Hyperbolic Headlines About Silicon Valley
The hyperbolic headlines are once again accompanying the articles about Silicon Valley. A Sunday NY Times article titled Silicon Valley Is Over, Says Silicon Valley kicks off what I expect is another wave of this. It references a recent Wired article titled Everyone Hates Silicon Valley, Except Its Imitators,
Go read them all and then tune back in here. Iâll wait.
Buried deep within the NYT article is an admission. âComplaints about Silicon Valley insularity are as old as the Valley itselfâ followed by an anecdote about Jim Clark moving to Florida during the dotcom era. Blink twice if you donât know who Jim Clark is; blink once if you downloaded Netscape from an FTP site somewhere when it was still called Mosiac. And, blink three times if you realize that Netscape is now owned by Oath, which is a subsidiary of Verizon, which is headquartered in New York, and is the merger of Bell Atlantic (Philadelphia), NYNEX (New York), and GTE (which, awesomely, bought BBN, created GTE Internetworking, spun it off as Genuity after the Bell Atlantic merger, which was then acquired out of bankruptcy by Level 3 (Broomfield, Colorado â adjacent to Boulder) which is now owned by CenturyLink (Louisiana)). Blink four times if you are still here and followed all of that. Kind of entertaining that Netscape led us to Monroe, Louisiana.
Now, go read Ian Hathawayâs post titled Silicon Valley is Not Over. He nails it.
Dan Primack waded in with a tweet.
The âSilicon Valley VCs moving to the Midwestâ story is a bit like your friend saying after a vacation to a tropical island: âI might just quit my job and live there forever.â
Itâs not happening.
â Dan Primack (@danprimack) March 5, 2018
Itâs worth clicking through and reading the comment thread. Itâs delightful.
Silicon Valley is not over. Over 100 years since its notional inception, itâs a fascinating and amazing ecosystem. But itâs also not the only place you can create technology companies. Iâm sitting in a hotel in New York and, according to a recent article from Bloomberg, New York Will Never Be Silicon Valley. And Itâs Good With That.
The real story is that you can create startups, and thriving startup communities anywhere. Imagine the NYT article was titled âIn a Moment of Introspection, Silicon Valley VCs Realize That There Are Tech Startups Outside of Silicon Valley.â Nah â that wouldnât get as many clicks.
Also published on Medium.