| |
Posted Sep 14, 2012, 2:05 AM
|
 |
Registered User
|
|
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Oakland
Posts: 3,338
|
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by the urban politician
San Francisco has pretty much nothing to do with what Silicon Valley so successful. It's just the lucky beneficiary of its proximity to it..
|
It's pretty ridiculous to claim that SF has nothing to do with Silicon Valley. Half of Silicon Valley as it is more commonly defined (Santa Clara County + the southern parts of San Mateo and Alameda counties) is within the SF MSA, and the entire thing is within the SF CSA. Silicon Valley formed largely because of the presence of Stanford, and Stanford is where it is becuase of SF.
And SF is arguably a part of "silicon valley" already, at least according to the San Jose mercury news:
Quote:
O'Brien: Welcome to the new and expanded Silicon Valley
By Chris O'Brien
Mercury News Columnist
Posted: 04/21/2012 03:00:00 PM PDT
Updated: 04/23/2012 12:02:18 PM PDT
What is Silicon Valley?
For some people, it's a place. For others, it's a way of doing business. And for others still, it's a synonym for the technology industry.
But whatever meaning you attach to "Silicon Valley," the precise definition has shifted over time as the local economy and technology have evolved. And so, with the publication of the 27th annual SV150 list today, we are expanding our definition of what we mean when we talk about Silicon Valley.
After years of drawing a sharp circle that included Santa Clara County as well as southern San Mateo and Alameda counties, this newspaper is expanding the geographic boundaries that it considers to be part of Silicon Valley to include the five core Bay Area counties: Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa. This is recognition, perhaps overdue, that the kinds of entrepreneurial companies and industries once tightly clustered in the South Bay can now be found throughout the region.
That's certainly the case with San Francisco, which is now by some measures the startup capital of the world. But it's also true to a lesser extent for the East Bay, which has staked its claim to a share of the innovation economy.
When I floated this expanded definition to several people who have long studied Silicon Valley, I expected it to rankle some purists. It did not. The only disagreements came about how far to widen the circle, particularly when it came to
including the East Bay. But no one in my admittedly limited survey expressed disagreement with the fundamental need to revisit the boundaries of Silicon Valley.
Russell Hancock is president and CEO of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, an organization founded in 1993 by several South Bay local governments and tech businesses with a mandate to focus on a specific geographic area that stretched almost up to the San Francisco border on the Peninsula and Fremont in the East Bay.
The idea was to get a region driven by a common industry to work together to address similar economic and social issues.
Now that the tech industry has expanded its areas of local economic influence, Hancock said his organization will eventually have to reconsider its own definition and its relationship to other parts of the Bay Area.
"It's a head-scratcher for us, but we're going to have to grapple with this," Hancock said. "This is a technology region, but how do you define and measure it? We want to be experts on that question. The day is going to have to come when we incorporate San Francisco into those measurements."
According to legend, the phrase "Silicon Valley" was coined by Ralph Vaerst, a California entrepreneur, and first published by trade journalist Don Hoefler in 1971. The phrase reflected the notion that Santa Clara County had become home to a growing cluster of semiconductor companies.
Much has changed since then. Over time, tech companies crept further up the Peninsula and around to the East Bay. By the early '90s, the SV150 list, initially focused on Santa Clara County companies, expanded to include San Mateo County and the southern parts of Alameda County.
Not only was the geographic boundary shifting, but so was the technology. Silicon Valley over time has grown to include software, networking equipment, the Web, biotechnology and more recently cleantech. Indeed, the chip industry that gave rise to the name has long since ceded its role as the region's leading tech industry, making the "Silicon" part of the name outdated.
"I think it's a fascinating process whereby the firms and the innovation ecology have spread in every direction it could," said AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information and a longtime observer and researcher of the valley's evolution.
Over the past few years, that push has made the tech industry the leading economic engine of San Francisco. Technology made its presence in San Francisco felt back in the early 1990s, when "Multimedia Gulch" emerged as a leading center of interactive technologies like CD-ROMs.
That gave way to the dot-com boom that left the city devastated after the bust in 2000.
But in recent years, the Web 2.0 generation has created a far more powerful and sustainable technology economy in the city. Last year, companies in San Francisco raised $2.87 billion in venture capital, more than any other single city on the globe.
Ron Conway, one of the valley's most influential investors through his fund, SV Angel, told me recently that five years ago, 75 percent of his portfolio companies were located on the Peninsula; now 60 percent of them are in San Francisco.
"There's a movement of technology companies to the city," Conway said. "A lot of media and e-commerce companies feel like they have to be there."
As a result, while historically lacking in tech IPOs, San Francisco has seen some of the most notable public offerings over the past year, including Zynga and Yelp. Indeed, with our new definition, the city has six companies on the SV150, led by Salesforce.com at No. 31.
While the case for San Francisco is solid, what about the East Bay?
READ MORE: http://www.mercurynews.com/chris-obr...ercurynews.com
|
SF city-proper has plenty of tech related businesses. Take a look at the "Communications Equipment", "Computer Services", and "Software and Programming" sections of this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ions_Equipment
That's over 50 tech companies in SF city-proper, which kind of makes it clear why it makes sense to include SF in the modern definition of "Silicon Valley", especially when you also take the information from that article above into account. At the very least it should make the case that SF does have "something to do" with Silicon Valley, even if one disagrees that it is a part of it.
Will SF ever become the center of Silicon Valley? I kind of doubt that will happen, but the tech industry has long had a presence in SF itself, and is on the rise currently. SF has for a long time been connected to Silicon Valley, and by a lot more than just proximity.
|
|
|
Linear Mode
