicon valley was Non Proprietary Technology. That is what made it. That is All that made it. The rest followed naturally.
But you can do "Non Proprietary Technology" anywhere. So why is there only one Silicon Valley?
Because there's another (related) item - and it's a BIG one:
Callifornia law - then and now - had a zinger on inventions:
If you invent something that is NOT in your employer's current or forseeable line of business, do it on your own time, and don't use company equipment and materials, it's YOURS.
No matter WHAT your employment agreement says: It's "against public policy" to let your employer grab your idea and sit on it if you wnat to develop it. And California interprets this VERY much in favor of the employee - so even if it's in the same field (sometimes even if it enables direct competition only a little while later) - the employer is S.O.L.
Write up a business plan, move across the street, and hang out your shingle.
Which key people do all the time - sometimes repeatedly, until one of their ideas catches fire.
THAT is the "Engine of Creation" behind the explosion of startups in California, and why Silicon Valley hasn't been successfully cloned in any of several other sites that have all of its other desirable characteristics.
Want to try to clone up a Silicon Valley in YOUR state? (Tried a few times with no success?) Start by cloning that law.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I have never lived in Silicon valley, but I have been a regular visitor for about 15 years. I travel there for business meetings and conventions usually for a week at a time. I have been all over the valley at all times of year, etc. My follow-up question would be "which Silicon Valley ?"
... Stanford fuels the fire but isn't necessary. I always enjoy overhearing conversations about mutex locks and Posix compliance and Java Beans and silicon-on-copper while buying a Barbie for my daughter, but there are concentrated nerd communities in many places nowadays.
.com bust. The Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose used to be a great place to stay. You could step out of the lobby and get on the light rail. You could walk to restaurants, a mall, and clubs late into the night and the sidewalks were still crowded. The light rail is still there, but there is no-place to go anymore. During the late 90s, office space became so precious that the malls, restaurants, and clubs were forced out to make way for higher paying tenants. Then the bubble burst and Downtown San Jose was left a lifeless corpse. Now the places to stay when on business are Sunnyvale or Mountain View. I liked the "culture" of the valley better in the early 90s.
Stanford is certainly a great source for alpha nerds, but the founding technology seeds of Silicon valley were not started by Stanford grads. Think HP, Varian, Xerox PARC, National labs, Nasa, Apple,
As for rich people, why would anyone locate/fund a start-up in Silicon Valley now ? The cost of doing business there is outrageous. There are great people in many places where start-up costs are half or a third and you don't even have to leave the USA. Consider Research Triangle in North Carolina. Venture capital can be spent anywhere, and it goes so much further other places.
Economically, the valley is the poster city for comparison between the haves and the have-nots. Compare the have-nots who drive 2 hours to work every day and raise 5 children in a tenement vs. the childless power couple with dual 6 figure incomes, a 1000sf ranch in Mountain View, and evidently dead end genes.
Culturally Silicon Valley has some "issues."
People used to raise families there, but not anymore. I always ask people I meet about their families, and few have any children. Almost none have more than 1 child. Families with the famous 2.5 children used to live in those ubiquitous 1000sf 1950's ranch style houses.
The Silicon Valley of the early 90s changed radically in the late 90s and changed again after the
The technology and internet hub of the USA in 2006 is in Northern Virginia, near Dulles Airport in what is known as the Dulles Corridor. AOL is headquartered there for a reason, and everybody who is anybody has an office there now. No better place in the US to find tech jobs. It is also one of the wealthiest places in the US per capita.
In his opinion: 'I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds'. Nerds is a pretty general term. I would argue that you also need the proper mix of creative nerds, tech nerds, marketing nerds and management nerds. Guess I best read the essay and see if Nerds is decomposed into sub-classes.
I know that this is off-topic, but I just want to address an issue I've been seeing in the tagging beta:
Why do people tag stories with keywords that are part of the headline? The only tag showing for this story is "siliconvalley," which is about a zero on the usefulness scale of 1-10. The whole point of tagging is to provide additional meta-data about a story, not just to take the nouns in the headline and turn them into tags. For goodness sake, you could at least play the Fark card and just tag stories as Interesting, Amusing, Asinine, etc. if you don't have anything better to go with.
I like my ibook as well as the next guy but the specific culture and landscape of Silicon Valley is putrid and dehumanizing. I think the real question is can high tech be produced in a more humane way. OSS seems to answer that to some extent in software, hardware may be a different question altogether. This passage from the essay Life on Margins should give all techno utopians pause to think:
m argins.html
"Taking a wrong turn off the walled highway, from which, through extensive work over the last several years, all landmarks have thoughtfully been concealed, I discovered the sanitized strip of North First Street in sprawling, silicon-powered San Jose. I knew about Silicon Valley, of course. Who doesn't? But I'd never been at its epicenter, surrounded by the built world it makes and is, in turn, made by. Along North First Street, mile after mile of modern office parks squat on old orchard land, the lovely, irrelevant mountains far away on either side. No humans can be seen behind the endless ranks of tinted windows or outside in the dead lakes of their windswept parking lots. Meaningless logos: UNISYS, INFORMIX, 3COM--glow like neon eyes from empty concrete faces.
All is new, clean, quiet, freshly painted, expensively landscaped. But the rows of young trees, stuck in the manicured earth as ornament, look more like famished prisoners lined up to be shot. They, and the glass box buildings, seem as untouched by life and movement as an architect's scale model. Even the brilliant sunshine can't make it look real. A single refrain is repeated in the parking lot signs: This Area Is Monitored by Video Surveillance at All Times.
In its regimentation, if not its ostentation, North First Street ironically calls to mind the old Socialist bloc, except if you recall that the ugly architecture there was mostly built to house people. (It's clear no people actually live anywhere near these buildings, they must live miles away, in suburban tracts.) Even the eternal spying generated by that now fallen system was a perverse form of employment, performed by actual human beings instead of neutral, unresistant machines.
But Silicon Valley, in spite of the reversals of recent years, is a zone of expansion, not collapse. New ground is being cleared every day. There is money here, and more is pouring in, like cement into a mold, to shape a future.
At the northern end of this long, silent no-place, atop lead-gray bunkers, the enormous white radar disks of Lockheed rise from behind a straggling line of brush, blank dish-faces turned toward the bright, generous California sky, looking for death."
http://www.whatifjournal.org/pages/Online/rodgers
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
My favorite line: Many have tried, most have died. Usually fron silicone confusion.
The essential element is a MARKET for the output of the venture, even if it's just a busines plan (i.e., investors to buy in). There must also be a local buyer for the PRODUCT. The Internet crowd thinks this is just silly, but read on.
LOCAL Vendors/LOCAL customers. The quintessential SV firms had smart local customers who helped re-design their products and a supplier base that fine-tuned their production machinery. And a local consulting base (largely Stanford) that advised, invested AND promoted. PLUS buckets of Federal contract money irrigating the defense/aerospace/electronics complex with remarkably sloppy accounting controls.
Lotsa Cheap Technicians. Thousands of guys got jobs in SV after technical service in the Air Force & Navy. Liked the area and stayed put. Goes for San Diego too. Don't underestimate the booster role played by San Jose Mercury. Coverage = credibility. Just try to place a startup sales-success story in the Chicago Tribune!
IMHO the financial and human resources the rest of the USA poured into SV were the deciding factors along with the talents of Stanford's EE profs promoting their students into Federal contracts.
For maybe forty years the MIT Forum (a volunteer alumni operation) has attempted with moderate success to cultivate mini SV's across the country. Anyone care to comment on their success?
One thing you need is a socially tolerant environment. Sergey Brin's father said in an interview that they left Russia because he didn't think his son, as a Jew, would ever be able to get a fair shake in Russia. In Silicon Valley no one cares what religion anyone is. How many nerds fresh out of college want to take a job in a dry county in rural Alabama?
Big F'ing Deal! NY has far more of just about everything you've listed there other than weather.
I'm roughly employee 35 at a Silicon Valley startup, doing pre-sales technical work and implementations with our customers in and around NYC. I can tell you this from experience:
Northern California is a technology center because it doesn't have a substantial competing industry. A software house in SV needs to compete with other software houses for talent. A software house in NYC needs to compete with other software houses, consulting and solutions vendors, and the customers' own IT shops. Wall St, in particular, is willing to throw lots and lots of resources into hiring the best people available. I've worked with plenty of Wall St developers who are every bit as sharp as the best in SV.
