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The thing is, any reasoning that assumes Silicon Valley is where it's at ignores all the TechCrunch articles about "the crisis in venture capital" and the inabi
by giles_bowkett 18y ago
The thing is, any reasoning that assumes Silicon Valley is where it's at ignores all the TechCrunch articles about "the crisis in venture capital" and the inability of the VCs to find companies that need their money to lift off at all in the commodity-hardware/open-source-software era. It's very, very unlikely that the Valley-centric monoculture of the past will continue to characterize the startup scene. NY has a startup scene, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Edinburugh, London, every place I've been to or met people from in the last ten years has a startup scene. Even Santa Fe, New Mexico, an isolated mountain city of only 60,000 people, counting daytime commuters, has a startup scene.
The radical reduction in startup cost for technology companies is THE technology-business event of the last twenty years. It absolutely decentralizes tech startups by making VCs much less important. Yes, the Valley still has an edge in terms of people, but if you're used to being the center of the universe, having an edge isn't the same.
This explains local startup scenes, and makes it obvious they'll become more important in future, not less. Paul Graham isn't just wrong for the obvious reasons - because anybody who says NY is about any one thing is smoking crack, for instance, or because of the Valley's echo chamber, or because there must be something in Boston's relative non-entity-ness despite its incredible programmer population, etc., etc., etc. - he's also wrong because he's ignoring the ginormous sea change in startup capital requirements that his own business revolves around, and which he himself first identified in one of his essays years before anyone in the Valley ever blogged about it.
He's ignored his own discoveries.
- giles_bowkett 18y agodammit, I misspelled Edinburgh.
- tstegart 18y agoYou get points for using ginormous though.
- giles_bowkett 18y agoI do what I can.
- pg 18y ago"Ultimately power rests with the founders. A startup with the best people will beat one with funding from famous VCs, and a startup that was sufficiently successful would never have to move. So a town that could exert enough pull over the right people could resist and perhaps even surpass Silicon Valley." http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html
- giles_bowkett 18y agoYes. Because it's about which town is number one. It's not about the fact that any town can produce great tech today, with or without startups. Nor is it about the fact that today's abundance of great free tech enables many towns to simultaneously produce work of top quality, making the whole concept of "number one" meaningless. Nor is it about the fact that so many towns and non-towns can produce great tech that towns become irrelevant too. Actually, by yes, I mean no. I think I've read nearly everything you've published. I was aware of the quote when I wrote the criticism, and I think the quote fails to address any substantive part of it. I think if you want to address any criticism I make, you'll need to write something new, or dig up something obscure which I haven't read.
- timr 18y agoYeah...Seattle has a startup scene. But from what I've witnessed, you can't compare it to the scene in the bay. Your average startup founder in Seattle is in his mid-to-late 30's, and has just come off of an N-year (N >= 10) successful career at Microsoft or Amazon. He's financially comfortable, and the decision to jump into a startup was probably driven as much by boredom (with the 9-to-5) as ambition. Moreover, without outside help, young founders rarely get the time of day from local investors (after all, everyone knows that you need to work at Microsoft for a while to gain experience before you can start a company!) All of this could be viewed as good or bad, but in my opinion, it's not as vibrant, energetic or varied as the scene in the bay area. Here, young founders have an uphill climb to prove themselves -- in the bay, it's almost the opposite.