Paul Graham - Essays

This sounds hard. Actually it might be easy. My professor friends, when they're deciding where they'd like to work, consider one thing above all: the quality of the other faculty. What attracts professors is good colleagues. So if you managed to recruit, en masse, a significant number of the best young researchers, you could create a first-rate university from nothing overnight. And you could do that for surprisingly little. If you paid 200 people hiring bonuses of $3 million apiece, you could put together a faculty that would bear comparison with any in the world. And from that point the chain reaction would be self-sustaining. So whatever it costs to establish a mediocre university, for an additional half billion or so you could have a great one. [3]

However, merely creating a new university would not be enough to start a silicon valley. The university is just the seed. It has to be planted in the right soil, or it won't germinate. Plant it in the wrong place, and you just create Carnegie-Mellon.

To spawn startups, your university has to be in a town that has attractions other than the university. It has to be a place where investors want to live, and students want to stay after they graduate.

The two like much the same things, because most startup investors are nerds themselves. So what do nerds look for in a town? Their tastes aren't completely different from other people's, because a lot of the towns they like most in the US are also big tourist destinations: San Francisco, Boston, Seattle. But their tastes can't be quite mainstream either, because they dislike other big tourist destinations, like New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.

There has been a lot written lately about the "creative class." The thesis seems to be that as wealth derives increasingly from ideas, cities will prosper only if they attract those who have them. That is certainly true; in fact it was the basis of Amsterdam's prosperity 400 years ago.

A lot of nerd tastes they share with the creative class in general. For example, they like well-preserved old neighborhoods instead of cookie-cutter suburbs, and locally-owned shops and restaurants instead of national chains. Like the rest of the creative class, they want to live somewhere with personality.

What exactly is personality? I think it's the feeling that each building is the work of a distinct group of people. A town with personality is one that doesn't feel mass-produced. So if you want to make a startup hub-- or any town to attract the "creative class"-- you probably have to ban large development projects. When a large tract has been developed by a single organization, you can always tell. [4]

Most towns with personality are old, but they don't have to be. Old towns have two advantages: they're denser, because they were laid out before cars, and they're more varied, because they were built one building at a time. You could have both now. Just have building codes that ensure density, and ban large scale developments.

A corollary is that you have to keep out the biggest developer of all: the government. A government that asks "How can we build a silicon valley?" has probably ensured failure by the way they framed the question. You don't build a silicon valley; you let one grow.

If you want to attract nerds, you need more than a town with personality. You need a town with the right personality. Nerds are a distinct subset of the creative class, with different tastes from the rest. You can see this most clearly in New York, which attracts a lot of creative people, but few nerds. [5]

What nerds like is the kind of town where people walk around smiling. This excludes LA, where no one walks at all, and also New York, where people walk, but not smiling. When I was in grad school in Boston, a friend came to visit from New York. On the subway back from the airport she asked "Why is everyone smiling?" I looked and they weren't smiling. They just looked like they were compared to the facial expressions she was used to.

If you've lived in New York, you know where these facial expressions come from. It's the kind of place where your mind may be excited, but your body knows it's having a bad time. People don't so much enjoy living there as endure it for the sake of the excitement. And if you like certain kinds of excitement, New York is incomparable. It's a hub of glamour, a magnet for all the shorter half-life isotopes of style and fame.

Nerds don't care about glamour, so to them the appeal of New York is a mystery. People who like New York will pay a fortune for a small, dark, noisy apartment in order to live in a town where the cool people are really cool. A nerd looks at that deal and sees only: pay a fortune for a small, dark, noisy apartment.

Nerds will pay a premium to live in a town where the smart people are really smart, but you don't have to pay as much for that. It's supply and demand: glamour is popular, so you have to pay a lot for it.

Most nerds like quieter pleasures. They like cafes instead of clubs; used bookshops instead of fashionable clothing shops; hiking instead of dancing; sunlight instead of tall buildings. A nerd's idea of paradise is Berkeley or Boulder.

It's the young nerds who start startups, so it's those specifically the city has to appeal to. The startup hubs in the US are all young-feeling towns. This doesn't mean they have to be new. Cambridge has the oldest town plan in America, but it feels young because it's full of students.

What you can't have, if you want to create a silicon valley, is a large, existing population of stodgy people. It would be a waste of time to try to reverse the fortunes of a declining industrial town like Detroit or Philadelphia by trying to encourage startups. Those places have too much momentum in the wrong direction. You're better off starting with a blank slate in the form of a small town. Or better still, if there's a town young people already flock to, that one.

The Bay Area was a magnet for the young and optimistic for decades before it was associated with technology. It was a place people went in search of something new. And so it became synonymous with California nuttiness. There's still a lot of that there. If you wanted to start a new fad-- a new way to focus one's "energy," for example, or a new category of things not to eat-- the Bay Area would be the place to do it. But a place that tolerates oddness in the search for the new is exactly what you want in a startup hub, because economically that's what startups are. Most good startup ideas seem a little crazy; if they were obviously good ideas, someone would have done them already.

(How many people are going to want computers in their houses ? What, another search engine?)

That's the connection between technology and liberalism. Without exception the high-tech cities in the US are also the most liberal. But it's not because liberals are smarter that this is so. It's because liberal cities tolerate odd ideas, and smart people by definition have odd ideas.

Conversely, a town that gets praised for being "solid" or representing "traditional values" may be a fine place to live, but it's never going to succeed as a startup hub. The 2004 presidential election, though a disaster in other respects, conveniently supplied us with a county-by-county map of such places. [6]

To attract the young, a town must have an intact center. In most American cities the center has been abandoned, and the growth, if any, is in the suburbs. Most American cities have been turned inside out. But none of the startup hubs has: not San Francisco, or Boston, or Seattle. They all have intact centers. [7] My guess is that no city with a dead center could be turned into a startup hub. Young people don't want to live in the suburbs.