4 ms·

Too expensive, too crowded, too stifling, and nowadays sometimes even too bland. Without roots in the city, there doesn't seem to be much to recommend it these

Too expensive, too crowded, too stifling, and nowadays sometimes even too bland. Without roots in the city, there doesn't seem to be much to recommend it these days besides the weather and the massive, insane availability of liquid capital compared to the extensive dearth in other markets. But as long as the money is there, and other sources of investment capital remain locked away, that's not a bad recommendation. SV VCs may be getting more cautious, but investors in other markets don't seem particularly eager to loosen the purse strings. So they may say they plan to leave, but I just finished a comic fantasy novel called 'Thud!', and this (lightly edited) passage comes to mind: - "I'd wonder...you know, if I were a king...I'd wonder why people were happier living in squalor in [the city] than staying back home. ... "There's dwarf bars all over, and they've got mining tools wired to the wall, and there's dwarfs in 'em every night quaffing beer and singing sad songs about how they wish they were back in the mountains digging for gold. But if you said to them fine, the gate's open, off you go and send us a postcard, they'd say, 'Oh, well, yeah, I'd love to, but we've just got the new workshop finished...maybe NEXT year we'll go back home.'"

klipt 9y ago
The great thing about Discworld is that it's just like the real world - only funnier.
dv_dt 9y ago
> SV VCs may be getting more cautious, but investors in other markets don't seem particularly eager to loosen the purse strings. There is some sort of irony in SV VCs being at a keystone of the internet and yet somehow being unable to invest outside of SV.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  It does make a sort of sense - VCs in the bay area seem to congregate there because software companies can promise (if things go just right) stratospheric return rates. Those glitzy home-runs can fund a lot of flops, and the investors still win out. If you want to make something physical, you can't hand-wave and make wild assumptions about growth rates and user acquisition and ARPUs. You have a Bill of Materials, distribution costs, a slim margin, and rapid competition from cheaper and often outright dangerous knock-offs with little recourse. Look what happened with hoverboards. So in a market that is as jaw-droppingly risk averse as this, but people still want to grow their huge hoards of capital, the money takes the path of least resistance and follows the only available market that can theoretically produce an exponential growth curve more than once every few decades.

klipt 9y ago

The great thing about Discworld is that it's just like the real world - only funnier.

dv_dt 9y ago

> SV VCs may be getting more cautious, but investors in other markets don't seem particularly eager to loosen the purse strings. There is some sort of irony in SV VCs being at a keystone of the internet and yet somehow being unable to invest outside of SV.

leggomylibro 9y ago
It does make a sort of sense - VCs in the bay area seem to congregate there because software companies can promise (if things go just right) stratospheric return rates. Those glitzy home-runs can fund a lot of flops, and the investors still win out. If you want to make something physical, you can't hand-wave and make wild assumptions about growth rates and user acquisition and ARPUs. You have a Bill of Materials, distribution costs, a slim margin, and rapid competition from cheaper and often outright dangerous knock-offs with little recourse. Look what happened with hoverboards. So in a market that is as jaw-droppingly risk averse as this, but people still want to grow their huge hoards of capital, the money takes the path of least resistance and follows the only available market that can theoretically produce an exponential growth curve more than once every few decades.