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I get that it is expensive and challenging to keep the best engineers in Silicon Valley for years at a time. However, it seems really odd to conclude from that

I get that it is expensive and challenging to keep the best engineers in Silicon Valley for years at a time. However, it seems really odd to conclude from that that the solution would be to start a consumer web startup in Boston. I can name almost no consumer web startups from the past decade that weren't built in Silicon Valley. Stack Overflow? MySpace? Some fashion startups in NYC? Anything else? For most of its early life (and perhaps still), Facebook had less than one engineer per million users. Is that kind of talent available outside of the Valley? How many people that have worked at the scale of Google/Facebook/Yahoo!/Twitter (with all that it entails in terms of coding standards, infrastructure, and so on) exist outside of the Valley? Maybe the Seattle area has enough ex-Amazon/ex-Microsoft people to launch a big consumer web startup, but even there, a substantial part of Bing seems to be based in Silicon Valley.

harryh 15y ago
> I can name almost no consumer web startups from the past decade that weren't built in Silicon Valley foursquare, tumblr, groupon, spotify, meetup, kickstarter
- socratic 15y ago
  Do those startups have technical or other infrastructure problems that compare to a big Silicon Valley web startup? (Groupon obviously had to scale sales, but that's not what I mean here.) Here's tumblr.com vs blogspot.com on Google Trends: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=tumblr.com%2Cblogspot.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://trends.google.com/websites?q=tumblr.com%2Cblogspot.co... Here's foursquare.com vs facebook.com on Google Trends: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com%2Cfoursquare.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com%2Cfoursquar... Here's etsy.com vs ebay.com (from another comment): http://trends.google.com/websites?q=ebay.com%2Cetsy.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://trends.google.com/websites?q=ebay.com%2Cetsy.com&... Here's the other four you list vs facebook.com: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com%2Cgroupon.com%2Cspotify.com%2Cmeetup.com%2Ckickstarter.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com%2Cgroupon.c...
  - samirahmed 15y ago
    I dont quite understand your reasoning here. Please explain how moving any of these companies to Silicon Valley would have made them better than Facebook? I would are that Foursquare in NY and Foursquare in SF would still have the same premise and penetration that it has if it were build in SF, I think many of these companies are limited by their concepts and not their location. However if you feel as though Foursquare etc would have been better if they were based in Si Valley, please explain why.
    - socratic 15y ago
      The success of a startup is commonly viewed to be a combination of the concept and the execution. Of course, the "concept" is rarely a singular thing---a company often needs an initial niche product to score desperate early adopters, and then it may need a more general vision to break into larger markets. Was/is Facebook a social network for college students? A social graph? A platform for social games? Silicon Valley seems like a good multiplier on execution, as well as a place where it is easier (and more expected) to increase the original product vision. VCs insist on the team trying to take over a $100B+ market, many top infrastructure engineers, mobile developers, UX people, and so on won't stay if they don't think the equity will be worth anything, and there is a huge amount of highly mobile web talent. More talent breeds more ideas, expanding the concept and improving the execution. Could Facebook have scaled their engineering team to handle 2x-5x the number of users every year (with maybe 1m users on day one of the company), with a huge portion of those users viewing the website every day, without being in a place with (a) tons of web talent and (b) a culture where leaving an established job to work at a web startup was reasonable? In terms of upper level management, half of Facebook's C-level executives appear to be ex-Google. Could Facebook have gotten that level of operational and advertising expertise in Boston? To answer your question directly, I suspect there are huge recruiting, operational, and business development challenges to running a large scale consumer web startup outside of Silicon Valley. That said, it is hard to know how that would impact any particular company, or any particular space (e.g., location-based services).
  - harryh 15y ago
    Oh, definitely not disagreeing that SV/SF is #1 in terms of density & scale of technology companies. This is undeniable. Just offering that there are some significant consumer web tech companies being started in other places these days. More now than ever in fact. Shameless plug mode: And BTW, the technical challenges at foursquare are actually pretty interesting. We have all the issues you'll see in a social network (primarily the fact that our data is hard to partition) combined with the fact that much of what we do is based on your (or your friends) entire history of usage. It gets pretty hard pretty fast. If you find this sort of thing interesting I'd love to talk to you. http://foursquare.jobs http://foursquare.jobs
- rdl 15y ago
  Plus basically all the Chinese startups. Some of them have huge scale issues, too.
ceol 15y ago
>I can name almost no consumer web startups from the past decade that weren't built in Silicon Valley. Stack Overflow? MySpace? Some fashion startups in NYC? Anything else? I believe Etsy is based in NY.
phillmv 15y ago
Uhm, I would wager that there are a lot of smart engineers who don't live in California.
- anamax 15y ago
  > Uhm, I would wager that there are a lot of smart engineers who don't live in California. No one is suggesting otherwise. However, if you need a critical mass in a given area, you don't have a lot of choices. For many areas, CA has a couple of options. (SoCal would be considered a big deal if it didn't happen to be in the same state as SV.)

