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Is Silicon Valley Reproducible?
Posted by
Cliff
on Thu May 25, 2006 09:05 PM
from the appalachains-have-some-nice-valleys dept.
from the appalachains-have-some-nice-valleys dept.
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?
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Reproducible? (Score:4, Funny)
Depends on how good their DRM is, I guess...
Jobs (Score:3, Funny)
First thing's first (Score:5, Funny)
Check (Score:3, Funny)
Well, that's going swimmingly....
Re:First thing's first (Score:5, Interesting)
Housing was not always expensive here. When Wozniak was developing the Apple I, middle-class homes were routinesly built on 10,000 square foot lots because land was so plentiful, and blue-collar jobs could confortably pay a mortgage.
In that environment, you can imagine how a young man could dedicate two or three years to desigingin something while taking insignificant personal financial risk.
Just another reason why we CAN'T have another "silicon valley" here - living expenses prohibit one from starting a full-time garage business.
I could share a funny personal story about threatening investors to leave the valley so that I could get a cheap house and work from my garage, rather than having to take their money so I could draw a salary. I've thought about this one a bit.
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Re:First thing's first (Score:5, Insightful)
I can not wrap my head around that statement.
Go get a medicore job in a rural area where cost of living is dirt cheap and work out of your garage there creating your incredible invention that will change the world.
The era of having suppliers near you are long gone. I have not seen a decently stocked electronics supplier for almost a decade and that was when I was in Japan and floored by the incredible supplies on the Akhiba strip. In the USA places like Warren Radio and other Electronics distributiors have stopped carrying small parts in stock for small count sales long ago. All distributors are simply sales offices where you get to place your order for 1000+ pieces now.
I have survived on my inventing and design manufacturing by mail order. I get my boards built in China for $2.50 a square inch 2 sided plated through with solder mask and silk screening. $3.50 a square inch for every 2 layers inside after that for small or single runs for beta testing a design. I order my parts from digikey or even Jameco lately as they have massively expanded their SMT lines of parts and typically are far cheaper than Digikay or Mouser.
All while living in a super tiny 1600 sq foot home with a full basement and full garage for my horribly expensive $800.00 a month house payment.
I have produced, manufacturered and sold 3 seperate devices. One of which I have sold to the manufacturer of the origional home automation system I was making the module for as a third party.
Who needs silicon valley. Being close to your competition and suppliers is a really stupid expense that holds an incredibly low value today.
Where I am I can hire local college kids for 1/50th of what they can in the state of california and get them beating down my door. And a good student in a norther university is just as good as a good student at CalTEch. It's the student's abilities and drive not the price of education that makes them good.
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Re:First thing's first (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:First thing's first (Score:3, Informative)
That means we have lots of old rich people who aren't going anywhere, and a working class that generally won't have a chance at buying real estate any time soon. Even if the "bubble" burst back to 2002 prices, it won't make housing much more accessible to workers living in the valley, only wealthy immigrants.
Well if they keep on getting...... (Score:3, Insightful)
Uhmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uhmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Silicon Valley is full of itself. There are serveral areas that have vibrant Tech communities besides Silicon valley, there's a whole class of nerds that want nothing to do with the fruitcake culture of the west coast. The one thing they have is "cachet", if you're clueless and rich its a hip place to go broke investing in Fedex'ing Iron ore around the world, in other areas you need a more solid plan than "I'm gonna do stuff on the intarweb".
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Re:Uhmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not denying that there are other good places to do tech, but that's not enough for startups. It's no coincidence that of the four internet giants, three of them are in the Bay Area (with the fourth in Seattle). Best of luck to Austin or wherever you favor in coming up with the next three, but if you're looking to do an int
Willliam Shockley (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
the black plague (Score:3, Informative)
As for the Silicon Valley, this is my speculative side talking now: I believe it was the level of regional education and
Re:the black plague (Score:3, Insightful)
wrong, there's cultural element (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also unique to California (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Northern Virginia? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Northern Virginia? (Score:3, Informative)
At any rate: Graham's article betrays a surprising lack of knowledge about situations outside his orbit. Of course
bulldoze and restore it (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
I agree more dystopian than utopian (Score:5, Insightful)
"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
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Changes to the current Silicon Valley (Score:3, Insightful)
More women. WAY more.
Key elements of Silicon Valley (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Key elements of Silicon Valley (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of things (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lots of things (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a good point. I would build upon it to add one other ingredient that we have here in SV that others lack: encouraging entrepreneurship not just in words, but with law. Most of us have read the stories on Slashdot over the years about contract employees who had great ideas and worked on them on their own time only to have the employer sue to take the idea & whatever practical implementation had been created.
