
Silicon Valley isn’t the gold mine it used to be - smaili
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/21/vcs-say-silicon-valley-isnt-the-gold-mine-it-used-to-be/
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HillaryBriss
_A lot of Bay Area VCs have been blind to the droves of tech talent located
outside the region. Believe it or not, there are great engineers in America’s
small- and medium-sized markets too._

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im_down_w_otp
Having had to interview hundreds of candidates during my career I've never
understood the infatuation with the Silicon Valley talent pool. The problem
with there being enormous piles of what amounts to accountability-free money
being handed out on often the flimsiest pretext is that nobody actually has to
be all that good at anything to have worked at some impressive sounding places
with impressive sounding titles.

Certainly there's a lot of talent in SV, but it's not the end-all-be-all of
"the best and the brightest" that investors seemed incapable of considering
more critically until recently.

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shady-lady
> nobody actually has to be all that good at anything

It seems as long as they can regurgitate grad level algorithms, most other
things are non issues.

The brightest are people who look at quality of __life__ (that thing you only
get one of) & decide that a life where you can actually __live__ (nice* home
in nice* area/< 40 min commute/~40hr work week) and then choose to live that
life.

There absolutely are very bright people there who make 7 figures a year and
can do all those nice things. But that's a tiny minority.

barring the weather argument, i don't get why people choose SV. Great, you can
work with "scale" but that's about it. Unless you're looking for massive
funding, why bother?

the novelty of moving fast & not mastering a technology so somebody else
_might_ get rich loses it's appeal after ~5 years.

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dmode
Oh no, not another "Silicon Valley is dying"article. Here's the numbers for VC
investment in 2018, if anyone is interested. [1] California companies raised
$12B and $12.7B in Q2 and Q1 of this year. Almost 90% of this is in the
valley. Next is MA at $2.8B. Texas is a DISTANT 5th with $606M. And no
Midwestern state even makes an appearance in the top 10. Just this month Lucid
motors raised $1bn, Postmates raised $300M and Proterra raised $155M.

[1]
[https://www.pwc.com/us/en/industries/technology/moneytree/ex...](https://www.pwc.com/us/en/industries/technology/moneytree/explorer.html#/type=quarter&category=Sector&currentQ=Q2%202018&qRangeStart=Q2%202013&qRangeEnd=Q2%202018&chartType=bar)

~~~
cbames89
As a separate point, I've heard some complain that access to talent is more
difficult for tech companies than access to capital. Raleigh-Durham has the
second highest number of CS PhDs(1)

(1)[https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/12/where-us-brainpower-
ten...](https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/12/where-us-brainpower-tends-to-
cluster/420102/)

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mac01021
You mean in 1849?

