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Silicon Valley - Still Important To Tech Advances
mrspin writes "This week the The New York Times sparked a lively debate by publishing an article which argued that, when it comes to creating innovative technology, geography still matters — and that Silicon Valley is the place to be. It's certainly true that Silicon Valley, compared with other innovation hot-spots, has the much needed Venture Capital and the connections that enable money to flow from one new company to another. Want proof? ZDNet takes a look at LinkSViewer, a new web-based visual networking tool for exploring capital relationships in Silicon Valley." Is the success of Valley-area projects the result of a more creative environment, or is the cachet of the area (and the resulting money) the reason behind their success?
It's like New York and London that have become the major financial centers over the years. These things could move anywhere around the globe, but the connections, infrastructure, and history continue to keep these areas vital. Silicon Valley could remain vital for a long time for all sorts of new technology.
IMO, the creative process there is no different than if it was done in Orlando, fl. Money has a funny way of enabling corporate synergies. Ahh, there, now I've satisfied my daily quota of BS-speak.
Certain places will always be known for certain things... I work in Hartford, CT - Insurance Capital of the World... well maybe not so much anymore, but having a Hartford presence just makes sense - there is a large pool of insurance specialists - in IT, Finance, Underwriting, Accounting, Actuary... Same goes for Silicon Valley, and the loop around the Boston suburbs... software blood will always run thick in those places.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
Silicon Valley is better for "brave, new world" revolutionary innovation, but not necessarily for "better, faster, cheaper" evolutionary innovation. Advances that require building on years of previous knowledge require more stability than the Silicon Valley environment can provide. Example: more successful microprocessor design is done in either Oregon, Haifa, Austin, New York (IBM), etc. than in Silicon Valley.
positive feedback loop. Fueled by Standford and the initial tech boom it has become a self sustaining cycle with each new crop of entrepreneurs being fed by the next.
Thalasar
Basically what it boils down to is that these areas benefit from the fact that there's already a bunch of people with the needed resources already there. As much as we'd like to think the Internet makes location irrelevant, the reality is that we're social creatures and we'll always have an affinity for meeting people in person. We get jobs, build companies and get investment, primarily, through the social networks we create. It's possible to do these things without social networks but it is WAY harder.
In my career since College I've worked in two cities and have worked in five companies. Of those five companies, I was hired totally cold by only one of them. In all the other cases, I knew somebody who worked for the company who I'd worked for/with in the past and was able to use that to get my foot in the door. Now take that concept and multiply it thousands of times amongst the social networks that develop in a limited geographic area with a strong focus on a particular kind of business.
So I think ultimately it's less about the cash in the valley, and more about the people there. The cash follows the people and the ideas.
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Sure, entrepreneurs are the ones that think up of the new ideas and lead the innovations, but nothing would get done without talented developers. It just happens that skilled developers tend to migrate toward the Bay Area because of the high density of good companies. This in return, encourages more startups and we start seeing even more talented developers flocking to the Bay Area. It's kind of self-renewing and I don't see it going away any time soon (save some catastrophic earthquake...).
The new Silicon Valley (SV) is not in the USA. The new SV is located in Bangalore, India and Shanghai, China. Ebenezer Scrooge...errr... Microsoft can buy 5 Indian/Chinese engineers for the price of one American engineer.
Alabama is proof. We have one of the top research hospitals in the United States. We have a whole city full of freaking rocket scientists which incidentally has the nation's highest concentration of engineers. Jimmy Wales grew up here. We had three winners on American Idol (who no one cared about until then) and lots of good local bands (who no one cares about now.) Every generation, Alabama produces enough interesting people to completely replace the asshats who are responsible for Alabama's history - but then they all move, leaving the same old rednecks in charge.
Reputation is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's the sole reason why Alabama is still socially conservative.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Wow, look at this. As Everynicklstaken says:
"ZDNet did not take a look at this. You took a look at this, and posted it to your ZDNet blog.
Full disclosure = A good thing."
Everynickelstaken's post is a little lost down there. I think it should get more play.
