16 ms·

The Abundance of Silicon Valley

184 points by cyb_ 6y ago

rayiner 6y ago
> Why did Fairchild have to choose its epicenter as a one dimensional strip of land between mountains and bay with nowhere to physically expand to? Why did every starry-eyed post-bubble founder plop their headquarters in a dinky suburb that would fight them for office space and housing forever after? Abundance is an accident The Valley grew up around Stanford: https://interestingengineering.com/the-origin-story-of-silicon-valleyand-why-we-shouldnt-try-to-recreate-it https://interestingengineering.com/the-origin-story-of-silic.... Silicon Valley is the result of deliberate industrial policy and state investment into institutions. I grew up in northern Virginia and watched a similar thing happen in Virginia from 1989 to today.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  I also grew up in northern Virginia; what was the equivalent to Stanford there (There was the obvious pull of the federal government, but post 1989 the growth was almost entirely outside the beltway).
  - rayiner 6y ago
    I'm talking about the larger industrial policy. In the 1980s and 1980s, Virginia pursued a very similar approach as California had in the 1960s and 1970s: it invested in transportation and education while maintaining a low-tax, business-friendly environment. For example, the state created GMU as an independent university in northern VA in 1972, and created TJ as a STEM high school in 1986. Virginia Tech expanded graduate engineering programs into the Northern VA campus in the 1990s. GMU and Virginia Tech aren't Stanford, but both are R1 Research Universities, and the tech industry, especially on the government side, was far less snobby about degree prestige back then. Like California, Virginia focused on attracting government research labs and affiliated entities like defense contractors (MITRE, SAIC, etc., were there long before Google). Finally, the Dulles Tech Corridor grew for largely similar reasons as Silicon Valley when it first started. There was plenty of cheap formerly agricultural land that was largely unregulated, but easily accessible thanks to the newly-built Dulles Toll Road. Good for building things like data centers.
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      I suppose my life checks most of those boxes. - I attended TJ; when my dad got job-offers out-of-town the fact that my parents felt that I would need to attend a private school to get similar education quality was factored into budget decisions. - My dad and my aunt got their PhDs from GMU - My dad worked for MITRE - My aunt works for SAIC - I would have stayed there if I got even a single job offer (my college GPA was poor, and that immediately disqualified me from most positions; the telecom company I interned at was a casualty of the dot-com bust). What I'd like to dig more into is what caused so many telecom companies to end up in that area (maybe the large amount of low-productivity farm-land waiting t be turned into data centers?). It was a telecom company in Herndon, not MITRE that was my dad's first job in the area, and the reason why my family originally moved there.
      - rayiner 6y ago
        Interesting! My brother and I went to TJ (‘02 and ‘08) and he worked at MITRE during the summers.
        aidenn0 6y ago
        I graduated in '99 (Jason Miller if you want to see my dorky picture, which is only fair since you were the only rayiner in my senior-year yearbook) so we were there for one year together. This is the third week in a row I've discovered someone that I interact with in some way online went to high-school with me, which is a weird coincidence.
    - euroclydon 6y ago
      The stuff I see coming out of MITRE for cyber security... is that a place anyone who could work at a Valley startup, would actually want to work at?
      - aidenn0 6y ago
        My Dad worked at MITRE to take a break from the long hours at startups. 9-5 hours, working on cool stuff, and the actual cash pay was in the same ballpark (obviously no equity though).
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  Additionally, around when Fairchild et al were created, California was a great place to live. High wages with average cost of living, cheap housing, great weather etc made the place a paradise for regular people to move into. It was not in any way resembling what it is right now.
UncleOxidant 6y ago
Nice, well written essay. Reminded me of Annie Dillard's writing. I'm not sure if it's the end of Silicon Valley, but if it is and that results in spreading the abundance around the country more evenly that wouldn't be a bad thing. Location in biology is important and limiting, however, location for our human endeavors is becoming less important due to technology.
- CalRobert 6y ago
  Would you recommend anything in particular by Dillard? "How we spend our days is how we spend our days" struck me from the moment I read it (though once I learned the context, the meaning shifted. I haven't read anything by her, though.
  - davee5 6y ago
    "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" is her signature book and for many (myself included) a spiritual experience to read. "The Writing Life" is the best book about the process of creating that I have ever read, and I often suggest it to my design teams. (Designers like to read books about design, but you don't hire designers because they're good at words. You want to read about creating? Read books by writers.) One of my favorite excerpts from The Writing Life: > A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well," the writer said, “I don’t know... Do you like sentences?" The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of the paint."
  - UncleOxidant 6y ago
    Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It's such a calm, meditative book. In fact, IIRC it has a chapter on fecundity that is similar to this essay.
jasode 6y ago