harryh 15y ago

> I can name almost no consumer web startups from the past decade that weren't built in Silicon Valley foursquare, tumblr, groupon, spotify, meetup, kickstarter

socratic 15y ago
Do those startups have technical or other infrastructure problems that compare to a big Silicon Valley web startup? (Groupon obviously had to scale sales, but that's not what I mean here.) Here's tumblr.com vs blogspot.com on Google Trends: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=tumblr.com%2Cblogspot.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://trends.google.com/websites?q=tumblr.com%2Cblogspot.co... Here's foursquare.com vs facebook.com on Google Trends: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com%2Cfoursquare.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com%2Cfoursquar... Here's etsy.com vs ebay.com (from another comment): http://trends.google.com/websites?q=ebay.com%2Cetsy.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://trends.google.com/websites?q=ebay.com%2Cetsy.com&... Here's the other four you list vs facebook.com: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com%2Cgroupon.com%2Cspotify.com%2Cmeetup.com%2Ckickstarter.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com%2Cgroupon.c...
- samirahmed 15y ago
  I dont quite understand your reasoning here. Please explain how moving any of these companies to Silicon Valley would have made them better than Facebook? I would are that Foursquare in NY and Foursquare in SF would still have the same premise and penetration that it has if it were build in SF, I think many of these companies are limited by their concepts and not their location. However if you feel as though Foursquare etc would have been better if they were based in Si Valley, please explain why.
  - socratic 15y ago
    The success of a startup is commonly viewed to be a combination of the concept and the execution. Of course, the "concept" is rarely a singular thing---a company often needs an initial niche product to score desperate early adopters, and then it may need a more general vision to break into larger markets. Was/is Facebook a social network for college students? A social graph? A platform for social games? Silicon Valley seems like a good multiplier on execution, as well as a place where it is easier (and more expected) to increase the original product vision. VCs insist on the team trying to take over a $100B+ market, many top infrastructure engineers, mobile developers, UX people, and so on won't stay if they don't think the equity will be worth anything, and there is a huge amount of highly mobile web talent. More talent breeds more ideas, expanding the concept and improving the execution. Could Facebook have scaled their engineering team to handle 2x-5x the number of users every year (with maybe 1m users on day one of the company), with a huge portion of those users viewing the website every day, without being in a place with (a) tons of web talent and (b) a culture where leaving an established job to work at a web startup was reasonable? In terms of upper level management, half of Facebook's C-level executives appear to be ex-Google. Could Facebook have gotten that level of operational and advertising expertise in Boston? To answer your question directly, I suspect there are huge recruiting, operational, and business development challenges to running a large scale consumer web startup outside of Silicon Valley. That said, it is hard to know how that would impact any particular company, or any particular space (e.g., location-based services).
- harryh 15y ago
  Oh, definitely not disagreeing that SV/SF is #1 in terms of density & scale of technology companies. This is undeniable. Just offering that there are some significant consumer web tech companies being started in other places these days. More now than ever in fact. Shameless plug mode: And BTW, the technical challenges at foursquare are actually pretty interesting. We have all the issues you'll see in a social network (primarily the fact that our data is hard to partition) combined with the fact that much of what we do is based on your (or your friends) entire history of usage. It gets pretty hard pretty fast. If you find this sort of thing interesting I'd love to talk to you. http://foursquare.jobs http://foursquare.jobs
rdl 15y ago
Plus basically all the Chinese startups. Some of them have huge scale issues, too.

ceol 15y ago

>I can name almost no consumer web startups from the past decade that weren't built in Silicon Valley. Stack Overflow? MySpace? Some fashion startups in NYC? Anything else? I believe Etsy is based in NY.

phillmv 15y ago

Uhm, I would wager that there are a lot of smart engineers who don't live in California.

anamax 15y ago
> Uhm, I would wager that there are a lot of smart engineers who don't live in California. No one is suggesting otherwise. However, if you need a critical mass in a given area, you don't have a lot of choices. For many areas, CA has a couple of options. (SoCal would be considered a big deal if it didn't happen to be in the same state as SV.)