Prominent local superstars included Dell, Nortel and Enron (As well as numerous companies who fared better, admittedly)...
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/30/business/a-new-breed-of-w...
Smart, ambitious people tend to congregate, and capital follows. If during past exoduses, people moved to random places, I can see why SV remained the primary magnet. But, this time everyone seems to be moving to Seattle and Austin (based on my anecdotal experience of ~20 SV startups that have moved to Austin in the past 6 months).
Other things that make this time different: remote work being generally acceptable & higher state income tax
Of course, "every time is different", but eventually SV will fall. The question is just when and what the right conditions are.
Boston should have been Silicon Valley. It had all the education and a much deeper history of innovation. It also could have been down in New Jersey where Bell Labs was.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of where other states stand on this issue. I know Massachusetts implemented some similar reforms a decade or so ago, but that's a little late to the party.
I grew up in Boston and spent the first 4 years of my career there. The biggest problem the Boston startup scene has is that VCs won't fund you unless you're 40+, have a proven track record at an established local company, and can demonstrate a solid business model with LOIs or customer contracts in hand. Sounds reasonable, right? Except that Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit, DropBox, and YCombinator all started in Boston and left because none of them ticked the boxes needed to attract funding. I had lunch with Drew Houston right after he closed DropBox's Series A, when he was looking for employee #2. He said that immediately after presenting to Sequoia, the whole office had checked out the product and he had a term sheet within a week; meanwhile the Boston VCs they presented to (despite knowing Drew since childhood) had hemmed and hawed and said "We need more data".
These are the kind of cultural differences that aren't easily papered over with policy. They're also why the Midwest and the South struggle to attract and keep startup ecosystems. I suspect that many of the problems in California (over-regulation, direct democracy, laissez-faire overlooking of social problems like homelessness & crime, the tendency for everyone to jump on the next bubble) are actually the flip sides of the cultural attributes that make it great, which is an extreme openness to new experiences and a willingness to take a chance on new ideas.
Pro-labor is not anti business, quite the opposite here. But it's never understood that way.
Some things like banning non-competes, personal IP protections, corporate immunity from COVID lawsuits, police union reform, teachers union reform, pension reform, family and sick leave... there are so many things to attach one's name to its mind boggling. And there is wide support for some of these things on both sides of the aisle - and it doesn't touch guns or abortion!
Boston is a tech hub, just smaller.
It's also way too classist and aristocratic in its thinking. Where you went to school basically informs a caste system.
Climate aside though, it is a nicer city. It has more usable (though quite old) transit, is very walkable, clean, low crime, and is much more affordable than the Bay Area (though still pricey).
Though back then you could get a house in Cupertino for 300k?
It’s now $3M.
This has some effect and makes living here to start a company higher risk.
It’s nearly the exact same conversation you see today. It’s a little wild to me that they thought housing prices were high then.
It makes me wonder if in 2047 I’ll look back at this thread and think “only $2M - what were they complaining about? Can’t find a place today for less than $18M”
Today the same engineer at a FAANG would make about $300k. Houses are about $2M and interest rates are about 2%, so relatively speaking things are cheaper. However, unlike in 1993, today's salaries are unlikely to grow by 10x over the next 30 years while the mortgage is paid off!
> everything built on a handful of enormous corporations
"Second, automotive executives in early-20th-century Detroit behaved a lot like Silicon Valley executives today: They regularly switched companies and launched spinoffs and startups. This culture of cross-pollination spread innovative manufacturing and design ideas among the Detroit manufacturers. Distant competitors couldn’t keep up with Motown’s research and development operations and eventually failed or sold themselves to Detroit."
> I don't think there was much of a scene of small, innovative companies that didn't depend on the enormous corporations to be in business
"The people who built the car’s parts eventually learned so much about automotive manufacturing that they went on to launch their own brands. Olds’ subcontractors included the Briscoe brothers, who helped build Buick, and machinist Henry Leland, who created Cadillac and Lincoln. The Dodge brothers also cut their teeth making parts for both Olds and Henry Ford. Ransom Olds, himself, eventually left Olds Motor Works to found the REO car company. A few other executives from Olds founded Chalmers and Hudson. William Durant, the man behind General Motors, was twice forced out of the company, forming Chevrolet and later Durant Motors while he was away. All of these ventures were based in or near Detroit."
[0] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/02/why-are-all-the-...
This doesn't even include the thousands of automotive supplier upstarts in every part of the supply chain from bolts to tires to tooling.
Similar to Silicon Valley, Detroit was also globally dominant in automotive production prior to 1929 (with 90% of production centered there).
Germany and Japan didn't get seriously into the automotive game until the post-WWII era. And China not until the 2000s. But when they did, they become competitive quite quickly.
You're naive if you don't think the same thing will happen with internet companies. Today the US only represents under 15% of automotive production globally.
Seattle at one point had Microsoft as the hub, Amazon came on the scenes in 2000s - once they both reached critical mass, there was practically no stopping the growth because engineers had an alternative. Eventually we had FB/Twitter/Snap et al starting offices here and having massive presences which led to present day. If only the weather wasn't what it is, I think we would have reached this ~20 yrs ago.
I don't know if it is going to be Austin / Boulder - but once any of those cities build two equally good employment opportunities, it is going to be a real contender. This is what makes TSLA / Oracle move significant: till now what were outposts are becoming real hubs.
In 2019, California had negative population growth.
> California had a population of 39.78 million as of January [2020], the state Department of Finance said, down from its previous report of 39.96 million residents in July [2019].
That's the most recent 6 month period we have reported numbers for, and occurred in the 2nd half of 2019. For the full year in 2019, population was still slightly up overall.
[0] https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/population-shrinks-in-cal....
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/05/california-populati...
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.