The Abundance of Silicon Valley

It&#x27;s very worth remembering that the abundance of Silicon Valley is fragile, and temporary. But I think many articles surmising that the peak is now have the timescale wrong.<p>I&#x27;d compare Silicon Valley to Detroit with a century time lag. The American automotive industry started in the 1890s, just like the Internet industry started in the 1990s. Like the Internet, it built off a constellation of related technologies that had been under development for 30-40 years. The automobile industry was built on the iron mines in Duluth, coal mines in Appalachia, petroleum industry in Ohio, steelworks in Pennsylvania, and Great Lakes transportation infrastructure that had been setup throughout the 19th century. The Internet was built on software from Boston; microcomputers from Albuquerque, Austin, and Houston; an OS from Redmond; semiconductors from Oregon; and so on.<p>In 1910, the population of Detroit was 465,000. It had nearly doubled from 285,000 in the previous decade, fueled both by international migrants looking for then-high wages and Black migration fleeing persecution in the rest of the U.S. (sound familiar?). The auto industry was well established, with Model-T production in its heyday. Supplier networks were already starting to grow up around the big-3 automakers.<p>But Detroit&#x27;s population didn&#x27;t peak until 1950, at quadruple its 1910 population. In between, Detroit would be key to winning two World Wars, and the automobile would fundamentally reshape society. Most of the growth happened between 1932-1960, and only after key government &amp; societal infrastructure changed to be built around the automobile rather than the automobile serving as a luxury novelty for Gilded Age technorati.<p>Eventually Silicon Valley will end up like Detroit, with abandoned 4-over-1 condo complexes and empty office parks where the software industry once stood. But we&#x27;ve got a while to go. We haven&#x27;t had our war yet, and the basic infrastructure of society - transportation, legal, military, government, etc - is still based on pre-electronic conceptions.

The fundamental design of the Internet was to be robust against various forms of damage to the network. I see Silicon Valley as a similar type of system. It is not difficult to look back 40 years and see how at each inflection point, The Valley&#x27;s constituent technologies, and the companies they spawned, led the rest of the world and scaled The Valley up.<p>- In the 1980s, Silicon Valley&#x27;s Intel lost it&#x27;s dominance in DRAM production to Japan. The economic impact was dire, and yet<p>- In the early 1990s, networking and workstations emerged from the likes of SUN and Cisco. They carried through until global competition stole their wind, and it was on to<p>- The late 90s and the .COM boom. And what a boom it was, Amazon, Google, followed by another death knell for myriad .COM corpses. Promptly engendering<p>- The 2000s birth of social media. MySpace faltered, then LinkedIn, then Facebook, then Twitter, came up and are still going strong on the foundation of<p>- 2010s open source platforms. Still mind-blowing: At one point WhatsApp had 40 software engineers and 400,000,000 users. At 3 years old.<p>I&#x27;ve heard about the exodus from California, usually citing so many thousands or 10s of thousands of people leaving. But looking a the net population changes, Santa Clara County is down 5,000 from 2018-2019. Alameda, San Mateo, San Francisco are all up.<p>Silicon Valley is a system that regenerates from one generation to the next, and so far, always bigger and more influential than the last.

<i>&gt;Why did Fairchild have to choose its epicenter as a one dimensional strip of land between mountains and bay with nowhere to physically expand to? </i><p>Possibly because the 8 engineers that formed Fairchild defected from Shockley Semiconductor. William Shockley chose that area to start a company partly because his ailing mother lived there.[1]<p>Another contributing reason was a Navy Research center was in the Bay area so the military was an eager buyer of the latest semiconductor technology.<p>The seeds of a few players starts a &quot;business cluster&quot;.[2] Similar phenomenon as movie industry concentrated in Los Angeles. Country music in Nashville. Finance&#x2F;fashion&#x2F;publishing in New York.<p>I don&#x27;t think COVID in combination with better telecommuting technology like Zoom will disperse business clusters as some think. It definitely will enable more remote collaboration but the concentration of business clusters will still remain.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;William_Shockley#Shockley_Semiconductor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;William_Shockley#Shockley_Semi...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Business_cluster" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Business_cluster</a>