>Why did Fairchild have to choose its epicenter as a one dimensional strip of land between mountains and bay with nowhere to physically expand to? Possibly because the 8 engineers that formed Fairchild defected from Shockley Semiconductor. William Shockley chose that area to start a company partly because his ailing mother lived there.[1] Another contributing reason was a Navy Research center was in the Bay area so the military was an eager buyer of the latest semiconductor technology. The seeds of a few players starts a "business cluster".[2] Similar phenomenon as movie industry concentrated in Los Angeles. Country music in Nashville. Finance/fashion/publishing in New York. I don't think COVID in combination with better telecommuting technology like Zoom will disperse business clusters as some think. It definitely will enable more remote collaboration but the concentration of business clusters will still remain. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Shockley_Semiconductor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Shockley_Semi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster
nostrademons 6y ago
It's very worth remembering that the abundance of Silicon Valley is fragile, and temporary. But I think many articles surmising that the peak is now have the timescale wrong. I'd compare Silicon Valley to Detroit with a century time lag. The American automotive industry started in the 1890s, just like the Internet industry started in the 1990s. Like the Internet, it built off a constellation of related technologies that had been under development for 30-40 years. The automobile industry was built on the iron mines in Duluth, coal mines in Appalachia, petroleum industry in Ohio, steelworks in Pennsylvania, and Great Lakes transportation infrastructure that had been setup throughout the 19th century. The Internet was built on software from Boston; microcomputers from Albuquerque, Austin, and Houston; an OS from Redmond; semiconductors from Oregon; and so on. In 1910, the population of Detroit was 465,000. It had nearly doubled from 285,000 in the previous decade, fueled both by international migrants looking for then-high wages and Black migration fleeing persecution in the rest of the U.S. (sound familiar?). The auto industry was well established, with Model-T production in its heyday. Supplier networks were already starting to grow up around the big-3 automakers. But Detroit's population didn't peak until 1950, at quadruple its 1910 population. In between, Detroit would be key to winning two World Wars, and the automobile would fundamentally reshape society. Most of the growth happened between 1932-1960, and only after key government & societal infrastructure changed to be built around the automobile rather than the automobile serving as a luxury novelty for Gilded Age technorati. Eventually Silicon Valley will end up like Detroit, with abandoned 4-over-1 condo complexes and empty office parks where the software industry once stood. But we've got a while to go. We haven't had our war yet, and the basic infrastructure of society - transportation, legal, military, government, etc - is still based on pre-electronic conceptions.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  You're ignoring over half of Silicon Valley's history in your narrative, including the population boom that gave the region its name and the vast majority of its growth. Silicon Valley has been getting transplants since the 60s. The region has grown around 15-20% in the last 20 years. From 1960 to 1980 region roughly tripled its population. There's a reason why prop 13 came about in the 70s. I'm not saying it will always be a tech mecca. But ignoring a majority of its history with tech just so you can compare it to Detroit seems disingenuous.
seibelj 6y ago
> Every year, we think that this cannot possibly continue, and every year it does. > Until now. As covid and wildfire smoke have atomized us all into whatever living space we can afford, and into a grid of separate video boxes on a screen, the place as it was no longer exists. The forces that kept people here are temporarily gone. Through cratering rents San Francisco is finally proving to opponents of growth that supply and demand apply to housing too. Intelligent people will twist themselves in knots trying to disprove basic economics. I see long threads on HN all the time of brilliant people convinced that supply and demand is just "far too simple" or "totally disproved" etc. etc. This book is a classic https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465060730 https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465...
- avgDev 6y ago
  And I have another book to read, my book collection is starting to become like my steam collection.
- closeparen 6y ago
  It’s usually the “supply and” part that people don’t believe; “demand” is less controversial.
  - rlanday 6y ago
    I’ve been trying to explain to YIMBY-type folks for years that while, yes, supply and demand are both important, it’s extremely rare that the price of an asset will crash due to increased supply. It’s almost always due to decreased demand. E.g. the price of taxicab medallions in New York did not fall because the government increased the number of medallions; it was because Uber and Lyft decreased the demand. People sometimes reply, “but that’s the same thing!” I don’t think it is though. Obviously if the number of available medallions went up, we might see a similar effect, but that’s not what actually happened: the political situation restricting the supply never went away.
    - ng12 6y ago
      What's the point? NYC could have issued more supply to reduce the price. The fact that they chose not to until the demand for them dropped has no bearing on the supply/demand relationship.
captaincole 6y ago
