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What does "cutting edge" mean? They don't use modern deployment startegies? They don't use recently popular web frameworks? "Cutting edge" is so vague it's not clear whether SV just cargo cults more or whether it's actually more technically innvovative.

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Maybe bleeding edge is a better word.

They just try a lot more things and find out faster what is working and what isn't working. Most of them turn out to be useless but the ones that work give them an early start.

For example while kubernetes is all the rage in Silicon Valley and every startup is using it, most companies further away from SV take longer to adopt these new technologies. They are just evaluating and experimenting with k8s and in few years might move more significant loads into it. Similar with other tech as well. I think that’s just one example but you could look at programming languages, different automation and deployment tools etc and Silicon Valley is on the cutting edge.

I'd argue that something like k8s is a huge investment for startups and is more of a time waster than anything else. I have a friend that worked at a startup that used Terraform to deploy their stuff, and the whole thing was overkill given that they literally just compiled a binary and put it on a single host. Instead, the friend just wrestled with the Terraform based build process and complained about learning the tool instead of getting stuff done.

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