Silicon Valley isn’t the gold mine it used to be | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley isn’t the gold mine it used to be

techcrunch.com

23 pointssmaili9 comments

A lot of Bay Area VCs have been blind to the droves of tech talent located outside the region. Believe it or not, there are great engineers in America’s small- and medium-sized markets too.

Having had to interview hundreds of candidates during my career I've never understood the infatuation with the Silicon Valley talent pool. The problem with there being enormous piles of what amounts to accountability-free money being handed out on often the flimsiest pretext is that nobody actually has to be all that good at anything to have worked at some impressive sounding places with impressive sounding titles.

Certainly there's a lot of talent in SV, but it's not the end-all-be-all of "the best and the brightest" that investors seemed incapable of considering more critically until recently.

> nobody actually has to be all that good at anything

It seems as long as they can regurgitate grad level algorithms, most other things are non issues.

The brightest are people who look at quality of __life__ (that thing you only get one of) & decide that a life where you can actually __live__ (nice* home in nice* area/< 40 min commute/~40hr work week) and then choose to live that life.

There absolutely are very bright people there who make 7 figures a year and can do all those nice things. But that's a tiny minority.

barring the weather argument, i don't get why people choose SV. Great, you can work with "scale" but that's about it. Unless you're looking for massive funding, why bother?

the novelty of moving fast & not mastering a technology so somebody else might get rich loses it's appeal after ~5 years.

Oh no, not another "Silicon Valley is dying"article. Here's the numbers for VC investment in 2018, if anyone is interested. [1] California companies raised $12B and $12.7B in Q2 and Q1 of this year. Almost 90% of this is in the valley. Next is MA at $2.8B. Texas is a DISTANT 5th with $606M. And no Midwestern state even makes an appearance in the top 10. Just this month Lucid motors raised $1bn, Postmates raised $300M and Proterra raised $155M.

[1] https://www.pwc.com/us/en/industries/technology/moneytree/ex...

As a separate point, I've heard some complain that access to talent is more difficult for tech companies than access to capital. Raleigh-Durham has the second highest number of CS PhDs(1)

(1)https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/12/where-us-brainpower-ten...

Aren't large impressive numbers exactly what we expect at the peak?

Lucid motors raised 1B from the UAE

I feel like the proper measure would be return on investments experienced by venture capitalists. Though it's great to get bought out, that shouldn't be the end in itself, the end should be creating successful companies...

You mean in 1849?

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