I think that this was a really interesting parallel to the natural world. There are two really important questions to be asking when trying to figure out if the exodus of Silicon Valley is temporary or permanent. 1. Is the damage or outside stressors that are causing the exodus permanent? (I really hope not...) 2. Was there a natural cause (repeatable, will continue) for the previous abundance, or was it just momentum and luck that kept Silicon Valley as abundant as it has been. Point number two I leave for discussion.
samcheng 6y ago
Like many wildlife populations, Silicon Valley is cyclical, with a boom-and-bust cycle. 101 was quiet and San Francisco was a hipster haven rather than a tech-bro mecca during the dot-com bust, for example. The fundamentals that make this a great place to live and venture will remain, though. The weather is great. The mixing pot of global languages and cultures stretches back to the gold rush. World class educational and 'big tech' institutions aren't going anywhere. Investors express difficulty in gauging personal rapport over a video call, and are still largely clustered in the Bay Area. The network effects around having a critical mass of brilliant technical minds are substantial. I hope that this abundance can flow outward, to other cities, like Denver or Austin or Seattle or SLC, even if that makes my property values dip a little. I'll enjoy digging up sand crabs at the beach (nobody I know calls them mole crabs) long after the latest wave of tech migrants have left.
- dkislyuk 6y ago
  And on a city level, the history of San Francisco itself is filled with spectacular boom times followed by spectacular bust times. For me, a perspective shift was reading Season of the Witch by David Talbot, chronicling the boom/bust of the 1960s-1980s. Declaring the end of SF/Bay Area is a long-standing tradition, and yet the region always finds a way, in part because of the fundamentals you mentioned.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
CalRobert 6y ago
Spent nine years living in San Luis Obispo, and somehow I never encountered a single clam in Pismo. Was I missing something obvious?
joejerryronnie 6y ago
The author spends most of the article discussing how mysterious and unknowable the underlying causes of abundance are. And then closes out the article with “this time it’s different”. That seems inconsistent.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  ...mysterious, unknowable and fragile.
davidw 6y ago
> The forces that kept people here are temporarily gone. I wonder a lot about this and its effects. We're seeing big price increases here in Bend, Oregon and what seems like an influx of people from larger cities. Why live in a city if you can't do city things? Bend was already trendy though. I wonder if this effect will indeed spread out even further. There are a bunch of former logging/ranching towns here in Oregon (and, indeed, throughout the west) that are not doing nearly so well. Roseburg, Pendleton, Baker City, Grants Pass come to mind. They have access to some nice outdoor spaces themselves. Will people start moving there, or will they constrain themselves to 'the beaten path' of towns that their peer group considers a 'nice place to live'?
- solarkraft 6y ago
  I'd suppose it's a development similar to (or exactly) gentrification. First a few pioneers come for the cheap housing, they make it cool, a few more people come for the coolness and eventually, if a critical mass is reached, it'll become an established desirable area (of course this can reverse as well). Since people tend to accumulate I suppose that once the prices in Bend get too high people will indeed spread out, bit one of the nearby towns will win the "trendy" people.
m-i-l 6y ago
Isn't there a risk of amnesic shellfish poisoning[0] in that area? Looking at the wikipedia page for domoic acid[1] Pismo Beach is even mentioned by name. Could that be part of the reason why there's an abundance of shellfish on that beach, i.e. because people leave them alone rather than risk permanent brain damage? I'd read it is a likely explanation for the incident that influenced Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds[2]. Don't want to spoil the article's analogy, although you could perhaps make a new one connecting abundance to toxicity. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesic_shellfish_poisoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesic_shellfish_poisoning [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domoic_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domoic_acid [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/mystery-behind-hitchcocks-birds-is-solved-at-last-6282470.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/...
- moultano 6y ago
  People still eat them, just illegally. The rangers have to bust people for it all the time. https://amp.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/environment/article210474849.html https://amp.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/environment/article...
  - m-i-l 6y ago
    Interesting. It seems the concerns are about restocking rather than poisoning, and the warning signs don't mention the risk of contamination, although it seems advisories are put out when there is elevated risk: https://wildlife.ca.gov/fishing/ocean/health-advisories https://wildlife.ca.gov/fishing/ocean/health-advisories
sinoue 6y ago
Really enjoyed your observations on Pismo clams and Moss Landing crabs. Silicon Valley has always been about abundance. CC Morse used the fertile Santa Clara Valley to build the world’s largest seed company. His land gave birth to the original VC and investment in Fairchild semiconductor. As long as there is opportunity there will be abundance. https://twofeet.weebly.com/walking-blog/charles-copeland-morse https://twofeet.weebly.com/walking-blog/charles-copeland-mor...
brundolf 6y ago
Well-written, and a fascinating anecdote about the clams, but it lost me when it hoisted silicon valley up onto the same level as the wonders of nature itself. Really demonstrates the delusional sense of self-importance that the region is steeped in.
_curious_ 6y ago
