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Old Posted Nov 14, 2019, 5:23 PM
iheartthed iheartthed is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Quixote View Post
Snap gave rise to Stories (essentially the equivalent of Facebook “status updates” from back in the day), which Instagram subsequently hijacked and used to elevate the platform to another level of popularity. This has been a big rebound year for Snap after its stock reached a low of $4 and change. It’s still growing followers and continues be more popular with Gen Z than Instagram. The Snap “Shows” in particular are a differentiating feature in that IG’s counterpart IGTV has sort of flopped.

LA also birthed the scooter movement (Santa Monica-based Bird) before you had Lime, Uber, and Lyft follow suit.

Disney+ also launched yesterday (albeit to disappointment due to technological glitches), and the streaming space is about to become even more crowded once AT&T and Comcast launch their own services.

Otherwise, it’s really difficult to break into the elite class of tech superstars (of which I don’t count Netflix a part of). And even then, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook aren’t recent startups; the first three have been around for decades.

The tech sector in LA is rising. As with NYC, Boston, DC, Austin—all of which are described as “tech” cities—LA doesn’t need an Amazon, Apple, or Google to show for it. As I’ve pointed out for the umpteenth time, San Diego is a thriving biotech center (top three with Bay Area and Boston), yet doesn’t have a Gilead Sciences or Biogen headquartered there.
The point I was trying to make is that there are two forces happening in tech right now that are transforming the industry:

First, it is generally becoming more democratic and less biased to Silicon Valley. Ten years ago if you wanted to launch an idea with venture capital, you pretty much were forced to move to the Bay Area. While there is still a lot of location bias, and a lot of it is biased to the Bay, a person does not absolutely have to be in SV (or NYC, or Boston, or Austin), to get funding. I would guess that today it's like 50% Bay Area, 50% everywhere else combined, whereas 10 years ago it was 99% Bay Area, 1% everywhere else.

Second, and I think this will be more transformative for the tech industry, is that the list of scalable ideas that the Bay Area had almost complete competitive advantage over has been pretty much exhausted. The Bay Area was well-positioned to be the early pioneer because it had a lock on hardware engineering and software engineering. So if you wanted to turn a phone into a computer, you had to be there. Nowadays, the Bay Area doesn't have a lock on the industry knowledge that will power the next phase of tech. Is it better to create self-driving cars in the Bay Area or Detroit? Is it better to create AI technology for the federal government in the Bay Area or the D.C. area? FinTech in the Bay or NYC?
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