Silicon Valley

I am in San Jose this week attending a conference. Although San Jose is at the centre of Silicon Valley, the downtown area itself is pretty small and very quiet. It’s the smaller, less well known cities around here where you find all of the hi-tech household names. Apple are based in Cupertino, Intel in Santa Clara and you drive by many others: Oracle, Adobe and Google. The catalyst for much of the innovation in this part of the world has been Stanford University. Stanford is based in Palo Alto, just to the north of San Jose. It’s a combination of factors that has lead to this area being the hi-tech capital of the world. In particular, the research work being done in Stanford combined with a ready supply of cash from Venture Capitalists that have their offices nearby. There is a history here of young people trying out their ideas in Stanford and when they hit on an idea that they think has potential they are able to access a local supply of money that gives them time to convert their idea into a business.

These factors result in the start-up companies staying in the area. That and, of course, the ready supply of local talent.

After the supply of money being tight here for a few years, the signs are that it is more readily available now. The VC’s are again willing to put money into potential businesses that don’t have a clear revenue model. They are willing to gamble on some of these in the hope that they will turn into the next Google or E-Bay.  

 San Jose skyline

This entry was posted on 26. February 2008 at 03:18 and is filed under innovation, international, General. 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.