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The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case
- bena 4y agoYou need colleges. You want the next Silicon Valley, pump money into the CS programs of area colleges.
- x86_64Ubuntu 4y agoAnd unfortunately, your best universities are not in the heartland and very few in red states. Silicon Valley has the luxury of educational centers, as well as large tech firms that can be used to seed the area with talent they create and attract. You would be hard pressed to find such a confluence of actors in the heartland.
- ghaff 4y agoYou can argue the "best" point I guess but there are all the large state schools (which can give a very good education if you seek it out), Purdue, Notre Dame, University of Chicago... But probably more around the great lakes than further south.
- saalweachter 4y agoCarnegie-Mellon, UIUC, Michigan/Ann Arbor, University of Wisconsin/Madison, Northwestern, Ohio State...
- pnutjam 4y agoPurdue is great, but it's in Indiana and the social policies will continue to disincentivize both workers and investors. a quick list of reasons not to locate in Indian: * abortion ban * no renter protection * strict non-compete's allowed * school funding keeps getting worse
- ghaff 4y agoWell, it doesn't seem to be keeping a lot of companies and people from heading to Texas, especially Austin.
- pnutjam 4y agoAustin is relatively close to California. Both Texas and California have huge populations. What does Indiana have?
- ghaff 4y agoIndianapolis is a three hour drive from Chicago which is the third most populous city in the US. Whereas Austin is over 1,000 miles from SF. (Once you're getting in a plane anyway, 1K miles vs. 2K miles doesn't make much of a difference.)
- juve1996 4y agoIt has brutal winters compared to Austin.
- ghaff 4y agoFor me, Austin's summers are brutal. Lots of people live in northern states where it snows. You get used to it. I would not in general make a decision about a job based on the weather.
- juve1996 4y agoWhy not? Why would anyone not consider climate when deciding on a place they'll be living?
- lotsofpulp 4y agoClimate and geography are basically my number 2 and 3 for deciding on where to live, because I like to spend time outside. Number 1 is obviously security of shelter and other resources, including income to procure them.
- yardie 4y agoI consider Rice and UT-Austin as two of the best universities in a conservative, red state. But they don't get a lot of respect from coastal elites because they aren't in NYC or SF.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- LanceH 4y agoAnd A&M. But there is no density in Texas. Dallas, Austin, and Houston are 4 hours apart. There is virtually no synergy between them for a corporation other than existing under the same state laws. If these three were all half the distance from each other, and the weather was mild year round, and they were on the coast, it would be a different story.
- natch 4y agoI don't know that those two universities don't get a lot of respect. I have always heard good things about them, here in my elite coastal bubble. As a counterexample, MIT is not in NYC or SF, and it gets respect. For the universities you mention, maybe the (perceived?) sense of lower respect comes from picking up on outsider's suspicions that a Texas university may draw from the state, and thus may have a higher percentage of, you know, people who put tribe and faith ahead of logic and reason (which is not a swipe at all Texans, just more my personal opinion of the red voter types nationwide). Of course those suspicions may be unfounded.
- prottog 4y agoBoston is an archetype of the "coastal liberal elite" city in the line of NYC or SF, so clearly it gets respect. ;-) > people who put tribe and faith ahead of logic and reason For many things, one man's logic and reason is another's tribe and faith. A red voter type might see blue voter types engage in all sorts of illogical policy behavior that, to the red voter, appears solely grounded in blue tribalism and orthodoxies that might as well be church doctrine.
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- AlgorithmicTime 4y ago
- ghaff 4y agoThere are a lot of universities with good CS programs scattered around the country. I expect if I took a list of the top 50 (or whatever) programs and put pins in a map. I expect you'd see some clusters that correspond to tech centers (Bay Area, Boston), secondary tech centers without an outsized academic presence, and some groupings of schools in areas not especially known as a tech hub.
- natch 4y agoNecessary but not sufficient.
