Silicon Valley Arrogance
avc.blogs.com
avc.blogs.com
We're in Austin, TX - commonly accepted as 4th largest startup hub behind Valley, Boston and Seattle. And people here don't get Internet - everybody's busy inventing new ways of being acquired by IBM via producing yet another boring (but always revolutionary) B2B crap on J2EE.
You can be anything you want and excel at it anywhere in the world, but its the BIG LEAGUE perception in each respective profession of being in that city/region, take it as a complement not an insult ;)
And furthermore I think that it is not always good for entrepreneurs to be in Silicon Valley. I have noticed that a lot of valley people are extremely focused on whatever the fad of the day is. If your website doesn't have tags and RSS feeds, and is done in Ruby on Rails you are just sooo yesterday.
But guess what? Nobody cares. Most people that use the web (AKA customers) don't even know what any of these things are. They just want something that works.
And they don't care whether it is built with Ruby or assembler, or whether it has Megoo-ultraflash mashup components.
People from the valley often miss this.
And he's not in Silicon Valley.
Yes he definitely gets it.
But there are three profound advantages to Denmark (which is where I am based)
1) Danes are smart... I went to the valley on an exploratory tour a few years ago to gauge the standard, and I was really disappointed. I might of course not have met the right people, and my sample could have been bigger. But seeing what comes out of the valley everyday I think that it is not totally off. I think that it is no coincidence that the hackers behind turbopascal, Delphi, c#, PHP, c++ and Ruby on Rails are all from Denmark. A friend of mine even got disqualified from a hacking contest (hack together a functioning system in one hour) because they thought he must have gotten outside help...
2) Because of the restraints we face (the whole ecosystem of startups is severely lacking), our cultural heritage and our education system we have a great knack for designing smart systems. I and my peers often wonder how upstarts in the valley can spend so much money and come up with stuff that is so badly designed and so bloated. Both programatically and design wise.
3) The girls are beautiful.
That said there are of course many advantages to the valley, primarily momentum. This part is almost impossible in Denmark.
Edit: I don't mean to sound as a selfrighteous idiot, so I hope it doesn't sound that way :-)
I agree with what you have said, but here are the disadvantages of being based in Denmark:
1) high taxes
2) hard to start a business, compared to USA or even places like the UK or Australia
3) nearly impossible to become a permanent resident if you are a foreigner
4) Copenhagen is more expensive than California
5) Janteloven
1 and 5 are somewhat countered by the high wages, but you are right. Because of the progressive taxing you end up paying 65% in taxes if you are a high earner. This is only for personal income though - if you keep your money in a holding company the tax rate is comparable to the US.
Denmark is a great place to be a Danish hacker. :)
I mean seriously, what would you spend your time doing if you lived north of the arctic circle ?
(Although my expense reimbursement checks are issued by "Silicon Valley Bank". Go figure.)
I've talked to some people about why silicon valley is where it is and some say it's pretty arbitrary, some even claim that a new "silicon prairie" if you will, could be started here. Then the temperature goes from 52 to 12 with -11 windchill and, suddenly, we realize all over again why we too want to move to California.