Click on: "ZDNet take a look at this and you get: http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=93
and you get "Steve O'Hear," ZDNet blogger extraordinaire.
Click on "mrspin" and get this: http://www.insearchofthevalley.com/
and you get "Steve O'Hear" again!
Kind of recursive. "I've got this theory and I've got proof. Click here for the proof. I wrote that, too."
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
tends to stay in a given area. It doesn't like to move. It creates laws and social structures to protect itself (or the humans who work for it do). Once the protection is in place, its almost impossible to move it somewhere else. Only a heavy disaster or economic devistation will get rid of it, and then only because the protection is gone.
The Valley will continue to be important for as long as California can keep the funding and investment laws in place.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
People like Steve Jobs, Larry, and Sergey have created an environment of pseudo-celebrity that feeds itself here in The Valley. Nerds (like myself) flock to the place in order to gain a social status that was unheard of pre-.com.
It's turned in to a cyclical thing now as the VC's came here to be bigwigs in something else besides entertainment and, of course, they want to be close to their money, so they make sure the companies they're pushing stay local.
Plus, Northern California is a pretty decent place to live in general. Most will complain about the housing prices but (most of) the salaries support that. Where else can people who were anti-social or even beat up in high school gain status and bathe in their sense of an overactive sense of self-entitlement just because they got an MBA? [sic]
Saving the World: One Drink at a Time
I'm reasonably forthright in my distaste for Manhattan, yet as a musician I find myself going there at every reasonable opportunity. Why? It ain't for the "scene," it's because that's where they keep the money. I go to Staten Island because that's where they keep the musical instruments because Manhattan is where they keep the money. I go to Queens . . .
Yeah, right. Get real.
KFG
The positive feedback loop is a big part of it. It produces a pool of trained people from whom you can hire the skills you need on short notice and without paying relocation expenses and "moving away from where the action is" penalties.
But another factor is a small but very important piece of IP law in California:
If an employee makes an invention, on his own time, without using company materials or resources, and it's not in the company's immediate or likely future business path, it belongs to the employee. No matter what the employment contract says. (The contracts generally explicitly include one page which IS this provision.)
The result is that people who invented something that their company wouldn't be developing could rent the building across the street and build their own startup to develop and market it. And many of them did - and did it again a couple years later - repeat for decades.
The result is that startups budded off and grew like a yeast culture.
Any other state that wants to build its own version of Silicon Valley needs to clone this provision into their own state law.
If this is done, and they can provide an alternaive to California's high crime, high tax, and oppressive political-correctness, they might see an even bigger boom in one of their major university towns.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Wow, no matter how many times I read that I think your making a different point. You should go into politics.
OTOH, maybe this cold medicine is screwing with me.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How many IT people out there have been forced to use second rate software because that's what was sold to their boss by the guy he plays golf with? :)
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Technology is forcing people there by eliminating anything that doesn't require face to face communication. To be employed, you have to do things that require physical presence in the same place as your peers. Otherwise, you might as well be in Siberia.
Exactly. A journalist at Stanford, for chrissakes. It's his job to puff up the Valley.
I'm glad things are going well for you...
I'm planning to make the move out there in about 4 months. I'm currently on the job hunt.
Are you looking for work out there as well?? If so, how is the hunt going?
I know when I visited Palo Alto I had a great time just walking around. It was a really nice area, and I could just hop back on the train to get back to San Francisco.
good luck!
Relocating to San Francisco / Palo Alto... Hire me?
It has more to do with the big guys rubbing elbows than anything else. It is far easier to share titles on boards with your friends and their companies if they are somewhat geographically close.
In the late 90's people were flocking to the valley to write web pages for 90 and 100 thou. They got there and found rent on an apartment took a big chunk and then they were spending hours in traffic. And each and everyone that showed up drove prices higher and made traffic worse. Part of the tech crash was simple the salary pressure to cover the living issues in the valley. What kind of sense does that make. The better question is why should any of the CEOs give a shit.