Northern California is a tech center because there is less competition from other industries. A hot developer in SV is going to work for a tech company, the only question is which one. A hot developer in NYC has a choice of industry.
Is Silicon Valley Reproducible?
Not without a large influx of desperate women.
California does not enforce employee non-compete agreements as a matter of law. I've heard an interesting theory that this promotes greater workforce mobility and therefore the distribution of knowledge equilibrates to pareto efficiency more quickly, which can be quite valuable to an industry that advances as rapidly as information technology did during the late nineties.
Of course, it's possible that we still would have had a Silicon Valley without this legislative environment, but it may have progressed more slowly and it would not have been as likely to happen in California specifically.
I see one of his headers is "Not Bureaucrats". I'm sorry, but bureaucrats are exactly what created Silicon Valley. Billions of dollars in government contracts in the 1940's, 1950's and on are what created Silicon Valley, are the engine which created it. Look at the Internet - the first RFC came out in 1969, and yet no commercial traffic was officially allowed on it (NSFnet rules) until the mid 1990s. Those 20+ years of interim were from the government gravy train. Exactly what Graham seems to not want to hear, which is probably why people like him are so ahistorical.
"There is a massive influx of cash in this area because it is the seat of the gov't. Granted, it is all tax money, but that is where it flows."
Truly a great idea! We'll start a tech hub in Dick Cheney's pocket!
Wait, even better... a bombed out school in Iraq! Get working on that solar powered, uh, everything, guys.
Rupert Sheldrake first describe these, I don't totally agree, but
I have come to find, a city, a company, organizations, families and many other things are at some level forever trapped by the original starting conditions.
Very much like crystal growth.
Unless a city (no region really) started under similar conditions as Silicon Valley did, it would be next to impossible end up in a similar way.
Silicon Valley for me was like Mecca for a Muslim when growing up in New Jersey.
I was the holy capital for technology. A place where for the devoted to flock to.
Once there I did live up to it's expectations. I mean I could have a conversation about Unix at a Mc Donalds and many of the people at other tables would not only understand what I was talking about but join in...
SV has a long history dating back to Senator Stanford and the creation of the Rail Roads, the Gold Rush and California or Bust of the dust bowl era. HP and Ampex, Lockheed and Skunkworks, Moffet Field, Xerox Park, Berkeley, BSD, Acid tests and flower children. Eastern and Western Cultural melting pots. San Francisco and the whole GAY out of the closet openness thing. Fairchild, Apple, SUN, SGI, Intel, VPL, Atari and Xanadu.
There is a level of experimentation, freedom and openness to new ideas and concepts and a wacky let try the impossible.
Without these things no area could ever be Silicon Valley.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Yeah, great way to show your arrogance. Care to explain what Sikhs have done to gain the "Mafia" reputation? Just because they are there in great numbers doesn't make them a mafia.
In a recent visit to the DC area, I would think that Silicon Valley would be easy to reproduce there.
From Dulles via the 267 Toll road in Virginia there are alot of technology companies, though they seem more gov'ment contracters and military industrial companies.
A friend of mine who was raised in MD just north of DC said that the 270 in Maryland has alot of tech and IT related companies. It has a few good universities (Georgetown/Geo. Washington/Virginia Tech/UofMD), alot of nice museums (Free) a fair amount of diversity, not quite like LA or the Bay Area.
Plus housing is not quite out of reach for experienced tech workers who make decent wages, which is impossible for someone who makes even 100k a year!
Public schools are awesome for those with families and want to raise nerdlets.
Public schools in California are downright dismal compared to the midwest and the east coast (I'm from Wisconsin and had a great public education in a working class industrial neighborhood)
But Silicon Valley was founded also by alot of government spending and a military base. Didn't Stanford and Berkley receive alot of government money for research in the 50s and 60s? Which spawned off alot of the early tech companies.(Fairchild, HP, etc) Someone corrent me if I'm wrong.
It is no secret that foreign companies such as Oracle, Microsoft and Google have setup R&D labs in these zones or parks.
China also accounts for 40% of Japan's software outsourcing business.
A lot of the Menlo Park venture capital firms have branches in Shanghai, China. They are funding the future Google and Yahoo equivalent companies in China.
Flip flopper. Just kidding :)
P.S. Decade = 10 years (mod me as informative please,please,please)
I lived in Silicon Valley and the DC region and worked with VCs in both areas. There's a tremendous difference in culture between the two regions. West coast startups are all about innovation and foster new ideas. East coast companies are all about services and contract execution. That's why you have SUN and Apple in California and AOL and Verizon on the east.
California focuses on brilliance and creativity. East coast focuses on formality and contract execution. I was think that was government-related, but it's also true within NYC with financial services and more old-school business.
So, Silicon Valley CULTURE is very unique and it's far more important than $$ and nerds.
"Silicon Valley" will only be useful for another 10-15 years or so.
After that it will be a whole different ball game, and only the players who spent that 10-15 years building up expertise will initially be relevant. (Of course within 10 or so years after that, everyone will have the expertise, and there will probably be a Silicon-Valley-like hotbed of it somewhere...)
SV has an inherent advantage as a first mover. (Please, don't mod me down for using buzzwords.) Any new SV would have to compete with the original, and the original already works and has market share.
Industries often cluster around certain areas. Autos around Detroit, Aerospace clustered in LA for a time, gun maufacture in the Conneticuit river valley in the 19th century. Some of it appears to be simply random; that's where the industry inventors got their start. Seattle has lots of Microsoft jobs because that's where Bill and Paul grew up. As the industry grew the spin-off companies started to feed off each other, and employees or their knowledge could shift from company to company. They developed into a place where you could find _anything_ happening in the industry.
If you wanted to replicate SV you'd need a couple major research universities, and some way to keep everything relatively compact, within maybe a 100-150 mile radius. The geography of the bay area helps out on that score. It compresses everyone in the industry into a fairly small, incenstuous area. If you want to have a meeting with someone you can drive somewhere and meet them for lunch. You need people with multiple skills, including science, management, and finance. Probably also no one dominate company. That turns the place into a company town, and cuts down on cross-fertilization.
This question is interesting in light of claims in television campaign ads by Chet Culver, who is running for the Democratic nomination for governor of Iowa, that he will create a Silicon Valley in Iowa. There's some sound bite in there about creating tech jobs to keep "bright" kids in Iowa. For some reason I can't figure out, he's apparently leading the polls for the primary.
For all kinds of reasons that have already been posted, I don't buy it. Chet, you're not the original poster, are you? Just now doing research?
(Unfortunately, if he wins the primary, I will end up voting for him for governor anyway. Ick.)
I propose Missoula, Montana for next Silicon Valley, in hopes that it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This has long been such a beautiful place to live that many PhDs choose to live here in humble poverty instead of seeking fortunes elsewhere (myself included). So all you rich people and nerds, come check it out! There's plenty of room to grow in Montana and thanks to global warming, the weather in Missoula just gets warmer each year!
Building a better ribosome since 1997
Like redmond? There's a ton of software companies in redmond, not just microsoft. Does Cupertino have something that Redmond lacks aside from a cool nickname?
a large number of ga tech grads do startups there(there are some serious branez at ga tech for sure), and there is a huge international trade presence and it is one of the top venues in the nation for tradeshows and conferences. Good area for systems builders, too, once you find your way around the warehouses in "chambodia" and develop some contacts.
and compared to kalifornication, housing prices are very reasonable, although the traffic do sucketh, but I think that is happening everywhere in major urban areas.
anyone who's lived in silicon valley knows its Stanford. SUN, cisco, Google, SGI, Netscape, and many more all started at Stanford or by Stanford graduates. I'm not a Stanford grad but I know if you take that huge old boys club away and Silicon Valley dries up and blows away.
Boston / Cambridge MA. Admitedly it's more biotech than anything else, but we got plenty of the regular type. plus we have Harvard, MIT, and Whitehall. We have all the bigest biotech firms too. i suppose you could say were "peitry dish bay".