- torstenvl 4y ago4-5 of the top 20 CS programs are in the Upper Midwest, depending on whether you count Western Pennsylvania (I personally do — politics are solidly Midwest conservative; manufacturing is a major industry; ethnicity is largely German-American rather than British; religion is largely Catholic and mainline Protestant rather than Quaker and Congregationalist; and so on. Pittsburgh looks and feels more like Columbus than like Philly.)
- prottog 4y agoIf we define the Midwest as the plains between the Appalachians and the Rockies, Pittsburgh is clearly closer to the Midwest than the East Coast.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- juve1996 4y agoPittsburgh politics are not midwest conservative, unless you include the heavy suburban regions which are not where the tech companies are.
- bart_spoon 4y agoNo city is "midwest conservative", even in the heart of the midwest. Pittsburgh is 100% a Midwestern city.
- juve1996 4y agoIt 100% isn't, born and raised. It's nothing like or Indianapolis. The topography and history are completely different. Not northeastern != midwest. Pittsburgh has far more in-common with Baltimore than it does Indy.
- bart_spoon 4y agoThe topography and history are closer to Baltimore than Indy? It's historically been part of the Rust Belt. It's considered part of the Great Lakes Megalopolis [0]. It's on the Western side of the Appalachian divide. Culturally it has far more in common with Cleveland or Columbus than Philly or NYC. The only reason it's even a question is because its in Pennsylvania, which contains Philly which is clearly East Coast. But cultural, geographic, and economic regions aren't defined by stat borders. If instead of being a part of Pennsylvania, there was a "Western Pennsylvania" and "Eastern Pennsylvania", no one would question lumping Western Pennsylvania in with the rest of the Midwest. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_megalopolis#/media/File:MapofEmergingUSMegaregions.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_megalopolis#/media...
- bart_spoon 4y agoThere's a ton of world class engineering colleges in the Midwest. The graduates all move to the coasts for jobs. It isn't a lack of colleges, its a comparative lack of jobs.
- awiesenhofer 4y agoIf I had a dollar for every article about "the next silicon valley", I would be a VC myself by now...
- wil421 4y agoAgreed. There’s a local area where some type of people refer to it as SV. It’s really bunch of satellite sales offices trying to hype things up.
- VLM 4y agoIf you make a location unlivable, people won't live there in the future. Conversely if there's a place that people visit for vacations, people will live there in the future.
- jvanderbot 4y ago> If you make a location unlivable, people won't live there in the future. Yep > Conversely if there's a place that people visit for vacations, people will live there in the future. What. The population of tropical islands, ski-resort towns, and Paris beg to differ.
- staticautomatic 4y agoBoth of those statements are true of Venice.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago>Conversely if there's a place that people visit for vacations, people will live there in the future. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/10/venetians-venice-italy-fear-city-becoming-a-museum-as-population-falls-to-50000 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/10/venetians-veni...
- t_mann 4y ago> if there's a place that people visit for vacations, people will live there in the future meanwhile, in the real world: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-06-30/venice-is-dying-a-long-slow-death https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-06-30/venice-is...
- mlatu 4y ago[doubt] if i were to bet, it'll be on a different continental plate
- yieldcrv 4y agoI think people need to understand the history of Silicon Valley to see why you need an ethos that comes from individuals Not just a cluster of tech companies and VCs, which is already a high bar An area needs a concentration of people made wealthy there, who have to be interested in becoming VCs right there. the state needs the same unenforceability of noncompete laws as california at a bare minimum. dumb things have to be heavily funded all the time, repeatedly, with little scrutiny. high profile failures have to occur.
- asdajksah2123 4y agoYou also need a culture of supporting non-conformists. A culture where children are socialized into believing that things must only be done in a certain way because that's how it's always been done and doing it differently not just makes you immoral but makes you a bad person will invariably reduce the number of kids who will grow up trying to "think differently" when solving problems.
