I’m fascinated by Fred Wilson’s recent post he called The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs, on his AVC blog from late last month. This is so much like my own sense of how it was, beginning with the first semiconductor companies appearing in what was then called the Santa Clara Valley in the 1950s. I was in elementary school then, in Los Altos, CA, where all this was happening. His summary:

In my mental model of Silicon Valley, the first ‘tree’ was Fairchild Semiconductor (founded in 1957) which begat Intel (founded 1968) which begat Apple (1976) and Oracle (1977), which begat Sun (1982), Silicon Graphics (1981), and Cisco (1984) which begat Siebel (1993) and Netscape (1994), which begat Yahoo! (1995) and eBay (1995), which begat Google (1998) and PayPal (1998), which begat YouTube (2005), Facebook (2004), and LinkedIn (2003) which begat Twitter (2006) and Zynga (2007), which begat Square (2010), Dropbox (2008), and many more.

I’ve compared this phenomenon to crabgrass. One plant generates others nearby. I think it must have been like this with auto makers in Detroit and steel in Pittsburgh, but that was well before my time. This is certainly what we saw in the Silicon Valley:

If you drill down a bit deeper, you see that the founders, investors and early employees generate a tremendous amount of wealth from these big successes. The later employees don’t make as much wealth but they do learn a ton and make enough money that they don’t need to work for someone else and so they strike out on their own and are often funded by the folks who made the big money in the prior startup. That’s how the seed drops from the tree and starts a new tree growing. This continues on and on and on.

Tree, crabgrass, seeds, and seedlings; sort of the same thing. And I’m seeing what he describes in the growth of other hubs too:

This darwinian evolutionary model of startup hub development is not limited to silicon valley. We have seen it play out in other places, most notably Boston, and increasingly in NYC. It is also playing out in markets like Boulder Colorado and Austin Texas and many other parts of the US and many parts of the world.

Fred Wilson’s VC firm is called Union Square Ventures, and Union Square, in Manhattan, is right in the middle of the growing New York high tech startup hub around Soho and the Garment District. Some call it Silicon Alley. And I’ve also seen this happening in Austin, and, although I don’t know Boulder, I do see Brad Feld’s Boulder influence spreading.

The big follow-up question is what can anybody do to break the cycle and speed it up and get some other location onto the same path. What starts it? What are the factors? 

And how do we get that here (wherever here is)?

(Image: bigstockphoto.com)