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Comment by tryitnow | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm. Does he even reference the fact that the SF Bay Area was the recipient of massive amounts of government and government contractor money?

And what about the free-wheeling, non-traditional culture (embodied in the Homebrew Computing Club)?

These two factors created Silicon Valley. Federal money subsidized the semiconductor boom, which brought a lot of technical expertise to the area. Then the open-minded culture created the perfect environment for entrepreneurship.

It seems like the formula for success is: (1) Massive exogenous funding (on scale only the federal government can do) + (2) A highly open-minded culture that accepts failure as an inevitable part of creation.

Honestly, there's just not a lot of places that qualify. Pretty much all of the east coast, mid-west, and south are too conservative. And nowhere is really receiving massive loads of external funding like the Bay Area did in the 20th century.

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To be fair, Pittsburgh gets a lot of external government money through DARPA grants to General Dynamics and CMU. I had a friend (working on DARPA contracts at General Dynamics) who told me "wearable computing is going to be huge". This was in 2007. 2007, before the iPhone even came out. In general, the military seems to know about things 10 years before Silicon Valley gets ahold of them, who knows about them 5-10 years before the rest of America does, who (until recently, with China's resurgence) knows about them 5-10 years before the rest of the world.

Other huge innovations first funded by DARPA: multitasking (1963), the Internet (1969), the GUI (1968), GPS (1978), self-driving cars (2004).

“I also explore the social and cultural forces that provide the atmosphere for innovation. For the birth of the digital age, this included a research ecosystem that was nurtured by government spending and managed by a military-industrial-academic collaboration. Intersecting with that was a loose alliance of community organizers, communal-minded hippies, do-it-yourself hobbyists, and homebrew hackers, most of whom were suspicious of centralized authority.” Excerpt From: Walter Isaacson. “The Innovators.”

It's harder to see these roots now, but for a long time military-industrial competitiveness was a huge driver of advancement in the field

> the military seems to know about things 10 years before Silicon Valley gets ahold of them

I think it's more accurate to say that the military (and academia) are working on technology X for at least a decade before it's mature enough to commercialize.

Interesting to hear so much good about CMU: Long the president there was one of my Ph.D. dissertation advisers.

> Honestly, there's just not a lot of places that qualify.

I'm not so sure location has much to do with it or that there is much a location can do that would help.

But for places:

Sure, within 100 miles of the Washington Monument.

Federal spending? Awash in it. For technology? Same.

Universities? Johns Hopkins, Maryland College Park, Maryland Baltimore County, Catholic, American, Georgetown, George Mason, VPI, UVA.

VCs? There are some.

There is Boston with Harvard and MIT and no lack of Federal research spending. And lots of VCs and bigger bucks, too.

Then, sure, there is NYC:

Universities? Columbia, Rockefeller, and NYU and a new, growing tech educational center on Roosevelt Island.

VCs? Plenty of them, and bigger bucks, too.

Can make a good case for a large fraction of the college towns around major US universities, e.g., the Big Ten.

Maybe the bottleneck is elsewhere, say, finding the next Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Sun, Google, Facebook? If there is one and it goes through YC, then it's not in stealth anymore and, if it looks really good, can set up shop the same place as that 900 pound gorilla -- anywhere it wants to.

Net, I'm not sure location has much to do with it. And I'm not sure that the 25-29 age range PG has in mind is now the most promising. And, net, net, IMHO the bottleneck is just better ideas.

> And what about the free-wheeling, non-traditional culture (embodied in the Homebrew Computing Club)?

Not much mention of government funding, but there is this:

"A city has to tolerate strangeness to be a home for startups, because startups are so strange. And you can't choose to allow just the forms of strangeness that will turn into big startups, because they're all intermingled. You have to tolerate all strangeness."

Not to mention a couple of top-ten universities located within 50 miles, and other great schools elsewhere in California.

To be fair, the presence of Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh is one of the cornerstones of the essay.

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