-schwal "Hanging is too good for punners, they should be drawn and quoted"
What started Silicon Valley was that it had critical mass, of everything that modern tech companies needed to grow out of.
The article lists a lot of that, but misses some other things. Pre-existing tech and engineering companies... before it was Silicon Valley, HP and Varian already started here, IBM was a major major force in the area (one of IBM's bigger research centers), GE was here in force. Lockheed is here, doing unmentionable space stuff, and Space Systems Loral's predecessors.
These were all more traditional tech companies, but the untraditional tech companies were in a sense a spinoff from the density of skills and suppliers and environment that the larger tech companies had been growing in for decades previously.
If rich people and nerds automatically create the culture, why does it not exist in NYC? The financial services industry has created a lot of rich people in NYC (I'd wager far more than Silicon Valley). The financial services industry has brought in many nerds to build their IT systems. Yet you don't see the same kind of innovation in "Silicon Alley" that you do in Silicon Valley. I'd say the answer is culture. The financial services industry is a risk adverse culture due to its banking roots. Culture changes very slowly.
Where else are there 3 major airports within 50 miles of each other with a Bay between them?
Wash. DC. No Bay, though - that's off to the side.
Where else are can you find enough land to support the millions of poorer people who live on the edges of the valley and take all the supporting jobs that the rich dont have to do,
DC has poor people.
Decent Mass-transit, Two major Colleges, a better freeway system then most places, AND better then average weather?
Check, check, and, um, nope. DC has 4 seasons, which may appeal to some.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
What people fail to understand is that the Renaissance was started in Italy because of a vacuum, more or less. The black plague swept through Europe, starting from Italy and spreading outward. Therefore, Italy was the first to recover from it and also the first to recover its economic situation and its population. What happened afterwards was the good old case of arts following financing.
As for the Silicon Valley, this is my speculative side talking now: I believe it was the level of regional education and sound economic framework that allowed it to develop there. Think, why hippie California and not Bangladesh? I don't think introducing a plague would help us recreate it. On the other hand, another world war just might do the trick.
Same thing draws everyone else... beer and sex! :D
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
As with most human behavioral and economic phenomena, it is the complex mix of definable and indefinable factors that make the magic!
Paul fucking graham again?
is he really the messiah? Can he really see the future?
look everyone, paul graham farted again! Let's put it on Slashdot!
Respect the Constitution
"I wonder if WA state has a similar law."
CA also has a law that invalidates non-compete clauses. By contrast, WA has the most restrictive non-compete clauses in the US (it's not an accident that Microsoft, Real, Amazon, etc. are there).
WA is more on the employer's side than the employee's. CA is more like Europe, with a more restrictive list of what's allowed in employment contracts. I do not know but would suspect that this applies to idea ownership as well.
The author left out the biggest point: immigration. Silicon Valley has always been the first and last destination for most Asian immigrants. Silicon Valley is the cheapest flight from Asia.
Most of the workers in Silicon Valley were educated in China and India, not Stanford. Their background is engineering all the way because they're not burdened with stupid black studies classes, history of homosexuality, and all the garbage Americans are forced to study. Asians have loads of money to fund businesses because their currency is priceless.
What makes Silicon Valley so special? San Diego, California's second largest economy has almost no tech jobs. It's not just money and education that breeds a Silicon Valley. UCSD is right here, and there's almost no tech jobs (excluding biotech IT). I did work for ONE UCSD spin-off... where are the rest?
I lived in San Francisco proper, which many would argue isn't Silicon Valley, but I assure you... the Silicon Valley types that can afford the lifestyle, do live there. There's no problem finding work, even in the city. My biggest problem is finding a job that I'm not overqualified for. My years of hard work have made me unemployable by any company not seeking the bleeding edge of talent.
In Silicon Valley, I had no problems. In Southern California... don't even bother. Stay where the money is. So Cal is the end of you career as far as I'm concerned. Beautiful beaches that you'll rarely visit are hardly reason enough to sacrifice your standard of living. God save me and relocate me to San Jose! They just "get it" up north. Down here... the uneducated wealthy rule supreme. That's my opinion anyway. This is no flaimbait. I just seek understanding. I fly up north monthly to interview for jobs, *because* it's that bad here. Sony, Intuit, and Qualcomm are your biggest employers. I'd die for a Cisco or two... even a beenz.com
One major factor as to why Silicon Valley is so successful is due to the fact that when the area was first being developed, land was CHEAP. I know that this is no longer the case, but it was at the beginning. Leland Stanford, who donated large amounts of land to Stanford university, put in a condition that his land could not be sold. So instead, when the university ran into troubles in the early 50's, it signed 99 year leases with major companies such as Kodak, GE, HP, etc. The smart move on the part of the university is that it limited the leases to High Tech companies which, as someone mentioned earlier, helped both the university and the companies (of course this benefited institutions such as Berkeley University as well).
However, many of those companies probably wouldn't have settled there if the university didn't lease the land at such low prices. Of course, today Silicon Valley is one of the most expensive places to live in California.
Having the high tech companies present attracted more companies and thus a cycle was formed which keeps companies there to this day.
Universities are still doing this today abeit on a much smaller scale and with mixed results. Time will only tell if any of these initiatives prove to be as successful.
Source for some of this information: http://www.netvalley.com/svhistory.html
I'm becoming of the opinion that you couldn't have a silicon valley anyplace with real freezing winters.
Since I've been living in Chicago it seems like almost all the other tech people I talk to about it say "Ew, I could never move someplace that cold!"
I live and grew up in a suburban/rural area.. over the past 10-12 years or so I've been witnessing exactly what you're talking about, if to a lesser degree. When I was younger, riding my bike everywhere, it was kind of interesting. I knew some people who lived out in these new developments, they were a bit outside town.. it was neat to ride around and see all the land that was torn apart, trenches for pipes, stone laid where roads would be. Still, the developments were relatively small, and much farmland remained in all directions. I started driving a few years later and the developments were still growing. A few of them grew to completely fill fields. In the 2 years between getting my license and graduating, traffic through this crappy little town with its 2-lane, 4-red-light main road probably doubled, at least. It FELT cramped, something that had been absolutely foreign for the 18 years previous. Not only that, but thanks to some retarded goddamned federal regs dealing with developments, NONE OF THE ROADS ARE STRAIGHT. Nothing better than a town doubling in size with the outlying areas all having roads that are nothing but curves. Yeah, that's great. Awesome. Enjoy your 1-car garage and lack of curb-side parking because you're on a constant curve that already reduces what should be wide enough for 2 cars to pass, to a 1-way street because everyone is constantly turning one way or another. No, I'm sure there'll never be a problem with people hitting things because they're always in a turn. Nah, who cares if it's icy -- I'm sure the borough which never could keep its few roads cleared of snow will have no PROBLEM dealing with these new developments! Now? Well, some of the areas that were started when I was on my bike are STILL getting bigger. The field across from my high school is being turned into housing. Funny, too. The development has "arbor" in its name. It's been farmland for at LEAST the past 2 decades. I'd wager for at a score of decades before that, too. Matter of fact half the developments have something dealing with trees in their name, but they're all nothing but farmland. Were.. nothing. So now this area is burdened with a friggin order of magnitude more traffic than less than a decade ago, with absolutely no improvement to existing roadways underway or in planning. We just have to deal with it. And then these idiots have the nerve to complain about the train tracks that have been there since the town was FOUNDED that they moved next to. Or that the field stinks in the spring when the farmer's spreading manure. Well you know what, shove it up your ass, doucheface. ps: SCREW YOU TOO MR. FORMATTING
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
I'd also expect something in the Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge Universities) region, but maybe they spend all their creative energy on boat races. Hey, very few could hope to question the sheer mass of brainpower there, or their thousand-year tradition of eccentricity and experimentation, or the sheer volume of bleeding-edge science, so you've got to explain the total lack of bleeding-edge industry there somehow.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Why recreate a recipe for depression?
There's no money in Silicon Valley for anyone but real-estate traders.
Everyone outside Silicon Valley can make money on the corporate interests there.
Almost all the people there are spending all their money on rent or home-loan interest.