So what happened. The DSEOs (dip shits in charge) started looking for a place where they could get work done for pennies on the dollar. The fact that productivity has more often than to gone to zero is irrelevent. With a bit of brains they could have created tech areas in a distributed fashion. But that would not have been the business practice of the day.
Don't get me wrong. I think some of the out sourcing is a good thing. There is a lack of really good engineering talent here. Companies should look for competency. But it needs to nake sense. I have worked on so many projects that I knew would not ever make it out the door. But delivering real products is not the business of most companies. Their business is mostly looking good on the books for a while so management can get a pay out.
Is the success of Valley-area projects the result of a more creative environment, or is the cachet of the area (and the resulting money) the reason behind their success?
Neither. It's the fact that there is a concentration of engineers here. As simple as that. If you start up a software development company, you want to hire software developers. Guess where you'll find software developers? In Silicon Valley! That's also where you'll find sales and marketing folks with a software development background. Most people don't just sell their homes and move halfway across the country to join a startup. So you start it up where you have a concentration of potential employees.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Yes, Silicon Valley is still important.
As a geographical location.
The same as Queen is important for England today.
Yet it does not mean that Silicon Valley location is a panacea, or some sort of passing score.
The really successful startups don't even need venture money. Did you hear that?
Some companies are in Chicago, others are in East Coast, and some are in garages.
What really important is who in this garage, and not where it is located.
and all that? :-)
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
That company laid me off and shut down the office a year later :)
Also, I think a lot of it depends on the nature of the network and how you use it. My take is to use those relationships to establish credibility, that is, I expect I can get the jobs on my own skills, but knowing somebody helps establish that when you say you can do something you're in fact capable of it.
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It scores a lot of runs but also leads the industry in strike-outs.
I think that the dot-com dumbness was mostly confined to the SV (except for the investors). At least I didn't see those software developers that were in it only for the money in my area.
and its main importance is that it's "where the money is". I was happy to move out of there, and money is the only reason I can think of for going back even for a visit.
One can make a case for living within a local UPS radius from SV to make ordering stuff (as in physical) out of there, but if one has the good fortune to live within a reasonable distance of a Fry's, that's almost as good.
I think that unless one's VCs insist that one put the startup in SV, it's a lot more cost-effective to find a place for a IT-oriented startup with cheap fiber optic broadband and cheap electricity outside of SV. . . as google did.
While it's k3w1 to make the scene in the various SV hot spots. . . a successful startup takes more than being cool. As for experienced technologists. . . if one can live with telecommute, one can get them anywhere.
Tech Public Policy stuff
between VCs, startup capitalists, journalists, etc. in SV (I'd call it an ecosystem) may be more of a barrier to getting radical new technology done than an accelerant.
The problem here is that the "low hanging fruit" in terms of ideas within that network got mined out years ago, and if you're outside the network, good luck in getting a hearing regardless of how "outside the box" or how good it is, you'll need it.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Maybe your engineers would rather live in the Bay Area, despite the cost of living* -- to enjoy the world-class cosmopolitan atmosphere and cultural amenities, recreational opportunities, natural beauty, and freewheeling cultural vibe that embraces freethinkers and innovators.
Frankly, I can't think of any place more boring, stifling, and backward than the suburban sprawl of North Carolina.
*There's a reason the Bay Area cost of living is so high -- it's called supply and demand.
Bay area has dominated, and Boston is not far behind, and has been heating up lately -http://business.bostonherald.com/businessNews/vie w.bg?articleid=177352
http://akorri.com/
These areas have the technical skills, universities, tech acquirers, and money. The VCs are able to incubate a lot more potential winners when you have these factors all in one place.
"Frankly, I can't think of any place more boring, stifling, and backward than the suburban sprawl of North Carolina."
This sort of tripe usually comes from people who have either never lived in North Carolina, or never bothered to leave the confines of CARY. The Triangle is actually a pretty great place to live. We have lots of great things to do, a very diverse population, high concentration of tech geeks, and a rapidly building undergound art/music scene.
If you come here with preconceptions of what to expect and never bother looking, you're not going to find what you're looking for.
Open your mind and your eyes and enjoy everything North Carolina has to offer.