Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
All (nearly) those former agricultural regions are now high density housing or business parks. But the rest of the valley, where houses haven't been torn down and rebuilt with property-line hugging multistory monsters, has older homes with character.
Los Altos, where I grew up, is succumbing to the property line multistory monsters slowly. But Mountain View and Sunnyvale and Cupertino and Santa Clara mostly aren't.
You're implying a stereotype; please don't take swipes at people like that.
There are many nerds that end up down there. I had a friend from school that went down there (He was Lebanese), and liked it quite a bit. I think he's been down there for about 15 years now, with a brief lapse to South Florida before he headed back to Alabama.
Sure, sample size of "one", but people do like it over there.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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..
In Scotland there's an area called Silicon Glen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Glen
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.
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...
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.
Twice as many jobs with half as much Jobs!
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.
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.
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.