
In Silicon Valley, Chinese 'accelerators' aim to bring startups home - raleighm
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-startups/in-silicon-valley-chinese-accelerators-aim-to-bring-startups-home-idUSKCN1II0UG
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rmason
One of the most difficult problems we have in Michigan and the Midwest in
general is that a large percentage of our most talented developers leave the
state upon graduating college to go to work for the Silicon Valley giants.

If you talk to them a few years later they long to return to the Midwest and
they want to do a startup. What if Michigan had an accelerator in Silicon
Valley, one where it's native VC's and angel investors had first crack at
funding these companies with the provisio that they move back home?

~~~
cyberpunk0
I mean do you blame them? It's cold, not much to do, political turmoil in
recent years. I don't see MI offering a lot

~~~
bischofs
Was warm enough for Henry Ford, The Dodge Brothers, William Durant, Herbert
Henry Dow, Louis Chevrolet etc. Maybe some thicker skin and a harder winter
would benefit folks ;)

~~~
nemonemo
At that time, Silicon valley didn’t exist and California was barely getting
mass migration. About a century later, now even the car industry seems to move
toward California..

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bischofs
Doesn't seem like a good thing to me, with the cost of real estate, energy and
labor in California, building sprawling manufacturing plants for cars probably
won't work. Plus the margins on building cars are very low at high volumes -
not something SV is used to.

~~~
Retric
California is huge and has plenty of cheap land as long as you don't need to
live next to the ocean.

Ex: ~1000$ an acre.
[https://www.landandfarm.com/property/Freeman_Ranch-7072064/](https://www.landandfarm.com/property/Freeman_Ranch-7072064/)

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Animats
China is going to win this one, because US VCs want to "exit". Big Chinese
companies are quite happy to keep ownership as the company becomes operational
and profitable. They want revenue, not valuation.

~~~
noobermin
I might be touching a sacred pearl in these parts, but in many ways, the US
start-up system incentivizes the wrong things, as you say, just getting an
exit. A more valuable thing for people with capital to shoot for is sustained
or long-term value (revenue is one of those things I guess).

~~~
staticautomatic
Indeed, the tech world (and to some extent, the business world more generally)
is a stark reminder that there is no longer any social pressure against being
a "sellout."

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songgao
I can’t help but think this best aligns with US immigration system. US take in
huge amount of international students, but don’t have a reliable (no, lottery-
based work visa with a ~50% SLA is not reliable) and easy way for top
graduates to work. Instead, policies that were made tens of years ago in fear
of US jobs stolen by foreigners are still effective and the same mindset
influence many Americans.

This is just an effort among many to attract talent in the US, and at this
point any country who doesn’t make this kind of effort is basically leaving
free money on the table.

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rdlecler1
Surprised they missed CometLabs, an AI focused Accelerator in SF that is part
of Legend Holdings.

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nopinsight
It is not clear any longer that in the near future most new software
technology will still originate in the US.

It appears that the first author of about 50% or more of accepted long papers
at ACL 2018, a top NLP conference, is a Chinese. (I didn't count
comprehensively as there are > 200 papers, but I counted from a substantial
sample.)

[http://acl2018.org/programme/papers/](http://acl2018.org/programme/papers/)

Added:

Yes, an NLP conference is far from a comprehensive sample of software
technology. That is why my first sentence was quite tentative. Nevertheless,
the data could be a harbinger for a more widespread phenomenon to come (US
researchers used to dominate many, perhaps most, top AI conferences).

The point is not mainland China will dominate software technology. It is that
the US may no longer be dominant.

Feel free to add other data to contribute to substantive discussion.

~~~
curuinor
Chinese ethnicity doesn't mean Chinese (PRC) national. There's also Taiwan,
Singapore, Hong Kong, etc...

~~~
seanmcdirmid
And plenty of Americans are Chinese (especially in tech research), if you see
the latter as an ethnicity rather than a nationality.

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coliveira
That looks great. More countries should have this kind of initiatives, so we
could have technology to spread worldwide, instead of getting concentrated
into a single high-cost area of the world.

~~~
joshuaheard
Where I live in Seattle, one reason for the high cost is Chinese cash buyers
snapping up real estate to move their assets out of the country.

China's authoritarian government's policy is world domination, and I don't
think we should be helping them.

~~~
StudentStuff
Ignore our highly restrictive zoning for the majority of the city, and the
booming giants we have from Boeing to Amazon crowding the region. Many of the
people I grew up with have moved from Capitol Hill, Ballard & West Seattle to
Marysville, Tacoma and Issaquah due to the housing crisis pricing them out of
the city.

Condo complexes are practically never built due to our state liability laws,
and the only apartments being built are premium units, as once you deal with
the zoning requirements and end up with 20% of your building's floor space
getting lopped off, that is the only thing that can profitably be built.

~~~
joshuaheard
Seattle does have many other housing problems. However, I was outbid by all-
cash Chinese buyers in Bellevue and Sammamish, as well, when looking for a
house.

~~~
StudentStuff
Have you looked at the zoning code in Bellevue or Sammamish? Its likely much
worse than Seattle's, I know Kent's zoning is positively wretched, mandating
that more than half of any commercially zoned property be paved for parking.
How can you have density when you zone it away?

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NicoJuicy
When you lived in the West, why return to China? ( Except money)

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driverdan
It's unethical to give a piece of your company to an oppressive government
like China's or anyone else involved in human rights violations.

~~~
megous
US is involved in human rights violations too. So where does that logic leave
us?

~~~
make3
This is a false equivalence, China is objectively much worse.

At least America doesn't jail or kill its political activists and journalists,
doesn't have what is effectively a dictator for life, doesn't directly control
all media in the country, has a semblance of real democracy, doesn't keep it's
states by threatening them with military action, doesn't overly and actively
censor it's citizen (although it does spy on them).

~~~
api
Whataboutism is a powerful disease of modern discourse. Pretty soon we will
start letting killers go because John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer killed
more people.

I think it arises from a misguided attempt at calling out hypocrisy, but the
result is a race to the bottom where any other example negates any criticism.
Nobody is perfect so if you have to be perfect to criticize no criticism is
possible.

~~~
sametmax
> I think it arises from a misguided attempt at calling out hypocrisy

That's quite a good analysis.

And it's literally the case here. OP was going all "white knight", being
judgmental and saying how could people help such a bad country as China.

Which is both a limited view and hypocrisy at it's finest. I'm veggie, but I
don't stop being friends with meat eating people, although I do consider it
something cruel.

The world is not black and white.

It's not because we don't know it's not a proper civilized argument. It's
because it was not meant to be an argument in the first place. Just a way to
keep OP in check.

But yeah, that's a big fail.

~~~
api
The trouble is that I always see the inverse too: people deflecting any
criticism of American foreign policy by citing other countries with worse
human rights records.

