71–80 of 96 posts
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It's actually more pleasant than the 100+ degree sultry summer weather ... Northern California doesn't have that problem either.
stupid question: what is considered "silicon valley"? Is it in northern or southern california? (I was under the impression that it was southern california)
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> 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
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.co... Here's foursquare.com vs facebook.com on Google Trends: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com%2Cfoursqua…
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.
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> 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
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.co... Here's foursquare.com vs facebook.com on Google Trends: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com%2Cfoursqua…
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
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Why??? How can you be proud of something you dont control? Its irrational.
I'm sure there's some psychological term for what long-time Chicagoans feel for the winter there... you'll find it amongst the chapters concerning victims who identify with their abusers. (I did my five years in Chicago and gtfo).
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It's actually more pleasant than the 100+ degree sultry summer weather ... Northern California doesn't have that problem either.
stupid question: what is considered "silicon valley"? Is it in northern or southern california? (I was under the impression that it was southern california)
There are many that wouldn't include San Francisco/Oakland in the "Silicon Valley" region - but enough technology companies have started migrating to those areas, including Emeryville, that I don't think it's too much of a stretch to include those areas.
As far as weather - it's actually highly variant for such a small area, with some parts of the bay benefitting from air conditioners in the Summer, and Heating systems in the Winter (though it rarely gets down to freezing, it can frost up a bit in the morning). I live in Redwood City (Climate best by Government Test), in a reasonably tree lined Page Street - and haven't felt the need for either in the last three years - though it has gotten down to around 55 degrees in the house a few times in the winter.
As a Canadian who used to live in 100 Mile House (actually Fawn Lake) British Columbia, who had to deal with _months_ of sub zero weather, and occasional sub -40 degree day, I'll agree with the general trend here - I'm happy to have left that miserable weather behind.
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 ea…
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.)
It's probably the most damning and valid critique of The Valley. How many Twitters/Facebooks/Dropboxes/Airbnbs don't exist because the founders sold them for $15M in 18 months? Sometimes it's because the founders aren't really passionate enough about what they're working on. Other times it's just financially insane to say no. A great example is Mint.com. How do you tell Aaron Patzer not to sell, when he's going to ma…
It didn't seem to me that he was complaining about founders selling companies quickly so much as employees flitting from one to the other so fast. In my experience, founders in the Valley are more likely to have the confidence to turn down acquisition offers than founders outside it. All the examples you list are Valley startups.
It's a catch-22 for technology companies - on the one hand, they have to work pretty hard (or offer a lot of money) to hold onto their employees past that five year mark. On the flip side, the reason they have to work so hard to do so, is because there are so many employees ready to change companies - including coming to work for theirs.
He didn't know what he was doing when he founded FB (by his own admission), and so moving to SV was immensely helpful for him. He knows how to run a company now, and was simply stating that for those who live outside SV and know what they're doing, there's nothing intrinsically holding you back from success by locale.
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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 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.co... Here's foursquare.com vs facebook.com on Google Trends: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com%2Cfoursqua…
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 Foursqua…
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).
What I find mildly offensive is that he's generalizing everybody in the valley as go-getters with short attention spans and no interest in long term value. I guess I've never been anywhere else, but the majority of the people I meet out here have a passion for creating things of value.