Silicon Valley is Hollywood for Startups
thestartupfoundry.com
thestartupfoundry.com
Didn't we already collectively agree that the events depicted in the Social Network were more Hollywood than Silicon Valley?
Not that I totally disagree with the comparison, I've made it myself as recently as yesterday, but it's not exactly a bad thing. There was a time when Hollywood was making a lot of good films. But those films brought in money, and money brought in vanity and all that other nastiness. There's certainly plenty of money bouncing around SV, but the fame is a bit more self-contained. If you move to the valley and send a letter home to your mom about how you bumped into Fred Wilson in a coffee shop, she would probably not run off to tell all her friends about it.
If the worst thing you can say about the valley is that everybody there wants to build something great and is willing to risk a lot to make an effort at it, that sounds like a fantastic environment.
Yeah, but Fred Wilson is the Silicon Valley equivalent of a Harvey Weinstein. And, while I'm sure some people know who the Weinsteins are, they're not as famous as, say, Tom Hanks.
Ask your random sample who Steve Jobs is. Then, you'll get some traction. He would be the SV equivalent of Stephen Spielberg. Or, perhaps Bill Gates or Michael Dell, the respective George Lucas and Robert Zemeckis equivalents the tech world.
That being said, the point I was trying to make is that you can become very successful in SV and have nobody outside of the tech community know your name - your product is your product. In Hollywood, your product is you, success is, by definition, corellated with fame.
- love of me-too and sequels ? check.
- living off the glory days of the past ? check.
- patronage and network trump talent and originality ? check.
- overwhelming sense of self-importance ? check.
- lack of common sense economics ? check.
Maybe Silicon Valley is Hollywood for startups after all.
- A ton of talent available to those that know how to find it and care for it? Check.
- A vibrant hacker community like nowhere else? Check.
- A vibrant entrepreneurial community like nowhere else? Check.
Seriously, did Silicon Valley step on your mother's grave or something? You sound like Oscar Wilde's definition of "cynic": someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Not bad going, two ad-hominems and not a single rebuttal of my arguments.
Oh, and my mother is alive and well, thank you.
Silicon Valley is a good place to live and work. Is it overhyped? Sure. But that by itself doesn't make it a bad place.
- substance trumped by image ? check.
- 99% of players only one level deep ? check.
- disdain for any other industry ? check.
- being notorious better than being unknown ? check.
- "where" more important than "what" ? check.
- lack of understanding of the real world ? check.
- religious worship of youth ? check.
Really? Conformity is the last thing I think of in this town. Have you been to San Francisco?
- love of me-too and sequels ? check.
Google, Facebook, sequels. LinkedIn, sequel. Check.
Zynga, Netflix, Pandora, Yelp, YouTube, PayPal... not so much.
Iteration and competition on business plan and product is good business. How many people are there making scads of money off of selling cereal? How many types of cars are there? How many banks? How many types of shoes? Are these "me too" businesses? Sure. But, the "me too" of Silicon Valley doesn't succeed unless the follow on company creates significant value over and above what the previous company did. (Google created a ton more value than Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, etc..)
- living off the glory days of the past ? check.
Really? I have 2,500 members at Hackers & Founders that are focused on being the next thing, and are quite bored with the "glory days" of Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc... There's tons of innovation happening. You just don't read about it all.
- patronage and network trump talent and originality ? check.
False. You don't make it in this town unless you can produce. No one cares where you went to school or who your daddy is. I have an Associates Degree in Nursing from a community college in the suburbs of Minneapolis, and I run the largest network of startup geeks in the Valley.
- overwhelming sense of self-importance ? check.
The market capitalization of all the companies within 1 mile of highway 101 between San Francisco and San Jose is $500 Billon. The San Francisco Bay area is one of the 20 largest economies in the world. So, yeah. It's kind of important. Self-important? Maybe.
- lack of common sense economics ? check.
Last I checked, Hollywood and Silicon Valley weren't hurting in the money making department. How is that a lack of common sense economics?
Now, I will grant you that both economies operate on economies of scale. And, that many company's business models only work at massive scale. But, there's sufficient risk capital to support that in both towns.
Maybe Silicon Valley is Hollywood for startups after all.