The South Bay is only a technology hotbed because Apple and Intel started there. Beyond that, it's nothing remarkable, and in a lot of ways it's a human and economic disaster.
When you're talking VC firms you're not talking just cash - although I'll get to that in a minute - you're also talking where that cash is located. VC firms usually assign a member to the board or help manage the companies they invest in. And someone isn't going to sell their home on Sand Hill road and relocate to Iowa to tend to the invements.
Now as far as cash, in the 3rd quarter last year, 1.02 billion dollars was invested in new companies. In other states the whole year is touted in dozens of millions. For perspective, Silicon Valley's take represented nearly 40% of the entire pie for the 3rd quarter of 2005 with New York at a distant 12%. That means SV wasn't just first - it was first more than 3 times over what came "second". There's a ton of other reasons for the cash pour that's on but the sheer size and number of funds available insure that other "Silicon _____" will be far and away from the real-deal.
All of these figures were culled from the Mercury News but I'm taking a smoke break from evening work and don't have time to google it at the moment.
do geeks reproduce in captivity?
You can't handle the truth.
The University of Washington has been quietly growing into a major research university. Microsoft has created thousands of rich people and imported thousands of nerds. The culture is diverse. The cultural DNA of Seattle is boom-town risktaking ("hey, why don't we switch from building office furniture to building airplanes?").
But then someone would have to write a book with a title like "Fire in the Rainstorm".
Have you ever been anywhere?
Okay, California is more snobby than the midwest, but California is about 1% as snobby as any place up in the Northeast.
Austin sounds nice, but on the other hand, your comments on it sound kind of, well, snobby. Like braggin on Whole Foods. I'm glad for ya. Why would I care which is the first Whole Foods? Does that make it better?
As to why that area is called Silicon Hills: It's because someone wanted to call it that. Not because of some measure of success. There's Silicon Fenn, Silicon Glen, Silicon Alley and a lot of other places too. All of them have had some success and rightly so, but to say you have to pass some kind of test before you get to make up a nickname for your city is bizarre.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
would have a really good chance to reproduce a lot of what's going on in Silicon Valley if it weren't for the bullshit politics that go on in the city.
Pittsburgh has CMU, Pitt, Duquesne, Robert Morris, Chatham and a few smaller tech schools withing a 15 minutes of each other. There are all kinds of former industrial sites where manufacturing (Chip Fabbing/circuit board assemble) could go on. Housing is extremely affordable. A house in an upscale suburb that would go for $150k in Pittsburg would easily be a $700k house in many other cities. Since there aren't many tech jobs in the city, people leave after they get their degrees. If people could get jobs in their field, they'd stay in town.
A couple of billion dollars of VC would do wonders for the town.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
So here's another angle. The original silicon valley is suffering from the current housing "bubble" that has yet to "burst". What this means is that as the average cost of living (i.e.: housing costs, gas, etc.) go up, fewer and fewer people can afford to live here. So all the young talent now are forced to migrate elsewhere.
I can barely afford it; I am an entry-level field service technician at a semicon equipment supplier. And if you figure I'm on par with an recent college grad (10 years Naval service, Electronics Technician), then what hope do they have what with the massive school loans they are also trying to pay off in conjunction with starting a new career? If it weren't for my awesome girlfriend of 5 years who makes substantially more than me, I could barely afford a studio appartment anywhere near San Jose or Fremont. BTW, side note, at $22/hour I'm grossing over $1800 every two weeks but net pay is only $1200. THAT's what you get for living in California, number one, and number two is that there is no way in hell I'd even consider trying to own even a modest home when the average 1200 sq ft, two bedroom house near the East foothills (at least 10-20 miles from anywhere) goes for around $600,000.
Entry level. $600k for a house/condo. $2400/month. 10 years experience in the electronics field. You do the math, and try to pay for a car and gas and all the other bills. I'm getting the hell out of the valley as soon as I possibly can because it simply costs too damn much. Me and everyone else. So what happens when we leave (or refuse to settle to begin with), and the current crop of "founders" retires (think about it, it's happening now...)? What are you left with?
Silicon Valley has enjoyed a good run, but higher taxes and cost of living are going to prevail when it comes to where the nerds will settle and prosper. Don't get me wrong, I love this industry (I work as a tool vendor at frikken Intel for chrissakes--a geek's veritable wet dream if you will) but like I said, in less than 5 years I'm out of here.
Back to the "housing bubble". Even if it levels off (might be happening, who knows, it's becoming more and more fashionable to live here) then it's not going to go down, it will just stay at the current level--unaffordable.
Geeks are smart. You will see.
There is simply too much glass..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberjaya
For a huge variety of reasons all sane young women leave the Silicon Valley because it has nothing to offer them. After the geeks realize their mistake of not practicing their seduction skills, they hope that money will buy them love. Money can buy love, but the women that congregate due to that environment is exactly what men don't really want. A desperately and sad situation. Any sane person would leave to find a real life somewhere else unless they are making the BIG bucks.
Follow Me To Certain Death
Have you all forgotten Bangalore.
/. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
As sometimes happens, us Brits have taken a good idea from the US and made a similar-sounding version of it - Silicon Fen near Cambridge! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Fen/
... is pretty much the only city that actually attracts young people in Bulgaria. We have a technical university, a national university (with several CS-oriented majors), and at least 2 other universities with CS students... there's even an entire district of student boarding houses. There's a crapload of software companies - local and outsourcers from Germany, France and even some from the US - and a huge shortage of skilled developers - turns out outsourcers had to leave once they figured there is simply noone left to hire. Why? Bulgaria is a very small country, and though we are inexpensive, there's simply not enough of us. Well, sorta, because there're anually at least about 100-200 fresh developers out of the universities (they could be more by the book, but we all know only a few CS students become good developers). So, on the plus side, being a developer in Sofia these days is like being in heaven. The salary is way above average, there are plenty of great clubs downtown, and torrents rule the net. Of course, many people prefer to just leave the country and live normal lives abroad. Anyway, it's still not a bad place to be.
Why is this obvious troll 'interesting' ?
Eh, Graham is a sort of faux-Aristotelian thinker: he has his logic, he doesn't need any of your damned facts. The conclusions are always perfectly logical if you accept his premises: this is what makes his writing so attractive. The fact that his premises are incorrect and incomplete doesn't matter, what matters is that his world is consistent and simple, in a manner this 'reality' nonsense isn't. Welcome to Lake Woebegone, where the men are strong, the women are good looking, and all the children are above average.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
RTP? It has the universities, decent weather, and good companies.
Coderz 4 Life
In Scotland there's an area called Silicon Glen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Glen
In the Spanish version of Slashdot (Barrapunto) there is a history about Cómo convertir Barcelona en un Silicon Valley (How convert Barcelona in other Silicon Valley). There are some interesting ideas about technology business and Spain economy.
My city: Barcelona.
Perhaps not in the same scale but the same idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Forest (wikipedia). The first time I visited Silicon valley (I from Australia) what impressed me most was the large number of garage bussiness with one or two employees. We had to dice a 12inch wafer and this guy had two diamond saws in a small garage and that is what he did all day. In this particular industrial state you could see every garage someone doing another service, a bit further down the road there was a group of people populating board sitting. Silicon Valley must be full of these small companies that can change their services according to the demand very quickly. For a start up the benefits of having all this services required around the corner are really helpful which must help them to thrive. You just focus on the new idea not on how to fund a new diamond saw. Cheers, Aldo
The silicon valley itself will spawn new ones where there is the critical mass of nerds and rich people. Israel and India are the next two destinations. The VCs are smart people. They have sensed the trend.
The Silicon Saxony in East Germany has simular ingredients. Super Cheap real estate, minimum friction bureaucracy. Guess why AMD built Fab36 in Dresden. Same reason Fairchild Semiconductor took a shed in the middle of nowhere in the californian desert and started the whole craze.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The "success" of Silicon Valley is being reproduced in different parts of the world - Cambridge in the United Kingdom especially springs to mind. Having spoken with some of the people heavily involved in this project, we determined that there were several key ingredients that made Silicon Valley essentially unique and hard to reproduce.
