I used to be in SF and in South Bay. Recently moved to Seattle , closely associated to the India and Swiss tech ecosystem.
In my experience further away you are from SF, less cutting edge you are. In my experience even South Bay is 6 months behind SF.
SF is a big melting pot, where a huge amount of talent are trying out new things and they are open to sharing their experiences - be it about latest technologies or latest customer acquisition strategies. Because of this, you find out about the latest strategies and associate advantages and disadvantages much earlier. By the time these strategies turn in blog posts and capture popular mind share - it takes months and years.
Of course there are exceptions everywhere and some companies outside SF are great at being at cutting edge. However on an amortized basis, further away from SF you are, more likely you are to be behind the cutting edge.
What does "cutting edge" mean? They don't use modern deployment startegies? They don't use recently popular web frameworks? "Cutting edge" is so vague it's not clear whether SV just cargo cults more or whether it's actually more technically innvovative.
They just try a lot more things and find out faster what is working and what isn't working. Most of them turn out to be useless but the ones that work give them an early start.
For example while kubernetes is all the rage in Silicon Valley and every startup is using it, most companies further away from SV take longer to adopt these new technologies. They are just evaluating and experimenting with k8s and in few years might move more significant loads into it. Similar with other tech as well. I think that’s just one example but you could look at programming languages, different automation and deployment tools etc and Silicon Valley is on the cutting edge.
I'd argue that something like k8s is a huge investment for startups and is more of a time waster than anything else. I have a friend that worked at a startup that used Terraform to deploy their stuff, and the whole thing was overkill given that they literally just compiled a binary and put it on a single host. Instead, the friend just wrestled with the Terraform based build process and complained about learning the tool instead of getting stuff done.
Quite a few of these were produced out of Google and FB, so it makes sense they would be based out of MV/Meno Park.
However most of the unicorns or near unicorns since 2010 have been based in SF. Dropbox, AirBnb, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, Zenefits, SoFi, Credit Karma, CloudFlare, DocuSign, Wish, Slack, Github, Instacart, Prosper, Automattic, Eventbrite, Okta, Docker, Gusto, Nextdoor.
Let list could go on and on. I stand by my statement that more talent in concentrated in a smaller area vs South Bay and they are trying out a lot more things and also faster. Dynamics of an urban area also play some role where, where you can quickly walk to, use public transport or get an Uber, vs driving to another place in South Bay. All this leads to SF being ahead of South Bay in terms of learnings and trying out things.
I’d argue SV does so well because SV is fundamentally extractive in how it uses tech. It uses tech as a way to strip mine a particular domain, often bypassing incumbents in the process. There is nothing innovative about this process. It is not ‘high’ tech so much as applied tech. Another take on this: look at the type of people that SV idolizes by and large. Are they mostly hackers? Or business people?
SV is a colony of capital B business, and they keep the makers around because they have to.
> It uses tech as a way to strip mine a particular domain, often bypassing incumbents in the process.
The term strip mine is a loaded term. In the classical sense, it devastates the ecosystem while extracting resources that are impossible to replace.
In fact, Silicon Valley does not do that. People aren't going to stop needing transportation because Uber used up all the transportation, and it won't stop needing places to stay because AirBnB lets you rent out your apartment.
> SV is a colony of capital B business
What is a capital B business as opposed to a lower case b business?
Strip mining is a loaded term, and a touch unfair, perhaps. But I'd argue that tech itself is a resource of sorts, and needs periodic re-investment in order to continue to sustain high growth. I do think SV strip mines tech itself. (I got these thoughts from Alan Kay, they aren't my own, but I keep thinking about them.)
Where is the Xerox PARC of 2018? Why isn't there one? We have more computing power and are economically (as a whole) better off than at any other point in history.
At some point, you have to start aiming for the moon again.
Edit: capital-B business to me is the ultra-aggressive dominate-everything mindset that seems to corrupt a lot of people.
You're talking out of both sides of your mouth now. Strip mining usually means something that destroys a natural resource.
You were originally talking about how Silicon Valley "strip mines a particular domain." That implies that it's strip mining other industries, such as hire for ride, etc etc. You could almost argue that they strip mined animation and movie special effects because they took profits from manual animators and movie prop creators.
I fail to see how Silicon Valley is "strip mining" tech. (Btw, something different from what you previously implied) They're grabbing low hanging fruit, but they're not ruining the resource for everybody else.
Also, to address your last point, the economies of scale are such that at this point, if you don't dominate a market, at least locally, you're dogmeat.
You're naming products or companies and not technologies or processes. Moreover many of these companies are privately traded and their balance sheet is unknown. These companies could be healthy or they could be struggling and we have no idea.
So what is your metric of "cutting edge"? It sounds like you're optimizing for small business strategy? Seems honestly like VC funding is the biggest indicator here.
Swift - Cupertino
ARKit - Cupertino
Multitouch - Cupertino
iOS - Cupertino
Android - Mountain View
Netflix and all of their innovation: Los Gatos
Haven’t touched San Jose even..
I agree with you completely, suggesting San Fran is more cutting edge than the South Bay is a bit ridiculous.
This is satire, right? You're suggesting that ideas don't make it from SF to mountain view in less than 6 months with thousands of people commuting between the two each day and cross pollination of meetups on both sides.
Containerization and its orchestration all started in the south bay. Pray tell, what was in use in SF for 6 months before it hit the startups based in MV, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, etc.
There are always exceptions (like your containerization example), which can be attributed to serious tech players like Yahoo, Google and FB in South Bay. However holistically, SF has had much more unicorns and near unicorns. The contrast between SF and rest of the world has been more pronounced in recent year vs pre-2010 (except China of course - due to the growing economy and closed nature making it difficult for outside companies to operate).
And the most valuable company in the word is in the South Bay — worth more than every San Fran unicorn — combined.
Valuation has zero to do with innovation and using unicorns as a measure of bleeding edge tech is nonsense. Some of the very beat tech doesn’t necessarily turn into the best businesses.
And don’t forget, the South Bay has one of the most innovative middle-out compression innovators in history: Pied Piper.
In my experience further away you are from SF, less cutting edge you are. In my experience even South Bay is 6 months behind SF.
SF is a big melting pot, where a huge amount of talent are trying out new things and they are open to sharing their experiences - be it about latest technologies or latest customer acquisition strategies. Because of this, you find out about the latest strategies and associate advantages and disadvantages much earlier. By the time these strategies turn in blog posts and capture popular mind share - it takes months and years.
Of course there are exceptions everywhere and some companies outside SF are great at being at cutting edge. However on an amortized basis, further away from SF you are, more likely you are to be behind the cutting edge.