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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

This is ridiculous. The Bay Area, specifically Stanford and Berkeley, contributed to the WWII tech research initiative and then afterwards, Terman made Stanford Research Park which led to Silicon Valley.

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Yeah, I thought it was somewhat due to Stanford's handling of IP. The argument I heard was that if you're researching at Stanford and make a productizable discovery you can spin off a company no strings. I was at Cornell when I heard this, where any company built off on-campus research had to sign over 20% of the company up front. Makes those initial pitches to VC that much harder.

it was a lot more. they built an incubator called Stanford Research Park as a joint venture with Palo Alto. It gave access to students (key to any tech company, getting fresh students with new ideas and up to date knowledge), access to VC, and nice facilities for tech startups.

I don't know the exact terms of universities when it comes to founding companies but I don't see how the university can prevent you from founding a company, or demand a percentage.

I don't think that's the case. I've anecdotally heard that Stanford does take some (possibly small) amount of equity. From the first paragraph of Stanford's patent policy[0]:

> All potentially patentable inventions conceived or first reduced to practice in whole or in part by members of the faculty or staff (including student employees) of the University in the course of their University responsibilities or with more than incidental use of University resources, shall be disclosed on a timely basis to the University. Title to such inventions shall be assigned to the University, regardless of the source of funding, if any.

For an example of an institution with the kind of IP policy you're describing, the University of Waterloo in Canada has a policy[1] that by default assigns IP to creators rather than the institution:

> Except as stipulated below, it is University policy that ownership of rights in IP created in the course of teaching and research activities belong to the creator(s).

[0]: https://doresearch.stanford.edu/policies/research-policy-han... [1]: https://uwaterloo.ca/secretariat/policies-procedures-guideli...

Yeah this is definitely false. In most cases you own 1/3 at Stanford. But Stanford supports entrepreneurship like nowhere else, in my experience.

That's interesting. Maybe it's the amount of equity that matters so much - it's been years since I heard this and it was an off-hand comment in a talk.

Yeah, the important part about this is "with more than incidental use of University resources," which, for software, is almost nonexistent. (Even internet usage doesn't count as more than "incidental," which I know is a point that many places use to "suggest" they had a part in the creation.)

Otoh, they are extremely supportive of professors and PhDs (and undergrads, though those are often more software) starting companies based on research, and have very good policies regarding this. Most people end up generally happy on all sides.

> The argument I heard was that if you're researching at Stanford and make a productizable discovery you can spin off a company no strings

It's definitely not "no strings" - otherwise Stanford wouldn't be the actual owners of PageRank (which they licensed to Google).

Might be different in upper levels, but this wasn't the case from my experience as an undergrad at Stanford. Wanted to mess around with programming drones for a prototype delivery system (I think in 2015), submitted my proposal for a 2k grant to buy a drone, but I dropped the idea when the committee that manages it said they would make decisions about IP. Maybe my proposal wasn't important enough to warrant an actual negotiation? I suspect that at upper levels of development/research this process is handled differently.

undergraduates aren't employees and have total freedom to do what they want with their intellectual output. However, they can just decide not to give you any money if you make trouble.

No one disputes that those events you cite happened. However, those events were essentially random, not caused by local efforts to stimulate industry. Because of them, the area was blessed/cursed with an excess of productivity that it didn't know how to cause.

Now it's just coasting downhill, unable to maintain the altitude that it once had because it never knew how to (was never possible to?) build that altitude without a big dose of random luck.

Stanford Research Park was a joint venture between Stanford and the city of palo alto. It was highly non-random.

Lots of failed research parks, oil wells, railroads, gold mining operations.

The thing with oil wells, railroads, and gold mining, is that geography/geology matters more than path dependence.

Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and to a lesser extent NYC and London, are more about path dependence. Their dominance in their sectors seem more resulting from, if anything specific to point to, legal factors, than geography or any particular natural resource/phenomenon.

Why make movies and software in California, one in the south and the other a bit more north?

The founding of Hollywood was just as random as the events that "caused" the rise of the Valley. What if Griffith had gone elsewhere? What if Edison hadn't enforced his patents, causing the exodus across the country to make movies out of his purview? Similar climate/environs/affordability elsewhere, why not AZ, NM, TX, GA, FL?

This is a lot different than, say, the reasons for North Carolina to eventually beat New England in textile production, or why the Rust Belt is where it is, or why rail and shipbuilding was big in the Northeast but not so much space and auto manufacturing. It's more like why the appliances that are made in the U.S. are mostly made in the south.

