How to Create a Local High-Tech Hub at Outside the Valley

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How to Create a Local High-Tech Hub

By Will | July 1, 2007

Notebook_todo One of the coolest essays on creating a tech hub was written by Paul Graham. How to Be Silicon Valley gives the recipe for cooking up the next tech hub. He makes a lot of important points about what creates a tech center, and what does not. Here are some of my key take aways:

1. A tech hub takes nerds and rich people to fund them.
2. A lot of the rich people that want to fund high-tech startups are nerds themselves.
3. Therefore, you need to create a nerd-haven – a place that will attract and keep nerds around.

How do you create this nerd-attracting place? There are two main components.

1. Create a city with a tech creative-class culture. Tech-creative are a special sub-set of the creative class. A youthful and creative technologist type person usually likes lots of independent stores, coffee shops, and youthful activities like hiking. A vibrant urban center-point is a good start.
2. Create a city with a world-class university. What it takes to create a world-class university - is big name professors. Big name professors will take a lot of money to lure and pay to stay, but once the momentum gets going, new top thinkers will want to come to the university to teach and learn. This creates a ongoing cycle of top people attracting other top people. It may cost several hundred million dollars to get started, which is a lot of money. But, if you live in an urban center, go check out how much you spent on your last sports stadium.

Some cities get confused and think they can create a tech center simply by fiat. They may hire some bureaucrats in the government that are in charge of high-tech startups, or they may build an office park and give it a high tech name, and invite large tech companies to move in. There may be some limited success by these methods, but the young technologists are not looking for bureaucrats or buildings – these things are actually the last things on their minds.

One main key seems to be that smart/ creative people like to be around other smart/ creative people, so once you get the ball rolling, it can be self perpetuating.

So work towards creating a city with some personality and a world class university. These are some basic fist steps to pulling in the technologist creative-class people you want. And, the dynamic interactions between the right types of people is where future ideas are launched and funded.

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