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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."
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.