2 ms·
But Utah is not on the coast, therefore "nothing happens there" and you can't advance your career (supposedly). The mega-prestige city where you "must be" phen
by api 11y ago
But Utah is not on the coast, therefore "nothing happens there" and you can't advance your career (supposedly).
The mega-prestige city where you "must be" phenomenon is a major driver here. It's really exploded since roughly 2000.
Edit: I think the best way of seeing it is to look at where early PCs came from:
MITS Altair: Albuquerque, NM
Commodore 64: Philadelphia (metro), PA
IBM PC: Miami / Boca Raton, FL
CompuColor II (first color home PC): Norcross, GA
TRS-80: Fort Worth, TX
Apple II: Cupertino, CA
Today every single one of those would be from San Francisco or Silicon Valley, because that's where You Have To Be. Seattle I suppose gets an honorary mention, but the rest of the world doesn't exist.
The same thing has happened to varying degrees in other industries. Everything has super-concentrated in a handful of super-expensive mostly coastal cities. The rest of the country is a backwater falling into permanent depression.
- ghaff 11y agoCombined with the fact that, for certain demographics, if you can't walk out of your apartment to a hipster coffee shop, life is basically not worth living. (SF pricing issues admittedly extend to the entire Bay, but for many thriving cities, very high prices are mostly a near-in urban phenomenon.)
- ghaff 11y agoThe minicomputer industry was more concentrated, especially around Boston (though also Silicon Valley with HP, Rochester MN for IBM and others I'm sure I'm forgetting) but, even then, they were pretty spread out over a fairly large greater metropolitan area and beyond. There are still a lot of tech companies outside of the Valley, including startups. But there's certainly a tendency to concentrate.
- mwcampbell 11y agoSo how do we fix this?
- api 11y agoI think it's concentration of capital more than anything else. You can do engineering or write code anywhere, but raising money is much easier in SF/SV than anywhere else.
- mwcampbell 11y agoAnd why is raising money so important? Can't a lot of software businesses be bootstrapped?
- api 11y agoBootstrapped companies are at a huge disadvantage vs. funded companies. Funded companies can afford deeper longer-sighted investments and kamikaze growth-at-all-costs free/freemium strategies that bootstrappers cannot. The only huge growth companies to emerge as startups that I can think of that started with a paid product were companies with an unavoidable physical dimension like Uber and AirBnB.