Silicon Valley is the place to be

Filed in archive Entrepreneurship on February 3, 2006

The RedHerring carries a story about the networking skill of Silicon Valley:

"Similar stories abound in Silicon Valley, which still soaks up more than a third of all venture capital in the United States and incubates more startups than any other region. The narrow stretch of land between San Francisco and San Jose has given birth to some of the biggest names in technology, from Hewlett-Packard to Intel to Oracle to Apple Computer to Sun Microsystems, many of which spawned startups of their own.

The area is not only full of young technology companies, it's also replete with people who, like Mr. Lanza, act as catalysts, connecting those who need money, employees, managers, accountants, lawyers, and business partners with the people and companies most likely to fit the bill.

"The advantage of the kinds of networks [Silicon Valley] has and the overlay between industrial and legal and venture capital and university networks, where all those networks feed into one another-that's fairly unique," says Mark Granovetter, a Stanford sociologist spearheading a research project aimed at tracking and mapping the relationships between key players in Silicon Valley. "Regions that don't have all this reciprocity back and forth find it difficult to stay at the cutting edge."

Many other regions-including the Boston area, Silicon Valley's biggest U.S. competitor-are dominated by "insular, secretive, inward-looking firms, universities, banks, and research institutions that hinder the social networking and open information exchange that support multiple entrepreneurial experiments in Silicon Valley," says AnnaLee Saxenian, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Regional Advantage, an examination of the differences between Boston and Silicon Valley."

Coming into Silicon Valley last year from Germany I can certainly attest the enormous entrepreneurial drive that can be found in this area. So many startups, so many networking events, such an abundance of Venture Capital firms in a close proximity combined with a very pleasant climate and geography make this place almost perfect.

Sure other communities come close and can even beat the Bay Area in some disciplines but overall there is no place like Silicon Valley for entrepreneurs if you ask me.