The superficial similarities are easy to point out - there are quite a large amount of venture capitalists in both places (or easy access to venture capital money), proximity to large research universities. However, the differences between the two locations are telling.
Firstly, as several other posters have described, the attitudes towards bankruptcy can be vastly different. In our study, we looked at differences in attitude between the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands and found that while failure in your first entrepreneurial undertaking is considered almost de rigueur in Silicon Valley, the culture in the UK and the Netherlands tends to be less forgiving. While this is now changing, there are still many people with good ideas who are still worried about taking on high-risk projects because the perceived cost of failure is much higher.
Secondly, the attitude of the VCs and business angels towards companies. For example, we found that VCs in the Netherlands tended to have a narrower scope than VCs in both the United Kingdom and the United States. We spoke to a few large VC firms in the Netherlands and found that many of them invested only in companies whose main base of operations would be in any one of the Benelux countries. Their justification for this being that they felt it lowered their risk profile.
I also believe that Paul Graham might have downplayed the influence of governmental policy on entrepreneurship. While I'm not too sure about the situation in Silicon Valley, certainly in the UK and NL, there are entrepreneurs who view VC financing as a "lender of last resort", as it were. They've heard many stories of how VCs put very restrictive covenants on the way business is conducted, for example the need to sell their stake in the company after a certain amount of years, and they are wary of this before seeking out such financing. The first port of call for money tends to be grants, either from the nearby universities or from the government. These grants have the advantage of being relatively liberal (once you've convinced the committee to give you the money, they maintain a pretty hands off approach to the way you run your business) and are a good way to build value in the company with a very low cost to the founders.
There is also some evidence that rates on personal income tax and capital gains tax can have a strong effect on the rates of entrepreneurship, although I wouldn't want to comment too much on this as I haven't studied this avenue in very much detail. There are, however, papers that go into this in more detail. Notably:
I could go on and on about this, but the point is that this is still an active topic of research and the actual drivers of entrepreneurship can be quite hard to elucidate. There is a very good book that serves as a good launching point for further study in this topic entitled "Clusters of Creativity: Enduring Lessons on Innovation and Entrepreneurship from Silicon Valley and Europe's Silicon Fen" by Rob Koepp. Book is readily available from Amazon.
You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I'm a little skeptical about Cyberjaya, actually. Specifically, because it seems that Malaysia has yet to fully develop the ingredients required for such a project to realize its potential.
Firstly, Malaysia still lacks the highly skilled workforce that is required. I don't have hard figures for this; only anecdotal evidence. The best brains know that the market for their capabilities is essentially global (I know there are barriers to the free movement of labour, but that's another discussion) and would tend to move to places where they are given better financial compensation.
Secondly, the culture still has a hostile attitude towards bankruptcy and failure. You see it at many levels; parents who chide their students for "only" getting 7 As in their SPM (national high school examination) instead of 13 or 14 or whatever the newest record is. The people who speak of disclosed bankrupts in hushed whispers. It really does tend to make a lot of potential risk-takers think twice about embarking on their risky activity.
Finally, the venture capital industry is still somewhat underdeveloped. I know the Malaysia Venture Capital Management Berhad (MAVCAP) is making some inroads into this, but it's going to take a while before they fully develop the capabilities that larger international VCs have.
I do believe it is a worthy investment, though. It is, however, one of the things that will take years and years to pay off, if at all.
They tried to reproduce Silicon Valley near Cambridge in the UK. As far as I've heard it's not been the rip-roaring success that the people who thought of the idea imagined. The impression I get from a friend who works there is that there are a lot of start-ups which quickly turn into tits-ups. He's having more success with his home business making and selling infra-red controllers http://www.redrat.co.uk/.
There's a number of pulled-out-of-my-arse random reasons why it hasn't taken off like Silicon Valley:
1. It was pushed by National and Local Government. This never works, otherwise the North East of England would be like Silicon Valley after the amount of money that has been plowed into the region through Government and through the regional development agencies.
2. The Weather: as another post mentioned the weather in Silicon Valley is brilliant. In Cambridge it is the opposite. Nine months of the year an east wind blows out of the Russian steppes, across the North Sea and blasts across the flat fens of Norfolk towards Cambridge. It gets a bit warmer for a month or two in the Summer but if you try something like punting in the Cam and fall in, you could still die of hypothermia in August.
3. Marketing: No-one outside of the flat and soggy corner of England that is East Anglia knows what the fuck a "Fen" is. Anyone readin the name "Silicon Fen" will know straight away that it will be a cheap knock-off of Silicon Valley. Doh! The people who built Silicon Valley didn't call it that, it was called that by people who saw what he entrepeneurs and risk takers were doing.
4. Food: The UK is well known for having the worst food in Europe. I know there are more Michelin starred restaurants in London that ever before but 99.9% of the food in the UK does not come from Micehelin starred restaurants and who want to come and live here in you can live in California, France etc. This ties i with point 2 as well.
5. Risk Aversion: most brits don't like taking risks. They are terrified of risks, even more so then the Germans. One kid cuts their knee on a school trip and all school trips are banned because they are too dangerous. One person gets stabbed with a knife and know they are talking of banning all carrying of knives in public places. No more camping knofe fro me then when I head off into the mountains. Is it any wonder that people living and growing up in such an atmosphere aren't willing to take business risks. We will never see the likes of Alan Sugar, Richard Branson and Anita Roddick again.
I'm sure there quite a few more.
No but, yeah but, no but...
http://www.unixguru.com/ (Probabably a dead horse on /., but worth a cautionary mention.)
Curse you plastic mold maker!
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7915125/
Zhongguancun, Beijing indeed looks like it has all the ingredients: entrepreneurial spirit, rich people, nerds, a world-class university, and a cool place to live.
I was under the impression that one of the main reasons for silicon valleys success was that californias labour laws prohibit clauses that stop you from working with a competitor when you quit/are fired. I believe it's this that has caused Silicon Valley to flourish places in other states (Bostons Route 128) with similar conditions (minus labour laws) have not done so
What you say is true, but HP and Varian were in Silicon Valley as second-generation startups.
The first generation was the Federal Telegraph Company, founded by Cyril Elwell in the winter of 1909-1910 (originally as the Poulsen Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company). Never heard of it? It was built to commercialize the arc (not spark) transmitter developed by Valdemar Poulsen, and by 1918 had succeeded in building and operating 1-megawatt continuous-wave radio transmitters.
Elwell was not only a Stanford graduate, he got his first financing for the company from Stanford faculty members, including the president of the university. So it can truly be said that Stanford itself acted as the first venture capitalist for the Valley.
Like the startups to follow, Federal people often left to do great things:
--Since it needed receivers to go with its transmitters, Federal hired a man from New York to develop a receiver for it, and set him up in a laboratory in the bay area. There, Lee DeForest would invent the triode vacuum tube (valve).
--To transfer the arc transmitter technology from Denmark to the Valley, Poulsen sent some of his employees with the equipment. One quickly became disillusioned with Federal, but liked the Valley, and started working with speakers. Soon thereafter, Peter Jensen formed his own company, Magnavox. Jensen's name lives on today in several lines of audio products.
--Leonard Fuller, longtime chief engineer of Federal, eventually ended up on the Berkeley faculty. The story goes that one day during the Great Depression, he was sitting in the faculty cafeteria when Ernest O. Lawrence was complaining that his cyclotron research was limited by the size of magnetic pole pieces he could obtain. Fuller realized that the 1-megawatt arc transmitter Federal had designed had very, very large magnetic pole pieces and, as they were too heavy (80 tons) to scrap, several had been sitting unused in a Valley warehouse since the end of World War I. A donation was quickly arranged, and the unused Federal components came to play a significant part in the development of large particle accelerators.
... a supossedly clever person write such inane twoddle ?
Hey Graham, get the arse out of your head by removing your head out of your arse.
.. may be the more interesting question.
After all in the 70s and early 80s all the interesting stuff came from a DEC and various other companies clustered around MIT.
They just lost it at some point, its easy to see that with the demise of SGI and the apparent decline of Sun hardware central could be on the move.
Software central has already moved to Seatle (microsoft view) or cyberspace (opensource view).
