Interesting timing to see the techmeme-reported blog interest in <a href=http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/10/10/wikimedia-will-move-to-san-franciscoWikimedia's move to San Francisco with the simultaneous (but as yet-unconnected by Techmeme) of Paul Graham’s Why to Move to a Startup Hub. As part of my continuing live experiment with Techmeme, I’m wondering if this posting will collapse them into a single Techmeme thread.
There’s an interesting corollary to Paul’s argument that all startups (at least all web startups) ought to move to Silicon Valley. That is, if you’re an investor, you’re better off looking AWAY from Silicon Valley, since where the action is today is a) much more expensive and b) much more driven by today’s fashion than tomorrow’s innovation. A lot of the most interesting innovations today are in alternate startup hubs. Biotech, financial services, next gen hardware, mobile — these aren’t happening primarily in the Valley. (Paul does admit that “If your startup is connected to a specific industry, you may be better off in one of its centers. A startup doing something related to entertainment might want to be in New York or LA.” But that raises the question: where are the startup centers for the NEXT wave of innovation, not the current one.)
It’s also interesting to see how much blog activity is getting driven by press releases such as the Wikimedia one. At Radar, we tend to ignore press releases, figuring that if the PR flacks are already on it, it’s not really news any more.
Update: got picked up on the Paul Graham story right away, but not the Wikimedia story. Realized I’d linked to the press release, not to the first story mentioned on Techmeme. Fixed the link, will see how quickly it updates, and whether the two stories collapse.