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It's weird that it kind of makes it a small town vs big city discussion. I think most of the big tech sectors seem to spawn near good universities. The univer

It's weird that it kind of makes it a small town vs big city discussion. I think most of the big tech sectors seem to spawn near good universities. The universities supply the highly educated workforce for the businesses and the size of the city seems to play less of a role.

dredmorbius 8y ago
Look at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Supercomputing centre and home of Mozilla, but the talent and firms leave. And they don't head to Chicago either.
- wenc 8y ago
  I was talking to UChicago prof who did his undergrad at UIUC, and he said a lot of money was spent to bootstrap the tech economy in Champaign-Urbana but even back then at the height of the dotcom boom, it didn't make sense to him because most people just did not want to live in the middle of cornfields. Rural colleges (even good ones) that are too far away from a city or a metropolitan area rarely have strong diversified economies because talent just doesn't want to live there. If they did, these places wouldn't remain small. Ann Arbor does reasonably well, but it is close to Detroit (which despite most people's mental images of blight, has a very large suburban population that isn't too different from that of other cities in America). Pittsburgh does reasonably well because it is itself a city. Off the top of my head I can think of many small college towns with good tech programs that have not managed to develop a strong diversified/tech economy: * Ithaca, NY * Providence, RI * West Lafayette, IN * Charlottesville, VA Madison WI does ok for some reason (it's a really idyllic place to live as a student), but even then outside of Epic and a few large employers, it's not really a talent magnet. Historically, the very concept of a university in medieval times arose due to urbanization. Outside of a few exceptions like Oxford/Cambridge, situating universities in rural settings is actually not the default idea. Thomas Jefferson famously despised city life and placed UVa in rural Charlottesville, and other colleges in America followed suit. But most European universities are usually located in cities or towns, and instead of sprawling bucolic campuses, they are spread out all over a city.
- HarryHirsch 8y ago
  Why would that be? Midwestern smalltown politics and close-minded attitude? An Indian colleague who is teaching in the nowhere Midwest tells genuinely awful stories about racism and is getting ready to leave.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    Weather extremes, lack of mountains and beaches.
- jonathankoren 8y ago
  Andreesen left and went to Silicon Valley as fast as he could. While NCSA Mosaic was written in Urbana, he started Mosaic Communications (the original name of Netscape) in California, and was hated for years at UIUC after that.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    Thanks I meant Mosaic, of course.

dredmorbius 8y ago

Look at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Supercomputing centre and home of Mozilla, but the talent and firms leave. And they don't head to Chicago either.

wenc 8y ago
I was talking to UChicago prof who did his undergrad at UIUC, and he said a lot of money was spent to bootstrap the tech economy in Champaign-Urbana but even back then at the height of the dotcom boom, it didn't make sense to him because most people just did not want to live in the middle of cornfields. Rural colleges (even good ones) that are too far away from a city or a metropolitan area rarely have strong diversified economies because talent just doesn't want to live there. If they did, these places wouldn't remain small. Ann Arbor does reasonably well, but it is close to Detroit (which despite most people's mental images of blight, has a very large suburban population that isn't too different from that of other cities in America). Pittsburgh does reasonably well because it is itself a city. Off the top of my head I can think of many small college towns with good tech programs that have not managed to develop a strong diversified/tech economy: * Ithaca, NY * Providence, RI * West Lafayette, IN * Charlottesville, VA Madison WI does ok for some reason (it's a really idyllic place to live as a student), but even then outside of Epic and a few large employers, it's not really a talent magnet. Historically, the very concept of a university in medieval times arose due to urbanization. Outside of a few exceptions like Oxford/Cambridge, situating universities in rural settings is actually not the default idea. Thomas Jefferson famously despised city life and placed UVa in rural Charlottesville, and other colleges in America followed suit. But most European universities are usually located in cities or towns, and instead of sprawling bucolic campuses, they are spread out all over a city.
HarryHirsch 8y ago
Why would that be? Midwestern smalltown politics and close-minded attitude? An Indian colleague who is teaching in the nowhere Midwest tells genuinely awful stories about racism and is getting ready to leave.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  Weather extremes, lack of mountains and beaches.
jonathankoren 8y ago
Andreesen left and went to Silicon Valley as fast as he could. While NCSA Mosaic was written in Urbana, he started Mosaic Communications (the original name of Netscape) in California, and was hated for years at UIUC after that.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Thanks I meant Mosaic, of course.