Warren Seen

There are times when this whole internet thing just doesn’t cut it. Times when paradoxically, the closer it brings you to something, the further away you feel. What am I talking about? I’m talking about The Valley.

“Ha!” I can hear already the snorts of derision from regular inhabitants of the stretch of 101 that leads from Menlo Park to San Jose. Bear with me for a second before you launch into a tirade about vast expanses of grey concrete, exorbitant housing costs and nightmare commutes and I’ll explain myself properly.

Yes, I have visited the valley briefly, in the summer of 2004. Even then, there was a sense of optimism and purpose about the place.

I certainly don’t envy any of those negative aspects of life there - hey, I work from home, my commute is about 30 seconds from the kitchen to my office, as long as I don’t trip over any cats.

What I do envy is proximity. The concentration of talent in such a small geographical area is just crazy.

Take a look at the web 2.0 Innovation Map and tell me it’s not the case. Sure, there are plenty of startups located elsewhere, but not in the same concentration as in the valley. Not to mention access to VCs and a suite of deep pocketed companies the built to flip set can pimp themselves to.

Now even me, who is 99% coder, and about 1% entrepreneur, I know that it’s all about the networking baby… and the networking possibilities in that kind of situation are much greater than me sitting here in a timezone which is +17 hours from the West Coast.

I mean, if Marc Andreessen walked into my local coffee shop, I’d fall over. Hell, I’d fall over if anyone else in my local coffee place even knew what Netscape WAS. At least they know how to make a decent coffee.

But it’s not even about the “big names” that you might bump into… it’s simply about critical mass. Cool stuff like BarCamp or SuperHappyDevHouse is a total non-starter in a sleepy city (of 100,000) where you can count the number of companies doing software development on two hands and still have digits to spare. It’s like living in a vacuum, which possibly explains the loud sucking noise I hear.

So what’s a boy with a big idea to do?Living vicariously through blogs and Flickr photostreams only gets you so far. Moving is not an option, and somehow I think an 18 hour commute won’t work

Clearly, the way forward is to treat this as a constraint and move on. Better still, capitalise on locality, a la Ben Barren and gnoos…

“Making it” locally has its own challenges though, Nik Cubrilovic at OmniDrive has discovered something I learnt back in 2003 with my last employer, Australian venture capital is harder to get and just generally lacking in any kind of upside to make it worthwhile when the barriers to US entry are so low.

On the other hand, a “build to flip” operation doesn’t seem viable, what are the real odds of getting plucked from the other side of the world - particularly if you weren’t the same team that created Kazaa?

Maybe it’s ok to be a big fish swimming in the small pond, if you’re still big enough to make it in a bigger pond?

Global… Local. Global, Local. Global/Local.

Hmm…

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 4th, 2006 at 2:52 am and is filed under web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.