Silicon Valley is disappearing: tech start-ups are pulling out of Silicon Valley

This May, the famous "Burn After reading" Social application Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel came to China to visit some of China's social application peers. Among them, when chatting with a peer, the other side casually asked a "Where is your company in San Francisco?" So Evan Spiegel very seriously replied: "We are not in San Francisco, not in Silicon Valley, we are in Los Angeles."

"Why not in Silicon Valley?" Naturally, such inquiries are indispensable. In the view of most Internet practitioners and entrepreneurs in China, Silicon Valley is an innovative paradise, with the most insane group of people, the ecosystem of venture capital, incubation, innovators ' communities, universities and giant internet companies is quite complete. The coolest innovations in the world are supposed to come from Silicon Valley, not elsewhere. It is said that Evan Spiegel did not explain the problem too much at that time, but replied lightly: "I don't like that place."

If even Evan Spiegel don't like Silicon Valley, then there must be some change in Silicon Valley. The founder of the Snapchat, who was born in Los Angeles, attended business school at Stanford. But before the end of his studies, he began to focus on the Snapchat and moved back to the Los Angeles area. In the suburbs of Los Angeles, Snapchat has a big house on the beach near Long Beach as the office of an expanding team-a place that is ridiculously expensive in San Francisco or the heart of the Valley of Palo Alto and Menlo Park.

Snapchat is just one example. The "innovation Company", which was born in the US and even in California, chose the Los Angeles area rather than the San Francisco Bay region (the legendary Silicon Valley) as its "headquarters" location. Oculus Riftde, another virtual reality technology company that was bought by Facebook 2 billion dollars, also had its headquarters in Orange county--, near Los Angeles, even after the acquisition, Oculus's team remained in Orange Shawnee Office, and has held its independent developers ' conference in Hollywood, instead of moving into Facebook's Park in Menlo Park, like Instagram and parse. In addition, the most famous "anonymous social" application secret, headquartered in Los Angeles.

These companies naturally have their reasons in Los Angeles – those innovative companies with prominent social attributes need to accumulate the most rewarding content in the Los Angeles area, which is biased towards entertainment and vanity, while Oculus technology-driven companies are clearly more likely to have partners and natural customers in Los Angeles. But equally important is the fact that housing rents and people are relatively "cheap" – and that for the more "cheap" people here, many of them are from the best schools in the United States and are not at any time being dug away by companies that are miles away.

As you can see, New York has assembled another type of innovation company – closely related to E-commerce, trading, design and new media. Companies like Fab and Birchbox are just natural New York products. The recent B round has melted 185 million of dollars in payments with merchant solution Mozido also in New York. Another "next-generation virtual reality technology and wearable device" company, which Google has invested heavily in recently, Magic Leap headquarters in the southeastern United States of Florida and also has an office in Los Angeles (not the San Francisco Bay Area). In addition, others with the same "technology-driven" genes in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Quantopian and Portalinstruments, which have gained more than $ tens of millions of trillion, are located in Boston and Cambridge, the top universities and the elite's most crowded Massachusetts. And some of the top start-ups in Dnatrix, which are related to biotechnology and new energy data, are increasingly piling up in Texas's Austin, Houston, and the southernmost San Diego, California.

None of them are in Silicon Valley.

Perhaps this is an interesting fact: As China's massive hot money, internet giants and even some startups start to scale to the Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley itself is completing its own adjustment and "going central". And here's a very important background: technology companies are increasingly more than just companies that provide "technology" to its users. Early Intel, Oracle and Cisco, of course, have laid the Silicon Valley and are comfortable here, and companies like Google are clearly the best place for Silicon Valley, and Twitter and Facebook are fine. But as technology itself gets closer to an infrastructure, "technology companies" must use "technology" as a means of providing people with the variety of services they need in their life scenes, the most important resources these companies need are often not in San Francisco and the Bay Area, which has led to the "centrality" of Silicon Valley: with Entertainment, Film production and animation-intensive resources related to Hollywood in Los Angeles hundreds of miles away; more resources related to design, commercial transactions, media and finance are in New York; more resources and talent related to biomedicine and new energy are concentrated in Texas Houston and Austin and the southernmost Santiago of California. More related resources to public facilities in Portland, North Oregon State, California ... In general, where partners and potential customers are located, the headquarters of these technology companies tend to be set up, not just the legendary "Cradle of Innovation" and the most active and dense place for VCs--Silicon Valley. It's not a change that's done overnight, but as you can see, as the continental plate drifts, more and more "innovative companies" are moving from Silicon Valley to different places to complete resources and talent migration for deeper reasons – but they are still inextricably linked to Silicon Valley, in capital trading, talent, Connections between social networks and spiritual homes.