The author seems to be a good writer but it getting old hearing people wax poetic about their opinions on the valley - anyone got facts to support anything?
joshz404 6y ago
I'm kinda sick of these parallels being drawn between things that societies prioritize to the natural world. Economics isn't a study of the natural world. The ecosystems driving crabs to the beach has nothing to do with capitalism.
- samatman 6y ago
  The "Eco-" in the words "Ecology" and "Ecosystem" indicate that the inventors of those words disagree with your assessment.
  - joshz404 6y ago
    That is not how that works.
    - samatman 6y ago
      Yes it is.
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
The fundamental design of the Internet was to be robust against various forms of damage to the network. I see Silicon Valley as a similar type of system. It is not difficult to look back 40 years and see how at each inflection point, The Valley's constituent technologies, and the companies they spawned, led the rest of the world and scaled The Valley up. - In the 1980s, Silicon Valley's Intel lost it's dominance in DRAM production to Japan. The economic impact was dire, and yet - In the early 1990s, networking and workstations emerged from the likes of SUN and Cisco. They carried through until global competition stole their wind, and it was on to - The late 90s and the .COM boom. And what a boom it was, Amazon, Google, followed by another death knell for myriad .COM corpses. Promptly engendering - The 2000s birth of social media. MySpace faltered, then LinkedIn, then Facebook, then Twitter, came up and are still going strong on the foundation of - 2010s open source platforms. Still mind-blowing: At one point WhatsApp had 40 software engineers and 400,000,000 users. At 3 years old. I've heard about the exodus from California, usually citing so many thousands or 10s of thousands of people leaving. But looking a the net population changes, Santa Clara County is down 5,000 from 2018-2019. Alameda, San Mateo, San Francisco are all up. Silicon Valley is a system that regenerates from one generation to the next, and so far, always bigger and more influential than the last.
- bitwize 6y ago
  Silicon Valley survives because VCs with more money than they know what to do with like the local weather. It's like Hollywood, which has had many boom and bust cycles of its own, yet it's always there because the people with the money decide to stay, so that's where you go if you want your film project financed.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    Do the VCs tend to insist that the projects they fund are also located in the Valley? If so, why?
    - tolbish 6y ago
      It's not so much insisting as it is the path of least resistance.
mooreds 6y ago
That was beautiful.
rexarex 6y ago
That was beautiful
hintymad 6y ago
A question on writing. Is this really good writing? The author spent the first 2/3 of the article talking about beaches, clams, crabs and what not. It's interesting read for readers who are interested in this kind of knowledge, but in general is slowly laying out an analogy a good writing practice?
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  I thought it was lovely writing. I like reading Annie Dillard and it reminded me of her writing. It did take a while to get to the point mentioned in the HackerNews title, however the title of the blog entry was simply "Abundance" so much less was promised.
  - moultano 6y ago
    That's actually what the title is, mostly I just wanted to write about clams and crabs. The person who submitted it changed the title in a way that got more attention than the original that I submitted it with. :)
    - UncleOxidant 6y ago
      Ah, yes, changed my comment to reflect that. I really liked the writing. The HN title did seem to change people's expectations.
    - hintymad 6y ago
      Ah! That makes a lot more sense. I was thinking this article was more about abundance, but somehow missed the real title.
qppo 6y ago
If another state had the IP and non compete protections of California, had some wealthy former startup employees to found VCs, a liberal culture that celebrates risk (and its own arrogance, perhaps) then Silicon Valley might be threatened. And I can't be the only person that's tried to leave California only to realize that everything but the housing costs are worse elsewhere.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  You're not alone. I left California and came back for the same reason.
microtherion 6y ago
Beautiful writing! But "stacked into decrepit victorians" might be taking some poetic license; isn't a new arrival more likely to be stacked into a soulless condo tower or apartment complex, with the ambition of eventually moving into a little hillside box?
- moultano 6y ago
  I know a lot of folks that have rented victorian living rooms, sometimes even with a curtain to divide it in two. There just isn't that much else.
rmk 6y ago
Thank you cyb_ for posting this. What a well-written, beautifully-worded article. This is what makes HN special: this piece of writing wouldn't show up anywhere else. Speaking of HN and Silicon Valley, I see parallels. There are people who worked at creating the site and using it as a source of bright, idealistic young minds whom they could profit off of. They continue to work on keeping the site a good place to 'live in'. Did HN grow by happenstance and 'nature'? You bet. But you can't deny the unseen hands of the many people who keep HN habitable. Likewise, Silicon Valley is also no accident, although it has benefited greatly from happenstance and nature. Before SV, there was Lockheed Martin, and NASA, and further down south, Douglas Aircraft. Even today, the benefactors of Lockheed and co. indirectly fund Stanford, Berkeley, and many other places that continue to draw people from all over the world. But I strongly feel that if it takes hold, the current trend of (some) technology workers' activism will be the coup de grace that finishes SV off for good.

