In fact we didn’t fritter it away – we pretty much did everything we said we were going to do, including running out of money, but that’s another story.

I have no doubt that the culture of freedom, relaxed working practices and putting an emphasis on fun in SV startups and tech companies has engendered a fair degree of innovation and creative thinking. I just wonder though, have the vast amounts of VC cash swilling around the area for the last few decades masked the fact that the same level of innovation could have been developed in other ways. Sometimes it seems that the first creative idea a SV startup CEO has is “how do I burn all this cash in a new way”.

http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_29/b3690082.htm

Electron, the valley is a huge talent pool and an incredibly fertile place for the exchange of ideas and for meeting and hiring the brightest minds on the planet. You don’t have to be there, but it helps. I have never quite got why Irish businesses tend to open sales offices there though or why EI encourages it. If you are only selling to other IT organisations then you have missed your market a bit. Sales people are among the least likely to benefit from being there.

There is also an argument that it tends to restrict thinking. For example VCs jump on the ‘next big thing’ and direct investment at it (social networking currently) and away from what might actually be better ideas. There are assumed truisms also that rarely get challenged (google owns search, MS owns the desktop, Oracle owns the server etc) so the challenges to these orthodoxies (Ubuntu, Firefox, MySQL) get developed outside the valley.

Ireland has a pretty poor talent pool and getting worse if it can’t attract migrants. You can get around this by remote working as you demonstrate but the face to face cross fertilisation is not there and this is evidenced by the complete failure of any Irish companies to emerge and survive on a global scale despite 20 to 30 years of domestic and foreign investment.

the UK is similar. I can only think of Sage which is largely a domestic success story anyhow and insignificant globally. Yet the valley churns out $1bn organisations almost annually it seems and makes it look easy whereas the evidence from everywhere else is that it is extremely hard. That’s special and ambitious people will want to go there.