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Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

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Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#51

Post by vonmoltke »

ng12 wrote: post #34
derekp7 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why Chicago isn't more of a major destination for tech companies. The city is highly walkable, has excellent transportation infrastructure, and low cost nice housing is plentiful within an hour commute by train or car. You can get a nice house for less than 200k, apartment rent is around 600 - 1000 a month. In the city, there are a lot of old 3-4 story houses that have been converted to each floor being a re…

Because it doesn't have the people and that's all that really matters. SV is self-fulfilling at this point: talented programmers and entrepreneurs flock to the Bay because that's where the talented programmers and entrepreneurs are. Yes, there are talented programmers in every metropolitan area but the Bay has significantly more of them than anywhere else.

Yet SV companies complain the loudest about having a hard time finding talent. In large part, I suspect, because of decreasing amounts of talent that want to put up with the area.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#52

Post by arkem »

kodt wrote: post #31
derekp7 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why Chicago isn't more of a major destination for tech companies. The city is highly walkable, has excellent transportation infrastructure, and low cost nice housing is plentiful within an hour commute by train or car. You can get a nice house for less than 200k, apartment rent is around 600 - 1000 a month. In the city, there are a lot of old 3-4 story houses that have been converted to each floor being a re…

>You can get a nice house for less than 200k Gonna need a source on that one

Doesn't seem too far fetched[1] if you read it as a nice house under 200k within an hour of Chicago.

I don't know enough about Chicago to know exactly how far our an hour's drive is or to know exactly what 'nice' means in this context but it seems like there are areas where the median price is quite a bit lower than 200k.

[1] https://www.trulia.com/local/chicago-il/type:home_prices_sal...

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#53

Post by rayiner »

Eire_Banshee wrote: post #47
acchow wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> apartment rent is around 600 - 1000 a month You can't really use this as an "advantage" since it disappears rapidly once it starts become a tech hub.

Meh, it doesn't have the geographic limits that you get on the coast. The only geographical feature hemming in the city is the lake. You have essentially unlimited space to expand in all other directions. It would be hard to get skyrocketing rents outside of the immediate downtown area. But mostly Chicago just sucks. Its all the shitty parts of the midwest without any of the good ones. What you really want is Indiana…

> But mostly Chicago just sucks. Its all the shitty parts of the midwest without any of the good ones. What you really want is Indianapolis, Columbus, Minneapolis, Louisville, etc...

Shameful Indianapolis trolling.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#54

Post by wolco »

ng12 wrote: post #34
derekp7 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why Chicago isn't more of a major destination for tech companies. The city is highly walkable, has excellent transportation infrastructure, and low cost nice housing is plentiful within an hour commute by train or car. You can get a nice house for less than 200k, apartment rent is around 600 - 1000 a month. In the city, there are a lot of old 3-4 story houses that have been converted to each floor being a re…

Because it doesn't have the people and that's all that really matters. SV is self-fulfilling at this point: talented programmers and entrepreneurs flock to the Bay because that's where the talented programmers and entrepreneurs are. Yes, there are talented programmers in every metropolitan area but the Bay has significantly more of them than anywhere else.

Findig programmers is not the issue VC money and culture make the difference.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#55

Post by stingraycharles »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #36
aaron-lebo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did say SV, which is probably true. Europe may or may not have the culture you are suggesting, China might have that hunger but no business started there is safe from gov control, Russia has that control without the economic growth, a lot of places are too small. But...there's probably a dozen cities in the US where you could get everything you can in SV (ok, maybe not the monoculture, the crazy VCs, the crazy cos…

Europe has the culture, just not the funding. Investments are way too little

“Putting your money where your mouth is” applies here. This is precisly the symptom of a risk-averse culture, and it’s holding us back.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#56

Post by gumby »

_RPM wrote: post #40
tomaha wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because mostly only big companies choose their destination. For the rest it's where they live when they found the company. So if more people in Chicago found tech companies you'll get more tech companies. That's the reason SV is a self-feeding machine. People work at one of the many startups or big companies here, get experience, get money, and then part of them start their own companies. That's the circle that drive…

> So if more people in Chicago found tech companies you'll get more tech companies Wait, really?

I know it sounds tautological but makes sense in the context of the rest of the reply.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#57

Post by rdiddly »

There really is no rational reason why the phenomenon of Silicon Valley should exist. And at this point if there were anything special Silicon Valley knew that nobody else did, that knowledge has been pretty widely disseminated. And yet for all that, I suspect he's still wrong.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#58

Post by rothbardrand »

tomaha wrote: post #37
aaron-lebo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can learn an unbelievable amount sitting in your room in your underwear and work with and on world class projects. There are more free resources than ever before, location is not a constraint.

The resources you can have are so limited in comparison what you can do if you are on the right project with the right people at for example Google. You will not find a free or open project that will be able to compete with the data, resources, and knowledge you will find there. Besides that it's much faster to learn from someone who knows than finding the right material online. And in the end most world-class projec…

IF your goal is to work for google, facebook, Amazon or Microsoft, then yes, Google is a great place to be.

But if your goal is to work for next decades google, Apple, etc, then no, Google is not the place to be.

Start working on Bitcoin. Start working on Ethereum. Get to the cutting edge.

Everything you do at google right now is about 10 years out of date (and I'm including machine learning and all their "cutting edge" AI stuff) and targeted at supporting their existing established business.

Take this from someone who has been on the cutting edge for 30+ years-- the challenge for most people is that the cutting edge changes, and you have to be paying attention to follow it... by the time you learn mobile development, surprise, there's bitcoin! (as an example.)

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#59

Post by Eire_Banshee »

rayiner wrote: post #53
Eire_Banshee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, it doesn't have the geographic limits that you get on the coast. The only geographical feature hemming in the city is the lake. You have essentially unlimited space to expand in all other directions. It would be hard to get skyrocketing rents outside of the immediate downtown area. But mostly Chicago just sucks. Its all the shitty parts of the midwest without any of the good ones. What you really want is Indiana…

> But mostly Chicago just sucks. Its all the shitty parts of the midwest without any of the good ones. What you really want is Indianapolis, Columbus, Minneapolis, Louisville, etc... Shameful Indianapolis trolling.

I stand by what I said.

Re: Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley’s monopoly on big growth tech companies is over

#60

Post by adrianratnapala »

No idea if Mr. Thiel is right in this decade, but long term silicon valley has lost its main advantage: silicon.

The physical business of building computer parts, especially chips, involves a lot of hard science and deep magic and requires a kind of priesthood steeped in that magic. SV's original success was built on this -- it got rich because it is where the silicon priests lived. But now things have evolved so the it is the Chinese who know how to build the computers and (sometimes) the Californians program them.

Except writing apps is not really deep magic, and is something that can be done anywhere. So SVs advantages move to ever more nebulous things like networking and mentorship -- which are also human universals that happen everywhere.

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