
What It Will Take to Create the Next Great Silicon Valleys, Plural - kevin_morrill
http://a16z.com/2014/06/20/what-it-will-take-to-create-the-next-great-silicon-valleys-plural/
======
DavidAdams
The thing that's missing from almost all discussions of making a "Silicon
Valley" somewhere else is what I think is the key to the original Silicon
Valley's success: intergenerational investment. That is, a bunch of guys hit
it big on semiconductors in the mid 20th century, and instead of just buying
boats and joining the country club, these people set aside a portion of their
fortunes to invest in the tech-related businesses of the generation that
followed. And, crucially, without extracting onerous terms from those
investments. That established a culture of relatively permissive angel
investment that encouraged innovation.

Trying to get a startup off the ground in most other places it too hard
because raising seed money is too hard, and even if you raise seed money,
raising a series A is too hard, and so on. To make a Silicon Valley, you have
to seed the ecosystem with an initial generation of successful entrepreneurs
who are wiling to adopt the ethos of the SV angel investor, then provide an
investment infrastructure to make sure that promising startups don't die on
the vine.

And, as many others have pointed out, an open spigot of government money was
necessary for the original SV to develop, so that's probably necessary for any
copycat.

------
heydenberk
>> Imagine a Bitcoin Valley, for instance, where some country fully legalizes
cryptocurrencies for all financial functions. Or a Drone Valley, where a
particular region removes all legal barriers to flying unmanned aerial
vehicles locally. A Driverless Car Valley in a city that allows
experimentation with different autonomous car designs, redesigned roadways and
safety laws. A Stem Cell Valley. And so on.

On the surface this sounds kind of neat; on a practical level, this sounds
like a libertarian nightmare.

------
rayiner
> In fact, this kind of competition is probably the only way to create
> successful innovation clusters that can compete with the huge advantage
> Silicon Valley already has. . . . That’s why turning Detroit into a
> commercial Drone Valley could draw the innovative people who in turn want to
> be near other innovative people around that domain.

I find this akin to describing how other cities should create their own Wall
Street. I don't see the point. Wall Street and Silicon Valley are both places
that benefit so much from the concentration of capital (intellectual and
monetary), that there is little practical reason to have more than one of each
in the U.S. And outside the U.S., places with capital and technical talent
will find a way to put them together.

What I'm interested in is the harder question: what will it take to create the
next Detroit, circa 1950? Not just a place where new technology is developed,
where wealth is created, but a place where technology creates broadly-shared
prosperity and good middle-class jobs.

~~~
bluedino
>> what will it take to create the next Detroit (circa 1950)?

It's happening in India and China right now.

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bluedino
>> That’s why turning Detroit into a commercial Drone Valley could draw the
innovative people who in turn want to be near other innovative people around
that domain.

Detroit was built the automobile. It's a bad comparison to drones. Every
househould in America isn't going to own 2.2 drones. Drones aren't so
incredible complicated where countless other companies will pop up, making
tires and seats and radios and spark plugs and bearings.

Let's assume a successful drone-building company sets up shop and ends up
providing 2,000 jobs. That's a great gain for Detroit, but you're still
looking to fill a huge void in a town that used to have 10,000 workers in a
single plant.

~~~
RickS
Replace "car" with "box truck" and the metaphor fits a lot more closely and
remains strong. Businesses need vehicles to deliver stuff. Drones are poised
to replace trucks in that regard.

Also, who says a family won't own 2.2 of them? When I forget a file at home, I
have dropbox. What happens when I forget my sandwich? As reliability goes up
and cost goes down, a drone becomes a very reasonable family purchase.

~~~
stcredzero
In the case where that happens, only a handful of times a year, why wouldn't I
rather hire a drone Uber style to deliver that one package?

~~~
uptown
Perhaps. But even-so, distribute the total number of "drones", and divide by
the population and I bet you'd get close to that ratio.

Whether they're quad-copters, SUVs, vacuum cleaners, or some "drone" in a
factory retrieving the products a consumer just ordered ... whatever ... I'd
bet that society does shift in the direction of robots or drones handling an
increasingly-long list of services currently handled by humans.