Hollywood is what Hollywood is largely due to its geography. Within a ~4 hour drive of Hollywood its possible to get to an area of california that looks at least passingly (for the purpose of movie making at least) similar to more or less anywhere in the world.

This isn't the map i was looking for, but gives you the basic idea https://brilliantmaps.com/california-filming-map/. The Geographic diversity around Hollywood is absolutely responsible for its initial success.

The climate too. Always sunny (good lighting). Warm, but not too hot.

Cool map. Ecological diversity is evident around LA:

http://www.californiaherps.com/images/vegetationmapjeaster.j...

But what were the first two movies made in Hollywood? Griffith's Western and DeMille's Western. If another genre had been preferred in the 1910s, seems like a movie hub could've landed elsewhere. (Or maybe Westerns were actually made more due to budgetary constraints than preferences.)

https://digg.com/2019/movie-genre-popularity-1910-to-2018-da...

Couldn't've be East Coast because Edison.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/51722/thomas-edison-drov...

I honestly do not understand the downvotes. These are perfectly valid points, well argued ...

Edit: Was grayed out when first seen.-

They were most certainly caused by local efforts in the 1950s. The reason the Silicon revolution happened in Silicon Valley had everything to do with Cold War radar systems. I suggest watching Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley to get a better historical perspective:

https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

the cold war and american science by stuart leslie is a good accounting of the overall history from the early 20th century to the 80s: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/212074.The_Cold_War_and_...

The "silicon revolution" happened at Bell Labs, rising out of their need to replace vacuum tubes. Shockley only moved to SV because his mother lived there, and she was sick. And it just so happened that Terman invested heavily in making Stanford into a college with heavy links to industry. It is true that military research was a factor in this process (again, semi-coincidentally...Bell Labs invested heavily in military research because they believed, correctly at first, that this would protect them from being broken up...radar was invented, in its modern form, in the UK and developed heavily by Bell Labs/MIT) but there were other factors. SV's pre-eminence looked at from the 1950s was extremely non-obvious however (Boston was the centre of the VC world, MIT and Bell Labs led in research).

Agree, and a lot of those events were 60-80 years ago. I doubt that the amazing innovation and clever governance that allowed these events to happen (or cultivated them) would be possible today

What about other municipalities/areas who have great universities and contributed to WW2? There are many examples of areas with similar initiatives and prestigious universities but have not reaped the same outsized rewards over the past 60-80 years as SFBA. So I would posit that it is more luck than execution, and thus qualifies as a resource curse

The lack of non compete bans anywhere else in the country is not luck though, and other worker protections that prevent legal liability for stuff you work on outside of work.

The point was the local govts did not contribute to the the rise of Silicon Valley, not that no one in the Bay area was involved

local govts did a few things to enable this. They created a welcoming business environment that allowed for rapid expansion. For example, Stanford Research Park was a joint venture of Stanford, and Palo Alto. I am not sure there is any good writeup on the contribution of local governments to silicon valley.

Do you know how many local govts tried to do similar things and it failed? Local govt is not the essential component here.

If you say so. As an outsider (although I used to work close, in Sacramento, for 5 years), I only can say that I did not hear anything about substantial govt participation, similar to post-war infrastructure projects, or recent push for green energy. But, of course, I will be glad to find out that the Valley is the coproduct of some govt program, not only a lucky star alignment.

It's also the strong anti-non-compete of CA that allowed the flourishing and spread of technology and know-how.

This lecture by Steve Blank at the Computer History Museum is a great summary of the growth of Silicon Valley

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

Yes, but as he correctly points out, none of those things were done by the local govts.

I think there's some truth in the synthesis of this dialectic.

Could you make a similar statement in 1970 about Detroit?

"Detroit" moved to the suburbs. Check out the statistics for Oakland county (and possibly macomb county for the blue collar workers).

Toyota, GM, Ford, Chrysler, Nissan, VW, and all their parts suppliers(and the supplier parts suppliers) have at minimum a white collar office in south east Michigan.

The event that caused the Exodus from Detroit was the Race Riots. You can Google that because I'm not touching that topic.(and it doesn't help Detroit has a 1% tax)

>"Detroit" moved to the suburbs

Similar thing can happen to SV. People moving to "suburbs" -> other parts of CA.

Most people I know would choose to live in a temperate climate with low humidity if they had the option. Detroit might have been economically useful due to certain modes of travel and location of population at the time, but that may not be relevant anymore.