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Well, the trouble with India is it thinks it is really true and plays under this code of conduct at ODI/Test level. When was the last time you heard a batsman declared out for "handling the ball" at test cricket? [FYI K Shrikant, HTB, appeal by Tony Craig, Captain, MCC.] The ball was on the pitch and Shrikant was mending it for the next delivery nearby. Tony Craig, from silly point was walking in to retrieve the ball. That idiot Shrikant was crounched padding a spot on the pitch down. Instead of letting the tall English captain stoop over to pick the ball, he picked the ball and handed it to him. Tony appealed for "handling the ball" and got Shrikant out. True, what Tony did was by the rule. But that was not Cricket by the book of Indians. That is the problem with the Indians.
As XchristX says, may be success will change their mentality. Once they see how much benefit one gets by having a little killer instict and sacrificing a little "gentlemen" image. If they do good for them.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The big money these days for developers is in the DoD. Every major and minor player in software and hardware has a MAJOR DC office. (most of them in Northern Virginia) There is BIG money to be made in defense/homeland security, and everybody wants a piece. Politics invites money, and money invites nerds. QED
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
When I read the opening blurb the first things I thought of were the weather and the geography. I have lived in the Bay Area, and quite simply it is a beautiful place to be, and the weather is as close to perfect as can be found. Not a day went by that I didn't appreciate how nice a place it was to be, even in my first apartment in San Francisco, in the super-crappy category.
This being Slashdot, I suppose I wasn't too surprised that the opening blurb said "While the people are an important part to the Silicon Valley experience, they are only part of the requirement. What local characteristics must also be present, even if Silicon Valley is to be duplicated on a smaller scale?" and almost every post moderated up discussed the people (after the predictable DRM comments, of course).
It wasn't until almost right at the bottom that I saw a comment moderated up which mentioned weather (and restaurants). People want to be somewhere nice. Until San Antonio and Ottawa and Cambridge and Vancouver and Seattle and wherever else these other tech areas are start up their weather machines and bulldozers and make some changes, companies trhere are going to have a harder time drawing the employees they want than those in California.
Don't forget: a huge proportion of people in California aren't from California. These employees are drawn from outside, and it takes more than money to pull people in (usually). Perhaps the people writing the comments and moderating them for this thread either haven't been to California and so can't appreciate its physical qualities, or they are nerds who, even if they are in California, keep the blinds drawn and don't go out in the sunlight.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Could we have a silicon valley on slashdot? Let's see:
1. nerds (check)
2. rich people (...)
North Carolina has a lake with NC, NC State and Duke around it. Glasgow, Scottland was hot just a few years ago. When NC textile industry fell due to China, the research triangle created new fabrics to put NC back in the market.
I think it's definitely reproducible. The most recent example I can think of is Silicon Glen in the central area of Scotland, which had strong links to the universities of Scotland and the rest of the UK.
Most of the occupiers were Via systems, National Semiconductor, Motorola and Chunghwa. However, in or around 2000, many of the companies started to lay off their international staff.
I think you can replicate Silicon Valley, but you'll never get the pulling power and reputation that the valley has established.
hm. Graham is talking about smart people without knowing how "smart" works. In my view, the most important ingredient for resourcefull brains is a stable childhood far away from arm races at stock markets (or games of rich people in general). Money, nice environments, cafes, etc. are all second order effects, what you need in the first place is time and encouragement to explore new paths to bear frustrations and disbeliefs of people with influence.
If his hypothesis was correct, Los Alamos, New Mexico would be a "Silicon Valley". Los Alamos county is the wealthiest in the nation and also has the highest number of PhD's, many very, very nerd-like. In my opinion, I don't think one could pick a worse location. I think with Silicon Valley it's this plus much more. The moderate climate is one while the cultural diversity and support of this diversity is a major factor.
It's full of rich people and nerds. The rich people drive up the housing costs, and the nerds are just annoying. So if I could build a new silicon valley without those things somewhere else, that'd be great.
Oh, and the weather could use improvement too. Brrr.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
This comment mainly relates to the quote:
"You can't replicate that in Europe. Change your laws."
Let's take a simpler example - the member states of the European Union. One major issue for entrepreneurs in the European Union is that, except for the larger member states, the population and market may not be large enough for whatever new product or service is being introduced. This necessitates quite a bit of cross-border trade.
You can argue that there has been quite a lot of work done by the European Commission on reducing the barriers to inter-EU trade, but one area which still remains extremely complicated today is in the area of corporate taxation.
The situation is, broadly, as follows: each member state has considerable leeway in determining the tax bases and setting the appropriate tax rates on corporations within its jurisdiction. Tax regulations in each member state can be substantially different, and this means that the corporation could incur large tax compliance costs simply to ensure that they don't fall foul of any laws of the member states in which they operate.
The European Commission has advanced several suggestions to alleviate this problem: look up Home State Taxation and the Common Consolidated Tax Base, for example. However, I don't think it's likely these measures will be implemented too soon mainly because many member states view the right to set their own levels of taxation as an issue of national sovereignty.
It's an issue, I believe, which will be settled in the political arena which may or may not be backed by underlying economic rationale. But until such time as questions such as these are settled, I do have my doubts whether the European Union can be a globally-recognised entrepreneurial force.
Ottawa was consider Silicon Valley North (Ottawa is even in a "valley" technically). For most of the 90's, it was the darling city for Nortel, Alcatel/Newbridge and JDS Uniphase along with Corel's headquarters and Adobe offices and a slew of high tech hardware and software firms. Ottawa's population has nearly doubled in the last 2 decades, and this is due to the influx of technology and software firms into the area.
However, with the recent downturn in the tech market, Nortel laying off over 60% of their workforce, same with Alcatel and JDS Uniphase, its become more like Silicon Valley Ghost Town. I think this was mirrored in the original Silicon Valley, but with strong companies like Apple there, not as much.
There is some positive strong growth occurring once again, but when you see some the HUGE facilities that Nortel and JDS Uniphase once had packed full that are now largely empty now and being leased off and subdivided, it is a shame that we couldn't keep that status. Ottawa is just full of photonics start ups and other fledgling technology firms that largely exists because of government research grants (Ottawa is the capital of Canada for those that don't know).
Currently Silicon Valley North has shifted over to Alberta which is the darling province of Canada. Buoyed by their oil industry, tech and software has grown considerably and both Calgary and Edmonton has strong growth in the technology market.
I think the answer is that while you can find hot spots where technology firms concentrate and have a "gold rush" of sorts, you can't duplicate the true Silicon Valley. You will see them shift around in different countries but not become a permanent fixture on the landscape. Ottawa might once again show potential for becoming another Silicon hot spot, but it will be a few years before we have the same kind of growth we had in the 90's.
Of course, the real question is whether or not Silicon Valley's will be duplicated in Asia where they have the concentration of people with enough skills to make it possible.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
... where do you live? I'm just curious.
Twice as many jobs with half as much Jobs!
What local characteristics must also be present, even if Silicon Valley is to be duplicated on a smaller scale? What draws technology companies to a specific location?
take a look at the rtp (research triangle park) area in north carolina. they seem to be doing a good job of recreating this on a smaller, but growing, scale.
I just did a quick scan of Paul's article, and decided that yes, it was worth my while to put in a good work for my current home.
Sometimes affectionately called "Silicon Valley North", by people who live here, the Ottawa-Gatineau region currently (as of Jan06) has over 1,800 High tech companies employing just over 76,000 people. See: http://www.ocri.ca/email_broadcasts/ottawafacts/04 06_ottawafacts.html
Looking over the list of attractive qualities required, here's how Ottawa shapes up:
Universities: Carelton and Ottawa U, both with strong engineering programs.
Culture: NAC orchestra, National Ballet of Canada, The National Gallery of Canada, Chamber Music Festival, Blues Festival.
Geek Recreation: over 100 Km of bike paths, Mountain Biking in the Gatineau Hills, 4 ski hills within an hour's drive, and Mont Tremblant (world class) 2 hours away, the world's largest(over 7km long) skating rink on the Rideau Canal).
Real Estate is still reasonable, and Ottawa has a few lovely older established areas that suit the "geek" attitude such as the Glebe and Westboro(my fave). Lots of coffee houses and Cafe's, and several lovely little towns with in a one or two hour drive for weekend getaway's (Wakefield, Merrickville and Westport are a few that I have personally experienced)
Ok, I'm gushing, so I will stop now, but its a great place to be.
