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Why Startups Condense in America
bariswheel writes "The controversial genius developer/writer/entertainer Paul Graham writes an insightful piece on Why Startups Condense in America. Here's the skinny: "The US allows immigration, it is a rich country, it is not (yet) a police state, the universities are better, you can fire people, work is less identified with employment, it is not too fussy, it has a large domestic market, it has venture funding, and it has dynamic typing for careers. Inquire for details within."
If you filter out the remedial courses that US Uni's offer to get US students up to speed, they are better than most foreign Uni's. In Japan, College is the time to party, while in the US, High School is the time to party.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Why is he asking about Universities in Europe? What about Eastern Europe or the Ukraine or Russia? What about the results to the programming challenge that everyone made a big fuss about? What about China's Universities?!
It's about quantity. If Chinese Universities were able to handle the demand of top Chinese students, they wouldn't flood to American universities by the thousands. There are top universities around the world, but if you write down all the "tier 1" universities in a particular discipline, more than half of them will be in America.
One more reason could be that US has fewer bureaucratic barriers comparing to that in Ukraine or Russia for example.
It's much easier to find investors in USA than in Europe (i'm speaking as a french entrepreneur who tested the both side of Atlantic to run it's own business).
Biais.org : Python, art and chicken pie.
And you rate the US universities by the fact that a few of your classes had little value? Do you think his statement is inclusive of all universities? State Universities or private colleges? Ivy League calibur or run of the mill JuCo, or even State University? And were the classes required or did you choose them for your own curriculum? There's a reason why several countries state sponsor their best and brightest to attend our colleges, and those who do attend maximize their experience. You don't see foreign students signing up for advanced pottery or basket weaving.
The US is still the best environment conducive for education and innovation. We create, while they emulate. Chinese? Let me know when they can create their own chip without grabbing our ideas first. They're about where the Japanese were 30 years ago. We still have the best broad based educational infrastructure. We're still treated as the capital of the finance and business world. Our medical and engineering programs still gain recognition.
So some Russians are about to figure out how to write a recursive sieve in the least amount of time via rote and repetition, and are able to regurgitate that information on demand for competition. I'll be impressed when I see a Russian "Web 2.0" app that isn't spam or spyware.
Decades ago, companies stayed where they were started. They certainly stayed in the country where they started and they often kept their headquarters or a major plant where they started.
Movie producers run out to California, mostly to escape legal process servers because a patent cartel wanted to price-gouge them for the unlicensed cameras they were using, stayed, and founded Hollywood.
A guy named Chesney starts up a business in Pittfield, MA and GE ends up headquartered there, and employing tens of thousands of people prior to Neutron Jack Welch.
Digital Equipment Corporation starts up in Maynard because the guys who founded it were connected with MIT, and there was cheap space in an old mill there... and grow in that location to a multi-billion-dollar company.
But I can easily see an unstable state in which the United States continues to be a good place for startups, for the reasons mentioned, but all of the really economically important activity gets moved overseas just as the company begins to take hold. Over time, of course, that will undermine all the things that make the U. S. a great place for startups, but not immediately... just as U. S. researchers continue to win Nobel prizes for work performed under conditions that existed in the U. S. decades ago.
Tangentially, New England is a great place for startups because of the existence hundreds of small, independent machine shops that can do prototype work. I believe those shops are a long-lived legacy of a century or two ago when New England and its mills were the most sophisticated industries in the U. S. I wonder whether anyone in the state government is paying attention to the care and feeding of those small businesses?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I am not sure american universities are better, but they certainly are different. I have had the opportunity to take a few classes at KUL in Belgium (the "best" and largest university in the country). I would say students here LEARN the same things we do at universities in America, but they don't DO anything. In the US, courses consisted of a lot of work....exercises/homeworks, multiple tests/exams/quizzes in a quarter/semester, and labs + lab reports (often as frequent as one per week). In Belgium, you attended classes, perhaps there were optional exercises (in class, not at home, nor graded), and the only grade you get is the final exam, which is often about 15 minutes long and oral. Coming from US universities, you get a wealth of knowledge combined with hands-on experience that many places in Europe don't seem to be offering. Additionally, students here are not allowed to work during university (only allowed to work 2-3weeks per year), and their internships are usually severely limited (you think an intern job in the US is crap....here it can consist of just pushing a button). This has a huge effect on the job market and the prospects of what you will be doing in a job after you graduate. IMO, US students leave university much more prepared than their counterparts in Europe (well, maybe only Belgium?)
There are top universities around the world, but if you write down all the "tier 1" universities in a particular discipline, more than half of them will be in America.
Good point, which gets lost in most discussions like this.
For some reason, most people will read a sentence like "America has many of the world's top universities" and think it said "No country but America has a top university."
This is mostly a sign of the abject level of the teaching of basic logic at schools around the world. In America, too, because most Americans will misread things in the same way.
What I've always found especially curious is the mismatch of the American higher-education system with the open and blatant anti-education attitude of much of the American public. It's not just George Bush; signs of education and intelligence are carefully hidden by most American politicians, because they understand that this would be a major flaw to a huge fraction of the voters.