I would argue that New York does have nearly the same cachet for actors as Hollywood. Just because you're going to become an actor doesn't mean you're going to do film or TV. Chicago's Second City has also helped develop the careers of lots of famous comedians. (I know London has a thriving theater scene as well, but can any Brits comment on whether going to London to become an actor is a "thing" in the UK?)
What this metaphor might mean for startups is that there may be room for another startup hub or two, although with a different focus from Silicon Valley (perhaps non-web?), but probably not more than one or two.
I'm Irish, not a Brit, but if you want to do more or less anything seriously, at a top level, you head to London. This sucking vortex of a Queen City was attracting about 10% of every generation to it in the 1850s.
Every other city in the British Isles is an also ran, whether you are looking at culture, politics, finance... the list goes on.
It hurts the South-East because it puts the infrastructure under enormous strain and property prices beyond the reach of mere mortals, while draining the rest of the UK of its talented young.
This is one thing I think the Germans do right - a much more culturally, economically and politically balanced nation (even taking the East-West divide into account).
I dunno, the agglomeration/network effects could easily enough make up for that, and people can leave London once it's obvious they're not going to make it, having built up their human capital faster than they could have anywhere else, and being able to command London salaries on provincial living costs.
It hurts the South-East because it puts the infrastructure under enormous strain and property prices beyond the reach of mere mortals, while draining the rest of the UK of its talented young.
If they wanted to make housing affordable, whether rented or to own they could get rid of the green belt, or encourage much denser housing. The infrastructure problems could be solved by application of sufficient money and compulsory purchase, though one would need to massively streamline the current procedures on that, and on planning. If China can build subways with stations that open in fields, so could London.
As to the talented young, they speak English, if they weren't going to London it's very likely they'd be going to the States.
This is one thing I think the Germans do right - a much more culturally, economically and politically balanced nation
Never a matter of policy. Germany was the belated nation and it's multiple centres are a consequence of late unification and being split in half and made more federal in power structure by the conquerors. (I exaggerate the German lack of agency in the choice of West German state structure)
So to add to infrastructure strain, we'd have huge environmental damage.
> As to the talented young, they speak English, if they weren't going to London it's very likely they'd be going to the States.
Maybe. There are significant immigration barriers to that. The very talented, sure, but not your average educated IT guy (for example).
> Never a matter of policy. Germany was the belated nation and it's multiple centres are a consequence of late unification and being split in half and made more federal in power structure by the conquerors. (I exaggerate the German lack of agency in the choice of West German state structure)
Never said it was a matter of policy, more, as you say, historical happenstance.
As a programmer, you own the product. Noone needs to know you, and you product could be very famous without anyone knowing you.
As an example take the movie SALT. It is quite famous. I know the actors. I do not know the name of the producer or writer. That would be the programmer.
My point is, programmers do not need SV as much as actors need HW. Programmers are writers, and producers. You can produce a movie in your basement, and distribute it on Youtube for free. If enough people like it, you can get funding to do a more polished, cinematic version of it.
I would argue that New York and DC are extremely important as well. Centers of finance and government? Beijing and Shanghai may soon become quite influential so I would hold off on making judgments. They come off as self-congratulatory and insular.
So essentially, this comparison is not as patronizing as the article suggests. Rather it exposes some of the flaws. Let's just hope the valley doesn't get as full of themselves as Hollywood does and misses the warning signs when things start to change.
In Silicon Valley however, you can still win without playing the insular game, and paradoxically it might end up making you more successful.
I was always interested in startups because it seemed a path to 'doing your own thing' and not being beholden to 'the man.' It's funny that people have now come to think of it in the complete opposite way.
In Hollywood you can walk up to anyone and ask "How's your screenplay coming?" and they will look at you shocked and ask "How did you know I was working on a screenplay?" In Silicon Valley you can walk up to anyone and say "How's your business plan coming?" and they will look at you shocked and ask "How did you know I was working on a business plan?"
AFM is where all the lesser films get sold to distributors around the world, in a process that's very focused on commercial value.
In the boom times, producers could famously sell rights to a film that existed as nothing more than a mocked-up poster.
Wait...maybe y-combinator is afm?
Oh well, I'll just have to bide my time until then demanding a bigger trailer.
I have seen more managers not getting hired, because they ex-employees would not recommend them.
Bad managers usually leave a trail of bad rep, and at some points it catches up with them (usually when employers move on and spread out to other companies).