The Creative Economy
Have you ever wondered how to turn your hometown into the next Silicon Valley? Well, wonder no more! Apparently all it takes are a fair amount of nerds (check!) and some rich people. The article's a bit long, but I encourage everyone to take a crack at it and embrace your inner venture capitalist (link via Althouse).
posted by Joshua @ 10:21 PM
2 Comments:
I'm a big fan of Paul Graham (by which I mean I have over the last 2 years read every essay that he has posted, whether or not I agree with him). One pet peeve of mine is that he consistently presents NYC as a place that is not friendly for technology startups, for various reasons: expensive, unpleasant to live in, doesn't attract the right kinds of people, etc. From my POV, the only thing that NYC is lacking is a major research university with a particularly strong high-tech (computer science, biotech, etc.) division. Unfortunately, both NYU and Columbia are very far from the top of the list as far as those departments go, which is a pity, because NYC certainly doesn't lack smart people in the, for example, the medical field. Having said that - it is bogus that NYC is not computer-startup friendly. From the article (or rather, from footnote #5):
"A few startups get started in New York, but less than a tenth as many per capita as in Boston, and mostly in less nerdy fields like finance and media."
For those of you unfamiliar with PG, he has a very particular definition of "nerdy" in mind. He is one of the original people behind Yahoo Stores! (he called it viaweb, and sold it to Yahoo for 50 mil). His idea of nerdy are people that are on the forefront of the "Web 2.0" movement (basically, things like gmail, writely, del.icio.us, digg, reddit, flickr) - in other words, people that work on web applications that are designed to replace the 'regular' applications (like Outlook and Word) with web-page versions of those applications.
Simulations of financial transactions can be substantially more intellectualy involved, and media still has a lot of very deeply complicated and unsolved problems - and, funny enough, NYC has excellent universities that specialize in media and finance. Ultimately, PG is right - universities + nerds = tech startups, the question is "startups in what particular niche of the tech market?"
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