Sure there's winter, but this town is a "get out and enjoy it" kind of place no matter what the season.
So what does the " ' " replace when it's on a plural or names that end in 's'?
Like "The boys' toys", or "Jesus' sandals" ?
I'm just curious ... I don't normally get involved in grammar/spelling discussions but your link peeked my curiousity, and it only discusses -'s, not -s' and not proper names...
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
Universities provide an inexpensive, but intelligent source of labor. Many undergrads will work for little more than the experience. Even if they don't know much, they are better than most low wage gophers. The grad students might be more useful, but again they are motivated by other factors such as experience and thesis materal. Lastly, the experience of working for a startup begets more startups.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Dont talk when you don't even know your Cricket man. It's Tony Grieg not Tony Craig.
We should probably replicate silicon valley as soon as possible. An investigation of a horse-racing scam leads 007 to a mad industrialist who plans to create a worldwide microchip monopoly by destroying California's Silicon Valley.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090264/
Companies which are either headquartered there, were formed there, or had a huge presence there in the 1960's include 3M, Honeywell, ERA/UNIVAC/Sperry/Unisys, Control Data, Cray, etc.
The book _A Few Good Men From UNIVAC_ by David E. Lundstrom describes some of the happenings in the Twin Cities during that time period.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
recruiting the most insane, suicidal, kamikaze drivers the world has to offer would be a must..
Interestingly enough though, I think your point about the weather might be one of the most significant (and overlooked!).
If you think about it, we've got pretty good ratios of "rich people", "nerds" and "risk takers" in locations like New York City and Dallas, TX - but neither shows signs of being the next "Silicon Valley".
I think a key factor is an environment that encourages like-minded individuals to mingle on a regular basis and hash out ideas. When you've got bad weather (or even a cloudy or foggy day), lots of people don't feel as "energized" to get out of the house and do things. Here in the midwest, I feel that way quite a bit. If it's really cold, raining all afternoon, or just a generally "dreary" day, I'm more likely to feel tired and unmotivated.
Let's not forget that there needs to be an untapped market to create/exploit in order for such growth to occur. If there were to be another Intel in some far off land, it wouldn't be making it's bones in CPUs. The PC revolution was a singular event.
We have to assume that there is a new field of this size with such growth potential. I doubt next-gen electronics will be nearly as explosive.
From going to school up at Northern Arizona for two years I have noticed that almost everything that this man mentioned is included up in Flagstaff, Arizona. I know this sounds like an odd conclusion to make on his arguments but honestly with the university comprising most of the town and there being tons of potential investors with vacation homes in the area I think there is potential in the oridance restricted dark sky city. Now all we need is half a billion dollars to finance our university a bit to expand...
DC's not a good example of east coast VCs and even though it's been hopping these last 5 years, I'm not sure it knows what it doing other than private goverenment work (i.e. formality and contract execution). Most eastern VCs are in Boston and that's where it stated with ARC. DC doesn't have MIT, Harvard, or anywhere near the edcuational and innovation history or infrastructure. And it's also riduculous to have this general conversation without considering the impact of MIT on defense R&D during WWII, Vannevar Bush on governement R&D and communication technologies, Forrester (DRAM), Licklider ARPANET, and even DEC. That's without even considering the MIT migration of folks for better weather. On the West Coast side- Stanford get's its due in this post, but what about Fairchild Semiconductor? A tremendous amount of the valley starts here.
Everyone seems to ignore the Space Race and how instrumental it was in early development of the transistor, the integrated circuit, and the micro-processor. All of the things were developed with NASA money because they needed electronics that consumed less power and generated less heat. Less power because it is expensive to carry power in space, and less heat because cooling is expensive when you can not just jettison the heat.
Additionally there were many other technologies from micro-wave to lasers, that were developed here. Again these were largely funded by NASA in the quest for the moon race. Additionally, many aerospace companies brought many engineers and collected them here because of the race to the moon.
I firmly believe that the Silicon Valley could not even be recreated here without another space race!
You need a culture where experimentation is rewarded and failure is treated as a normal cost of experiments.
I agree. Silicon Valley is an obnoxious place. There are far too many cars, and far too many of them are "look at me" machines driven by obnoxious a-holes with massive egos. In some parts of the valley, it truly is suburbia gone mad. However, when startups in the valley hire, they don't look down on resumes with stints at Garden.com or Netscape. Actually, stints at companies that flamed out is usually seen as a good thing. You've hopefully learned from your experiences at companies that failed, and there is generally no implication that because the company failed, you failed.
I've sat in plenty of discussions where the hiring party and the hired were exchanging war stories about flame-outs they'd worked at. Learning from failure and not being afraid to take chances is definitely part of the Silicon Valley business culture, and even with rich people and nerds, if you don't have that willingness to accept risk, a startup culture would be very difficult to nurture.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I can not wrap my head around that statement.
The key part you seem to be missing is "here". In that this is hard to do in Silicon Valley these days. As you point out, you can do it elsewhere.
This might be a bit off-topic and in itself worth another "Ask slashdot".
..., we do this. What ist your field of expertise...?)
As a Silicon Valley Outsider or even from a foreign country (such as in my case from Germany):
What ist the best and most efficient way to get into contact with companies in the valley? Not so much with the larger, established ones but most preferably with young startup companies? For an exchange of ideas, for a possible future partnership, whatever.
What are the best fairs or conferences to visit, which blogs should one read, what are the most interesting meeting places to go to?
and that for the following topics:
- software development
- free software/open source software
- "Web 2.0"
Some time ago I was looking for a service in Silicon Valley which I knew from the east coast, as a company called cscout offers it there, particularly for New York (www.cscout.com) They are your scouting partner and bring you together with a lot of possible partners in a very short time.
The way it worked, was essentially this:
- you visited New York for some five to seven days
- beforehand they contacted some companies in the Silicon Alley and organised short meetings for you (each of these with a length of twenty to fourty minutes)
(Well, actually as a friend of mine who used cscout's service, told me that what they did actually sucked as there was no exchange beforehand, so most of that time went like: Hi, I am
Is there someone in Silicon Valley doing something comparable (a bit more efficient, maybe)?
Thanks
Juergen
You need rich people who get technology and nerds..
Here in Chicago we have a lot of rich people that don't understand, trust, or like technology and they can exercise greed in other investment vehicles.
I think it should be "Rich poeple who made significant money from technology" and nerds..
All of which makes it a pleasant place to be.
And all the Valley startups I've seen since the crash have been pretty sensible. Maybe you only hear about the silly ones.
It is Irreproducible Complex and therefore must be Intelligently Designed
Where else are there 3 major airports within 50 miles of each other with a Bay between them? Where else are can you find enough land to support the millions of poorer people who live on the edges of the valley and take all the supporting jobs that the rich dont have to do, but are willing to pay someone else to do? Decent Mass-transit, Two major Colleges, a better freeway system then most places, AND better then average weather?
JFK, LaGuardia, Newark.
Long Island, northern New Jersey, Westchester/Rockland counties.
NYCTA, MTA, NJ Transit, LIRR, Amtrak.
Columbia, NYU, Polytechnic, Stevens, NJIT, NYIT, Cooper Union, Fordham, Pratt, Pace, etc.
On highways, it's probably a wash.
And OK, the weather's not as nice, but we don't get major earthquakes, mudslides, wildfires, etc.
So... how about New York? Oh, wait - then again, the NYC metro area is already a huge, rich, varied center for all kinds of technology...
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Stanford plays an interesting role. Stanford was started by a robber baron, and it still shows. Stanford isn't primarily a university. It's really a landowning company and investment bank that runs a school on the side for the tax break. This is clear if you look at Stanford's IRS filings. This works out quite well for all parties. Stanford's investment unit invests in private venture capital partnerships, which is an unusual investment for a university but works out well, because they have people who can evaluate which portfolios have enough potential winners to come out ahead.
