Essays

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For all its power, Silicon Valley has a great weakness: the paradise Shockley found in 1956 is now one giant parking lot. San Francisco and Berkeley are great, but they're forty miles away. Silicon Valley proper is soul-crushing suburban sprawl. It has fabulous weather, which makes it significantly better than the soul-crushing sprawl of most other American cities. But a competitor that managed to avoid sprawl would have real leverage. All a city needs is to be the kind of place the next traitorous eight look at and say "I want to stay here," and that would be enough to get the chain reaction started.

Notes

[1] It's interesting to consider how low this number could be made. I suspect five hundred would be enough, even if they could bring no assets with them. Probably just thirty, if I could pick them, would be enough to turn Buffalo into a significant startup hub.

[2] Bureaucrats manage to allocate research funding moderately well, but only because (like an in-house VC fund) they outsource most of the work of selection. A professor at a famous university who is highly regarded by his peers will get funding, pretty much regardless of the proposal. That wouldn't work for startups, whose founders aren't sponsored by organizations, and are often unknowns.

[3] You'd have to do it all at once, or at least a whole department at a time, because people would be more likely to come if they knew their friends were. And you should probably start from scratch, rather than trying to upgrade an existing university, or much energy would be lost in friction.

[4] Hypothesis: Any plan in which multiple independent buildings are gutted or demolished to be "redeveloped" as a single project is a net loss of personality for the city, with the exception of the conversion of buildings not previously public, like warehouses.

[5] A few startups get started in New York, but less than a tenth as many per capita as in Boston, and mostly in less nerdy fields like finance and media.

[6] Some blue counties are false positives (reflecting the remaining power of Democractic party machines), but there are no false negatives. You can safely write off all the red counties.

[7] Some "urban renewal" experts took a shot at destroying Boston's in the 1960s, leaving the area around city hall a bleak wasteland, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them.

Thanks to Chris Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Marc Hedlund, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Greg Mcadoo, Fred Wilson, and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this, and to Ed Dumbill for inviting me to speak.

(The second part of this talk became Why Startups Condense in America.)


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