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Wow. We often wonder how the Bay Area would be unseated as startup capital of the world. Maybe it'll be the US's immigration problem.
by clamprecht 10y ago
Wow. We often wonder how the Bay Area would be unseated as startup capital of the world. Maybe it'll be the US's immigration problem.
- alxjsn 10y agoOr an earthquake.
- bgroins 10y agoLiterally unseated.
- muninn_ 10y agoJust because a few people from outside the US are worried about visa issues before applying to an incubator doesn't spell the end of Silicon Valley. The money, talent, and infrastructure to support startups (and large tech companies for that matter) aren't going away anytime soon and likely wouldn't go away even if we completely completely halted green card holders. Not that I would ever advocate something like that.
- JamilD 10y agoI don't think that's necessarily true. The Bay Area's become an international hub for tech, not just a domestic one — many influential founders (including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel) were born outside the United States.
- muninn_ 10y agoI don't disagree. It is the world's premier tech hub. But a fleeting 4 year long ban on immigrants wouldn't turn the city to rubble and leave everybody without jobs as Google and Y Combinator pack up bags and move to Tijuana and Beijing. There are larger forces at play here than that.
- JamilD 10y agoOf course. But it'll do some damage, which will only get worse as time goes on. What about 8 years? 12? If you restrict skilled legal immigration long-term, you're necessarily going to (slowly) drive companies away.
- muninn_ 10y agoThis implies that we don't have enough home-grown talent. We do.
- JamilD 10y agoIt's not a zero-sum game of open jobs to potential employees. If you're able to interact with the smartest people in the world - and not just your own country - you end up forming more effective and larger companies. Which in turn create jobs. If you shut out your country to the rest of the world, the next Google will be founded somewhere else. And I'll dispute your claim that the US has enough talent. There was a submission on HN recently about the top deep learning papers. Go through it. Count the number of American-born people. Geoff Hinton? Yann LeCun? Russ Salakhutdinov? Demis Hassibis (of Deep Mind)? Virtually everyone on there was born somewhere else. They're not Americans, but they're mostly working for American companies and contributing their talent to YOUR economy. [0] https://github.com/terryum/awesome-deep-learning-papers/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/terryum/awesome-deep-learning-papers/blob...
- muninn_ 10y agoSure and I love that those people (highly skilled immigrants) are working for American companies. But so what? That doesn't demonstrate that the US doesn't have enough talent. It just shows that some people from out of the country were working on something. Maybe if the situation was different then that paper could be exclusively written be Americans. The majority of the worlds most intelligent people reside elsewhere, but the US has nearly 400 million people. It's fine with or without immigrants. Japan is fine isn't it?
- Iv 10y ago> aren't going away anytime soon Reading the news, I would not bet too much money on that either.
- muninn_ 10y agoI'd love to actually take that bet. Excluding thermonuclear war, if things get annoying enough we'll just elect a democrat next year and restore the political arena that people believe is best. One (what seems to be) bad president isn't going to completely ruin Silicon Valley. It's pure hyperbole.
- jacquesm 10y ago> Excluding thermonuclear war, if things get annoying enough we'll just elect a democrat next year and restore the political arena that people believe is best. Most likely not next year.
- mschuster91 10y ago> Most likely not next year. In Germany and many other European countries, when the government resigns (or the government is mistrusted by parliament), there is the possibility of immediate new elections. Is this totally impossible in the US?
- nradov 10y agoTotally impossible (unless Congress or the States amend the Constitution to make it possible).
- djrogers 10y agoIn the US "The Government" is not a thing that resigns - it'd be the President. If the President resigned, the VP would become acting President until the next election. If the VP also resigned, we'd work our way down the line of succession. The system we have here is quite different from the parliamentary system you may be more familiar with.
- elif 10y agoI don't think it's "a few people." It is everyone holding or desiring a US visa that is worried. I would contend that it is only the extent of that fear that is variable. Maybe I am wrong and there are visa holders feeling absolute confidence at the moment, but I would like to hear why from even one before considering your "a few people" categorization as anything but spin.
- muninn_ 10y agoI'm speaking in relation to Y Combinator and those who are looking to apply to come to the United Stats to start a company. The number of those people is an absolutely small number compared to the whole. Unless you have data proving otherwise?
- mehaveaccount 10y agoI'm a visa holder and I'm not worried because worst case scenario I go back home to live with my family who loves me.
- chongli 10y agoYou haven't been reading the news very carefully. Worst case scenario is that you get sent to a 3rd party country, have your passport seized upon landing, and possibly end up in prison where your human rights are at risk.
- DrJid 10y agoSource?
- mehaveaccount 10y agoSource?
