

Silicon Valley: Abandoned - Hunchr
http://www.businessinsider.com/alaska-miller-silicon-valleys-ghost-towns-2009-10

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baguasquirrel
Ostensibly, this is good as it means cheap office space.

There's a catch though... have any of you folks actually seen these buildings?
They're not exactly in nice neighborhoods (I actually used to work next to one
of these). Most of them are over the 101 which means it'll be a 15-20 minute
drive to downtown for food. While it's true that Google is also past the 101,
they can also afford to hire their own chefs. An apartment off of San
Antonio/University/MenloAve/Castro/etc. seems preferable.

The other bit of trouble is that they're all large office buildings. Are they
set up so that they can be rented out by a small shop? I'm pointing at the
Yahoo campus buildings in particular.

~~~
Alex3917
"Ostensibly, this is good as it means cheap office space."

Cheap office space in a dying empire that smart people are increasingly
leaving because its citizens are too shortsighted to realize their economy
will collapse if they don't pay for what they've purchased, too racist to let
in the next generation of innovators, too stupid to educate their own kids,
and too apathetic to fix the problem.

Cap-and-trade is probably the last chance to fix the economy of the valley,
and frankly it's not looking good right now.

~~~
grellas
The Valley will not soon be displaced and will do just fine in spite of the
larger economic problems - nowhere else in the world will one find such an
aggregation of talented entrepreneurs, monied investors, academic expertise,
and, above all, critical relationships with those who know startups well and
are integrally involved in launching and promoting them.

With every cycle (I have seen them all), the Valley takes new shape in its
economic drivers, and it will likely do so again this time around. But the
tech revolution has fundamentally changed world commerce and is not about to
slow down. The Valley remains its epicenter, in spite of any bleak short-term
issues.

Early-stage startups (my area of specialty) have not slowed but rather
increased in the past year, and their quality is up (very often driven by
immigrants or first-generation children of immigrants - _this_ is a big change
from 25 years ago). The venture-backed part of the startup world has been on
hold and will largely remain so for the time being. In time, it too will
emerge again, but this will depend on an eventual opening up of the IPO
market.

The Valley will survive and emerge stronger than ever, in my view.
Opportunities for those seeking to launch new startups are as good as they
ever have been (and office space is cheap and plentiful, and certainly not
just in large office buildings but everywhere).

~~~
Alex3917
"The Valley will not soon be displaced and will do just fine in spite of the
larger economic problems"

Which seems more likely in twenty years:

A) The CA/US debt, education, and political problems will be fixed

B) In the near future Boris Johnson or some other politician who 'gets it' is
able to convince their government to pass a series of bills that create the
same economic/social conditions that created SV, and over the next twenty
years this new area catches up to and surpasses SV despite SV's current
massive advantage.

As for education, IIRC it was one of the top three issues for every
presidential election between 1964 and 2000 and virtually nothing changed. For
the past two election cycles it hasn't even been one of the top five issues,
and there's no evidence that it's coming back in 2012. The fact is that the
vast majority of CA/USians can't read English proficiently, that is well
enough to compare and contrast the viewpoints in two different newspaper
articles. This means the vast majority of our population is completely useless
in the modern economy. Not only are we making zero progress toward fixing
this, but there is zero will to fix it. And even in the past when there was
tons of will to fix it, it still proved unfixable.

As for the CA/US debt, the vast majority of citizens STRONGLY support
increasing the debt. A black-gay-atheist would have a better chance at winning
the south in the 50s than a presidential candidate who supports the kind of
tax increases needed to fix the debt.

As for our other political problems, our policies are completely based around
made-for-TV soundbites and not academic research. That's why our
infrastructure is crumbling, we support torture, we're destroying the value of
the dollar, etc. And I see zero sign of this changing.

As much as I love SV-- and I still intend on moving there-- let's face the
facts, the chances of someplace else catching up to SV are vastly better than
the chances of fixing the problems facing the US.

~~~
skmurphy
Silicon Valley is more than 100 years old. I blogged about this in
[http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/05/steve-blank-on-
secre...](http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/05/steve-blank-on-secret-
history-of-silicon-valley-at-chm-nov-20/) but here is one quick data point:

 _California Landmark NO. 836 PIONEER ELECTRONICS RESEARCH LABORATORY - This
is the original site of the laboratory and factory of Federal Telegraph
Company, founded in 1909 by Cyril F. Elwell. Here, Dr. Lee de Forest, inventor
of the three-element radio vacuum tube, devised the first vacuum tube
amplifier and oscillator in 1911-13. Worldwide developments based on this
research led to modern radio communication, television, and the electronics
age. Location: In sidewalk, SE corner of Channing Ave and Emerson St, Palo
Alto_

Radio technologies preceded and prepared the way for electronics and
semiconductors, and it was fueled with risk capital.

~~~
pg
That is a somewhat misleading claim. Whatever area had turned out to be the
center of the semiconductor industry, there would presumably have been some
electronics firms there already.

~~~
skmurphy
My argument is not that Silicon Valley was inevitable but that it takes a long
time to grow an entrepreneurial region.

It's not misleading in raising the bar to areas/regions that want to be the
next Silicon Valley and don't have an entrepreneurial substrate and
appropriate ancillary services (e.g. attorneys, accountants, banks, that
understand startups and entrepreneurs) to form a viable ecosystem.

I don't think the 100 years is misleading, if it had happened somewhere else
(e.g. Boston) I think it would still have involved the same antecedents: major
universities, risk capital, electronics firms...It may also have been
important that it was primarily agricultural land that was pushed aside, if
there had been other active industries they may have preferentially competed
for the same talent.

Three good books I rely on for this analysis are

"Understanding Silicon Valley" by Kenney [http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-
Silicon-Valley-Entrepren...](http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Silicon-
Valley-Entrepreneurial-Stanford/dp/0804737347)

"The Silicon Valley Edge" by Lee, Miller, Hancock, and Rowen
[http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Valley-Edge-Innovation-
Entrepr...](http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Valley-Edge-Innovation-
Entrepreneurship/dp/0804740631)

"Regional Advantage" Saxenian [http://www.amazon.com/Regional-Advantage-
Culture-Competition...](http://www.amazon.com/Regional-Advantage-Culture-
Competition-Silicon/dp/0674753402/)

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skmurphy
High vacancy in a central location means cheap rents that facilitate face to
face interaction. Perhaps there is room for a half dozen different kinds of
co-working / hacker dojo spaces that can now afford to come into existence.

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timcederman
I can't recommend <http://burbed.com> enough for people around here for some
good perspective on Silicon Valley real estate.

~~~
albertcardona
The columns remind me of the let's-converge-to-the-classics-in-the-safest-way-
possible-because-we-lack-guts-and-imagination in "The Fountainhead", by Ayn
Rand.

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steveplace
Story Title: Linkbait

CRE sucks, but it sucks less in that area.

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ryanwaggoner
Someone really should have proof-read these captions.

