Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
3people
2009–2024years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- So, I bought this and haven’t actually read it yet, so take my suggestion with a grain of salt, but I’ve _heard_ that this, from 2017, is good: https://www.amazon.com/Peopling-Silicon-Valley-1940-Present/...
I read this ages ago and it was good, but it’s 24 years old now: https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Silicon-Valley-Entrepre...
- Timothy J. Sturgeon’s "How Silicon Valley Came to Be" covers this as well:
See http://web.mit.edu/ipc/publications/pdf/00-014.pdf I had blogged about this in 2008 at http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/05/steve-blank-on-secre...The fact that the San Francisco Bay Area’s electronics industry began close to the turn of the Twentieth Century should lay to rest the notion that industrialization and urbanization on the scale of Silicon Valley can be quickly induced in other areas. Silicon Valley is nearly 100 years old. It grew out of a historically and geographically specific context that cannot be recreated. The lesson for planners and economic developers is to focus on long-term, not short-term developmental trajectories. Silicon Valley was the fastest growing region in the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s; but that growth came out of a place, not a technology. Silicon Valley’s development is intimately entwined with the long history of industrialization and innovation in the larger San Francisco Bay Area.Three good books on how Silicon Valley came to be
"Understanding Silicon Valley" by Kenney http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Silicon-Valley-Entrepren...
"The Silicon Valley Edge" by Lee, Miller, Hancock, and Rowen http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Valley-Edge-Innovation-Entrepr...
"Regional Advantage" Saxenian http://www.amazon.com/Regional-Advantage-Culture-Competition...
See also this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=908026
- My argument is not that Silicon Valley was inevitable but that it takes a long time to grow an entrepreneurial region.
It's not misleading in raising the bar to areas/regions that want to be the next Silicon Valley and don't have an entrepreneurial substrate and appropriate ancillary services (e.g. attorneys, accountants, banks, that understand startups and entrepreneurs) to form a viable ecosystem.
I don't think the 100 years is misleading, if it had happened somewhere else (e.g. Boston) I think it would still have involved the same antecedents: major universities, risk capital, electronics firms...It may also have been important that it was primarily agricultural land that was pushed aside, if there had been other active industries they may have preferentially competed for the same talent.
Three good books I rely on for this analysis are
"Understanding Silicon Valley" by Kenney http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Silicon-Valley-Entrepren...
"The Silicon Valley Edge" by Lee, Miller, Hancock, and Rowen http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Valley-Edge-Innovation-Entrepr...
"Regional Advantage" Saxenian http://www.amazon.com/Regional-Advantage-Culture-Competition...
- If I read between the lines of your response, it seems tech founders should absolutely move to the US to get a bit of that infinite money, as they can pivot and re-pivot while improving VC tax benefits.
I'm still trying to track down the J-L G quote.
https://books.google.com/books?id=CLxzUW4V_2cC&lpg=PA218&ots...
shows a matching few snippets from "Understanding Silicon Valley: The Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region" (2001), like
> 4. Many have remarked that in Silicon Valley there is little stigma attached to failure. Many have attributed this to a "cultural" trait; few have considered that it is in the interest of the venture capitalists to lower the cost of failure. It is critical to the entire system that entrepreneurs continue to venture. Discouragement and punishment increases the cost of failure and offers little economic return to the venture capitalists.
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/03068291... attributes this "failure" explanation to the "flexible recycling mechanism" of Bahrami and Evans, 1995 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/41165799 .
My memory of the J-L G quote is from the late 1990s/early 2000s, so almost certainly derives from ideas passed around at the time from one wag to the next.
Another phrase I found in this context is "learning by doing and failing".
Oh, you'll totally love (not!) this paper, "Failing Better: What We Learn" at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adam-Thierer/publicatio...
Seems the US is so great at internet companies because the Data Protection Directive, "instituted highly restrictive policies governing online data collection and use" prevented innovation in Europe.
Quoting it: "Often overlooked in the success of American start-ups is the even greater number of failures. “Fail fast, fail often” is a Silicon Valley mantra, and the freedom to innovate is inextricably linked to the freedom to fail. In Europe, failure carries a much greater stigma than it does in the United States."
citing “A Fearless Culture Fuels U.S. Tech Giants,” New York Times, June 19, 2015, http://www.nytimes. com/2015/06/19/business/the-american-way-of-tech-and-europes.html
Yeah, don't go reading that rah-rah-America-is-so-much-better NYT piece. Apparently "Even the vaunted European child-rearing, she believes, is too prescriptive" and "European children may be better behaved, but American children may end up being more free to explore new things."