- adventured 10y ago> It is everyone holding or desiring a US visa that is worried It's so far out of line of reason to believe that the US is going to basically end all - or any meaningful portion of - legal immigration, as to be nearly impossible to reply to. Where to start? The US will switch, if anything, to a merit based system. Canada already uses just such a system. Nobody seems to be outraged about it, or proclaiming the end of Canada because of it. There's far too much emotion in this thread.
- ryandrake 10y agoI don't know. It's not like there's all of a sudden a lack of homegrown startup ideas and tech talent in the Bay Area / USA.
- freehunter 10y agoThere's a lot of tech talent all across the US and North America too, but they end up flocking to SF. For the same reasons they'd hypothetically flock to Vancouver in this situation.
- pizzetta 10y agoDoes that not require that other major nations loosen their policies in conjunction with this, in addition to cultural aspects of self-promotion as well as failure and access to *capital.
- sama 10y agoI worry about that. It would be a devastating blow to the country if the next wave of technology doesn't happen here.
- tptacek 10y agoDon't worry so much. You have a mortal lock on the pipeline of first-time tech founders, and your cycles are overwhelmingly populated by graduates of US and European universities. Yes, a fair number of talented people from disfavored west Asian countries won't be able to start up here. That's OK: because of the way venture capital works, and because of YC's role in it, they really won't be able to start at all, and you won't have to compete with them. Sure, they'll remain outside the US as a nucleation site for new startups that could have in theory challenged US dominance in technology startups. But the US controls the financial energy. They won't get anywhere. Startups will survive large-scale institutional bigotry just fine. In fact: some of them will even profit from it. Sleep well!
- apsec112 10y ago"because of YC's role in it, they really won't be able to start at all" Not sure what the reasoning is here. How is YC doing anything to block people from starting companies? You don't lose anything by getting rejected from YC, other than the few days spent applying.
- davidw 10y agoThere are certain kinds of businesses - drug discovery - say, that take years and years to become profitable. It's not really possible to start them without a lot of capital. Not everything SV does is that way, but many companies are.
- potatolicious 10y agoThe startup ecosystem is heavily based on gatekeeping and validation by existing players - YC is one of many (but one of the most influential) in this space. To be a bit simplistic, I think Thomas' point is that the likelihood of tech startups outside of the traditional US-centric startup ecosystem succeeding is very low, due to lack of funding and the general consequences of being an Outsider to the Silicon Valley elite. YC's role in it is, of course, being one of the most influential players that control which ideas get funded/attention, and which do not. Even physically outside of the US, the startup ecosystem is still overwhelming reliant on US money. Which is to say even if there is an appetite for funding founders in these disfavored countries, regulations (or simple politics) may prevent it. That said, I do disagree somewhat - US/European money is not the only source of venture capital dollars. I suspect at least some of the founders we're losing here will be able to start their companies with Chinese money. The loss of this talent pool will contribute - in a small way right now, but snowballing as time goes on - to the loss of US-centric economic hegemony.
- marcosdumay 10y agoIt's almost always the government that makes or breaks a country.
- randyfreed 10y agohorrible attitude, and way too prevalent. I feel sorry for you.
- nostrademons 10y agoOnly if there's no mechanism for bad governments to be replaced, peacefully. We'll see if we still have that mechanism in 4 or 8 years, but in the meantime, I'll remain cautiously optimistic. The U.S. has had terrible presidents & strong political leaders before, ones who drove the country down a terrible path, and they've usually been forced out of power and their policies reversed within a decade. That's the great strength of democracy: it's not that it governs efficiently (it doesn't), but it provides an escape hatch so if a government is seriously going down the wrong path and everyone realizes it, the government doesn't last long.
- marcosdumay 10y agoI meant full government, not head of state. I agree that most of Trump's acts will be neutered, and in a few years things will probably change. I just don't think a government having a big impact is surprising.
- pyb 10y agoI agree, but only with the 'breaks' part.
- marcosdumay 10y agoPeople are always diverse, culture is always adapting. The most immediate factor for change is the government. On the longer term, other factors dictate the government, but they are still only indirectly linked to change.
- xiaoma 10y agoI completely agree that visas are a problem but I disagree that they will be "the problem" to unseat Silicon Valley as the world nexus of startups. I've spent most my adult life in Asia and have lived in several countries and cities that claim to be very serious about becoming the next tech hub. None of them have very liberal immigration policies. All have visas for highly skilled workers, all have visas for entrepreneurs and all have visas for investors. I have yet to see a single case where a founder could get a visa without either significant revenues or significantly more funding than YC originally gave. It's also pretty hard for mid-stage startups to hire foreign workers, even in places with exceptional government-driven startup initiatives such as Singapore. In my perception, Silicon Valley's most critical weakness is housing prices and its most likely true competitor is Beijing—not due to openness of immigration by any means, but due to a larger base of technically educated citizens and access to what is becoming the largest market in the world.