184 points by cyb_ 6y ago

> Why did Fairchild have to choose its epicenter as a one dimensional strip of land between mountains and bay with nowhere to physically expand to? Why did every starry-eyed post-bubble founder plop their headquarters in a dinky suburb that would fight them for office space and housing forever after? Abundance is an accident The Valley grew up around Stanford: https://interestingengineering.com/the-origin-story-of-silicon-valleyand-why-we-shouldnt-try-to-recreate-it https://interestingengineering.com/the-origin-story-of-silic.... Silicon Valley is the result of deliberate industrial policy and state investment into institutions. I grew up in northern Virginia and watched a similar thing happen in Virginia from 1989 to today.

aidenn0 6y ago
I also grew up in northern Virginia; what was the equivalent to Stanford there (There was the obvious pull of the federal government, but post 1989 the growth was almost entirely outside the beltway).
- rayiner 6y ago
  I'm talking about the larger industrial policy. In the 1980s and 1980s, Virginia pursued a very similar approach as California had in the 1960s and 1970s: it invested in transportation and education while maintaining a low-tax, business-friendly environment. For example, the state created GMU as an independent university in northern VA in 1972, and created TJ as a STEM high school in 1986. Virginia Tech expanded graduate engineering programs into the Northern VA campus in the 1990s. GMU and Virginia Tech aren't Stanford, but both are R1 Research Universities, and the tech industry, especially on the government side, was far less snobby about degree prestige back then. Like California, Virginia focused on attracting government research labs and affiliated entities like defense contractors (MITRE, SAIC, etc., were there long before Google). Finally, the Dulles Tech Corridor grew for largely similar reasons as Silicon Valley when it first started. There was plenty of cheap formerly agricultural land that was largely unregulated, but easily accessible thanks to the newly-built Dulles Toll Road. Good for building things like data centers.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    I suppose my life checks most of those boxes. - I attended TJ; when my dad got job-offers out-of-town the fact that my parents felt that I would need to attend a private school to get similar education quality was factored into budget decisions. - My dad and my aunt got their PhDs from GMU - My dad worked for MITRE - My aunt works for SAIC - I would have stayed there if I got even a single job offer (my college GPA was poor, and that immediately disqualified me from most positions; the telecom company I interned at was a casualty of the dot-com bust). What I'd like to dig more into is what caused so many telecom companies to end up in that area (maybe the large amount of low-productivity farm-land waiting t be turned into data centers?). It was a telecom company in Herndon, not MITRE that was my dad's first job in the area, and the reason why my family originally moved there.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      Interesting! My brother and I went to TJ (‘02 and ‘08) and he worked at MITRE during the summers.
      - aidenn0 6y ago
        I graduated in '99 (Jason Miller if you want to see my dorky picture, which is only fair since you were the only rayiner in my senior-year yearbook) so we were there for one year together. This is the third week in a row I've discovered someone that I interact with in some way online went to high-school with me, which is a weird coincidence.
  - euroclydon 6y ago
    The stuff I see coming out of MITRE for cyber security... is that a place anyone who could work at a Valley startup, would actually want to work at?
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      My Dad worked at MITRE to take a break from the long hours at startups. 9-5 hours, working on cool stuff, and the actual cash pay was in the same ballpark (obviously no equity though).
xyzzyz 6y ago
Additionally, around when Fairchild et al were created, California was a great place to live. High wages with average cost of living, cheap housing, great weather etc made the place a paradise for regular people to move into. It was not in any way resembling what it is right now.

UncleOxidant 6y ago

Nice, well written essay. Reminded me of Annie Dillard's writing. I'm not sure if it's the end of Silicon Valley, but if it is and that results in spreading the abundance around the country more evenly that wouldn't be a bad thing. Location in biology is important and limiting, however, location for our human endeavors is becoming less important due to technology.

CalRobert 6y ago
Would you recommend anything in particular by Dillard? "How we spend our days is how we spend our days" struck me from the moment I read it (though once I learned the context, the meaning shifted. I haven't read anything by her, though.
- davee5 6y ago
  "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" is her signature book and for many (myself included) a spiritual experience to read. "The Writing Life" is the best book about the process of creating that I have ever read, and I often suggest it to my design teams. (Designers like to read books about design, but you don't hire designers because they're good at words. You want to read about creating? Read books by writers.) One of my favorite excerpts from The Writing Life: > A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well," the writer said, “I don’t know... Do you like sentences?" The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of the paint."
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It's such a calm, meditative book. In fact, IIRC it has a chapter on fecundity that is similar to this essay.