&gt; <i>Every year, we think that this cannot possibly continue, and every year it does.</i><p>&gt; <i>Until now. As covid and wildfire smoke have atomized us all into whatever living space we can afford, and into a grid of separate video boxes on a screen, the place as it was no longer exists. The forces that kept people here are temporarily gone. Through cratering rents San Francisco is finally proving to opponents of growth that supply and demand apply to housing too.</i><p>Intelligent people will twist themselves in knots trying to disprove basic economics. I see long threads on HN all the time of brilliant people convinced that supply and demand is just &quot;far too simple&quot; or &quot;totally disproved&quot; etc. etc.<p>This book is a classic <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0465060730" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0465...</a>

&gt; Why did Fairchild have to choose its epicenter as a one dimensional strip of land between mountains and bay with nowhere to physically expand to? Why did every starry-eyed post-bubble founder plop their headquarters in a dinky suburb that would fight them for office space and housing forever after? Abundance is an accident<p>The Valley grew up around Stanford: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;interestingengineering.com&#x2F;the-origin-story-of-silicon-valleyand-why-we-shouldnt-try-to-recreate-it" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;interestingengineering.com&#x2F;the-origin-story-of-silic...</a>.<p>Silicon Valley is the result of deliberate industrial policy and state investment into institutions. I grew up in northern Virginia and watched a similar thing happen in Virginia from 1989 to today.

Like many wildlife populations, Silicon Valley is cyclical, with a boom-and-bust cycle. 101 was quiet and San Francisco was a hipster haven rather than a tech-bro mecca during the dot-com bust, for example.<p>The fundamentals that make this a great place to live and venture will remain, though. The weather is great. The mixing pot of global languages and cultures stretches back to the gold rush. World class educational and &#x27;big tech&#x27; institutions aren&#x27;t going anywhere. Investors express difficulty in gauging personal rapport over a video call, and are still largely clustered in the Bay Area. The network effects around having a critical mass of brilliant technical minds are substantial.<p>I hope that this abundance can flow outward, to other cities, like Denver or Austin or Seattle or SLC, even if that makes my property values dip a little. I&#x27;ll enjoy digging up sand crabs at the beach (nobody I know calls them mole crabs) long after the latest wave of tech migrants have left.

If another state had the IP and non compete protections of California, had some wealthy former startup employees to found VCs, a liberal culture that celebrates risk (and its own arrogance, perhaps) then Silicon Valley might be threatened.<p>And I can&#x27;t be the only person that&#x27;s tried to leave California only to realize that everything but the housing costs are worse elsewhere.

Thank you cyb_ for posting this. What a well-written, beautifully-worded article. This is what makes HN special: this piece of writing wouldn&#x27;t show up anywhere else.<p>Speaking of HN and Silicon Valley, I see parallels. There are people who worked at creating the site and using it as a source of bright, idealistic young minds whom they could profit off of. They continue to work on keeping the site a good place to &#x27;live in&#x27;. Did HN grow by happenstance and &#x27;nature&#x27;? You bet. But you can&#x27;t deny the unseen hands of the many people who keep HN habitable.<p>Likewise, Silicon Valley is also no accident, although it has benefited greatly from happenstance and nature. Before SV, there was Lockheed Martin, and NASA, and further down south, Douglas Aircraft. Even today, the benefactors of Lockheed and co. indirectly fund Stanford, Berkeley, and many other places that continue to draw people from all over the world.<p>But I strongly feel that if it takes hold, the current trend of (some) technology workers&#x27; activism will be the coup de grace that finishes SV off for good.