But in California, there is a law that makes it very clear that in an employee's free time (contract, full-time, whatever), they are free to come up with ideas and launch their own companies. In fact, one of my employers had a clause in their hiring contract which stated they owned everything I would ever do. I struck the clause before signing (just crossed it out) and wrote in the margin "this is not legal in California." The HR person read it, shrugged, and said "yeah, OK." Even if I had not struck the clause, it still wouldn't have applied, because the contract cannot override law (they cannot hire me to kill people, they cannot mandate 20 hour workdays, and so on).
To wrap up, the point is this: I have created many small money-making Web sites for myself while employed with others because I can. My ideas are safe. They cannot be stolen, even when companies want to claim them for their own. This is important enough that I have chosen to NOT move to other states that do not have similar laws. I will not move to technology centers in other states (or countries) unless I feel the small guy with the good idea has solid protection.
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Re:Lots of things (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously. The night life in the valley consists of maybe club paradise, the Edge, a few comedy clubs here and there, and the VERY occasional bar. Which lends itself to people staying at home, tinkering with their computers, reading, and watching an unfortunate amount of television.
People have a lot of freakish hobbies in the valley, mostly stemming from having nothing to do. People talk about starting their own companies, then do it, largely out of having nothing to do. They weld jet engines to the backs of cars, make networks of AI chatbots, reprogram furbies to say dirty things because it's more interesting than going to golfland.
Out here in Boston (where I live now) there is no shortage of great minds, great ideas, and people who say "I should have done that when I had the chance." There is just so much going on here, though, so much social competition, that you can't do it. You need to have at least a masters, a full-time relationship or two, and four hobbies, all of which must be social. The average person doesn't have nearly as much time to develop a pet project into a full business.
And so less gets made out here. Less crazy ideas get out of people's heads and are given a real chance to prove themselves. When they do, MIT has great financers. But if you're not making carbonated ice cream as a senior thesis, chances are you're just not going to finish your great idea.
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Short Answer No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Short Answer No (Score:4, Informative)
But really, the universities and the national laboratories have been key in the region's history. Why else do dozens of Nobel Prize winners live here?
As for the original question, Silicon Valley has been reproduced on smaller scales in several places. Cambridge is notable, as is Beaverton (home to many companies which are often mistakenly said to be in Silicon Valley).
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Re:Short Answer No (Score:4, Insightful)
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San Francisco is not hub of the SIlicon Valley (Score:3, Informative)
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.
history and other problems (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Silicon Hills? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Silicon Hills? (Score:3, Interesting)
You need relaxed employment regulation (Score:3, Insightful)
Silicon Valley vs. Austin (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Silicon Valley vs. Austin (Score:3, Interesting)
Nonsense time (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Critical Mass (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Silicon Valley has jumped the shark (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Silicon Glen (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Glen [wikipedia.org]
I did my Masters research on this.. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:I did my Masters research on this.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Silicon Fen (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Silicon Fen (Score:4, Interesting)
1) As someone who started his own company using government agencies for support I can tell you it's none other than great advice. And I received a grant from 3 sources no less.
Of course there's no problem getting the money and advice from the government agencies, but if throwing money at things was the answer why isn't the North East of England the hot-bed of entepreneurship that it could be.
2) The wind rarely blows from Russia, we have a well known gulf stream.
Apart from the difference between the wind and an ocean current they get a fucking cold wind in Cambridge and I say that as a Geordie.
3) A fen is just a name, I think you'll find people arn't stupid and can work out it's meaning. (We have places called "Cul-de-sac's" aswell - wonder what those are?)
If they have to work out it's meaning it's not a very good marketing name, is it.
4) Food, again what are you talking about?
No I have eaten food the length and breadth of Britain. THe food the you get from most restaurants (including indian, chinese, thai italian the lot), all motorway service areas, works canteans, on airlines, at corner shops, at chippies is all crap. It's not just the preparation and cooking that is bad, no-one if France, for example, would consider serving you an hot toasted sandwich in a plastic bag, so that the bag is full if condensation and your sandwich soggy within seconds. No one in France would think it is a good idea to pack freshly cut cheese in antimicrobial cling film, no German chef would serve the same mixture of boiled or steamed vegetables with every single meal they serve in their restaurant with no sauce or seasoning. You can shut your eyes and shout about the arsehole Chirac as much as you want but British food is crap
5) 2 Million people are Sole-Traders, many more self-employed in other areas, with over 19,000 business were started last year.
2 million window cleaners, mini-cab drivers and "Earn £35 per hour in your spare time" types does not mean that we have a thriving entrepreurial economy
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Nerds obviously don't look out the window (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
How Silicon Valley really works (Score:4, Informative)
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 [stanfordmanage.org] 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.
Not just NON-prop - also off-topic prop. (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:eh? (Score:3, Informative)
All (nearly) those former agricultural regions are now high density housing or business parks. But the re
Re:One ingredient (Score:3, Insightful)
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.