The second item that made Silicon Valley is a little provision in the Californa Labor Code. This is the famous Section 2870:
So what you do on your own time, unrelated to your employment, is yours. Period. And that's why employees can work on startups in their spare time. Few other states have that, and it's never something that seems to come up when other places try to copy California, because employers hate it.
Then there's 3000 Sand Hill Road, the address known to everyone who's ever had anything significant to do with a startup. This is a quiet little place near the intersection of Sand Hill Road and Interstate 280. It looks like a nice little housing development composed of concentric rings. The outer ring has houses and condos, and is adjacent to a golf course. The middle ring has small offices. At the center is a restaurant, the Sundeck. It's all very peaceful, and there's no indication that you're in one of the world's great financial capitals. Except that there's a directory board. On that directory board are all the big names in venture capital. Even the VCs who've outgrown the place maintain offices there. It's unique in the world; all the big players are in one small place and talk to each other.
Silicon Valley as a center of innovation is kind of slow right now. The dot-com boom messed it up. Before the dot-com boom, Silicon Valley was about doing cool stuff. The dot-com boom was about retailing. And retailing people just aren't that innovative. The huge increase in land prices pushed manufacturing out of the Valley. Then engineering moved to follow the manufacturing. Now, Palo Alto is really a kind of retirement town; you see students and old people, but not that many twentysomethings. In downtown Palo Alto, we lost Stacy's, one of the world's best technical bookstores, to get some store selling overpriced kitchen utensils. It's not clear if the Valley will come back, or remain the place you stay after you've made it.
But it's been great fun being here.
If the formula were this simple, then anyplace where there are people with money and nerds you'd end up with a mini Silicon Valley. No, there's another part to the formula missing.. you also need a reason for the rich people to invest their money with the nerds. That's the hard part to recreate.
Living in Silicon Fen, i.e. Cambridge, England, clearly displays the need for a good transport system and maybe some houses too. Rich people, nerds, transport system, places to live. We're a bit lacking in the latter two, which is stifling our capacity for 'crop' output...
There is one big difference between Vancouver and Silicon Valley: We've got chicks. Lots of them. Beautiful, educated, worldly ones.
And I don't mean that in the sense that attracting male nerds in that way has anything to do with the success of a tech region. The fact that there is a more balanced male/female ratio in the city lends a much more humanistic quality to living in Vancouver, not to mention the fact that brilliant female nerds don't feel nearly as alienated here.
Okay, so there is government nonsense factor working against Vancouver, but the chick factor outweighs it IMNSHO.
It seems clear that some excellent people moved to Silicon Valley and made it what it is today. Stanford is good because it consistently attracts the best students and faculty from all over the world. A large number of the founders and employees of the start-ups were born outside the US. So what made all these people move? First and foremost, California has always seemed welcoming to new immigrants. Compare this to most places in Europe where even being born in that country is not enough to grant you citizenship. Second, factors like a multi-cultural environment and the weather are important to new immigrants. People who leave their homelands are looking forward to nicer surroundings.
There is a smaller version of Silicon Valley (hosting 26K jobs). It's called "Telecom Valley" and is in Sophia-Antipolis - France.
Some years ago, someone from the MIT Media lab was trying to recruit me. As we were walking across the MIT campus to the T station, it was sleeting, and he said "Out here there are fewer distractions". I'm still in California.
I have been a student in two engineering departments, a small state school (UNH) and UC Berkeley. The quality of the teaching in both schools was comparable. If anything, it was better at UNH. The quality of the students (which is what you are talking about) is MUCH better at Berkeley. Schools like Berkeley have their pick of the best students from around the world. It is impossible to quantify, but I am certain the proximity of Stanford and Berkeley has contributed hugely to the success of Silicon Valley.
The truth is an offense, but not a sin.------R. N. Marley
The author forgot the hippies!! Apple was funded by the sell of a VW Bus not rich people.
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said I don't know." Mark Twain
Orlando is very similar to SV in many ways. First off, the non technological aspects:
Weather: It doesn't get cold in the winter. It gets pretty warm in the summer, but overall it is great. Hurricanes are rare and don't do a lot of massive damage that far inland.
Non-natives: You'll be hard pressed to find a person older than 30 that was actually born in Florida. Therefore most of the people in the area are new, and are open to new ideas. The culture is VERY progressive which brings me to...
Diversity: Yankees, Southerners, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans make up the majority of the population. When more film activity was going on at Universal and Disney, there was some Southern Calif, flavor in the population too. It really is a melting pot. Most of these people are fairly educated too.
Cost of living: Until about 5-7 years ago, cost of living in Orlando used to be VERY cheap compared to most other urban area. Pricing has gone up but there is NO state income tax, and most sales taxes in the state are pretty low. The overall employment and wealth of the area is significantly higher than that of the rest of the nation (thus crime was low etc)
Now to the IMPORTANT aspects of Orlando:
University of Central Florida (UCF)- This is where NASA would pull lots of knowledge and heads from. HUGE CS/CompEngineering department.
NASA - duh
Naval Training Center - until a few years ago this was one of the two places where nuclear engineers were trained for the US Navy.
Lockeheed - yep
Martin Marietta - yep (now Lockheed-Martin). 3 or 4 plants in the area
KDF/General Dynamics - Yep
Harris - yep
Westinghouse - big plant
Siemens/Strongberg/Carlson - yep, big plant. Electrical distribution and phone systems
Veritas/Seagate - yep
Full-Sail - school of media (recording/ game design/video/film etc)
Disney and Universal employ lots of engineers and media types.
USAF - Yep the Air Force has several bases within an hour or two drive. Also a launching facility next to NASA.
NAWCTSD - Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division (think simulators)
Comair Aviation Academy - flight school
Embry Riddle Flight aviation and flight school
GE - Yep
CENTCOM is in Tampa, 2 hours away
Air Force Agency for Modeling and Simulation (AFAMS) - next to UCF
Army Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM) - also next to UCF
AT&T -Yep
Boeing - Yep
CAE Systems Flight & Simulation Training - yep
HP - Yep
Institute for Simulation and Training - next to UCF
Northrop Grumman - yep
Raytheon Systems - yep
Here is a list of companies next to UCF in an area called "Research Park": http://www.cfrp.org/tenants.html
Orlando is a technological playground and absolutely worthy of the title "SV-East"
Libertas in infinitum
Besides nerds and rich people, what you really need for a Silicon Valley are nucleii, people whose expertise causes a cluster of competance to crystalize within their geographic area.
Utah is a thriving "second silicon valley", in no small part thanks to a group of nucleii, including Phil Windley (http://www.windley.com) that worked hard to make it happen.
In Nebraska (which has just as smart a group of people), there was no nucleii, and Nebraska is pretty much dead as far as tech innovation goes.
The other thing you need is a supportive local government. For example, in Chicago, if you follow things like eprarie(http://www.eprarie.com/) or the May Report, (http://www.tmronline.com), you can see that you have everything you need to have a second Silicon Valley, but the local government just isn't supportive of that happening.
While real estate may or may not be the main force driving boomtowns, the propect of making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in real estate appreciation is a major attraction to workers.
In places like Silicon Valley, many people have made more money on their homes than at their jobs. Plenty of people who got there 10 years have turned $500k into $1M or $1.5M, but people who got there in the 60s or 70s have turned $30-50k homes into $3M+, *just by being there.* How many people, even with high salaries, are able to wind up with that much from savings and other investments, in their whole lifetimes? Sure, tech stocks may have offered that opportunity, but most people don't have the knowledge for that. Any idiot can buy a house. For most Americans who can afford it, it's automatic.
So anyone who has been able to squeak by and make a mortgage payment in Silicon Valley for few years has made a fortune, *just by being there.* If this isn't an attraction, I don't know what is.
One reason corporate types wind up so much better off than the rest of us is, early in their careers they get transferred around to various cities every 2-3 years. Most of these places are boomtowns with rapidly appreciating real estate -- business hotspots where the manpower is needed. Each time they move they make a couple hundred grand or more on their house. I know one guy who has hit "the OC," Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Chicago all at the right times. Though his salary is excellent, he still made a lot more on the houses he bought and sold. These were just primary residences too, not really "investments." Remember that just $1k doubled 10 times is $1M. Take (a borrowed!) $200k and double it just 4 times, and you have...