Where do you headquarter your Silicon Valley startup?
Silicon Valley Shaped by Technology and Traffic - The New York Times
[A] look at the microclusters within Silicon Valley demonstrates the business relationships, the social connections and the seamless communication that animate the region's economy. It also suggests the human nuance behind the Valley's success and shows why that success is not easy to copy, export or outsource.
"These microclusters turn out to be a very efficient way to innovate, to see what works and what fails, and do it extremely rapidly," said AnnaLee Saxenian, an expert in regional economies and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
New companies, and emerging industry clusters, seek to build on and tap the skills of older clusters. While there are plenty of exceptions, it is generally true that hardware clusters -- semiconductors, disk drives and network equipment, for example -- are in the South Valley, around San Jose and Santa Clara. The actual manufacturing of hardware, of course, moved to cheaper places years ago. What remains in the Valley is product design and engineering.
Moving farther north in the Valley typically means moving farther away from the guts of the machine and climbing up the tiers of computing from chips to layers of business and consumer software and then into San Francisco, home to people with online advertising and digital design skills.
For start-ups, the location decision can be critical, particularly because of the area's notorious traffic jams. Lately the calculations about traffic, talent and real estate have become trickier because the Valley's economy is surging again, driving up rents and salaries and clogging roads.
Big industry-leading companies tend to become the center of gravity in each cluster: in semiconductors in Santa Clara, it is Intel; in networking in San Jose, Cisco; in database software in Redwood Shores, the giant is Oracle; and of course, in Internet services in Mountain View, it is Google.
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