Screw the Valley – Review Essay

Silicon Valley gets plenty of attention. The Santa Clara Valley itself is beautiful, and companies based there have created staggering amounts of innovation and value. I have reported on and been happy to collaborate with many of them. So business reporters and analysts are right to focus on the Valley. But as important as it is, there comes a time when you just need to look beyond.

Even players in the Valley reach that point. “Blame the seemingly never-ending hustle to find, train, and retain top development talent,” writes Tim Sprinkle, in Screw the Valley. “For some tech entrepreneurs, it has all gotten to be a little too much.”

Screw the Valley has a provocative title, but the subtitle gives you a better sense of what’s inside. It is, indeed, a “A Coast-to-Coast Tour of America’s New Tech Startup Culture.” That appealing mix of travel and technology is what prompted me to add the book to my Kindle reader. Another reason: I know the author, having once tried to recruit him to the tech magazine I used to edit.

Seven Cities, A Reality Check

“Startup culture” is the key phrase in the subtitle. That culture has two sources. First, there are the company’s founders, mentors, venture capital (VC) backers, employees and other stakeholders. Then there is how they interact with their local environment. In Screw the Valley, that involves seven cities that Sprinkle observed in the 2012-2013 time-frame.

These non-Silicon Valley locales have distinctive and common features. A successful figure dominates some scenes. In Detroit, Quicken Loans Founder Dan Gilbert is helping to re-imagine that city. In Las Vegas, Zappos Founder Tony Hsieh is making a big impact. How the players interact range from “creative collisions” to more formal encounters. In New York City, for instance, we meet nine bitcoin companies in a pitch meet-up. Then there are the accelerators. TechStars is one. Now a global program, it began life in outdoor-friendly university town Boulder. A start-up residential community is an unusual but compelling draw for Kansas City. Universities play key roles in other cities, including Raleigh-Durham and Austin.

There’s a moral element to these cultural alternatives. Ethernet godfather Robert Metcalfe thrived in Silicon Valley for three decades. But he described that business climate as “bloodthirsty, take-no-prisoners, swing-for-the-bleachers, free enterprise venture capitalism.” As a professor at the University of Texas, he said he is aiming for something different. In particular: to help make Austin not better than, but a better Silicon Valley.

Is employee satisfaction and corporate citizenship better in those cities than in San Jose? That is an interesting question, and maybe best answered one company at a time.

Startups tend to be upbeat, collaborative and adventuresome. But as Sprinkle notes in passing, most of them fail. What struck me most were such realistic notes. The CEO of a Kansas City-based accelerator put it this way, “Being a startup is miserable.” The best approach, he said, is to shorten that phase. Sponsoring happy hours or employing aimless college grads may not help you get there.

What Are You Starting Up?

How to define a startup is another question. Examples in Screw the Valley run the gamut. On the one hand is a small sports photo application developer in Kansas City, using cheap Google Fiber. On the other is a capital-intensive, manufacturer of non-silicon semiconductor devices in Raleigh-Durham. (Now there’s a competitor to Silicon Valley.)

A few years ago, I joined a young software company comprised of a virtual workforce. That might look like a startup. But with paying customers – and no need for VC overlords – the founder saw it as a business, plain and simple.

The point of “starting up” a business of any kind, after all, is simple. The basic drill is to find and serve customers, grow revenue and show a profit. A big question is how long you have to hit those goals. Many startups today also try to include a moral or social angle to their efforts. Being socially responsible, having fun along the way or even cashing out can all be good things. But that all becomes less likely if you miss the main point and fail.