- khuey 10y agoI agree that the most critical weakeness of Silicon Valley is real estate costs. I find it hard to imagine Beijing as a serious competitor though. If it were going to be anywhere in China I would expect it to be Shenzhen.
- briandear 10y agoBeijing? Right with the Great Firewall, it's a ridiculous place to run a tech company. With the air pollution it's a ridiculous place to live. I lived for many years in Shanghai but ultimately moved because it was nearly impossible to do anything tech related that relied on standard tools such as Github or marketing venues such as Facebook, etc.
- echevil 10y agoWell there are tons of interesting tech work done in China, targeting only Chinese market though :) its a self contained market I can walk around and pay for everything with my cellphone nowadays in China, but can't really do that in Bay Area.
- mehaveaccount 10y agoCalexit would allow California to bring in anyone they want though, and SF wouldn't have to worry about the US immigration policy screwing up it's tech scene. I'm looking forward to the Calexit proposition vote.
- komali2 10y agoThe obvious question is will the US government allow one of its most profitable states to leave? Highly doubtful. Great way to start another civil war, though!
- immigraway 10y agoI think a red government will let a blue state leave (permanent electoral majority). I don't think the same would be true the other way around, because progressive values are more, shall we say, evangelical than those of the nationalists.
- illumin8 10y agoIt actually doesn't matter what California voters want, or what a red federal government wants, a constitutional amendment would require 2/3rds of both the house and senate, as well as 75% of all the US state legislatures to approve Calexit. I think it's a good idea, and would probably move there if they did exit, but it's practically impossible for it to happen.
- caf 10y ago(permanent electoral majority) That's not how a two-party system works. Over time, the positions of the parties would adjust until a new equilibrium was reached.
- dang 10y agoYou can't do single-purpose political accounts here. Also, trolling with a username is trolling. We've banned this account.
- fixxer 10y ago
- Pxtl 10y agoIt would be delicious and terrible irony if Vancouver took over the role of startup capital, since it is the only place with a more unaffordable housing market than the SF bay.
- mediocrejoker 10y agoVancouver's prices are high but they are not SF-high. If you mean housing cost relative to salary, however, that's perhaps a different story.
- iLoch 10y agoThe average software engineering salary is somewhere around $75k here though.
- Tiktaalik 10y agoThe average price of a detached home in Metro Vancouver (includes suburbs of Vancouver) in February was $1.76 million. That's down from $1.82 million a year earlier. 99.7% of properties in the City of Vancouver proper are valued at more than $1 million. The average price for a detached home in the City of Vancouver in 2016 was $2.77 million. I've had some trouble finding closely comparable values but it seems like the median SF detached home price is ~$1 million. Even considering the exchange rate, it seems like Vancouver is more expensive. Certainly when one compares typical incomes Vancouver is dramatically less affordable than San Francisco.
- Kluny 10y agoAre you only counting detached homes? There are very few of those in Vancouver proper. If there are any, they are mansions. Do the same comparison with condos? And apartments?
- Tiktaalik 10y agoNo you are very incorrect. 81% of the land area of the City of Vancouver is zoned for detached homes and most of these are simple, cheap post war houses or cheap 60s era "Vancouver Specials."
- briandear 10y agoEver tried to get a visa as an American for Europe or the U.K.? Good luck with that.
- Daishiman 10y agoIt's way easier to get a tech visa for Europe of the UK. At the very least you don't have to wait around for an H1B lottery.
- CalRobert 10y agoYes. Depending on where you're going it's surprisingly straightforward. Hell, you can even go set up a business in the Netherlands if you're self-employed with relatively few restrictions. Also, what do you mean by "visa"? There are many different sorts, depending on whether you come to interview, work, be an entrepreneur, etc.
- adventured 10y agoHow would switching to a merit based immigration system - copying Canada's system - unseat the Bay Area as the startup capital? It won't, at all. If anything switching our immigration priorities will dramatically boost the Bay Area. This thread is overflowing with what is essentially revenge fantasy.
- metaphorm 10y agoThe U.S. doesn't have an immigration problem. It has a political problem where a faction of nativist nationalists has seized political power.
- api 10y agoWhy did they seize power? Because they were the only ones pointing out the economic collapse of rural and interior America. Liberals should have been in front of this issue but they ignored it, preferring to hide in coastal urban bubbles and navel gaze. So they opened the door to a bunch of demagogues. Immigration may not be a major cause of these problems but it makes a convenient scapegoat.
- metaphorm 10y agoI don't disagree with your analysis. I'm left-leaning in my politics but find myself unwilling to support the Democratic party at all for being politically ineffective, culturally asinine, and for being distressingly corrupt. American politics is in a terrible state right now.
- api 10y agoCompletely agree. I remember the primaries thinking wow... the scary thing is one of these people will be president.