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Bay area, center of the world?
Is the Bay Area the center of the world? If it isn’t, why does the IT world revolve around things happening over there and not anywhere else? I’ve been wondering about this ever since I began to think about building or joining a start-up. Think about it: The conferences are in SF, the new companies are in SF, the hip projects were born there or are moving there soon (think Flickr).
In a time where I believe we should be getting close(r) to establishing the idea of a global network of creative companies and people, it seems like things are focussing down on one point of the map, and that’s probably not healthy. I’ll give you two distinct examples:
- First, Ben Hosken emailed me about his own start-up, started in australia in 1999 but that had to move into the US early on to create a market for it to grow on. He put the situation in a brilliant way: “Its damn hard to be so far away from the “action” as you I’m sure recognize….if only we were in SF”. So very true.
- Second, my own case. Portugal is definitely not the place where you want to have new ideas because you feel powerless to climb the ladder through layers and layers of concepts from the 90s and Web 1.0-centered companies. It could be a lot better because it has a huge market of IT-aware youngsters to explore, but there are no real examples of people taking the time to try and develop new services.
Naturally any start-up that focusses on what I’ve been working on (social networking, folksonomies and the future of the web itself) will be thinking about dealing with a worldwide market, but it is always good to know that the people in your own city and country know what the hell you’re doing.
Its a weird world, the IT world. And we’re far from being global in terms of economy, even though the internet may get you to believe otherwise.
Back in 1998, despite being from california, i started a web 1.0 company near Boston. Location mattered a lot and it was a big part of why MetaEvents was only a moderate sucess.
There are a number of reasons why geography matters so much. Everyday when when go to cafe centro in south park we get coffee we run in to people form six apart, adaptive path, and other web 2 companies. It’s not so much it that you can’t follow what’s going on, but rather you can meet and chat with people easily.
Meeting are easier. When we are thinking of a project, we can easily find the right people and talk to them. Because there is a concentration of people living here, the social networks overlap with the companies. So when odeo was looking at talking to google about something, we said, oh, i know so and so at yahoo, let’s see if they have some similar stealth project we might want to use instead.
Noah and Evhead actually met because they were neighbors. Then later the relationship of audioblogger grew up, followed by ev leaving google, and noah talked him in to joining odeo. People move around in a community, you have a critical mass of people. So while you may be competitors this year, next you’ll work for each other. Over time you develop a community of people, ideas, and activity.
Another thing is san francisco draws people from all over the world. For example, stewart and catarina were here in the bay area, then went up to vancouver started flickr, but they had to keep coming back down to SF for meetings and deals, and eventually they got bought and moved back down.
Odeo has people on it’s team from germany, the uk, canada, venezuela, and uruguay. That’s typical that about half of the people involved in a bay area tech company are not from the US. That draw of talent reduces the possiblity of other major centers of innovation from taking hold.
One exception perhaps is the number of indian engineers who lost their work visas in the dot com collapse. They en-masse went back to india settling in bangalore creating another center.
Comment by rabble — June 26, 2005 @ 6:28 pm