How to Be Silicon Valley, K-W editionEverybody's favourite Accordion Guy, Joey deVilla, has started up an impromptu series on his blog about how Toronto could be a Silicon Valley. This, in turn, was inspired by Paul Graham's essay, How to Be Silicon Valley. Now, I love me some Paul Graham, and the essay gives some interesting tips. For those too lazy to follow any of these links, Paul lays out a bunch of stuff a city/region/whatever needs to achieve a kind of Silicon Valley critical mass. First and foremost, you need two types of people: Rich People and Nerds. Then you should probably have a bunch of other stuff as well:
Without going through the whole list, I think we score pretty well. I think this is a pretty nerd-friendly town. (As a spurious datapoint, I'm sure we have more comic shops per capita than Toronto does. Amazingly, almost all of them are girl-friendly, too. Talk about progressive!). So we have nerds. And thanks mostly to RIM, we have rich people, too. And people are working to build on that. Waterloo would really, really like to be another Silicon Valley. And, to be honest, I would too. Not least because I want to make cool things. I want to my friends to be making cool things too. I want to make cool things with them. But Waterloo doesn't really feel like Silicon Valley, does it? So what's missing? Why isn't K-W another Silicon Valley? Well, I don't think we have the attitude down, for one thing. There are definite elements of the stodgy and conservative around here. We have innovators, but we don't have big risk-takers. We had OpenText long before Google, but rather than going out and trying to parlee their search engine into some sort of web application development platorm, they got all boring and tried to actually make money, and so although they're doing okay, nobody's ever heard of them. Waterloo doesn't feel hip and exciting. We don't have any unconferences. We don't even have much of a blogging community. Look at the Waterloo Wellington Bloggers Association, for example. While something like GTA Bloggers or The Torontoist are concerned with gallery openings and capital-I Issues, we seem to get mired in tawdry politics and boring business practicalities. This doesn't bespeak a high-flying, anything-is-possible sort of attitude. In spite of all the universities and things, we don't really have places (physical or otherwise) for like-minded geeks to gather and dream big, geeky dreams. And I think that's what's really missing. One thing you realize when you grow up is that the world you want to live in isn't going to make itself. If you want something, you have to work towards it. But what does that mean? In practical terms, I'm not sure yet. I don't think I'm going to be putting up posters for my own unconference just yet, but I think I might have to get off my ass at some point. comments:This post is archived. Comments are disabled. Feel free to send me email if you have something to say. | |
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