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tormeh
What will it take to create the next silicon valley? Money. Lots and lots of
government money. Defense-sized pots of government money. Each year. For a
decade or more. That, and the ability to live there and speak only English.

~~~
mempko
This. People just don't understand how much massive amounts of government
money went into silicon valley from the 1950s onward. It takes lots of money
and time.

------
hga
There's a phrase for things like electricity and smartphones: general purpose
technology
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_technology)

As for more Silicon Valleys, it's telling that to my knowledge outside
California have made non-competes unenforceable, although Massachusetts is
getting a clue more than 2 decades after Route 128 died a hard and painful
death.

------
hackaflocka
Marc Andreesen believes that someone should not be commenting on the theory of
Disruptive Innovation if they have a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale.

And now he wants to tell me what?

------
jqm
A ubiquitous, world changing, radically different innovation (like computers)
in which hundreds or thousands of companies can simultaneously participate.

Is there such a thing on the horizon?

I don't think drones are it. Sorry Marc. You were in the right time at the
right place and had the right skills. Don't expect this combination of timing,
luck and effort to be easily duplicated elsewhere.

------
josephschmoe
Trying to attract investors to your city is how you get a gold rush.

------
josephschmoe
Drone Valley? Yeah, the FAA would like a word with you about flying test
planes over populated areas...

------
geebee
This blog post seems like a good opportunity to bring up another essay I
thought was very good by Andy Grove.

Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs

[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_28/b41860483...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_28/b4186048358596.htm)

The part that really resonated with me here was the issue of scaling in
manufacturing. Much of his essay takes on the notion that the US will be fine
if innovation happens in silicon valley and manufacturing happens elsewhere
(this is an oversimplification, I'd recommend you read the essay).

But what really resonated with me here is that scaling _is_ innovation, and
that by splitting the two and neglecting the second, the US has put itself at
a disadvantage, not just in the jobs generated downstream from high end
innovative work, but in the ability to do that innovative work itself...

"I believe the answer has to do with a general undervaluing of
manufacturing—the idea that as long as "knowledge work" stays in the U.S., it
doesn't matter what happens to factory jobs... I disagree. Not only did we
lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so
important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning
today's "commodity" manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging
industry."

One reason this resonates so heavily with me is that I actually got an MS in
Industrial Engineering, and I, like almost all of my cohort, work in software
now. The closes I came was writing software for manufacturing systems, and
many of our clients were overseas. But I never did learn how to scale, and an
entire generation of potential leaders in scaling up manufacturing the US
pretty much had to find something else to do (perhaps using those stochastic
processes to figure out how to get people to click on ads rather than reducing
defect rates in the mass scale manufacting of solar panels).

When it's time to manufacture mass numbers of drones (per the discussion
above, I could easily see the average US family owning quite a few drones). We
may not make them in the US, but the reason might actually not be cost, it may
be skill - we may simply not have the experience with scaling on physical
systems - partly because we skipped a couple of generations and we just don't
have the experience anymore.

Now (my own hobby horse), add in the fact that the US seems to be perfectly OK
with watching the enrollment of US citizens in graduate engineering programs
plummet (perhaps a rational decision at the individual level), and if high end
work shifts along with production, we may find we can no longer wave the magic
wand and get talented people to come here. Fix immigration all you like, the
top talent may go elsewhere and no longer bother with the US.

I'm putting forth a bleak scenario, and I'll admit it contains a few slippery
slopes, so this is meant as a call for concern, not a prediction. But I think
that the US needs to pay a lot of attention to our future workforce in
serious, large scale manufacturing engineering, and we're neglecting it,
badly.

------
dang
A dupe of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7902282](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7902282),
but we won't bury it because (a) the current article is a bit longer and (b)
the title of the earlier submission was Detroit-specific, which caused the
discussion to be.

~~~
matthewowen
I may have missed a post about it, but: is this new transparency in
moderation/etc/etc a deliberate and ongoing new policy? And to the extent that
it is, can we expect that buried posts will always have an explanation of why
they were buried?

I could understand why that might not happen, but it is generally more useful
to understand why something was buried than it is to know why something
narrowly avoided being buried.

~~~
dang
I've been posting these comments regularly for months now. It's not really a
new policy so much as an artifact of someone being public as moderator and
focused on HN. There's no way PG could have done this; it takes far too much
time. I'm not sure I can keep doing it either.

When we kill or bury a post, yes, we've been posting comments saying why.
People use the terms "kill" and "bury" to mean a whole lot of different
things, though, so it doesn't follow that any given expectation will be met.
Also, there are other things that we do (e.g. penalizing posts for being off-
topic or threads for being flamewars), that users do (voting and flagging),
and that software does (voting ring detector, flamewar detector), all of which
affect what appears where on HN.

