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I used to be in SF and in South Bay. Recently moved to Seattle , closely associated to the India and Swiss tech ecosystem. In my experience further away you ar

I used to be in SF and in South Bay. Recently moved to Seattle , closely associated to the India and Swiss tech ecosystem. In my experience further away you are from SF, less cutting edge you are. In my experience even South Bay is 6 months behind SF. SF is a big melting pot, where a huge amount of talent are trying out new things and they are open to sharing their experiences - be it about latest technologies or latest customer acquisition strategies. Because of this, you find out about the latest strategies and associate advantages and disadvantages much earlier. By the time these strategies turn in blog posts and capture popular mind share - it takes months and years. Of course there are exceptions everywhere and some companies outside SF are great at being at cutting edge. However on an amortized basis, further away from SF you are, more likely you are to be behind the cutting edge.

mathgladiator 9y ago
There is also a lot of hot air generated by SF that may be advantageous to ignore.
- timewarrior 9y ago
  Maybe choosing own network and use of own time wisely would help. Filter might be better vs ignore. If would rather be in a position where I can get potentially useful and useless information so that I can filter vs not having much information.
Karrot_Kream 9y ago
What does "cutting edge" mean? They don't use modern deployment startegies? They don't use recently popular web frameworks? "Cutting edge" is so vague it's not clear whether SV just cargo cults more or whether it's actually more technically innvovative.
- timewarrior 9y ago
  Maybe bleeding edge is a better word. They just try a lot more things and find out faster what is working and what isn't working. Most of them turn out to be useless but the ones that work give them an early start.
- richardknop 9y ago
  For example while kubernetes is all the rage in Silicon Valley and every startup is using it, most companies further away from SV take longer to adopt these new technologies. They are just evaluating and experimenting with k8s and in few years might move more significant loads into it. Similar with other tech as well. I think that’s just one example but you could look at programming languages, different automation and deployment tools etc and Silicon Valley is on the cutting edge.
  - Karrot_Kream 9y ago
    I'd argue that something like k8s is a huge investment for startups and is more of a time waster than anything else. I have a friend that worked at a startup that used Terraform to deploy their stuff, and the whole thing was overkill given that they literally just compiled a binary and put it on a single host. Instead, the friend just wrestled with the Terraform based build process and complained about learning the tool instead of getting stuff done.
hueving 9y ago
This is satire, right? You're suggesting that ideas don't make it from SF to mountain view in less than 6 months with thousands of people commuting between the two each day and cross pollination of meetups on both sides. Containerization and its orchestration all started in the south bay. Pray tell, what was in use in SF for 6 months before it hit the startups based in MV, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, etc.
- timewarrior 9y ago
  No, this isn't satire. Please check my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16218591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16218591 There are always exceptions (like your containerization example), which can be attributed to serious tech players like Yahoo, Google and FB in South Bay. However holistically, SF has had much more unicorns and near unicorns. The contrast between SF and rest of the world has been more pronounced in recent year vs pre-2010 (except China of course - due to the growing economy and closed nature making it difficult for outside companies to operate).
  - DavidHm 9y ago
    You seem to be conflating valuation with innovation.
  - briandear 9y ago
    And the most valuable company in the word is in the South Bay — worth more than every San Fran unicorn — combined. Valuation has zero to do with innovation and using unicorns as a measure of bleeding edge tech is nonsense. Some of the very beat tech doesn’t necessarily turn into the best businesses. And don’t forget, the South Bay has one of the most innovative middle-out compression innovators in history: Pied Piper.
- gros_roberts 9y ago
  This whole website is satire, mate.
Karrot_Kream 9y ago
I don't read the bit about the South Bay but that's absurd. gRPC - Mountain View Cgroups - Mountain View Golang, Rust - Mountain View Protobufs - Mountain View Blaze - Mountain View React - Menlo Park Buck - Menlo Park Thrift - Menlo Park And this is only a fraction of it. Do you even work in tech? You sound like a talking head...
- timewarrior 9y ago
  Quite a few of these were produced out of Google and FB, so it makes sense they would be based out of MV/Meno Park. However most of the unicorns or near unicorns since 2010 have been based in SF. Dropbox, AirBnb, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, Zenefits, SoFi, Credit Karma, CloudFlare, DocuSign, Wish, Slack, Github, Instacart, Prosper, Automattic, Eventbrite, Okta, Docker, Gusto, Nextdoor. Let list could go on and on. I stand by my statement that more talent in concentrated in a smaller area vs South Bay and they are trying out a lot more things and also faster. Dynamics of an urban area also play some role where, where you can quickly walk to, use public transport or get an Uber, vs driving to another place in South Bay. All this leads to SF being ahead of South Bay in terms of learnings and trying out things. And name calling doesn't get us anywhere!
  - haeffin 9y ago
    That's lots of names of companies and no examples of "best technology building best practices".
  - Karrot_Kream 9y ago
    You're naming products or companies and not technologies or processes. Moreover many of these companies are privately traded and their balance sheet is unknown. These companies could be healthy or they could be struggling and we have no idea. So what is your metric of "cutting edge"? It sounds like you're optimizing for small business strategy? Seems honestly like VC funding is the biggest indicator here.
  - mattgreenrocks 9y ago
    I’d argue SV does so well because SV is fundamentally extractive in how it uses tech. It uses tech as a way to strip mine a particular domain, often bypassing incumbents in the process. There is nothing innovative about this process. It is not ‘high’ tech so much as applied tech. Another take on this: look at the type of people that SV idolizes by and large. Are they mostly hackers? Or business people? SV is a colony of capital B business, and they keep the makers around because they have to.

mathgladiator 9y ago

There is also a lot of hot air generated by SF that may be advantageous to ignore.

timewarrior 9y ago
Maybe choosing own network and use of own time wisely would help. Filter might be better vs ignore. If would rather be in a position where I can get potentially useful and useless information so that I can filter vs not having much information.

