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Comment by fairity | Hacker News Reader

Reminded me of PG's article on how to build the next Silicon Valley: http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

PG's thesis was building a new Silicon Valley requires a critical mass of nerds and investors in one physical location.

Even with the rise of remote work, I think this still holds true.

Everyone can move to random places around the US, but ultimately, I think they will feel lonely because they're not surrounded by other like-minded nerds.

No magnitude of Zoom meetings can simulate the feeling of being physically surrounded by others like yourself.

With no clear alternative for physical location, I think everyone will come back after shutdowns end.

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You can't invent the next big thing in your garage when you can't afford a garage. Some of the things that made the valley( * ) a success are gone. I think the valley will live on, like it always has, but it will be different this time, just like each other time brought something different.

The internet has now reached a stage where location matters less than ever. It is no longer necessary to amass engineers in one physical location. I think a lot of us would be more creative(albeit less focused and productive) if we were living on a piece of land with the time and extra money needed to play with the things we are good at.

(*) The valley, not SF. The line is blurry but they are not the same.

Good point. The ideal scenario sounds like big tech making a permanent shift towards remote work while startup founders continue to amass in the valley.

Nerds, investors, good weather, hard working technical migrants, weirdos (I mean that in a good way), a tolerance for failure + people who take basically irrational risks, a lot of 'new warm bodies' who take the koolaid, a hoard of very talented, operationally minded 'startup professionals' who know how to grow companies from Round A->E, and open-minded biz dev community who will entertain doing deals with small companies, and highly acquisitive M&A teams with massive budgets that provided 80% of the exits, and/or large financial institutions with frothy buyers to buy shares for IPO.

Nowhere has that.

"a tolerance for failure" is a key point I believe in what you wrote here.

I have spent a ton of time in Asia and feel I have a better then average understanding culturally than most Americans (at least that is what what my friends from their tell me, but who knows!) Failure in Asia a source of great shame. Here if you fail the VC ask you "So did you learn anything...good, here is some more money for your next thing." I think that a key difference is the view that failure is a lesson that helps you do better for the next time and not a reason to be ashamed.

I moved more than 8000km to be in silicon valley. nothing happened. I spent time in coupa cafe. nothing happened. we had a profitable startup and we didn't raise money. looking back we should have put the money into the company instead of moving thinking we can raise money by being "local". but that is what literally everyone sold to us. IMHO silicon valley invests in an extremely specific type of company and 99% of investors simply don't understand anything about all the different industries out there and how they make money. sorry to give it to you straight up but that's the truth. there are crazy talented people anywhere else in the world, it's just that silicon valley is extremely good at marketing itself.

So true.

Physical proximity is a little overrated. Nerds can just hangout with each other on their own niche corners of the Internet like HN, indiehackers forum, private servers, and so on to form their own little communities of hackers just working on stuff. The problem is investments and capital is limited to a few locations. Maybe VC money needs to become location independent?

I think the heyday of being together in SF was actually before the boom. At some point, there were almost as many recruiters at meetups as there were engineers. I miss being with the making-stuff nerds quite dearly.

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