jasode 6y ago

>Why did Fairchild have to choose its epicenter as a one dimensional strip of land between mountains and bay with nowhere to physically expand to? Possibly because the 8 engineers that formed Fairchild defected from Shockley Semiconductor. William Shockley chose that area to start a company partly because his ailing mother lived there.[1] Another contributing reason was a Navy Research center was in the Bay area so the military was an eager buyer of the latest semiconductor technology. The seeds of a few players starts a "business cluster".[2] Similar phenomenon as movie industry concentrated in Los Angeles. Country music in Nashville. Finance/fashion/publishing in New York. I don't think COVID in combination with better telecommuting technology like Zoom will disperse business clusters as some think. It definitely will enable more remote collaboration but the concentration of business clusters will still remain. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Shockley_Semiconductor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Shockley_Semi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster

nostrademons 6y ago

It's very worth remembering that the abundance of Silicon Valley is fragile, and temporary. But I think many articles surmising that the peak is now have the timescale wrong. I'd compare Silicon Valley to Detroit with a century time lag. The American automotive industry started in the 1890s, just like the Internet industry started in the 1990s. Like the Internet, it built off a constellation of related technologies that had been under development for 30-40 years. The automobile industry was built on the iron mines in Duluth, coal mines in Appalachia, petroleum industry in Ohio, steelworks in Pennsylvania, and Great Lakes transportation infrastructure that had been setup throughout the 19th century. The Internet was built on software from Boston; microcomputers from Albuquerque, Austin, and Houston; an OS from Redmond; semiconductors from Oregon; and so on. In 1910, the population of Detroit was 465,000. It had nearly doubled from 285,000 in the previous decade, fueled both by international migrants looking for then-high wages and Black migration fleeing persecution in the rest of the U.S. (sound familiar?). The auto industry was well established, with Model-T production in its heyday. Supplier networks were already starting to grow up around the big-3 automakers. But Detroit's population didn't peak until 1950, at quadruple its 1910 population. In between, Detroit would be key to winning two World Wars, and the automobile would fundamentally reshape society. Most of the growth happened between 1932-1960, and only after key government & societal infrastructure changed to be built around the automobile rather than the automobile serving as a luxury novelty for Gilded Age technorati. Eventually Silicon Valley will end up like Detroit, with abandoned 4-over-1 condo complexes and empty office parks where the software industry once stood. But we've got a while to go. We haven't had our war yet, and the basic infrastructure of society - transportation, legal, military, government, etc - is still based on pre-electronic conceptions.

bcrosby95 6y ago
You're ignoring over half of Silicon Valley's history in your narrative, including the population boom that gave the region its name and the vast majority of its growth. Silicon Valley has been getting transplants since the 60s. The region has grown around 15-20% in the last 20 years. From 1960 to 1980 region roughly tripled its population. There's a reason why prop 13 came about in the 70s. I'm not saying it will always be a tech mecca. But ignoring a majority of its history with tech just so you can compare it to Detroit seems disingenuous.

seibelj 6y ago

> Every year, we think that this cannot possibly continue, and every year it does. > Until now. As covid and wildfire smoke have atomized us all into whatever living space we can afford, and into a grid of separate video boxes on a screen, the place as it was no longer exists. The forces that kept people here are temporarily gone. Through cratering rents San Francisco is finally proving to opponents of growth that supply and demand apply to housing too. Intelligent people will twist themselves in knots trying to disprove basic economics. I see long threads on HN all the time of brilliant people convinced that supply and demand is just "far too simple" or "totally disproved" etc. etc. This book is a classic https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465060730 https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465...

avgDev 6y ago
And I have another book to read, my book collection is starting to become like my steam collection.
closeparen 6y ago
It’s usually the “supply and” part that people don’t believe; “demand” is less controversial.
- rlanday 6y ago
  I’ve been trying to explain to YIMBY-type folks for years that while, yes, supply and demand are both important, it’s extremely rare that the price of an asset will crash due to increased supply. It’s almost always due to decreased demand. E.g. the price of taxicab medallions in New York did not fall because the government increased the number of medallions; it was because Uber and Lyft decreased the demand. People sometimes reply, “but that’s the same thing!” I don’t think it is though. Obviously if the number of available medallions went up, we might see a similar effect, but that’s not what actually happened: the political situation restricting the supply never went away.
  - ng12 6y ago
    What's the point? NYC could have issued more supply to reduce the price. The fact that they chose not to until the demand for them dropped has no bearing on the supply/demand relationship.

captaincole 6y ago

I think that this was a really interesting parallel to the natural world. There are two really important questions to be asking when trying to figure out if the exodus of Silicon Valley is temporary or permanent. 1. Is the damage or outside stressors that are causing the exodus permanent? (I really hope not...) 2. Was there a natural cause (repeatable, will continue) for the previous abundance, or was it just momentum and luck that kept Silicon Valley as abundant as it has been. Point number two I leave for discussion.