Karrot_Kream 9y ago

What does "cutting edge" mean? They don't use modern deployment startegies? They don't use recently popular web frameworks? "Cutting edge" is so vague it's not clear whether SV just cargo cults more or whether it's actually more technically innvovative.

timewarrior 9y ago
Maybe bleeding edge is a better word. They just try a lot more things and find out faster what is working and what isn't working. Most of them turn out to be useless but the ones that work give them an early start.
richardknop 9y ago
For example while kubernetes is all the rage in Silicon Valley and every startup is using it, most companies further away from SV take longer to adopt these new technologies. They are just evaluating and experimenting with k8s and in few years might move more significant loads into it. Similar with other tech as well. I think that’s just one example but you could look at programming languages, different automation and deployment tools etc and Silicon Valley is on the cutting edge.
- Karrot_Kream 9y ago
  I'd argue that something like k8s is a huge investment for startups and is more of a time waster than anything else. I have a friend that worked at a startup that used Terraform to deploy their stuff, and the whole thing was overkill given that they literally just compiled a binary and put it on a single host. Instead, the friend just wrestled with the Terraform based build process and complained about learning the tool instead of getting stuff done.

hueving 9y ago

This is satire, right? You're suggesting that ideas don't make it from SF to mountain view in less than 6 months with thousands of people commuting between the two each day and cross pollination of meetups on both sides. Containerization and its orchestration all started in the south bay. Pray tell, what was in use in SF for 6 months before it hit the startups based in MV, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, etc.

timewarrior 9y ago
No, this isn't satire. Please check my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16218591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16218591 There are always exceptions (like your containerization example), which can be attributed to serious tech players like Yahoo, Google and FB in South Bay. However holistically, SF has had much more unicorns and near unicorns. The contrast between SF and rest of the world has been more pronounced in recent year vs pre-2010 (except China of course - due to the growing economy and closed nature making it difficult for outside companies to operate).
- DavidHm 9y ago
  You seem to be conflating valuation with innovation.
- briandear 9y ago
  And the most valuable company in the word is in the South Bay — worth more than every San Fran unicorn — combined. Valuation has zero to do with innovation and using unicorns as a measure of bleeding edge tech is nonsense. Some of the very beat tech doesn’t necessarily turn into the best businesses. And don’t forget, the South Bay has one of the most innovative middle-out compression innovators in history: Pied Piper.
gros_roberts 9y ago
This whole website is satire, mate.

Karrot_Kream 9y ago

I don't read the bit about the South Bay but that's absurd. gRPC - Mountain View Cgroups - Mountain View Golang, Rust - Mountain View Protobufs - Mountain View Blaze - Mountain View React - Menlo Park Buck - Menlo Park Thrift - Menlo Park And this is only a fraction of it. Do you even work in tech? You sound like a talking head...

timewarrior 9y ago
Quite a few of these were produced out of Google and FB, so it makes sense they would be based out of MV/Meno Park. However most of the unicorns or near unicorns since 2010 have been based in SF. Dropbox, AirBnb, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, Zenefits, SoFi, Credit Karma, CloudFlare, DocuSign, Wish, Slack, Github, Instacart, Prosper, Automattic, Eventbrite, Okta, Docker, Gusto, Nextdoor. Let list could go on and on. I stand by my statement that more talent in concentrated in a smaller area vs South Bay and they are trying out a lot more things and also faster. Dynamics of an urban area also play some role where, where you can quickly walk to, use public transport or get an Uber, vs driving to another place in South Bay. All this leads to SF being ahead of South Bay in terms of learnings and trying out things. And name calling doesn't get us anywhere!
- haeffin 9y ago
  That's lots of names of companies and no examples of "best technology building best practices".
- Karrot_Kream 9y ago
  You're naming products or companies and not technologies or processes. Moreover many of these companies are privately traded and their balance sheet is unknown. These companies could be healthy or they could be struggling and we have no idea. So what is your metric of "cutting edge"? It sounds like you're optimizing for small business strategy? Seems honestly like VC funding is the biggest indicator here.
- mattgreenrocks 9y ago
  I’d argue SV does so well because SV is fundamentally extractive in how it uses tech. It uses tech as a way to strip mine a particular domain, often bypassing incumbents in the process. There is nothing innovative about this process. It is not ‘high’ tech so much as applied tech. Another take on this: look at the type of people that SV idolizes by and large. Are they mostly hackers? Or business people? SV is a colony of capital B business, and they keep the makers around because they have to.