Why Silicon Valley Will Continue to Rule, by Leslie Berlin — Medium
▻https://medium.com/backchannel/why-silicon-valley-will-continue-to-rule-c0cbb441e22f
The skills learned through building and commercializing one layer of the pearl underpinned and supported the development of the next layer or developments in related industries. Apple, for instance, is a company that people often speak of as sui generis, but Apple Computer’s early key employees had worked at Intel, Atari, or Hewlett-Packard. Apple’s venture capital backers had either backed Fairchild or Intel or worked there.
(...) Stanford, meanwhile, was actively trying to build up its physics and engineering departments. Professor (and Provost from 1955 to 1965) Frederick Terman worried about a “brain drain” of Stanford graduates to the East Coast, where jobs were plentiful. So he worked with President J.E. Wallace Sterling to create what Terman called “a community of technical scholars” in which the links between industry and academia were fluid. This meant that as the new transistor-cum-microchip companies began to grow, technically knowledgeable engineers were already there. These trends only accelerated as the population exploded.
(...) Historian Richard White says that the modern American West was “born modern” because the population followed, rather than preceded, connections to national and international markets. Silicon Valley was born post-modern, with those connections not only in place but so taken for granted that people were comfortable experimenting with new types of business structures and approaches strikingly different from the traditional East Coast business practices with roots nearly two centuries old.
(...) timing was crucial. Silicon Valley was kick-started by federal dollars. Whether it was the Department of Defense buying 100% of the earliest microchips, Hewlett-Packard and Lockheed selling products to military customers, or federal research money pouring into Stanford, Silicon Valley was the beneficiary of Cold War fears that translated to the Department of Defense being willing to spend almost anything on advanced electronics and electronic systems. The government, in effect, served as the Valley’s first venture capitalist.
(...) 2/3 of people in working in sci-tech Valley industries who have completed their college education are foreign born. Silicon Valley, now, as in the past, is built and sustained by immigrants.
(...) Venture capital is important for developing products into companies, but the federal government still funds the great majority of basic research in this country. Silicon Valley is highly dependent on that basic research — “No Basic Research, No iPhone” is my favorite title from a recently released report on research and development in the United States.
#disruption #silicon_valley #histoire #silicon_army cc @thibnton