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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

• 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
• code_duck 15y ago
  There are probably more fair comparisons, as you've chosen the largest websites in the world for the Silicon Valley side.