Paul Graham wrote a much linked-to post last month called How to be Silicon Valley (You can read many responses to this on popularity aggregator and comment site Reddit).
As a quick summary, Graham contends that to create a technology hub, you need two types of people:
- Rich people
- Nerds
you don’t need:
- Bureaucrats
- Buildings
and you need to have:
- Universities
- Personality
- Things that appeal to nerds
- Youth and liberalism
- Time
Joey has written several interesting comments about this, particularly about its applicability to Toronto. I suggest you read at least Part 0 and Part 1:
My commentary: I believe Graham has missed three important parts to the success of Silicon Valley, with direct applicability to the situation in Toronto
- Big Tech: there’s lot of big tech companies in Silicon Valley. The Old West wasn’t all cowboys, it was mostly ranchers. People need somewhere to go that will pay them when their first, second and third startups fail. Startups need a place to draw employees from, once they get past the first dozen.
- Geography: south of San Francisco, it’s easy to get from anywhere to anywhere along the 101, 280 and 82. San Francisco is a traffic dead end, which is why we here a lot more about the strip malled Mountain View than the more beautiful (as I remember it) San Rafael.
- Age integration: one thing I’ve noticed at conferences and camps I’ve gone to in the Bay Area is age integration. It’s not weird or unusual to be 40 years old, or 50, or 30 or 60. You are what you can do, not what you look like.
Where does Toronto come up short here (on Graham’s list and on my amendments):
- Personality. In particular, here’s Toronto’s idea of a world class civic center, which I think speaks for itself. Large granite slabs. Here’s some self-congratulatory drivel about how great this is. I understand they’re having the same jackasses redesign Bloor Street near Yonge.
- The Commercial Concentration Tax, aka “Let’s f*ck Toronto and move all big businesses to 905” tax, passed by the Peterson Liberal government and tacitly approved by the Conservatives and NDP. The IBM Lab, where I first worked when I moved from Toronto, has moved from Don Mills/Eglinton to somewhere deep in Markham. Rogers is relocating many of its developers from Mt. Pleasant avenue to Brampton. Why not? It’s a hell of a lot cheaper. Thus, there’s no pool of potential employers, management, tech-aware support and HR people, and so forth for downtown startups to draw from.
- Geography. Downtown Toronto is great for young people, but every meter you move away from the subway line, not so great for people with families. Liberty Village would be a great place to put BlogMatrix, if we really started making a go of it except I’d be commuting—within Toronto!—for 1 1/2 to 2 hours a day. Wilson station through Finch has great subway access, but the North York sector of Toronto (Mel Lastman Square, bah) is soulless as Dundas Square.
- Possibly because the previous two points, the two TorCamps and one TorDemoCamp I have attended have skewed pretty young. Not that there’s any thing wrong with that, except for at the DemoCamp when there was a moderate amount of sneering at a enterprise level app. Believe it or not kid, there’s important issues out there that need solving that are important, even though you’ve never heard of them. And “enterprise” doesn’t (have to) mean boring and process-laden, it means it has to scale scale scale. Just like that Web 2.0 app you’re plugging away at. Just because it works with 5 people doesn’t mean it’s going to work for 50,000 “with a little more hardware”.
If the first two issues can be addressed, I think the third can be overcome (there’s lots of great reasons for concentrating businesses in the core) and that it turn will help fix the fourth. Should we be optimistic about a solution for the first two issues? Both are political in nature, but in the era of progressive paternalism—which lusts after the concentration of wealth and power in centralized government—well… let’s just say we’re making our own bed, anyway.