Valley vs. New York: Culture

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 culture.

In order to fully under­stand the con­cept of peo­ple at the cen­ter, you must immerse your­self in the sub­ject. You must meet peo­ple out­side of your own cir­cle, out­side of your own eco­nomic sphere, out­side of your industry. And you can’t do that if you’re liv­ing in an area with a sin­gle dom­i­nant industry, commuting largely via per­sonal car and inter­act­ing pri­mar­ily, either at work or after work, with peo­ple in your own industry.

Mono­cul­ture vs. Polyculture

The first chal­lenge Sil­i­con Val­ley will have to over­come in order to retain its supremacy is that it will need to diver­sify beyond technology.

New York doesn’t have that prob­lem because tech­nol­ogy has never been its pri­mary indus­try (and prob­a­bly never will be as New York seems to abhor the ideas of a sin­gle cul­ture or group being dom­i­nant. Sure, Wall Street has had some power in the city but so has the media space, and the fash­ion indus­try, and the horse-drawn car­riage indus­try. But each of those indus­tries even­tu­ally found itself con­fronted with some set­back, erod­ing its power base fur­ther (in his­tor­i­cal terms, the power of Wall Street started erod­ing in the 1960s, with the fight over the cre­ation of the World Trade Cen­ter, and while it has seen ups and downs over the last 50 years, it is no longer the dom­i­nant force in New York).

The exis­tence of mul­ti­ple indus­tries in New York has forced the New York tech­nol­ogy field to think about build­ing prod­ucts that are attrac­tive to peo­ple out­side of the tech­nol­ogy field. As a result, a large part of the tech field has been blind­sided by the suc­cess of prod­ucts like meetup, etsy, and and gilt because they were not solu­tions based on heavy algo­rithms but based on input out­side of technology.

As Brady For­rest recently pointed out, one of the great think about New York is that “it’s never about tech­nol­ogy only, it’s always tech and some­thing else”. And that some­thing else is some­thing that would be very hard to repro­duce for the val­ley. The cross-germination that hap­pens here will, as evo­lu­tion has always told us, bring up new mod­els and new busi­nesses that could not pos­si­bly sprout out of a mono-cultural system.

Another aspect of this is that there seems to be an inher­ent pen­du­lum in the tech­nol­ogy world, mov­ing from times of great inno­va­tions that arise out of inno­va­tion for innovation’s sake, great feats of engi­neer­ing which arise with no pre-existing use for them. When the pen­du­lum is on that side, the Val­ley shines. For exam­ple, there was no pre-existing use for semi­con­duc­tors when engi­neers at Fairchild Semi came up with them. The Fairchild lead­er­ship failed to see this oppor­tu­nity and left it to oth­ers to mine. This was typ­i­cal valley-like world-changing type of inno­va­tion that New York-type lead­ers failed to see.

How­ever, the pen­du­lum often has to swing from that space where rad­i­cal tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion hap­pens to a place where busi­ness inte­gra­tion (and even­tu­ally busi­ness inno­va­tion) arises. When the pen­du­lum switches to that end, hav­ing com­pa­nies that mix exper­tise in the tech­no­log­i­cal field sit­ting side by side with exper­tise in a spe­cific busi­ness field helps cre­ate the new gen­er­a­tion of companies.

We are now in that sec­ond part of the cycle and New York has the lead because of its over­lap with many other indus­tries. For the val­ley, this can be a dan­ger­ous time unless it finds the next big rad­i­cal algorithmic-based tech­ni­cal change. For New York, it is an oppor­tunis­tic time as it can fos­ter the cre­ation of some star­tups that are work­ing on that next set of rad­i­cal inno­va­tions while at the same time mine the exper­tise inher­ent to its posi­tion as a dom­i­nant com­mer­cial center.

Take­away: Mono­cul­tures have neg­a­tive impact. Poly­cul­tures take longer to cre­ate pow­er­ful organ­isms but inher­ently build ones that are more adaptable.

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