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With the greatest respect for Mr. Thiel and his accomplishments I'm skeptical. I've travelled the world and my experience is that very few places in the world

• aaron-lebo 9y ago
  He did say SV, which is probably true. Europe may or may not have the culture you are suggesting, China might have that hunger but no business started there is safe from gov control, Russia has that control without the economic growth, a lot of places are too small. But...there's probably a dozen cities in the US where you could get everything you can in SV (ok, maybe not the monoculture, the crazy VCs, the crazy cost of living, and tens of thousands of programmers). There are massive advantages to getting out of the Valley, someone is going to realize that, if it hasn't been obvious for a decade.
  • tomaha 9y ago
    I agree that there are nice options in the US and you'll have a much more comfortable life. But if you want to learn as much as you can, if you want to have as many options as you could possible have, and quiet frankly earn as much as you could, you'll likely should move to SV and no other place in the US will even come close to that. The bleeding edge of technology is and will be in SV and China (and China is not really an option for most people).
    • aaron-lebo 9y ago
      You can learn an unbelievable amount sitting in your room in your underwear and work with and on world class projects. There are more free resources than ever before, location is not a constraint.
      • tomaha 9y ago
        The resources you can have are so limited in comparison what you can do if you are on the right project with the right people at for example Google. You will not find a free or open project that will be able to compete with the data, resources, and knowledge you will find there. Besides that it's much faster to learn from someone who knows than finding the right material online. And in the end most world-class projects will have someone that works or worked in SV in them because that's where they got a lot of their experience.
        • rothbardrand 9y ago
          IF your goal is to work for google, facebook, Amazon or Microsoft, then yes, Google is a great place to be. But if your goal is to work for next decades google, Apple, etc, then no, Google is not the place to be. Start working on Bitcoin. Start working on Ethereum. Get to the cutting edge. Everything you do at google right now is about 10 years out of date (and I'm including machine learning and all their "cutting edge" AI stuff) and targeted at supporting their existing established business. Take this from someone who has been on the cutting edge for 30+ years-- the challenge for most people is that the cutting edge changes, and you have to be paying attention to follow it... by the time you learn mobile development, surprise, there's bitcoin! (as an example.)
          • tomaha 9y ago
            That's what I'm working on right now. It's just that I can use all this expertise around me to do it. Everything repeats in technology and what you learned can and will be applied to new trends like Ethereum. I don't recommend anyone to really go to Google to work on the future (besides perhaps if you want to get an edge in AI). It's just that SV has a lot of people that have accumulated experience while building Google, FB, etc and that helps a lot no matter what comes next. You get a lot of experience and people able and willing to take risks which is a nice basis to build something new.
      • nostrademons 9y ago
        The difference is largely in the domain knowledge. You can learn just as much about web or mobile development on the web as you can at Google (more, probably, since Google's stack is largely proprietary and bound by lots of legacy code). You can learn as much about databases and programming languages. You can even learn all the machine-learning algorithms you'll need. But you won't learn as much about search as you would at Google, or about logistics as you would at Amazon, or about psychological manipulation as you would at Facebook. All that knowledge is locked up in the corporations that profit from it, and if all your software knowledge is based on what's publicly available, you probably wouldn't even know it exists. You might learn how deep learning works and how to apply it to MNIST digits from a web tutorial, but you won't learn anything about how to apply it to other problem domains or even what those other problem domains it can be applied to are from it. And economic returns are all based on supply & demand, so if you're supplying a service that everybody else can learn too, your economic returns are bounded by what all those other people are willing to work for. The big bucks accumulates to monopolies, those firms and the people who work within them who know things that nobody else does.
  • derekp7 9y ago
    I wonder why Chicago isn't more of a major destination for tech companies. The city is highly walkable, has excellent transportation infrastructure, and low cost nice housing is plentiful within an hour commute by train or car. You can get a nice house for less than 200k, apartment rent is around 600 - 1000 a month. In the city, there are a lot of old 3-4 story houses that have been converted to each floor being a rental unit, for about 1200.
    • jtmcmc 9y ago
      terrible weather? lack of real feeder schools for tech entrepreneurialism ?
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    • tomaha 9y ago
      Because mostly only big companies choose their destination. For the rest it's where they live when they found the company. So if more people in Chicago found tech companies you'll get more tech companies. That's the reason SV is a self-feeding machine. People work at one of the many startups or big companies here, get experience, get money, and then part of them start their own companies. That's the circle that drives SV and because it gets stronger each time it's hard for any other city or region to really catch up.
