I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Interesting essay here on what it takes to be Silicon Valley.
Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it?
Going down the checklist list, a lot of what made Silicon Valley we’re seeing in Wellington right now. Nerds clustering. Money and geeks mingling. Industry insiders reinvesting. A vibrant community.
Not that we want to recreate Silicon Valley, but you can see the Wellington IT community rapidly growing up and pushing off shore. We are are maturing quickly and our natural traditional disadvantages - isolation and small size - flip around to be competitive differentiators. Our small size allow networks to develop faster. Talent meets faster and knowledge gained gets distributed quickly across the community.
We’re seeing a number of people in the wider NZ industry relocating to Wellington. There is a buzz. A gravity.
So are we seeing the development of similar phenomena as to what happened in the Valley through the 70’s and 80’s happening here? I think so.
We will be different however in that I don’t think that the big technology industry, like that exists in the US moves in as well. Our characteristics will likely be a collection of smaller, nimble firms. The 0-60 space is where we play best.
blog
[...] Going even further, there is yet another level, when you can fund new ideas properly right from the start. This is the ‘insider money‘ phenomena that leads to ‘Silicon Welly‘ [...]