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> Who said California was sustainable? I think it never was. It was always fueled by brain drain. Never by local talent. It's important to note though how/why
by solatic 9y ago
> Who said California was sustainable? I think it never was. It was always fueled by brain drain. Never by local talent.
It's important to note though how/why California's growth was fueled by brain drain. Why did all these brains come to the Bay Area? If you think historically, where most of the incumbent money and players were, you would think that the talent would've gone to Seattle, Detroit, or New York, maybe Research Triangle Park.
The brain drain flowed to Northern California because of the area's openness and counter-culture. That's what allowed people to challenge the status quo through entrepreneurship and find like-minded people willing to get on board with that vision. And that's why, even as money becomes more readily available world-wide for IT entrepreneurship, and the Bay Area becomes less and less affordable, people will still keep coming out to the Bay. What sustained the flow of brain drain fuel to the Bay Area was the local culture, not the money - the money just sought that culture.
- thriftwy 9y agoI'm not sure about that. Bay Area had Shockley Semiconductor and then eventually Intel. If you don't have something like that, counterculture won't help.
- solatic 9y agoAnd Intel came out of Fairchild Semiconductor, which also had roots in Shockley Semiconductor, and William Shockley came out to the Bay Area from Bell Labs to be closer to his ailing mother, being that he grew up in Palo Alto, the son of a mining engineer father and a Midwestern transplant mother who came to Stanford to study and became a mining surveyor. Which makes William Shockley not just home-grown talent, but talent that brought the benefit of decades of research out in New York back with him. Further to the point, Shockley couldn't convince any of his colleagues out in Bell Labs to join him, since they didn't have the same roots in the Bay Area and the Bay Area didn't have the same draw then as it does now. But Shockley put in the leg work and recruited from the experience-less - the rest is history. The point is that money didn't bring Shockley back to the Bay Area, and Shockley/Fairchild/Intel didn't spring out of nothing.