Meanwhile, people make jokes about how education is now America's major export industry. Funny how a country can make and export something that they don't like to use at home.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Its like this in most other countries in europe. Sweden for example, here I have started 3 small companies with just filling out a form on the internet and paying the registration fee. No hassles, no bureaucracy. The swedish IRS and agency of companies are working towards makeing it as easy as possible for anyone to start a company. There are even money you can get from the government to start a company instead of beeing on unemployment compensation, this usually funds your salary for a year or so. (this requires that they agree to your business plan). (called "starta eget bidrag")
Also, here in Sweden we have a high "job security" with tough laws regarding employment. But that does not mean that a company can not fire someone that misbehaves. If you dont do your job you are fired, why would there ever be a law against that anywhere? I have seen people beeing fired here for not doing their job. I do also believe that this is the case in france despite the rumours of impossiblity to fire people that are not doing their job.
One key to the many successful startups in USA I believe, is that many young people in USA dream about getting super rich, or doing something big, makeing a difference. It is important in the american culture to "become something". Here in europe people seem to have a different attitude towards life and what you should do with it. Many are very happy if they have a normal job to go to every day, kids, somewhere to live and money to spend on entertainment/food and the ocational vacation, etc.
17th Century: Sweden/Ottoman Empire/Spain (in their respective spheres)
;)
18th Century: France
19th Century: Britain
20th Century: USA
21st Century: China?
I can't necessarily see China succeeding on the level of the previous empires, though, due to their foreign dependencies for resources, oil, and markets. Still, its got the size and if distribution of wealth improves they might create their own market...
Besides, they had their empire from about 1500 BC to 500 AD.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
As a European I find the article rather America-centric.
As an American I find this article to be Bay Area-centric. Silicon Valley ceased being an engine of significant economic growth after the dotcom bust. It is unlikely to return to its former glory. It is kind of humourous that pundits like Paul Graham are still taking victory laps for an era of growth in Silicon Valley he had little to do with. In the US the economies of the southwest and southeast are much more vital.
an ill wind that blows no good
I hate to say this, but the US is in deep troubble at least for the next 2-8 years. With fiat money, way over extended housing debt, heavy bond debt, an account deficit of 7%, and now the carry trade unwinding behind 100's of trillions (with a T) in derivatives contracts - it won't be long before all freakin satanic hell breaks loose in US financial markets.
The bad news, is that I don't think there is anything that can stop an economic collapse, the good news is that I think after the collapse the US has the highest potential of any country in the world for a spectacular recovery assuming that people don't panic and impose all sorts of controls that take away economic freedoms.
(PS, those people who have written off gold and silver as barbaric immature monitary systems are going to be in for a very rude awakening, he he)
You know, some folks have to pay $1200 a MONTH in rent......
$1200 per YEAR for college is peanuts.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
What do you get when you take the very few best students out of a nation of 300 million people and put them in a university where you've bought the very few best professors by offering more money (because of huge tuitions) than anywhere else? A very small number of very good universities. Also, when you say a state university can be top in its field, remember you're talking about the professors, NOT the students. (From my experience, these professors are often foreign and have come to the US because of better pay.) Also remember to include technical schools when you talk about the community college system in Europe. From what I've seen in the US, there's almost always a place for you in some (possibly not-so-good) university no matter how poorly you've done (or unmotivated you've been) in high school, especially if you're willing to pay enough for it. In Europe, a lot of these people, I think, would be off to a technical school instead.
There seems to be some kind of cultural bias (at least, amongst people like the author) that only sandal-wearing californians are capable of creating innovative IT. Linux was created by a Finnish student. The WWW was created by an Englishman working at a public institute in Switzerland. Yes, i'm typing this on an Apple. But there is no technological reason I'm not typing this on an Acorn instead.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
It all depends where you measure. Paul Graham appears to be basing his experience on MIT. Unfortunately the US only has one MIT and only five or so universities in the same class for technology.
The US Ivy League is unfortunately not world class in technology. The same is true of Oxford, the humanities are supreme, there is some world class science and math. Engineering is not an institutional priority. Yale and Harvard still have admissions policies that discriminate in favour of the children of alumni and against the most qualified applicants. You can't take second rate students and be first rate.
In the past this peversely helped the US system. MIT might well have remained a respected but unexciting trade school if Havard had decided to take engineering seriously. If Harvard and MIT had merged as was proposed before WWI then MIT would never have been the powerhouse it was after WWII. Harvard's anti-semitic hiring policies would have excluded most of the stars of the current CSAIL faculty.
Its not just the Rivests and Minskys that you loose with anti-semitic hiring, its all the non-jews who do not want to work in that type of environment. i think that this is probably one of the bigger effects on German academia, the NAZIs did not just exclude the jews, they excluded everyone who questioned their ideology. Once an institution has excluded the type of people who ask questions it can take centuries to recover. The Catholic church has not yet recovered from the counter-reformation, it probably never will.
There is no ideal higher education strategy. The US has historically had a much higher percentage of the population go through tertiary education. That is on balance probably a better strategy for this century than the UK where in the past only 10% went to university and there was a very deliberate divide between the ordinary and the elite schools.
