{ Thursday, September 17, 2009 }
In a recent article from the Wall Street Journal, David Byrne, front man of The Talking Heads and a resident of New York, talks about the perfect cities, and in one section says:
There is a lot of truth to that, and I think cities have a lot to do with creativity and invention, but acceptance of failure is not the whole story.
The Romantics believed that genius came from an individual, that they were inspired by a divine spark within them, had been granted a superior mind or vision and were able to see things that mere mortals could not. More recently we've come to believe that genius is really the result of hard work, "99 percent perspiration" as it were, which I wrote about recently as well. But it may be that creativity and invention are more dependent on the networks in which the creator participates than their individual genius or their willingness to put in the hours. As we've so often seen, great ideas occur where there is a confluence of ideas taken from the environment surrounding the creator or creators. Thus, Silicon Valley. Even people designing office spaces have discovered that creating little meeting spaces and sitting areas at the junctures between hallways increase communication between different departments in an organization and increase cross-fertilization of ideas and intra company relationships.
And the networks=genius idea explains why that idiot made $10 million dot com dollars -- he was very literally in the right place at the right time.
My Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon has recently been talking about how New York is poised for a tech revival, and I think he makes some very good points. He says:
Yes. As someone who goes back and forth between New York and Silicon Valley, I see more companies being started in the Valley. But I am seeing some great consumer internet companies being started out here too. Etsy is a great example. Hunch has to be on this list. And Kickstarter, which just recently launched, and is changing the way that creative projects themselves are funded. A promising beginning. There need to be more startups, naturally, and more seed capital, and a hometown newspaper, as Chris also notes. And the CS grads moving into startups rather than financial services companies. I'm optimistic.
LINK | 11:09 PM | TB
Having moved to the "valley" from NYC two years ago, and being heavily involved in the startup scene here, I actually feel like there is MORE innovation happening in New York, where you really have to stand out to succeed.
Lately, I feel like everything in the valley is just an iteration of something else or something that should be a feature, not a company. TC50 this week really put the nail in the coffin for me. I look forward to migrating back east and being a part of the creative energy in NY again.
(you should also mention Meetup.com as a great NY startup that's been around and thriving for years!)
Networks and places matter in science. Neils Bohr and The Copenhagen School ushered for physics, The Austrian school for psychology.
James Watson would never have discovered the double helix had he not been at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge. He might be considered the "idiot" who hit the academic jackpot -- simply by being in the right place in the right time (I would not say the same for Crick).
Virtual communities and technologies don't replace the power of place, they amplify it.
Michael E Driscoll | September 17, 2009 12:28 PMI love David Byrne in so many ways. San Francisco (which plenty of people don't consider to be a city because it's small) is thankfully not a part of that suburb known as Silican Valley and is an awesome place to start a company and innovate despite the massive taxes you have to pay to the city/county. Vibrant in a different way from NY -- just the change of castro/market from nasty intersection to a car-free pedestrian hang-out area has created whole new interaction for me - particularly with all the tourists who come to the castro to "see the gays" who have more in common with me (one of "the gays") than they might originally think!
Leanne | September 17, 2009 1:43 PMTumblr, Blip.tv & Squarespace are some other great NYC companies.
Personally though, have lived in the valley and not huge on location as the interwebs connect us all. Viddler started and is still located in Bethlehem, PA .. and started out of Lehigh U.
Robert SAndie | September 19, 2009 10:17 AMMy observation (having spent time with deep techies in various R&D labs and startups internationally) is that new ideas pop up at roughly the same time around the globe, there is a time when strands can be woven together and a few people see it. In other words, creativity is distributed fairly evenly albeit sparsely.
(In fact, if you look at any Great Idea and its Creator, you nearly always find a few close also-rans whom history has forgotten)
Where Silicon Valley excels is at allowing that spark of an idea to be driven to fruition. Is it acceptance of failure, or just sheer weight of infrastructure - creative networks plus other benefits like cash, experienced people, fairly gung ho early users
Porter would argue its the clustered infrastructure.
New York has great media infrastructure , beating even SV. (New York is one of a handful of cities where Talking Heads could have made it big time)
Which then points to NY's issue - the Alley is still not the Valley. I'd argue that it will be best off playing startups into those emerging media based technologies and sectors that NY has clusters for already.
alan p | September 22, 2009 5:36 AMHi Caterina,
In Silicon Valley the majority of people who work in the tech field are top notch self starters - in other words, everyone is a genius in those highly competitive technology driven environments. I can't really say that about any other industry...except maybe working at NASA or MITs Media Lab.
Great ideas have always come from the chaos of the creative process mixed in with the input of really smart people. So I can say YES to teams of collaborative genius-types working together as long as each member earns their position on a consistent basis, and works hard to earn the coveted team leader spot. But this can only happen in an environment where it is safe to tell the truth, and make mistakes.
This collaboration does Not work so much in other industries because most work environments load up their teams with mediocre people. Actually it has been discovered that on average teams do NOT produce really amazing work unless there is one jerk on the team playing Devils Advocate and pushing the boundaries. Creativity is uncomfortable and rewarding at the same time.
So I take my hat off to those geniuses who can actually work together in group environments for the development of big ideas without strangling each other. That many smart people in one room can create a bit of chaos as egos and ideas are consistently colliding. The real genius is the team leader who can keep everyone on target and capture the big idea from the milieu of ideas.
And BTW: NYC IS called Silicon Alley.
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isn't that byrne article great? in some ways what you say about the *network* being a contributor to creativity is another way to verbalize a notion of something kind of beyond psychogeography, something rooted in one's "surroundings" but on a deeper, socio-cultural level than just the architectural/commercial design of a place. the *network* of a place also has it's own impact on it's inhabitants, a pervasive and subtle impact (that some may even just call culture?).
jason wilson | September 17, 2009 10:46 AMwhat is the new term for this? psychonetworkology?