- mrkstu 4y agoTo an extent, but considering how well the Provo/SLC axis is doing in Utah, that doesn't seem to be a necessity.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- PLenz 4y agoTech jobs != Silicon Valley The jobs may come (_may_), but they won't be the same jobs you get in the valley. They will be the backroom, grunt jobs that companies want to make cheaper - cost centers. Profit centers will stay on the coasts.
- pyrito 4y agoI think it's really as simple as having a big company hitting a giant IPO that creates wealthy individuals who go on to invest in smaller up and coming startups. E.g. Seattle has Amazon and Microsoft, Bay Area has Meta, Google, etc.
- Camus134 4y agoMore importantly, the Bay Area has Stanford and Berkley pouring out new grads each year, a lot of them stick around.
- jeffbee 4y agoIf that were even remotely true then Silicon Valley would already be in Bentonville, Arkansas.
- pessimizer 4y agoThere are a ton of programmers in Bentonville, AR. I know some of them. The needs of Walmart are narrow, so it's not going to be the skunkworks-lousy valley, but for what Walmart does, it creates a community of IT contractors.
- jeffbee 4y agoThat's not what pyrito said, though. Pyrito claimed that the necessary and sufficient condition is a critical mass of rich people, a fairly doctrinaire application of "trickle down" economic theory. But we can see quite clearly that the Waltons, despite being fairly numerous, close in geographic proximity, and unbelievably rich, haven't triggered a Silicon Valley-like phenomenon.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoI would be surprised to learn the Waltons actually live and spend much of their time in Arkansas.
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- dontlaugh 4y agoIt's already in Shenzhen.
- mrkstu 4y agoIt was going to be, but the CCP seems determined to deprive their innovative companies of oxygen and happy to make state controlled companies the favorites.
- dontlaugh 4y agoThat is only relevant if you assume state-owned enterprises can't innovate.
- eternalban 4y agoSV started off doing work for the military. Manhattan Project was an "state enterprise", so was sending people to the moon. If a state owned sector is deemed strategic, and we can sleep soundly knowing that China definitely considers information technologies (h/w, infra, s/w, ai) as strategic, it generally does well in competent nations. The fact of stagnating sectors in planned and/or centralized economies always seems to boil down to self-defeating incentives, possibly merely as one symptom of general bureaucratic malaise. To wit, no one had to dangle the incentive of wealth in front of the exceptionally capable men and women who were active in research and development in US in the heydays of the cold war. The nongeek (mostly military) people who shepherded cagey super smart people like Feynman apparently went through a trial and error phase before they figured out how to manage them. And lucky for the creative types, the bureaucracy involved was very much aligned with them in finding super cool new things. That's why we have DARPA. If China has its own version of DARPA, they clearly have the brains, and Chinese are if nothing else exceptionally creative people, with a proven historic track record of hacking. What ailed them historically was a bureaucracy that failed to see in, or obtain strategic benefit from, the inventions. -Bureaucracies have been a problem to date- for humanity. (Even clerics can be conceptually viewed as 'ministry of god' bureaucrats, which is precisely what most of them are.) We haven't cracked this nut yet and imho it is an important one that is impeding human progress: we need them to get things done at large scale and in continuity, but they inevitably end up being the tail that wags the dog of society and state. The problem is of course the human in the equation (knowledge base, specialized language, meta-interactions) makes them impervious to correctives and purges. Possibly AI will finally help us get over this structural hump.
- cle 4y agoI selfishly hope that the software industry will continue its geographic diffusion and not be centered in any particular physical place anymore. I think it's possible, under the right conditions, to foster the same culture in virtual spaces, and I hope it happens.
- nazgulsenpai 4y agoSomewhere, Mark Zuckerberg is rubbing his hands and grinning devilishly whispering "soon..."