samcheng 6y ago

Like many wildlife populations, Silicon Valley is cyclical, with a boom-and-bust cycle. 101 was quiet and San Francisco was a hipster haven rather than a tech-bro mecca during the dot-com bust, for example. The fundamentals that make this a great place to live and venture will remain, though. The weather is great. The mixing pot of global languages and cultures stretches back to the gold rush. World class educational and 'big tech' institutions aren't going anywhere. Investors express difficulty in gauging personal rapport over a video call, and are still largely clustered in the Bay Area. The network effects around having a critical mass of brilliant technical minds are substantial. I hope that this abundance can flow outward, to other cities, like Denver or Austin or Seattle or SLC, even if that makes my property values dip a little. I'll enjoy digging up sand crabs at the beach (nobody I know calls them mole crabs) long after the latest wave of tech migrants have left.

dkislyuk 6y ago
And on a city level, the history of San Francisco itself is filled with spectacular boom times followed by spectacular bust times. For me, a perspective shift was reading Season of the Witch by David Talbot, chronicling the boom/bust of the 1960s-1980s. Declaring the end of SF/Bay Area is a long-standing tradition, and yet the region always finds a way, in part because of the fundamentals you mentioned.

deleted 6y ago

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CalRobert 6y ago

Spent nine years living in San Luis Obispo, and somehow I never encountered a single clam in Pismo. Was I missing something obvious?

joejerryronnie 6y ago

The author spends most of the article discussing how mysterious and unknowable the underlying causes of abundance are. And then closes out the article with “this time it’s different”. That seems inconsistent.

aidenn0 6y ago
...mysterious, unknowable and fragile.

davidw 6y ago

> The forces that kept people here are temporarily gone. I wonder a lot about this and its effects. We're seeing big price increases here in Bend, Oregon and what seems like an influx of people from larger cities. Why live in a city if you can't do city things? Bend was already trendy though. I wonder if this effect will indeed spread out even further. There are a bunch of former logging/ranching towns here in Oregon (and, indeed, throughout the west) that are not doing nearly so well. Roseburg, Pendleton, Baker City, Grants Pass come to mind. They have access to some nice outdoor spaces themselves. Will people start moving there, or will they constrain themselves to 'the beaten path' of towns that their peer group considers a 'nice place to live'?

solarkraft 6y ago
I'd suppose it's a development similar to (or exactly) gentrification. First a few pioneers come for the cheap housing, they make it cool, a few more people come for the coolness and eventually, if a critical mass is reached, it'll become an established desirable area (of course this can reverse as well). Since people tend to accumulate I suppose that once the prices in Bend get too high people will indeed spread out, bit one of the nearby towns will win the "trendy" people.

m-i-l 6y ago

Isn't there a risk of amnesic shellfish poisoning[0] in that area? Looking at the wikipedia page for domoic acid[1] Pismo Beach is even mentioned by name. Could that be part of the reason why there's an abundance of shellfish on that beach, i.e. because people leave them alone rather than risk permanent brain damage? I'd read it is a likely explanation for the incident that influenced Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds[2]. Don't want to spoil the article's analogy, although you could perhaps make a new one connecting abundance to toxicity. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesic_shellfish_poisoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesic_shellfish_poisoning [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domoic_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domoic_acid [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/mystery-behind-hitchcocks-birds-is-solved-at-last-6282470.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/...

moultano 6y ago
People still eat them, just illegally. The rangers have to bust people for it all the time. https://amp.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/environment/article210474849.html https://amp.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/environment/article...
- m-i-l 6y ago
  Interesting. It seems the concerns are about restocking rather than poisoning, and the warning signs don't mention the risk of contamination, although it seems advisories are put out when there is elevated risk: https://wildlife.ca.gov/fishing/ocean/health-advisories https://wildlife.ca.gov/fishing/ocean/health-advisories

sinoue 6y ago

Really enjoyed your observations on Pismo clams and Moss Landing crabs. Silicon Valley has always been about abundance. CC Morse used the fertile Santa Clara Valley to build the world’s largest seed company. His land gave birth to the original VC and investment in Fairchild semiconductor. As long as there is opportunity there will be abundance. https://twofeet.weebly.com/walking-blog/charles-copeland-morse https://twofeet.weebly.com/walking-blog/charles-copeland-mor...

brundolf 6y ago

Well-written, and a fascinating anecdote about the clams, but it lost me when it hoisted silicon valley up onto the same level as the wonders of nature itself. Really demonstrates the delusional sense of self-importance that the region is steeped in.