On balance I don't think it is MITs and Stanfords that give the US the edge. You can always hire in elite engineers. And the people who succeed at places like MIT are people who would probably succeed almost anywhere. I think it is the large span of middle ranking institutions.
The point is that you need relatively few engineers compared to the number of salespeople, marketers, finance, administrators etc. And while engineers do not typically value the inputs of non engineers much these have a massive effect on the performance of a business, if only because smart people find it pretty difficult to work with people whose intellectual development stopped at 18. university is not a perfect cure for this but it can help.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
One of the reasons I believe Americans become insular is the large size AND homogenaity. Hop in a car, pick a random direction, drive for a day. There's a pretty good chance you're still in the US, with Canada similar enough to fool you. Hop out and you'll likely be able to speak to a local, in English, with accent variation significantly less than within the UK. If you really wanted to, you can probably find a job in a week or less (you might be at McDonalds, but you can get a job), get an apartment, watch the same tv shows, and so on.
My point is that most Americans, even ones who travel, have no concept of any other way of life. That's not a criticism, just an observation. If everyone in Europe spoke the same language, ate the same food, etc, etc, we'd be saying the same about them. We don't have a concept of neighboring countries, except Canada and Mexico, because we never bump into any.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I spent my childhood in the Soviet Union. My family were refuseniks (denied permission to leave the USSR in 1979, pariahs of the state until we finally got out in 1989). Several members of my family in my grandparents' generation were "vanished" (one for teaching Hebrew, another for "subverting the communist economic system" by selling black-market pants). Though I didn't personally experience the worst of the USSR (Stalin's reign), I am familiar enough with the crimes of the USSR to discern when another country is repeating them. I think the United States (of which I am now a citizen and dearly love) has been steadily inching towards a Stalinist nightmare for many years. Maybe you haven't been paying attention to the news. Our country now engages in limited amounts of secret arrests, torture and spying on its citizenry. The last item may not even be limited. We build "detention centers" around the world and fill them with kidnapped foreign nationals. The scariest thing to me is that these crimes are never made public until revealed by the media. The media has very scant access to government secrets, so we can't know what deeper more malicious crimes are being committed at the moment. Once you've read about MK-ULTRA it's hard to imagine something our government won't do when not overseen by the public. So the grandparent poster is correct. We are not yet a police state, but we're well on our way.
"If you haven't heard of a university, it's likely that it's because little research has come out of it of note." I laughed out loud here, honestly.
;-)
Me too, though perhaps for a different reason.
There are a lot of fields of study in which there is significant research going on that is unknown to most of the field, because most of the papers are published in a local journal, in the local language. This is especially true in Japan and China. The research only becomes "public" when it is published in a Western language, usually English these days.
I've seen a number of list of the "best" universities published in the US. Very often, I subsequently come across the observation that the universities at the top are all teaching in English. When I mention this to people, the reaction can often be summarized as "There are universities that don't teach in English?"
I think this is the main reason behind claims that the US has most of the top universities. You're reading something written by an American, and most Americans are blissfully unaware of anything that isn't reported in English.
There are exceptions. I had a math prof whose specialty had a number of important people at one university in Romania, and they published all their preliminary papers in their local journal, in Romanian. So he learned Romanian, to read their papers. ("It's easy if you already read French, as any educated person must.")
I also worked for several years as the computer guru for a bunch of biologists, several of which learned to read Japanese for the same reason. There are evolutionary biologists studying Mandarin because of the important work coming out of China. But you don't find many Americans outside academia who would do such a thing.
(Of course, the calligraphy itself could be a reason to study those languages.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Here in the USA, we have an interesting cultural/political phenomenon: many lower middle class people strongly support the republican party whose policies are very biased towrads helping the very rich.
I wouldn't necessarily call that an American phenomenon. For instance, an interesting study showed that Latin Americans who immigrate to the US are horrifed by estate taxes...even when the estate taxes don't kick in until the estate is worth $1mil.
The estate tax is purely a tax on the wealthy, so its elimination would benefit the wealthy the most (though keeping it is not necessariliy helpful to the non-wealthy.) In either case, these immigrants see some type of potential for them to be worth that much, and plus some other type of cultural aversion to taxation at death, make them highly supportive of the estate taxe's elimination.
I don't know if the difference was because of the shift of responsibility, or the difference between motivation by paycheck and motivation by grade, or some other entirely different factor, or some of all of them.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Russia. During the russian revolution, in addition to shooting czarists and priests, they liked to shoot intellectuals-- the intelligent, educated folks who thought maybe shooting people and "collecting" their stuff wasn't the best way to build a worker's paradise. In fact, up until the late 40's when the race for the atomic bomb came about, "intellectualism" was considered a bad thing. To this day, the term "intellectual" has a strong element of derision in Russia. Or how about good ol' Mao? Very big anti-intellectual. He even opined that people didn't need to learn to read, as knowing too much would only confuse them. Militant islamists desiring to turn democracies into islamic caliphates are generally pretty anti-intellectual.
Deriding education is standard dictator behavior.
So yeah, nothing new there. Move along. Move along.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.