(2005-06-05) Silicon Valley Redux

Gary Rivlin on the DotCom v2 crowd in the context of Silicon Valley history/culture. The received wisdom about Silicon Valley is that the region is single-mindedly dedicated to technological Innovation. But that's not quite right. The miracle of Silicon Valley is that it is a system finely calibrated to spit out new companies (Start Up) - some of which have come to be worth hundreds of millions, if not billions, within a few years' time. Other locales have elite universities on a par with Stanford and Berkeley. The entrepreneurially inclined and brilliantly visionary can be found all around the world. But what distinguishes Silicon Valley from everywhere else is that it alone has Sand Hill Road, the Wall Street of Venture Capital... ''This is a startup town. Our core competency here isn't chips, or networking products, or software. The culture is built around the creation of startups.'' It reminds me more of The Soul Of A New Machine, where the reward for success is "you get to play another round" (like a Computer Game). Only there it was within a single company, here's it's across an entire City Region.