      • _RPM 9y ago
        > So if more people in Chicago found tech companies you'll get more tech companies Wait, really?
        • gumby 9y ago
          I know it sounds tautological but makes sense in the context of the rest of the reply.
      • radiorental 9y ago
  • NicoJuicy 9y ago
    Europe has the culture, just not the funding. Investments are way too little
    • stingraycharles 9y ago
      “Putting your money where your mouth is” applies here. This is precisly the symptom of a risk-averse culture, and it’s holding us back.
      • NicoJuicy 9y ago
        Rocket Internet has the (self) funding, the netlog creators have funding ( Twoo / Netlog / Realo / facebox / redbox), drupal got funding in America ( fast growing tech company in the USA),... We only have public companies here who are throwing pennies at startups ( 25 k) including the governement. Eg. http://idealabs.be/ http://idealabs.be/ ( Belgium from Telenet NV - the biggest ISP here)
  • volkl48 9y ago
    It is worth keeping in mind that SV's focus is only one area of employment for programmers. The major Northeast hubs have tons of programmers. The difference is that a lot of them work for the financial industry, government contractors, pharma, and the "unsexy" sort of older tech companies. This is good for finding somewhere with a lot of programmers but the downside is that the employment market is just as tight here and COL/salary is nearly as high. -------------- If you're looking for somewhere that actually offers you payroll savings but still has a good enough talent pool to be able to find employees fairly easily, that list is pretty small and arguably getting smaller. A lot of the trendier secondary cities for this (ex: Denver, Portland, Austin) are themselves getting very expensive, very quickly.
• melling 9y ago
  He referenced China. Any big startups come out of there?
  • Kenji 9y ago
    Alibaba. It's so big you can barely fathom that not too long ago, someone started a little website that turned into this.
  • dmode 9y ago
    Here's a list https://www.techinasia.com/china-top-well-funded-startups-2017-infographic https://www.techinasia.com/china-top-well-funded-startups-20... Didi has raised over $10bn.
    • spyhi 9y ago
      Also, not mentioned on that list is DJI, which is pretty dominant in the drone space, and it was only founded in 2006. I know it's not a software startup, but you'd be hard-pressed to say it's not a tech company.
  • rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
    China is a different case. Any successful tech company will be ruthlessly copied and scaled in China by mercantilist policies which work quite well. But there are no Chinese brands that are widespread household names out of China. Even if a billion Chinese use renren the rest of the world uses Facebook (and maybe vk). Even if a billion Chinese use Baidu the rest of the world uses google (and maybe yahoo, in Japan, for some reason).
    • dmode 9y ago
      There are a number of Chinese phone startups that are doing quite well.
    • gitah 9y ago
      Just walk around a BestBuy in the US and you'll quickly realize how many Chinese brands there are: TP-Link routers, Huawei routers and phones, Lenovo laptops, Hisense TVs, ZTE phones, DJI drones, Haier appliances, Ninebot scooters, Instantpot press cookers, etc. If you also count brands owned by Chinese companies than include GE appliances and Motorola, Alcatel, Blackberry smartphones. Go on Amazon.com and Chinese brands are bestsellers in many electronic categories: Anker/Sunvalleytek in phone accessories, Yi in action cameras and dash cams and security cameras, TCL in televisions, etc. Also the rest of the world isn't just US. Chinese smartphone brands have 50% marketshare world wide. Xiaomi, Huawei, OPPO are growing fast in South Asia, South East Asian and MENA. Transsion (you've probably never even heard of this company) owns phone brands that dominate Africa and is the marketshare leader there. Chinese home appliance and consumer electronic brands are also big in non-western countries.
• user5994461 9y ago
  The issue is not about the culture, it's the market size. USA has 300 million high value customers. Any successful company will be massive. There is hardly any other big market like that in the world.
• kamaal 9y ago
  Most of this was because the top most talent of every third world company wanted and came to the USA. Once they arrived at the US, they used their disproportionate quality of human capital and combined with the immigrant zeal to prove themselves they can succeed at life by doing great things in a new country. In the past the decade, it has become impossible for most of India and China's best people to come to the US due to very long Green card wait times. From the Indian perspective alone. Billion dollar start ups and entrepreneurial ventures are popping up all over the country. Even a decade back this was impossible to even think of. My guess is US is will gradually lose its grip being the economic super power of the world as China and India eat their lunch. It won't happen over a throw of switch, it will be a very gradual prolonged process.