- streblo 4y agoAbout 3 years ago I left Silicon Valley after being there for 15 years. I moved to the suburbs outside of another major US city, near where I grew up. I had already been working remote, and especially during the pandemic it felt like a relatively future-proof decision to be outside of the SV network. Frankly, now I'm not so sure I was right. No other place in the US (maybe in the world) has the amount and magnitude of technical talent and know-how, access to capital, or strength of network to compete with SV right now. Spend some time in SF, or Palo Alto, or Mountain View, and it's immediately obvious. Go to a cafe and people will be talking about tech. Your neighbor is probably in tech. Drive along the highway and you'll see billboards for tech products, and tech office buildings along the highway. Tech is deeply ingrained in the culture, top to bottom. There is no other place in the US that is like this and the gap for SV is still only accelerating.
- farisjarrah 4y agoThe billboards in San Francisco off Hwy 80 and Hwy 101 never cease to surprise me. I'll ask my wife, who was a middle school teacher, what a "Datadog" or "Salesforce" is and she never knows (or cares, which is fair enough). The tech culture is so ingrained that even the non-techies are oblivious to how deeply rooted it is.
- mister_tee 4y agoI remember flying into San Jose airport for the first time and the posters weren't advertising restaurants, hotels, and tourist destinations but enterprise routers and firewalls.
- bitmover 4y agoBarracuda!
- warner25 4y agoI've only been through Silicon Valley a handful of times, and the signage was one of the most striking things for me too. It's just an immediately visible indicator that the place is an outlier. I think, "wow, the density of software industry architects and executives and investors is so high here that it makes more sense to put up a billboard for them than one for consumers." The only other place where I've seen something similar is in Washington, DC, where you'll get advertisements on the Metro for things like fighter jet engines, apparently aimed at congressional staffers and Defense Department executives.
- tlogan 4y agoThere are few reasons why Silicon Valley is successful: 1) weather (no tornados, no super humid days, no snow) 2) proximity of great places (Lake Tahoe, Monterey, Napa valley, …) 3) good universities (Berkeley, standford, UCSF, …) 4) immigrants (especially south asian) are more welcome 5) big companies like Salesforce, Google, Facebook, etc. 6) support network: it is ok to be poor entrepreneur and hassle even you are bad at that. I do not know …
- lotsofpulp 4y agoCalifornia’s non compete ban and laws protecting personal IP from employer’s claims.
- natch 4y ago7) diversity (not just about immigrants — age, culture, political, philosophical, work style, gender, ability) has unspoken benefits beyond the ones that are usually touted. The diversity of Silicon Valley is very enticing not only for companies who just repeat the word as a marketing buzzword while not necessarily comprehending what it gives them (a lot), but also for young engineers, male and female, in their social lives, and having a huge diverse pool of potential partners to meet and mix with is something that appeals to our strongest drives as humans, and no dreary place is going to compete. It also creates a comfort zone for creative people of all types and backgrounds, not only for their work, but also for their life outside of work and the lives of their family members, some of whom may actually have opinions about where they want to live.
- prottog 4y agoIt's hard to look at typical Silicon Valley workplace or the broader society around it and say that there is diversity of culture, political viewpoints, and philosophy.
- bradlys 4y agoAgree... The diversity runs about skin deep and that's it. Most people in their 20s and 30s are still children of rich/UMC parents. Very few people I have met in SV are from lower class families. Socioeconomically - it's a wildly monolithic culture. Extremely capitalistic as well to where many people cannot fathom anything that doesn't fall outside the purview of capitalism because they've been taken so strongly by it and it's all they've ever known. You run into plenty of leftists/communists/socialists and what not too but they have no power or positions of authority... Usually just ICs or random people around Berkeley.
- pwthornton 4y agoUnless a lot of areas become a lot more hospitable to immigrants, it is very unlikely that they will become the next Silicon Valley —- or next anything really. When you look at places like Ohio, for instance, that have been stagnating for decades, a huge reason for it is that the population of Ohio was once representative of the country and has increasingly become older and whiter than the general U.S. population. This is because very few people are moving to Ohio — immigrants and others from other parts of the country. Ohio has one of the highest rates of residents born in the state, which is a recipe for stagnation. Say what you will about Silicon Valley, but it has long been a place where dreamers and immigrants could mix. Heartland cities and states that embrace immigration and net inflows of residents could very well become the next something. But that has to come first.
