- crushing conformity ? check. Really? Conformity is the last thing I think of in this town. Have you been to San Francisco? - love of me-too and sequels ?

- crushing conformity ? check. Really? Conformity is the last thing I think of in this town. Have you been to San Francisco? - love of me-too and sequels ? check. Google, Facebook, sequels. LinkedIn, sequel. Check. Zynga, Netflix, Pandora, Yelp, YouTube, PayPal... not so much. Iteration and competition on business plan and product is good business. How many people are there making scads of money off of selling cereal? How many types of cars are there? How many banks? How many types of shoes? Are these "me too" businesses? Sure. But, the "me too" of Silicon Valley doesn't succeed unless the follow on company creates significant value over and above what the previous company did. (Google created a ton more value than Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, etc..) - living off the glory days of the past ? check. Really? I have 2,500 members at Hackers & Founders that are focused on being the next thing, and are quite bored with the "glory days" of Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc... There's tons of innovation happening. You just don't read about it all. - patronage and network trump talent and originality ? check. False. You don't make it in this town unless you can produce. No one cares where you went to school or who your daddy is. I have an Associates Degree in Nursing from a community college in the suburbs of Minneapolis, and I run the largest network of startup geeks in the Valley. - overwhelming sense of self-importance ? check. The market capitalization of all the companies within 1 mile of highway 101 between San Francisco and San Jose is $500 Billon. The San Francisco Bay area is one of the 20 largest economies in the world. So, yeah. It's kind of important. Self-important? Maybe. - lack of common sense economics ? check. Last I checked, Hollywood and Silicon Valley weren't hurting in the money making department. How is that a lack of common sense economics? Now, I will grant you that both economies operate on economies of scale. And, that many company's business models only work at massive scale. But, there's sufficient risk capital to support that in both towns. Maybe Silicon Valley is Hollywood for startups after all.