_curious_ 6y ago

The author seems to be a good writer but it getting old hearing people wax poetic about their opinions on the valley - anyone got facts to support anything?

joshz404 6y ago

I'm kinda sick of these parallels being drawn between things that societies prioritize to the natural world. Economics isn't a study of the natural world. The ecosystems driving crabs to the beach has nothing to do with capitalism.

samatman 6y ago
The "Eco-" in the words "Ecology" and "Ecosystem" indicate that the inventors of those words disagree with your assessment.
- joshz404 6y ago
  That is not how that works.
  - samatman 6y ago
    Yes it is.

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

The fundamental design of the Internet was to be robust against various forms of damage to the network. I see Silicon Valley as a similar type of system. It is not difficult to look back 40 years and see how at each inflection point, The Valley's constituent technologies, and the companies they spawned, led the rest of the world and scaled The Valley up. - In the 1980s, Silicon Valley's Intel lost it's dominance in DRAM production to Japan. The economic impact was dire, and yet - In the early 1990s, networking and workstations emerged from the likes of SUN and Cisco. They carried through until global competition stole their wind, and it was on to - The late 90s and the .COM boom. And what a boom it was, Amazon, Google, followed by another death knell for myriad .COM corpses. Promptly engendering - The 2000s birth of social media. MySpace faltered, then LinkedIn, then Facebook, then Twitter, came up and are still going strong on the foundation of - 2010s open source platforms. Still mind-blowing: At one point WhatsApp had 40 software engineers and 400,000,000 users. At 3 years old. I've heard about the exodus from California, usually citing so many thousands or 10s of thousands of people leaving. But looking a the net population changes, Santa Clara County is down 5,000 from 2018-2019. Alameda, San Mateo, San Francisco are all up. Silicon Valley is a system that regenerates from one generation to the next, and so far, always bigger and more influential than the last.

bitwize 6y ago
Silicon Valley survives because VCs with more money than they know what to do with like the local weather. It's like Hollywood, which has had many boom and bust cycles of its own, yet it's always there because the people with the money decide to stay, so that's where you go if you want your film project financed.
- jbay808 6y ago
  Do the VCs tend to insist that the projects they fund are also located in the Valley? If so, why?
  - tolbish 6y ago
    It's not so much insisting as it is the path of least resistance.

mooreds 6y ago

That was beautiful.

rexarex 6y ago

That was beautiful

hintymad 6y ago

A question on writing. Is this really good writing? The author spent the first 2/3 of the article talking about beaches, clams, crabs and what not. It's interesting read for readers who are interested in this kind of knowledge, but in general is slowly laying out an analogy a good writing practice?

UncleOxidant 6y ago
I thought it was lovely writing. I like reading Annie Dillard and it reminded me of her writing. It did take a while to get to the point mentioned in the HackerNews title, however the title of the blog entry was simply "Abundance" so much less was promised.
- moultano 6y ago
  That's actually what the title is, mostly I just wanted to write about clams and crabs. The person who submitted it changed the title in a way that got more attention than the original that I submitted it with. :)
  - UncleOxidant 6y ago
    Ah, yes, changed my comment to reflect that. I really liked the writing. The HN title did seem to change people's expectations.
  - hintymad 6y ago
    Ah! That makes a lot more sense. I was thinking this article was more about abundance, but somehow missed the real title.

qppo 6y ago

If another state had the IP and non compete protections of California, had some wealthy former startup employees to found VCs, a liberal culture that celebrates risk (and its own arrogance, perhaps) then Silicon Valley might be threatened. And I can't be the only person that's tried to leave California only to realize that everything but the housing costs are worse elsewhere.

gamblor956 6y ago
You're not alone. I left California and came back for the same reason.

microtherion 6y ago

Beautiful writing! But "stacked into decrepit victorians" might be taking some poetic license; isn't a new arrival more likely to be stacked into a soulless condo tower or apartment complex, with the ambition of eventually moving into a little hillside box?

moultano 6y ago
I know a lot of folks that have rented victorian living rooms, sometimes even with a curtain to divide it in two. There just isn't that much else.

rmk 6y ago

Thank you cyb_ for posting this. What a well-written, beautifully-worded article. This is what makes HN special: this piece of writing wouldn't show up anywhere else. Speaking of HN and Silicon Valley, I see parallels. There are people who worked at creating the site and using it as a source of bright, idealistic young minds whom they could profit off of. They continue to work on keeping the site a good place to 'live in'. Did HN grow by happenstance and 'nature'? You bet. But you can't deny the unseen hands of the many people who keep HN habitable. Likewise, Silicon Valley is also no accident, although it has benefited greatly from happenstance and nature. Before SV, there was Lockheed Martin, and NASA, and further down south, Douglas Aircraft. Even today, the benefactors of Lockheed and co. indirectly fund Stanford, Berkeley, and many other places that continue to draw people from all over the world. But I strongly feel that if it takes hold, the current trend of (some) technology workers' activism will be the coup de grace that finishes SV off for good.