Silicon Valley vs. New York: Adversity

As part of a series about the advan­tages New York has over Sil­i­con Val­ley and why it may become dom­i­nant, let’s exam­ine the dif­fer­ence in deal­ing with adversity.

New York is not always an easy place to live in. Poor band­width, inad­e­quate mobile net­works, and mas­sive pop­u­la­tion breed adver­sity. New York­ers have learned to deal with it and lever­age it to cre­ate new experiences.

Adver­sity is Potential

But where some peo­ple look at gaps as an exam­ple of why some­thing or some­one can­not ful­fill its full poten­tial, entre­pre­neurs look at those as oppor­tu­ni­ties to cre­ate new busi­nesses. So things like mak­ing it impos­si­ble to open sam­ple sale places in mul­ti­ple loca­tions around the globe led to the cre­ation of Gilt, cre­at­ing a whole new model for online com­merce; issues around improv­ing gov­ern­ment effi­ciency led to see-click-fix; or more effi­cient ways to locate where your friends have gath­ered led to FourSquare.

Another aspect of the advan­tage of adver­sity is that it forces New York­ers to think about solu­tions that are adverse-condition resis­tant. So while many look at inap­pro­pri­ate band­width being an issue, it’s led New Yorker to cre­ate solu­tions that can work in the US as well as over­seas, in mar­kets where band­width is more constrained.

I was recently chat­ting with a New York based founder who told me that he was relo­cat­ing his tech­ni­cal team from Ukraine to Esto­nia because, beyond the cost of employ­ees, Eston­ian users tend to use slower com­put­ers and have less band­width. I was con­fused as to why that would be a good thing so he explained to me that since his com­pany was devel­op­ing soft­ware for mobile devices, it was bet­ter to have pro­gram­mers who knew how to wring every sin­gle bit of per­for­mance out of a 5 to 10 year old com­puter because that’s the kind of proces­sor you get on a mobile device today. Eston­ian pro­gram­mers have been doing that for a long time and it has now become a valu­able skill, one he couldn’t find in US markets.

I, not unlike many peo­ple in both the val­ley and New York, have often called for more band­width as some­thing that is essen­tial to future growth but that entre­pre­neur showed to me that such a call may not be nec­es­sary: smarter use of lim­ited resources may be a more effi­cient approach and only when we have have wrung out every lit­tle bit we could out of the band­width and pro­cess­ing power we have should we start beg­ging for more.

Because invest­ments in large-scale ambi­tious tech­no­log­i­cal projects have been suc­cess­ful in the past, money in Sil­i­con Val­ley tends to be less scared when it comes to invest­ing heav­ily in cre­at­ing brand new infra­struc­tures. So when an adverse con­di­tion arises out of con­straints, there is a nat­ural ten­dency to address the con­straint by throw­ing more resources at it. This brute force approach may not always be the best way to han­dle it (although, in some cases, it could be: for exam­ple, dig­ging up the exist­ing elec­tric grid and replac­ing it with a smart grid would be some­thing to look at).

So whereas the val­ley looks at a way to steam­roll a con­straint, New York­ers look at a way to mine it.

Take­away: Don’t look at adver­sity as some­thing that can be over­come with brute force, deal with it as a nor­mal con­di­tion and you will find inno­v­a­tive workarounds.

Update: This post is part of a series of why New York may gain the top posi­tion in the tech world, dis­plac­ing Sil­i­con Val­ley. The whole series is now online: Intro, Cul­ture Part 1, Cul­ture Part 2, Tal­ent, Adver­sity, Busi­ness