Really enjoyed your observations on Pismo clams and Moss Landing crabs. Silicon Valley has always been about abundance.<p>CC Morse used the fertile Santa Clara Valley to build the world’s largest seed company. His land gave birth to the original VC and investment in Fairchild semiconductor. As long as there is opportunity there will be abundance. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twofeet.weebly.com&#x2F;walking-blog&#x2F;charles-copeland-morse" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twofeet.weebly.com&#x2F;walking-blog&#x2F;charles-copeland-mor...</a>

I think that this was a really interesting parallel to the natural world. There are two really important questions to be asking when trying to figure out if the exodus of Silicon Valley is temporary or permanent.<p>1. Is the damage or outside stressors that are causing the exodus permanent? (I really hope not...)<p>2. Was there a natural cause (repeatable, will continue) for the previous abundance, or was it just momentum and luck that kept Silicon Valley as abundant as it has been.<p>Point number two I leave for discussion.

Isn&#x27;t there a risk of amnesic shellfish poisoning[0] in that area? Looking at the wikipedia page for domoic acid[1] Pismo Beach is even mentioned by name. Could that be part of the reason why there&#x27;s an abundance of shellfish on that beach, i.e. because people leave them alone rather than risk permanent brain damage? I&#x27;d read it is a likely explanation for the incident that influenced Alfred Hitchcock&#x27;s The Birds[2].<p>Don&#x27;t want to spoil the article&#x27;s analogy, although you could perhaps make a new one connecting abundance to toxicity.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Amnesic_shellfish_poisoning" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Amnesic_shellfish_poisoning</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Domoic_acid" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Domoic_acid</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;arts-entertainment&#x2F;films&#x2F;news&#x2F;mystery-behind-hitchcocks-birds-is-solved-at-last-6282470.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;arts-entertainment&#x2F;films&#x2F;news&#x2F;...</a>

Nice, well written essay. Reminded me of Annie Dillard&#x27;s writing. I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s the end of Silicon Valley, but if it is and that results in spreading the abundance around the country more evenly that wouldn&#x27;t be a bad thing. Location in biology is important and limiting, however, location for our human endeavors is becoming less important due to technology.

Well-written, and a fascinating anecdote about the clams, but it lost me when it hoisted silicon valley up onto the same level as the wonders of nature itself. Really demonstrates the delusional sense of self-importance that the region is steeped in.

&gt; The forces that kept people here are temporarily gone.<p>I wonder a lot about this and its effects. We&#x27;re seeing big price increases here in Bend, Oregon and what seems like an influx of people from larger cities. Why live in a city if you can&#x27;t do city things?<p>Bend was already trendy though. I wonder if this effect will indeed spread out even further. There are a bunch of former logging&#x2F;ranching towns here in Oregon (and, indeed, throughout the west) that are not doing nearly so well. Roseburg, Pendleton, Baker City, Grants Pass come to mind. They have access to some nice outdoor spaces themselves. Will people start moving there, or will they constrain themselves to &#x27;the beaten path&#x27; of towns that their peer group considers a &#x27;nice place to live&#x27;?

The author spends most of the article discussing how mysterious and unknowable the underlying causes of abundance are. And then closes out the article with “this time it’s different”. That seems inconsistent.

Beautiful writing! But &quot;stacked into decrepit victorians&quot; might be taking some poetic license; isn&#x27;t a new arrival more likely to be stacked into a soulless condo tower or apartment complex, with the ambition of eventually moving into a little hillside box?

The author seems to be a good writer but it getting old hearing people wax poetic about their opinions on the valley - anyone got facts to support anything?

Spent nine years living in San Luis Obispo, and somehow I never encountered a single clam in Pismo. Was I missing something obvious?

A question on writing. Is this really good writing? The author spent the first 2&#x2F;3 of the article talking about beaches, clams, crabs and what not. It&#x27;s interesting read for readers who are interested in this kind of knowledge, but in general is slowly laying out an analogy a good writing practice?

That was beautiful.

That was beautiful

I&#x27;m kinda sick of these parallels being drawn between things that societies prioritize to the natural world. Economics isn&#x27;t a study of the natural world. The ecosystems driving crabs to the beach has nothing to do with capitalism.