This phenomenon leads directly to another change, namely "The Silicon Valley cannot reproduce the theory" the break. Some Silicon Valley elites, such as Paul Graham, founder of the Y Combinator incubator and most of his colleagues, as well as most of the top investors in Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, Have long insisted that the rest of the world does not have to attempt to replicate another Silicon Valley deliberately. The unique culture behind the era of Silicon Valley (Cold War and arms race), the human network of Silicon Valley and the entire ecosystem, and the "perpetual motion" of Silicon Valley innovation, cannot be copied. The best way to inspire the best innovations in the world is to get the world's best innovators to come to Silicon Valley for new baptism and "re-education" Y combinator incubators have always done this, it boasts the best relationships and resources for an entrepreneur, whether it's from the top of Silicon Valley and Y Combinator's alumni companies – some of them have become companies valued at billions of or even billions of dollars (such as Dropbox and Airbnb). But for a car-rental application in Bangalore, which may have joined YC, it may be more important to fix India's big and small car rental business than a lunch with Facebook founder Zuckerberg, but the geographical significance of Silicon Valley's help on this issue is limited. Similarly, for some technology companies, Hollywood, New York, Houston, Austin, Portland and San Diego are probably more important in resources than the San Francisco Bay Area, where they need to be rooted and expanded, but at the same time, entrepreneurs have injected more and more entrepreneurial spirit and "Silicon Valley spirit" into these places. , the way they think in Silicon Valley, the methodology that drives corporate growth, the skills to build networks, the sense of "box" thinking, and even the glamour of storytelling, will be taken out of Silicon Valley.

The "centrality" of Silicon Valley is not even expanding beyond the rest of the United States: Another global gathering of design and fashion in London, the next clean energy and digital groundbreaking innovation country, Israel ... In the afternoon of the Pingwestsync 2014 San Francisco session on smart hardware, more than one local hardware entrepreneur in San Francisco said: "You don't need to think about anything, buy a ticket, go to Shenzhen, find a partner in Shenzhen," and the hardware accelerator in San Francisco-whatever lemons Labs or PCH Analysys will allow his start-up company to receive different training and "baptism" in two places in San Francisco and Shenzhen. These examples are also a typical example of Silicon Valley's centrality.

As Silicon Valley expands, Silicon Valley has become the most fashionable language and label for global innovation, and Silicon Valley's VC is changing. In the past two years, more and more Silicon Valley VC began to seriously discuss "Silicon Valley and outside the United States opportunities," China is certainly one of the focus of discussion, Germany, Israel, Britain and even Malaysia are listed. I remember the last time I saw Y Combinator's new president, Sam Altman, at the end of July, he was preparing to go to London to do a Y Combinator annual event, startup parochial. Speaking of China, he said: "If Y Combinator really ready to open a representative office outside the United States, China is undoubtedly the first stop."

And look at the problems that are happening in Silicon Valley: In addition to the different scenarios in which technology permeates social life, the focus of resource allocation has led some technology companies to radiate out of Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley seems increasingly less friendly to new technology companies. Large companies monopolize all social and human resources, housing rents, living costs and human costs are going to the outrageous direction of development, the loss of talent is more and more serious. Even without the resources of different industries, Silicon Valley's own ecosystem is in an almost "full load" state. To some extent, the "go-to-center" adjustment also happens from the bottom up.

Perhaps a recent interview expressed by Google co-founder and CEO Larry also represents Silicon Valley's current problems and the special phenomenon of the transition: Silicon Valley has become short-sighted, has not made a real breakthrough, and is increasingly unconcerned with the idea of big ideas. The phenomenon has overwhelmed Silicon Valley, and the "shallow" combination of technology and consumer life has allowed companies in Silicon Valley to go where they should be. On the other side, Silicon Valley remains the source of world technology-the most original and groundbreaking technological innovations that are still appropriate for this place.

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)