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The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

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Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#51
post #30
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purdue 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

Well, it doesn't seem to be keeping a lot of companies and people from heading to Texas, especially Austin.

Austin is relatively close to California. Both Texas and California have huge populations. What does Indiana have?

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#52
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were even remotely true then Silicon Valley would already be in Bentonville, Arkansas.

There 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.

That'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.

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#54
post #18

I 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.

Somewhere, Mark Zuckerberg is rubbing his hands and grinning devilishly whispering "soon..."

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#55
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4-5 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…

If we define the Midwest as the plains between the Appalachians and the Rockies, Pittsburgh is clearly closer to the Midwest than the East Coast.

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Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#56
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There 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.

That'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.

I would be surprised to learn the Waltons actually live and spend much of their time in Arkansas.

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#57
post #21

About 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 o…

The 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.

I 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.

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#58
post #17

I 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.

This is what happened in Waterloo, Ontario with Blackberry. Of course the tech scene there is no where near as large as a SV and a couple others, but it's still weirdly big and concentrated given the size of the surrounding city. Every mid to large tech company in that area has a decent size cohort of ex-blackberry people.

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#59
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'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.

I would be surprised to learn the Waltons actually live and spend much of their time in Arkansas.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-27/welcome-t...

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#60
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA : 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.

The periods where America was most globally dominant were not the periods where it’s immigration policy was most lax, if anything, the opposite is true.

Exactly. These young people have no idea what they are talking about and don't know American history at all, except what they've been propagandized to think. Immigration policy used to be very locked down, and now we have foreign agents encouraging our government to let them flood in unchecked.
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