What the death of coffee shops tells us about Silicon Valley
But Silicon Valley’s coffee shops are more than just caffeine stops — they are venues for programming, pitching, dealmaking and brainstorming. That these conversations could be so easily overheard seemed strange to me when I first moved there, and it can be irritating for residents who don’t work in tech to be constantly surrounded by a nerdy hubbub. For me at least, over the years, it became a useful form of ambient awareness of the industry’s latest obsessions.
Silicon Valley thrust social media and video conferencing on an unsuspecting world and in the past six months we have never been more grateful. Yet the cradle of the internet has always thrived on physical networking. Nowhere has been able to match the Bay Area’s density of talent, capital and ambition. Now, the opportunities for serendipity — so vital for nourishing the community — seem to be diminishing, in no small part due to the rapid shift to remote working that the tech industry has embraced: Facebook, Twitter and others have all said they will allow people to work from anywhere after the pandemic recedes.
If tech staff do become more widely distributed, that would only reflect where most of the industry’s best ideas are coming from these days. Some of the most influential tech companies today are not based in the Valley: TikTok is Chinese, with its US base in Los Angeles. Shopify, the ecommerce platform that inspired several start-up ideas in the latest Y Combinator batch, is in Ottawa, Canada. The most important new internet markets — such as India, Indonesia and Nigeria — are far beyond the horizon of closeted US West Coasters.
See the full story here: https://www.ft.com/content/99d312ba-17f8-49cf-84e0-429d9aadb226