- la64710 4y agoFTA : I believe that if America loses its way and ceases to be the most innovative, entrepreneurial nation in the world, the most likely cause will be not having an immigration policy that is as welcoming to people as it has been for the past couple of centuries.
- AlgorithmicTime 4y agoI doubt it. Look at the period from 1920-1960. Extremely entrepreneurial, extremely innovative, and tight immigration controls. The talent is largely already here.
- juve1996 4y agoConsidering many of that period were born from immigrants it's hard to make that argument. It isn't black and white.
- colinmhayes 4y agoChildren of immigrants are the real difference makers. They natively speak the language and understand the culture but also have the "immigrant" mentality instilled in them by their parents.
- Demonsult 4y agoHotelling's law and Nash equilibrium can partially explain why so many "next silicon valleys" haven't panned out. It's also interesting that the valley is in a jurisdiction with such pro-employee laws.
- prottog 4y agoFor the purposes of having the next Silicon Valley, I'd wager the salient factor is pro-competition laws (such as California's ban on noncompetes), not pro-employee laws. It's virtually guaranteed that if California adopted French labor laws -- which are at least nominally very pro-employee -- and made hiring and firing burdensome, Silicon Valley will stagnate and many of those companies will go elsewhere.
- t_mann 4y agoWouldn't Hotelling's law just predict that wannabe-SVs would try to copy every aspect of the original SV? I don't see how that alone explains their failure. I'd attribute the difficulty of creating the next SV partially to capital/talent concentration being a coordination game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game) - for any individual small developer, entrepreneur or investor, it makes sense to go where they have the best chances to thrive.
- Nasrudith 4y agoYou will never become the next foo by trying to be the next foo. Instead you need to stand upon your unique merits. The "Silicon Valley of Bar" never works as anything but campaigning to gullible and giving benefits to existing businesses for no real public gain. Arguing for entitlement to runaway success based off of some misguided notion of equity is even worse (and by definition incoherent). Success being seen as a birthright is a fast way to stagnation and failure, demonstrated time and time again by fallen US industries like steel and automobiles. Success isn't guaranteed even with hard work and connections!
- jeffbee 4y agoThe objective evidence for Tulsa, Oklahoma having "quite strong momentum" is extremely poor. They are still paying people to move to Tulsa. There are still fewer jobs in Tulsa than there were in 1990, in the same 30 years that employment in Austin has tripled, and employment in Seattle has doubled. https://tulsaremote.com/ https://tulsaremote.com/
- thraway3837 4y agoThis has been predicted for decades now, but always misses a key point for SV being so successful. The SF Bay Area is one of the most diverse places to live and work in the US. Your managers, colleagues, and the area are from very different backgrounds, and when you bring together this diverse set of people, you end up creating things that 99% of the world uses. Outside of LA and the NY metro area, diversity drops drastically. So while there maybe a growth in research parks/tax advantaged zones to attract satellite offices and software startups, HQ’s are still going to be based where the diverse talent lives. The second point is Americans simply are not pursuing the highest levels of education. Masters and PhD programs are filled with immigrants, and new departments are frequently established by hiring such highly educated people. And it turns out, it’s safer and more enjoyable for immigrants to live where they’re accepted and already have communities. One can hope that America becoming more diverse in the future will cause other more diverse areas to be established, but that depends on the politics of the area. Educated people tend to not associate with right wing/republican policies, and these areas will have to embrace that and not just devolve to gerrymandering. And that means your neighbors and communities also have to embrace diversity.
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- closeparen 4y agoImmigrants are pursuing advanced degrees because a) the immigration system incentivizes it and b) specific immigrant populations have specific experiences in living memory where education was the only path from medieval subsistence farming to modern industrialized life in the cities, and/or the only asset that Communists couldn’t effectively seize. I don’t think it’s at all the case that CS PhD programs are causally responsible for Silicon Valley’s progress, except to the extent that brilliant people were also incentivized by immigration authorities or their families to be in PhD programs at some point.
