Centerfield

Which Cities Acquire Innovative New Industries?

Slashdot published a pointer to an interesting essay by Paul Graham on why Silicon Valley happened where it did. Well, IMHO it's close but missing a few important things. It's a particularly interesting essay to me because at one time I held a very similar set of theories, which I had to refine because of contrary evidence.

On why New York and other metropoli saw little computer industry success, he says:

You can see this most clearly in New York, which attracts a lot of creative people, but few nerds. [5]

What nerds like is the kind of town where people walk around smiling. This excludes LA, where no one walks at all, and also New York

That was my theory, too, until I actually visited the city for a couple of weeks, and saw geeks by the ton (yeah, I have good geekdar, honed while recruiting for my failed startup). He's simply wrong about geeks not living there; it's just a question of what size city you're comfortable with. So why was NY's famous Silicon Alley an infamous squib? I've come to believe that the answer has to do with mental space of a sort taken by existing industries. If you want to start something having to do with books, insurance, or finance, that's the place. I suspect people will help you out with that kind of thing. But the Bay Area and Austin were really still looking for industries to enter when the computer and network revolutions came along.

Graham made one other minor mistake, which I would've made before moving here, too. I lived near DC a long time, and my first job was for the government, and it the setup of the job (though not the people) certainly discouraged entrepreneurialism. And I felt that was a general problem with govt jobs.

But Austin is a place where innovative industry and governmental industry coexist. You've certainly noticed our governmental industry, since it's ruling most of our blog readers at the moment (bwahaha!). I think that again, in DC it's a case of the attention going to the "house" industries which are government and centralized control.