Will Silicon Valley remain the best hub of tech in the next 10 years?
I want to move to the valley as its the hub of tech. Costs are high and moving to the US is difficult. Will US remain the hub of tech in the next 10 years? Do we have other options like Singapore?
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It's difficult to predict anything 10 years out.
But when projecting industry trends within a geography I look to Financial Services (FS) as a comparable.
Both Tech and FS sell "virtual goods and services" with a distribution model that does not necessarily lock them down to a location.
But even after the great depression of 1929 and repeated stock market collapses, New York is still a major FS hub.
So, it's really the people and local supporting infrastructure in a region that keep an industry going; not the distribution model.
I assume Silicon Valley will remain a leading tech hub in both consumer and enterprise tech in 10 years. The supporting infra is taken for granted.
Same thing can similarly be said about L.A. and the movie making business. Nothing prevents other locations from making movies, but it's hard to beat a century of built-up supporting infrastructure.
I don't think that a very good indicator. There is a difference between the tech industry and financial services. Financial services depend on markets that have a well known and established opening and closing time. In the US the markets are very much tied to 9:30AM to 4:00PM in the Eastern time zone.
How would that work if Wall Street were to move to US Central Time or Pacific Time? Would workers be expected to get up in the middle of the night?
The finance hub has actually moved a bit. Tt was in Philadelphia before NYC and "Wall Street" moved away from the area around the actual Wall Street after the Sept 11th attacks. Wall Street is largely in midtown Manhattan now and New Jersey. But still on the East Coast.
That hasn't really been the case for quite some time. A majority of option and equity trading now happens directly rather than on open exchanges and is thus immune to "market hours". Forex is 24 hour. And London is still the finance powerhouse despite not being in the largest economy (and not being in the Euro, but manages the vast majority of Euro bond trading) and in fact being in a country the rest of whose economy is a basket case.
But physical propinquity still matters, it seems, for the human intangibles.
Its not just the actual exchanges like the NYSE or NASDAQ but all of the other participants - the investment banks, the hedge funds, the ratings agencies, the analysts, the financial press. Following the sun, the day breaks first on the East Coast in the U.S. So yes while it could move to Boston, Mass, Charlotte, N.C. or back to Philadelphia where incidentally it was before Wall Street its probably limited to the boundaries of the Eastern Time Zone in U.S.
In LA you have something similar with movies -- most people are aspiring actors and there are many people in filming and sets. However, working as a programmer in LA versus SF is very different -- there are a lot fewer engineers and entrepreneurs here per mile than the Bay Area.
It comes down to proximity to people of the same talent set. Where are the people who are good at X living? That's where X is thriving. If suddenly all the engineers left Silicon Valley, it would no longer be a tech hub.
+ The move towards more embodied intelligent machines, be it home automation systems, internet of things, autonomous cars, or robots, makes it likely that location is still gonna be important and we will still see hubs indeed. Remote work for software is one thing, for hardware or hybridware it's more difficult.
+ Ten years might not be long from a technical point of view, but this is about people migrating to other places. Population dynamics might not as fast-paced as tech.
+ One thing is inevitable: a financial downtime between now and then. How the Valley will react, depends... It means fewer venture-backed new vultures on the market, a less crazy search for personnel, etc.
+ Economies of scale will always apply. High densities of companies, people, universities, homes, and other entities, will lead to higher and higher productivity. If you really want to compete with the Valley you'll have to work on these metrics as a region. Check https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/12/why-denser-cities-are-s....
The change that may occur is that Silicon Valley, while remaining in the lead, will see its centrality diminished by the emergence of decentralized funding using ERC20 tokens, aka the token sale model, which is quickly approaching traditional venture capital volumes [1].
I don't believe this would hurt SV's economy, as the decline in funding friction, while having very geographically distributed direct benefits, will have the second order effect of expanding the tech sector, and with it, tech companies operating in sectors not currently amenable to these new nontraditional enterprise structures and funding models.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_funded_crowdfu...
SF is still doing well, but it's no longer #1 when it comes to biotech VC dollars. That title goes to Boston now. And I can say that working in the industry, Boston has much more buzz when it comes to biotech than SF at this point.
Most of them closed. Pfizer still has some R&D there. There are a couple mid-sized biotechs there, but it's be a rough last few years. Similar to Seattle.
However, the prospects of moving there are not significantly better than the US. China is opening up new classes of visas and making certain business licenses more accessible, but my general impression from being in the ecosystem and talking with locals and foreigners is that it's difficult to get a sustainable business off the ground. The immigration situation (if that is a goal) is bleak.