- mariojv 4y agoIf this were the only factor, Houston would be the most innovative tech city in the US.
- eklein217 4y agoGod, what a nauseating read. I understand promoting companies in different parts of the country outside of the valley - as remote work has become a more realistic and desired thing among engineers, I think investors risk neglecting talent outside of their tiny little bubble. But pining for, or attempting to establish, a new SV is ridiculous, and doesn't consider the history of things at all. Artificially creating a centralized hub of industry (which already has several centralized hubs) will do nothing but drive up living costs and make it harder for anyone not in STEM to live there. More realistically, this idea will fail altogether and these "investors" will have to settle for small, corn-fed cities with a few tech companies that they can own minority shares in. These people already got their gold rush, why isn't that enough for them?
- jimmySixDOF 4y agoThe Next Silicone Valley Will Be in the Metaverse. Change My Mind.
- musicale 4y agoIt seems that Silicon Valley is at least in part fueled by universities, notably Stanford and Berkeley. So I'd expect a competitor would want to be near universities with a focus and strong record in engineering and technology.
- mattbrewsbytes 4y agoI think the ethos of SV is startups and the notion of building something in your garage and connecting with other like minded people. Now its also BigTech and massive scale of solutions (which are predominately ad driven) and connecting with like minded people to do those things. I don't think there will be a "next" SV. Just like there isn't a next Motown or various other things borne out of special sets of happenstance. Was there ever a "next" Hollywood?
- t_mann 4y agoRule of thumb: when you hear about any X as "the next Y", or "the Y of Z", it's fairly safe to assume that Y is in better shape than the commenters would have you think.
- jelliclesfarm 4y agoImmigrants who are the cream of the crop in their countries is the success of Silicon Valley. We just skim the top of the best from everywhere. And reward them. Sadly, the next generation of these immigrants become Americans and will be raised in American public school system. It shows. Sad, but true. That’s why we keep importing immigrants to keep running faster to stay in the same place. Hint: make schools centers of academic learning again for little humans. The only way to emulate Silicon Valley is to aggressively pursue merit and academic excellence of relevant subject matter. At the end of the day, the stock in trade of tech is IQ. The rest is just entertainment. Ruthlessly discourage and weed out all the distractors and hobby degree pursuers(like phD in history of social justice wars or post grad degree in open air drug den architecture etc). A hard core tech valley should focus on STEM, value high achievers and reward them while simultaneously protecting them from the turkeys who want to bring the elephant down. We better get the formula right in SV too because that culture is disappearing. There is shame in the valley for being too successful thanks to the hoard of foxes that jumped and jumped…couldn’t reach the sweet sweet inviting grapes..and hence found them too sour.
- jelliclesfarm 4y agoOf course, there is a flip side to this. The tech bros should stay in their lane. Just because they have a structural engineering degree doesn’t make them experts on housing policy. There are people who studied that. VCs and investors should stop trying to meddle with local politics. Bro, you can’t solve homelessness because you can train an AI. Also..AI art is NOT art. That’s making a mockery of the artists who spent years honing their craft. There is an almost borderline selfishness amongst the tech elite..like that of a child who wants all the candy for themselves. As a society, if we don’t give dignity to all and value everyone..that society will slide and crumble. It is not that tech bros are paid obscene amounts. It’s just that artists and service providers and even politicians(channeling Singapore model which we should all probably emulate) aren’t paid enough. There is no need for scarcity and hoarding(that comes from a scarcity mentality) here. Maybe SV could also learn something with some in the tech sector learning to stay in their lane and allow others to shine in their strengths and abilities. Everyone wants their little pool of limelight. It’s light. There is enough for everyone.
- RadixDLT 4y agoDetroit? maybe not the center, that place needs to be bulldozed and replace all the lead pipes, etc.