Silicon Valley on the Potomac
For vacation last week, my wife and I decided to travel about as far from our home inside the Capital Beltway as possible without leaving the Lower 48. So off to California we went. While visiting Silicon Valley, a friend told me something unexpected about my home back east: The seeds of a tech start-up culture have begun taking root along the Potomac.
To my surprise this morning, The Washington Post had a story on the trend.
Technology firms in industries as varied as e-commerce, education, health care, cybersecurity and energy have made their home in the nation’s capital and its surrounding suburbs.
The result is a burgeoning technology hub that some consider the region’s new economy, particularly in the District, where hundreds of young entrepreneurs have formed a creative class of technologists with business ideas and the zeal to execute them.
What does it say about America when Mr. Dot Com goes to Washington? The answer depends on your position in a debate as old as the federal city. While George Washington and architect Pierre Charles L'Enfant hoped the backwoods city would one day become a commercial hub, Thomas Jefferson hoped it would remain, well, a backwoods.
In the early decades, Jefferson's vision dominated the landscape as L'Enfant's famed street grid went unfilled. But anyone who has visited in recent years knows that the growing power of the federal government has not only lined the streets with departments, law firms and lobbying shops but also enriched the surrounding counties.
Reading about the growing number of consumer tech start-ups in in the nation's capital, perhaps the question we should ask ourselves is this one: Will the tech sector change the culture of Washington or will the culture of Washington change the tech sector?
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Comments:
Sep '11
Re: Silicon Valley on the Potomac
Uh...old news, dude.
The core routers and DNS servers that govern the Internet are located in Lorton, Virginia, and MAE East is one of the two principal hubs of the Internet's architecture. ("MAE East" is a sort of phony acronym--it's counterpart, in San Jose, is named "MAE West." Geek humor.)
Most inter-continental Internet connections land at MAE East--particularly those from Europe and Africa. This is less of a big deal than it was in the 1990s--back then an Internet user in Germany connecting to a Web site in England made the connection over MAE East.
While international bandwidth has boomed--and the technology of edge-content delivery has blossomed--many companies still think it pays to be located near MAE East.
And, of course, Washington, DC is the only metro area in the U.S. seeing any economic growth....
Re: Silicon Valley on the Potomac
John Murdoch, thanks for sharing this. The Washington Post article mentions the legacy of AOL and other big companies in contributing to Washington's tech start-up culture, but it leaves your point out entirely. In fairness to the article, I should have written that the piece focuses on the growth of start-up sites geared toward consumers. I will make that fix to the original.
Mar '12
Re: Silicon Valley on the Potomac
It is where the money is at. No surprise there.
Aug '10
Re: Silicon Valley on the Potomac
It's only a certain rare kind of company that cares about having bazillions of bits per second Internet bandwidth. I suspect that startups are locating there more because they expect to have to put a lot of effort into dealing with (e.g., lobbying) the Federal Government.
Re: Silicon Valley on the Potomac
"Will the tech sector change the culture of Washington or will the culture of Washington change the tech sector?"
Hm. That's a question that had simply never occurred to me. What's your own bet, Mr. Horn?
Aug '12
Re: Silicon Valley on the Potomac
I live and work in DC at one of these so-called tech start ups (although political in our work focus). Remember, DC is a young town so it is burgeoning with twenty yr olds, many of whom enjoy living in a city with so many other young people their age (think college, grad school, Hill staffers etc). Also, as in any media/news hub, there is a premium on being physically where the action is at to get original content. For many tech companies, they are tangentially connected to government or at least activities of the government.
Aug '10
Re: Silicon Valley on the Potomac
Magazines and newspapers publish "the next Silicon Valley" articles all the time. One year it's Brooklyn, another year it's Raleigh-Durham, another year it's D.C., etc, etc, etc.
Aug '10
Re: Silicon Valley on the Potomac
Jonathan Horn:
Will the tech sector change the culture of Washington or will the culture of Washington change the tech sector?
I cannot claim to have clairvoyant powers of future prediction, however...
Ottawa, Canada's capital city, had a big tech culture in the 80s and 90s.
Remember Corel?
Remember Newbridge?
Remember Nortel?
Where are they now?
Feb '11
Re: Silicon Valley on the Potomac
Jonathan Horn/Peter Robinson---I do not think the DC-area tech sector (which is by no means as new as the article tends to imply) will change Washington culture...the numbers of people and amounts of money are too small relative to the government employees, contractors, lobbyists, and "nonprofits" which drive DC culture, and also the tech companies are mostly pretty far out in the suburbs, not downtown.
Coincidentally, today I put up a post on the Washington area, partly in response to the ridiculous NYT article of about a week ago: DC Boomtown: The New Versailles.
Oct '10
Re: Silicon Valley on the Potomac
DC has already distorted startup culture.
Look at the hotness of a few years ago - clean tech and green tech - entirely driven by government subsidy.
Elon Musk has a claim to be the most admired man of the moment among the startup class, and his last two venture - Tesla and SpaceX - live off subsidies or government contracts.
There are also, of course, thousands of startups dedicated to making red-tape slightly more tractable; Sarbanes-Oxley spawned an industry...
Aug '10
Re: Silicon Valley on the Potomac
They are going to DC because that's where the money is. And THAT is the real problem..
Re: Silicon Valley on the Potomac
Peter Robinson: "Will the tech sector change the culture of Washington or will the culture of Washington change the tech sector?"
Hm. That's a question that had simply never occurred to me. What's your own bet, Mr. Horn? · 14 hours ago
Though I will hope for the former, my guess would be the latter. As some have pointed out here, the decision to locate near the federal government may already represent a distortion of the market.