Lots of places contributed to WWII research initiatives. Why not Chicago, where the first nuclear reactor was built? Or Boston, with MIT whose research labs churned out fire control systems and computers? Or Los Angeles, with its defense powerhouses and UCLA/Cal-Tech? Or Detroit? Or anywhere else in the US with given the wartime mobilization?

Because Shockley moved here. Fairchild was founded here, and the Fairchildren built Silicon Valley and its venture capitalism.

MIT had a similar revolution centered around Route 128.

Without William Shockley moving to the west coast, the "Silicon" part of Silicon Valley would likely be elsewhere in the world.

he played an important role, but all the work by military tech companies and stanford during the war did as well.

As you point out he could've chosen elsewhere to move. Seems likely the aforementioned developments helped him pick where he did.

He chose to move where he did because he was raised there and moved back to take care of his ailing mother.

That's a counterfactual. Yeah, maybe Shockley's project happened elsewhere it Silicon Elsewhere could have happened somewhere else. But it didn't happen elsewhere. But you are assuming that it would have catalyzed elsewhere. For example, it could have catalyzed in Murray Hill, New Jersey after the transistor but it didn't.

Anyways, people are always leaving the Bay Area. If you came here five years ago, first you were new here and second, you've known people who have left.

So Keith Rabois left for Miami. Great for him. The question is whether the next Keith Rabois will spring forth from Miami. Unlikely.

Magic Leap is based in Plantation, part of the Miami metro. So- you're still right.

I believe they will, given the current Keith Rabois as a mentor.

It is interesting how you can gloss over the signifcance of the inventor of the transistor moving to the bay area, and then use the example how his former laboratory in New Jersey failed to commercialize the transistor as an example of how Silicon Valley is uniquely situated to allow innovation to happen.

A much more reasonable interpretation is that Shockley was going succeed no matter where he went, not that Silicon Valley is uniquely situated, especially with the dominance of east coast companies in defense contracting.

When Shockley moved west in 1956, Stanford Research Park was already 3 years old. Its defense roots predate even that. Shockley wasn't moving to a technological wasteland.

https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

Ames Research Center dates to 1939.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ames_Research_Center

William Shockley graduated from CalTech, and his connections from CalTech, more specifically Arnold Beckman, funded his new venture in silicon transistors.

It's true that Shockley picked Palo Alto because of his mother, but it would be unfair to not also credit Stanford who had an outsized role in helping solidify the Bay Area as the hub for "Silicon Valley".

Many many many companies tried to move the industry away from California since the 50s, and every time, those companies star players ended up relocating to the bay area.

California's free-wheeling culture permeates at all levels, from investors all the way down to the individual contributors. It just wasn't an accident that Silicon Valley happened the way it did.

Okay, so if California's "free-wheeling culture" caused SV to be where it is, what factored into CA's cultural development? Why the lack of free-wheeling culture elsewhere?

While I don't fully agree with the parent, there was a long tradition of "Go west young man" for people who wanted to make their fortunates far from eastern bankers and other conservative industries. Very broad brush, but also not wholly inaccurate.

Are you serious? SF's Castro is the gay capital of the world. Summer of Love. The Emerald triangle. The Hells Angels. I could go on.

But why there? Why not somewhere else?

Only seemingly non-random factor you gave is the Emerald Triangle, which could be the answer.

Ahh, sorry. I think I mis-read your comment. I thought you were questioning the existence of free-wheeling culture in CA.

As to why CA, I don't think there is any one reason. The weather and geography are huge. It was a lightly populated state in the 1950s, so real estate was much cheaper than on the heavily populated east coast (big for both start ups and 'artistic' types). And the gold rush mentality is/was pervasive, which I personally think leads to a government and culture that is generally supportive of start ups and small businesses. While CA has a reputation for being unfriendly to businesses, the taxes and regulations are largely targeting big businesses. So that leaves more room for small start ups to compete.

I mean, just look at California's history. If people were willing to upend their lives since the 1800s to move their families to the other side of the country on vague things like the promise of striking it rich somehow, those people probably had distinct personalities. Every one of California's strongest industries have been because people escaped where they were to go strike it rich (in money or fame).

Wine, Movies, Farming, Banking, Education, Tech.

California is just a state with a long history with a weird mixture of entrepreneurs you won't find elsewhere.

At the same time, a significant portion of the computer industry (HP, which is moving its--well HPE's--HQ to Houston, notwithstanding) was in the East through about the 90s. Boston in the case of the Route 128 companies, etc. But also others like IBM. So a large chunk of the industry was away from California.

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