On Friday, in an interview on-stage at a conference held in Utah, Mark Zuckerberg stated that the tech behemoth wouldn’t be based in Silicon Valley if it were launching today.
I wouldn’t Start a new Company in Silicon Valley today
Facebook Chief Executive Officer said, “I like the Bay Area, so I’m not super negative on it, but I do think on balance if I was starting from scratch now, I would not pick the Bay Area,”
He said that when he first moved to Silicon Valley, he was 19-years old and “didn’t know anything about building a company,” and that “at the time a lot of tools for building a company weren’t as built out as they are now.”
Now, although, he said, social media makes it much simple for a new company for finding their customers, as well as adding new servers to power a new app or website is just a matter of renting capacity from the Amazon Web Services cloud platform.
“Back then it was a lot more complicated,” Zuckerberg said.
In addition to that he says, that it was difficult for Facebook for getting the servers and data centres it needed to start itself, let alone find the essential venture capital among the downturn in the tech sector after the dot-com bust. He had to come to Silicon Valley for finding out the answers and solutions to all those issues, he said: “It really felt like it was going to be impossible.”
Things have changed, however, and the conditions are right for more startups for appearing in more places.
“I think the world is in a different place now,” Zuckerberg said. “I think the infrastructure exists for people to do stuff like this in more places.”
Silicon Valley has been considered as the hub of tech innovation for quite some long time. Apple, Google, Facebook, and Uber are known for attracting the best talent for high-tech jobs. But at the same time Silicon Valley is also getting a lot of competition from various cities such as New York, which is said to take down the crown from Silicon Valley as the tech innovation centre of the world.
Over the past years, Silicon Valley giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple are increasing their presence in New York. Back in the month of November, Facebook had also signed a lease at Hudson years for more than 1.5 million square feet of office space.
In addition, he also stated that it’s not only easier to go outside Silicon Valley, but that there are now benefits to doing so.
“There’s a lot of advantages to building a company that is not in such a monoculture,” he said, while adding that “Silicon Valley being an all-tech town there’s not as much diversity of how people think about things as you’d like, in a lot of ways.”
