Arrington: “Silicon Valley sucks”
May 22nd, 2007 by Benjamin KuoTechcrunch’s Michael Arrington, in a post from very early this morning, says “Silicon Valley sucks“. Arrington says, in the post, titled “Silicon Valley Could Use A Downturn Right About Now” that:
It’s no longer about beautiful products and genius developers. It’s about the money and the status, and hot PR chicks and marketing departments.
Maybe Southern California hasn’t yet the same fevered pitch of venture capital funding that Silicon Valley has, but (with a few exceptions) most of the activity here has been remarkably less bubble-like than you would expect. Where a lot of the general frothiness in the market has been over new Internet services, it looks like to me that Southern California is still seeing a fairly broad spread of investments — biotech, software, semiconductors, and medical devices, along with consumer-facing services and some amount of content. Of the more fizzy investments, they are all smaller, angel-sized rounds — not bubble-era multi million dollar investments. Plus, the people getting funded here all seem to be serial entrepreneurs or with a very strong technical background.
Perhaps it’s because most of the Southern California investors went through the last bubble and have been more cautious; or perhaps being geographically isolated from Silicon Valley there’s less of a herd mentality. I also think that some portion of the deal flow in Southern California is expansion capital into later-stage firms, who cut their teeth in the grim economics post-boom, and are only now taking capital to expand. In any case, I haven’t seen the same PR frenzy and quite the craze here, despite the capital flowing into companies here…
